Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-96.252.245.207-20130116060134/@comment-24696651-20140624202919

Now, I might be an idiot, and I might be a chicken (but only if I'm in the matrix or having some very strange hallucination), but I believe sixty hours is the closer to the standard playthrough time for the main quest (fourty hours if I recall correctly). Playing through the main quest of an Elder Scrolls game and nothing else is like paying for Chinese buffet and only eating some plain noodles, or visiting London just to gaze at Big Ben; although it is a very important part of the game, it is completely missing the point, only experiencing a tiny fragment of the world. To power through all the quests would take at least two hundred hours, if you were playing on novice difficulty and you knew where everything is. Most players will easily get three hundred hours and still find a few surprises.

When it comes to a larger world, I just want to have slightly more realistic sizes - twenty people does not constitute a city, and even that city could not be fed by just a few farmers with barely a hectare of land between them. Such a small city is unlikely to have a skilled labour force large enough to construct such magnificent palaces and walls. If the whole of Tamriel was depicted in Skyrim proporitons, we would have perhap four thousand city dwellers supported by three hundred farmers, supporting a military and guard force of one thousand five hundred, with thousands upon thousands of brigands pillaging and making a living preying off them. No medieval farmers could support such a vast populace, unless they had some complicated magical machinery, which we see nothing of. Obviously Bethesda will need to keep a sizable urban populace and many bandits, but the ridiculous proportions could at least be made semi-realistic. In one province we might have one thousand to two thousand city dwellers, depending on the province, supported by seven hundred to one thousand five hundred farmers, guarderd by one hundred guards and, if there is war, two hundred soldiers, preyed upon by two hundred bandits. While the number of bandits will have to be blown way out of proportion to populate the various dungeons, the rest is feasible, although it will reqiure an increase in Bethesda's staff (Oblivion had a thousand named NPCs, and assuming that the farmers and city people will be named and there will be a few hundred miscellaneous people, I would estimate around two thousand to three thousand named NPCs).

But moving on from realism and scale, the combat in Skyrim is also a major flaw that needs to be addressed. You have your left hand, and your right hand. That's it. No matter how many spells and swords and shields you have, the fundamental stumbling block of paper thin combat makes it repetitive. I have actually completely blanked out, not thinking at all, during Skyrim combat. And the quests really annoyed me. The Theives' Guild, for instance, had a grand total of two quest wherein you actually steal something, and five which involve partaking in criminal activities. Seven quests' main activity is going through some sort of dungeon. The Companions... It was ridiculously short. In less than five quests, I was a member of the elite inner circle. Too many quests lead you into a dungeon crawl - which would be fine, were combat better, and many of them simply lack interesting detail. And finally, while for the most part I found the art fresh and pleasing to look at, particularly the distinct architecture of different cities, one cannot help but notice how most every dungeon looks the same.

If Bethesda wants to do justice to the lore they have created in The Elder Scrolls, they need to address the above problems: Combat must be deeper and more complex; quests must be more original, must have more activities than just dungeon crawling, and should hopefully have branching storylines so as to give, at the very least, the illusion of being able to change the world how you want; guild quests must be more closely related to their guild and have slower progression in ranks; dungeons need to be more varied; and last, but not least, there needs to be some sembelance of realism in the general populace and economy.

A long post, I know, but after the first glorious hundred hours of fun in Skyrim, as my natural cynicism returned to me, I noticed these things, and I have been meaning to properly record them.

TL;DR: Read the 4th paragraph from the top (the penultimate paragraph