The Future Of Tamriel
 

TES3:Morrowind was set in Morrowind. TES4:Oblivion was set in Cyrodyll. What options does bethesda have for continuing their saga? Where will be TES5? Do you think they will make it an MMORPG with the whole of Tamriel? Or will they make expansions, such as TES4:Oblivion:Skyrim Expansion, TES4:Oblivion:Summerset Isle Expansion? Seeing as bethesda have allready made games out of the larger sections of the map, what will future games hold???

There is no TES 4… just as there is no Ultima IX, no Might & Magic IX and no Fallout Tactics/Brotherhood of Steel… *repeats the Mantra until he believes it again*

And you could already travel the whole Continent in TES 1 :)

That's true… TES 1: Arena was a huge game, and in my opinion, great for its day. Of course the whole game system was nothing like the modern iterations of TES. The game system was partly a ripoff of the D&D rules of the time (like having armor rating going between 10 which was bad and -10 which was great).

I recently replayed Arena using dosbox and had a great time. If you can stand the incredibly dated graphics you should get it and play it (but be ready to spend between 40 and 100 hours playing it). There really was a lot of depth for a game of that era. I especially love the holidays.. if you're in the right place at the right holiday you can get some great deals. And the weather… sunny, rainy, snowing… Arena had it all. Over 400 cities to visit, thousands of quests (not all good of course). It was a blast!

Almost forgot… it's free from Bethesda so get it and play it:

The Elder Scrolls I: Arena

Yes, Morrowind and Oblivion have **super cool** graphics 'n stuff… but this is what a great RPG is really about. Don't get me wrong, it was nowhere near perfect, but man it was great for its time!

I think that Pete Hines did say something aboyt this in an interview somewhere with someone (sorry I can't remember where, but it could be on gamasutra)

Pete Hines said about a MMORPG that it needed to be a fresh approach, possibly meaning a fresh IP, not an old one like TES. So, no, I don't think that there will be
a MMO set in Tamriel, nor on Nirn.

TES 5, will for me, anyway, be about the powerstruggle on who is going to have the power in Tamriel, Chancellor Ocato, the Elder Council or the Nobles (or maybe the people?). The main quest could feature more (mature) political content where your protagonist had to choose which imperial factions he would support, and then there could be certain sidequests fleshed out from the main quest so that the game
more than Oblivion would feel like a unified whole game, meaning that the sidequests and main quests sort of grab and grib and intertwine between each other.

This would be great :)

However, I fear and I'm concerned about Bethesda Softworks already have chosen their (console) future, catering to what they think is the (action) console crowd.
So my best guess is that Bethesda will widen & develop the radiant AI more, the game will start featuring small fire arms, such as the fint pistols of the 17th century, and the game's combat will be more like FPS combat with no depending on stats and abilities, just the trigger finger of the player. To me, that would be sad :( ---
but apparently that is what sells these days :(

I think Fenris put it succinctly!! TES has gone downhill since Arena!! Put that game with Ob's graphics and there would be no comparison possible; Arena would BLAST the opposition off the planet!! Hmmm, maybe I should replay it!! :)

While Arena was nice, Daggerfall was the better game IMO. More options, houses and ships, thousands of locations, horse and cart, a paperdoll… I replayed both Arena and Daggerfall last year, and I still like Daggerfall better. It may be buggier than Arena, but still has more of everything.

Personally, I had hoped for something like Battlespire when they announced Oblivion, being able to travel across several planes of Oblivion, but, oh well. They also had a game set several hundred years in the past (Redguard), so both options seem to be out for TES V. I know I'd enjoy a game which has Tamriel or at least the Iliac bay as a setting, but the tendency seems to be towards smaller places of the planet. Perhaps it's Blackmarsh next time…

I think the setting might be one of the other continents. And it wouldn't surprise me if a TES MMORPG would come sometime in the not so distant future.

I fired up Arena last night for the first time in years and was amazed how much like Ultima Underworld it seemed.

Good grief, Corwin. What hope is there when the moderators won't respect the topic of the thread?

Anyway. I'd guess Elsweyr. They've just dealt the death blow to the Empire, so it's a particularly inopportune time to leave Tamriel. They've used Morrowind, Hammerfell and Cyrodiil, Bloodmoon was a sort of mini-Skyrim, Bretons are too similar to Imperials, and Black Marsh and Valenwood are probably too homogenous and too underdeveloped to support an entry in the main series.

The Summerset Isles could work. The only strike against it is that they've already done their elf game. I'm predicting Elsweyr for its Vvardenfell-like variety of environments and its exotic inhabitants, which is a style they'll probably want to return to after the traditional high fantasy of Oblivion.

I also predict that they won't remove character stats or add guns.

Perhaps its time for Bethesda to make a re-make of Arena.

There were lots of Bretons in Daggerfall as events took place in the Iliac Bay (thus partly in High Rock and Hammerfell).

The continent Akavir might be another choice for a sequel, especially since the Nerevarine seems to have left for the place.

Abby, before you can determine where TES might go, you have to remember where it's been. At my age, that means replaying the old games to spark my memory cells!! :)

I have this maddening half-memory of a developer saying they had no plans to set a game in Akavir, since they hadn't come close to exhausting Tamriel's stories, and they didn't want to fill in every corner of the map -- that Akavir's purpose was to be a mystery. But I can't find the quote.

Interestingly, someone on TES forums found a new IP being marked? or reported to the US Copyrigts office in November 2006.

It is called Skyrim.

This looks suspisciosly similar to the whole Shivering Isles thing, where rumours about the Shivering Isles Expansion also were aboundant, and the moderators locked every thread on the subject, until maybe 2 months before Bethsoft announced the SI expansion for Oblivion.

Now, the thread about Skyrim isn't locked.

And this means that there must be thruths in this: Either Skyrim is a (new) expansion for Oblivion or TES V (5).

[I have a snagging suspicion that those people who does these sort of things really are from Bethesda Softworks, admins or developers, which then sort of, and by the use of 'false account's do this to see how the TES community will react or is reacting to say Skyrim as an idea for either an expansion or the next TES game].

ETA:
I would really like, as I think most of the TES community would, a re-make of Arena,
Battlespire, Redguard and Daggerfall so that these games would work on XP (and Vista) and on Xbox 360. This would be so cool :)

That would be sad if they made a game about every province on Tamriel before straying off to the other continents. I would rather see that they made a game on another continent and went back to Tamriel at another point.

Regards Asbjørn

Thanks for the heads-up. Some links to mark applications:

Skyrim: 1, 2, 3
Oblivion: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (which includes Oblivion Mobile)
Knights of the Nine: 1
Shivering Isles: 1
Shadowkey: 1

So what am I? Chopped liver?

Long-standing rumours in TES community were that the sequels to DF would be Oblivion and/or Summerset Isle. And Oblivion contained references to unrest on Summerset Isle -- plus the evil Altmers in Tribunal working with the goblins.

On the other hand, Summerset Isle would break the long-standing tradition of one-word titles: Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard, Morrowind, Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Oblivion. Granted, they just blew that away with Gibbering Isles, but for now I'll keep pretending TES ended with Oblivion.

IMO, the scope of the next game will depend on Bethseda's technical approach. I'd like to see them go back to the idea they had with Daggerfall.

Despite its undeniable financial success, Bethseda's struggled with TES ever since the original game in the series. Arena was a straightforward game that was big but modular. They took that to a further extreme with Daggerfall, which was huge, complex, and amazing -- but incomplete, way too modular, and with enormous new balance issues.

Unfortunately, Bethseda then switched gears, and took the series in the other direction, making the next two games progressively smaller and less complex (but more pleasing aesthetically).

I would expect them to either continue with that by making the next game even smaller and simpler or to go back and finish what they tried to accomplish with Daggerfall. I would vote for the latter, obviously.

Good analysis. But I personally don't think they'll go back to the roots. As Bethesda and fans of Oblivion say: It's progress.

TES 5 = GTA Medieval, probably in a new continent or world.