So, Skyrim's out 11/11/11

[kandrathe]

Oblivion I've never even closed an Oblivion gate and only ever actually been inside the first one. I've started quite a few characters, and I've put more hours into it than some other games that I've liked, but it never sustained me.

It only appealed to me with some necessary balance mods. One crucial one for me, was leveled items, which allowed items you obtained as quest rewards to level up with you. Otherwise, you were punished for completing those quests below level 25, where the end game level is about 30.

For magic, I still am looking for a game to more faithfully implement a more complicated D&D type magic system (e.g. Alteration/Transmutation, Illusion/Phantasm, Enchantment/Charm, Divination, Conjuration, Evocation/Invocation, Necromancy and Abjuration), with the verbal, somatic, and material components. Then, have experience with that particular form influence success and power. And, most importantly, would be that spell failure is not just a fizzle, but could have unpredictable results.

For combat, I'm looking for games that are more than one key for hit, and another for block. Oblivion, did make the extra effort to add disarming and paralysis variations at higher skill levels, but by the time you get them you pretty much kick butt in that skill using normal attack. I would like the game to implement advanced weapons techniques.

And, the final bit about Oblivion, which I had trouble with out of the box, was the opponents AI, so one of the mods I installed focused on making the opponents much more challenging (ie. attempt to get range to use ranged attacks, set priority on spell use, run away if they are outmatched or severely injured and conserve magicka and fatigue).

But, these are my preferences. Perhaps the ordinary person starting out the game might be intimidated by this much complexity, so I'd opt for "Easy" difficulty to use the simple spell, and combat systems, with less intelligent AI. Normal, would implement the more advanced abilities, but give more grace in exact timing, and more of the AI smarts. Hard mode, should be require more perfection in casting and combat, and implement the full range of AI intelligence.

When I was writing games back in the 80's, my programmer friends and I wanted our games to have an unlimited variation capability. It makes each encounter and replay different, and interesting. So, our creatures usually had preferences. For example, I wrote a simulation of aquatic life in a typical North American lake. We researched typical lake conditions and inhabitant preferences and coded them into the simulation (habitat, temperature, food, etc). When developing the animation routines, each I gave each creature in the simulation deference to its preferences when having it choose where it would move/swim, and whether it would decide to attack prey or run away from predators. The game was then that you could choose to be one of the creatures in the environment, and interact with the various other creatures in real time. So, in general, I like games where most of the decisions are governed by the objects interaction with its environment. It means you need to track things like warm/cold, hungry, sleepy, fatigued, thirsty, angry, horny, curiosity, etc.

This is hard to do for 100% of the creatures in a world, so really, the ones you care about most are those within visual range, and of those the ones mostly in the direction the player is looking. Most games (including MW, Oblivion) are divided into cells, with 9 cells being loaded at any one time (the one you are in, and the 8 cells surrounding you that you might move into). Once you leave a cell, the creatures in that cell can be saved as they are (unless they are a special creature having a mission which takes precedence, ie. Shadowmere returning to Fort whatever). When new cells are loaded, a catch up AI routine can be run to determine how the creature has changed since you left depending on how long ago it was.