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Role Playing (Games) Games

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for November 2011 231

Bethesda took advantage of the Video Game Awards this weekend to announce the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, titled Skyrim. The game is planned for November 2011, and a teaser trailer has been posted on the Elder Scrolls website. Details are sparse, though the game will apparently run on an "all-new" engine.
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Announced for November 2011

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  • by orphiuchus ( 1146483 ) on Monday December 13, 2010 @11:19PM (#34542876)
    They have been unacceptable since Morrowind. Seriously, its almost 2011. Allow your damn characters to move their legs on a diagonal.
  • Sometime in February 2012 after fans and Bethesda patch and finish the content!

    I am actually pretty happy about this. I enjoyed morrowind and oblivion a lot and hope they can expand on the great stories just waiting to be told.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      If the trend over the past 3 games continues, the new game will have 7 NPCs and the world will be a single village. One would think they could get that working out of the box. (Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles).

      • by Fjandr ( 66656 )

        And then there was Arena, which I wouldn't even hazard a count on NPCs, towns, and square miles. Each game has gotten smaller since then, when the game spanned the entire continent.

      • by Haeleth ( 414428 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @05:59AM (#34544554) Journal

        Daggerfall had 750000 NPCs, 15000 towns, 184000 square miles - Oblivion had 16 square miles.

        No, Daggerfall had about 8 NPCs, one of which was then copied and pasted 749992 times; about 15 towns, each of which (again) was copied and pasted 1000 times; and basically no land at all, because there was absolutely no reason to set foot outside a town except to fast-travel to the entrance of another dungeon (which would also be identical to all the others, but with the same corridors and rooms arranged in a slightly different order) to do a quest (which would be one of the same three basic quests, with the same goals and the same twists, and just a few details tweaked at random).

        Having lots of "content" is meaningless if it's all the same handful of places you've been before, populated by the same people you've talked to before, repeated over and over again by a pseudo-random number generator and occasionally given a slightly different texture or a palette swap.

        Oblivion was too small, I will agree. But Daggerfall was even smaller in terms of actual variety.

        • I thought the size of the game world in oblivion was fine, it was just too compressed. All of Morrowind took place on one tiny island off the coast of said region. Oblivion threw away any sense of scale by putting five or so cities in all of the largest region in Tamriel and making it so that it could be crossed by walking in less than an hour real time. Artificially limiting the scale as they did in Morrowind would have helped me suspend my disbelief a bit. I would have taken invisible walls over comp

          • Not only did they shrink it, but the pre-Oblivion lore made it clear Cyrodil was a jungle, with parts of it turning more into swampland. Plus, the lore made the Imperial City out to be far more massive than it was in game. IIRC it was supposed to continue across the lake.
        • They have a foggy recollection of games of old that had these MASSIVE universes and say "Why can't that be done?" forgetting that those massive universes were full of nothing. Like I remember the original Elite. I liked that game a lot, space shooties are good stuff and free form is a good way of doing it. And wow what an amazing game a MASSIVE universe, all on one floppy disk! They were so much better than today's programmers! Well no. What they did was have a procedurally generated world. That's cool and

          • by Omestes ( 471991 )

            They have a foggy recollection of games of old that had these MASSIVE universes and say "Why can't that be done?" forgetting that those massive universes were full of nothing.

            This isn't completely true. One of the things I loved about Morrowind (and which annoyed me about Oblivion) was that there WAS stuff hidden all of the massive world. Yes, there were big expanses with pretty much nothing in them, except hidden in the middle, where you would never look, was a huge cave full of bandits worshipping dremo

    • Actually, if Bethesda keeps its usual TES schedule, it will be released somewhere between christmas 2012 and summer 2014. Then another half a year for a massive fan-made patch fixing all the content bugs and an official patch fixing most of the engine bugs, and sometime around 2015 the game should be actually playable and fun.

      (remember, NO TES game has been released on time, and some delays were years long)

  • With the money at their disposal Bethesda could have easily gotten another gravelly-voiced old dude for the voiceover, but they got Max von Sydow. Excellent opening move, Bethesda.

    • Bethesda got Sir Patrick Stewart to play the Emperor in TES4. They know the importance of having a celebrity voiceactor.

      Now, the value of having more than 14 voiceactors to do all the 900+ characters in the game, that they don't seem to quite get.
      • Actually I was thinking more along the lines of their not using an overexposed actor like Christopher Lee.

    • by cob666 ( 656740 )
      Very cool - I was watching the teaser and thought WOW, That sounds like Max Von Sydow. I might just try this game JUST because they used Max for the voice overs.
    • by geekoid ( 135745 )

      Yeah, well Flash Gordon got Max von Sydow as well.

      What spell did bethesda cast that gets people psyched about a game when there history is so full of crap? why the hell does anyone buy a bethesda game when it first comes out?

      • Oh is there a highly-anticipated Flash Gordon game coming out next year too? I didn't realize he managed to overexpose himself as much as Christopher Lee. The fact that he's done Flash Gordon and barely anything since adds to the impressiveness of the move of hiring him.

        I played Oblivion on PC the day it came out and enjoyed it thoroughly; whatever problems it had at launch weren't so severe as to affect my enjoyment.

  • That and the Mass Effect 3 teaser gave me a happy today. :-)

  • Did I understand that right? there be Dragons in Skyrim? That would actually be awesome!

    I guess I stil have a year to finish Oblivion Mainquest. I've been playing regularly for nearly 5 years now (with 2 characters), and I never actually finished that one.

    • Hopefully, but it could easily just be the Akaviri invading again. And the "Dragonborn" is definitely the player.

      • by qeveren ( 318805 )

        I'm hoping it's the latter and not the former. I'm kinda tired of dragons being the villains all the time, not to mention IIRC they were a civilized race in the TES lore.

  • by Debello ( 1030486 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @12:02AM (#34543088)
    Looks like it'll just be Fallout 3 with swords!
  • I'll be saving up the cash for a new machine come 1week before 11.11.11

    • by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @02:33AM (#34543780) Homepage Journal

      Knowing Bethesda and its schedule-keeping skill, if your machine arrives at 11.11.11, it will be obsolete and too old to run TESV when it finally comes out.

  • The new engine is almost certainly the id tech 5. Bethesda bought Id a little over a year ago and there's no reason to buy Id other than Carmack's engines. Apparently the Tech 5 engine wont be licensed outside of a very small circle.

    Here's a link to some footage of RAGE which will use the same engine and the game to debut the technology:

    http://www.g4tv.com/videos/46674/E3-2010-Live-Hands-On-Rage-Overview-Demo/ [g4tv.com]
  • by makubesu ( 1910402 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @12:29AM (#34543226)
    I saw a mudcrab the other day. Horrible creatures.
  • by Morpeth ( 577066 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @01:28AM (#34543518)
    I really hope they focus the development with the PC in mind. So many games now are being ported to PCs as an afterthought, usually with disastrous results -- or at a minimum the game gets dumbed down for the consoles.

    A lot of studios are going console crazy now, even ones that traditionally were strong PC supporters like Bioware (compare Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights to the upcoming Dragon Age II).p>

    As a PC gamer it's a trend I'm very bummed about... more and more games with lots of glitz and less substance.

    • I hope the long term sales of these games caused by the modability on PC keeps their focus there. They may make more short term with the console sales, but they probably sell more copies of Morrowind for PC than they do of Oblivian for 360 now.
    • There are some downsides to games designed with a console in mind as well, but not the ones most people seem to cry about. The only real downsides I find are games with poor controls, where it is clear a gamepad is the target not a mouse and keyboard, and games with low resolution textures, where it could and should look better if it made use of modern PC graphics. However games can and do solve that. There are plenty of games where the PC version looks better and has a good interface. Dragon Age is a good

  • Dear Santa, all I wish for Christmas is for Bethesda to hire some better character animators (and fire the one that did the Jumping animations), and support alt-tab, if they need help, please direct them to BioWare. Thanks.
  • by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @01:29AM (#34543524) Journal

    So we got a year to listen to the dev's hype the game up, listen to fanboys hype the game up.

    We'll get magazines, blogs, and whomever, hyping the game up.

    We'll get pointless previews, stupid conversations, and of course, dumb ass predictions (like this).

    Sort of like, we always do.

  • I just hope that they don't make it so that the way to victory is to play a mage and then only use fighter skills (what is used improves). The game scales to your power level in your main skills, so you can push your other skills to max and Oblivion will still throw enemies at you that are appropriate for level 1. Oh, and if you choose a non-combat skill as your main skill and then level that, such as alchemy, you are in for a world of hurt because of the same mechanic - your enemies will become overpowered
    • by orphiuchus ( 1146483 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @02:13AM (#34543700)
      That system was only in Oblivion(and Fallout 3). Hopefully they realize that scaled content has no place in a sandbox RPG, and they drop it altogether.
      • by NoSig ( 1919688 )
        True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the
        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Smegoid ( 585137 )
          I liked that morrowind wasn't nerfed. The game created some basic rules and if you were smart to mix and match (i.e. potion quality scales with int, and int potions are additive, so boost your int like crazy and then make amazing potions) you could overpower the game. But that was the fun part. Compared to morrowind, oblivion was on rails. I still remember the sheer awesome of going into a cave way beyond my level. Realizing it and then using a cheap levitation potion to get our of harms way and rain down
          • There was still some scaling even in Morrowind, but only in regards to which enemies would show up - the same type of daedra would have the same stats, but if you're higher level you'll get a tougher type of daedra in the same ruins.

        • Why bother with any of that. In Oblivion just do the arcane University quest line (quite easy at level 1), learn the Chameleon spell and then enchant your armour with 100% chameleon and nothing will ever touch you, ever, even if you walk up to them and twat them in the face.

          • by NoSig ( 1919688 )
            Dying is not the issue, dealing enough damage to kill anything in less than 5 minutes is - at max level. In any case I considered 100% chameleon a bug and didn't want to use it. I guess my conclusion after playing the game long enough was that the leveling system itself was a bug too at high levels, even if it was working as intended by the developers.
        • True. It was also ridiculous that common bandits had daedric armor when you got to a high level. Though there were issues in Morrowind as well. In Morrowind it was advantageous to jump at all times to increase your skills even when just traveling somewhere. In both games you have to keep a careful accounting system outside the game to time your skills-ups in your minor and major skills so as to get maximum stat increases on level up. Morrowind also allowed you to be nearly invincible at level 1 through the use of potions. The systems were a mess in both Morrowind and Oblivion. I can't say how they were like before that, since I don't remember how it worked in Daggerfall.

          I had more fun with oblivion than with morrowind, because in morrowind I had to go crazy keeping track of minor skills and improving enough of them so as to get good stat increases at the next level. Oblivion I played much more naturally, mostly ignoring immersion-breaking things like skill and stat scores, and managed to be reasonably successful (though I'm sure people who tweaked every last bit of power our of their characters would have kicked my ass in pvp, but then, this is a single player game, so who

  • But Bethesda CAN'T release a new Elder Scrolls game!

    Elder Scrolls has always been a single-player series, and single-player is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD! Our lords and masters at EA have said so! [slashdot.org]
  • by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Tuesday December 14, 2010 @09:35AM (#34545796) Homepage Journal

    Needs co-op so my girlfriend can play it along with me, or I'm not going to be allowed to play it.

    • Get a new girlfriend. She sounds like she sucks. My wife doesn't try to make me do anything as long as I help out with basic chores around the house and spend time with her a few nights a week. You don't want to marry someone who tries to control you, it already sucks enough dating someone like that.
  • 1. Fix the leveling problem
    2. Come up with a decent goddamn story for a change. Hire writers if you have to!

    Oblivion was one of the most amazing, gorgeous, astounding games I'd ever seen. I'm still blown away by it. But for chrissakes,the leveling was awful and the writing was shit. Can't we have a game that delivers on all counts?

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