Mechanics are a core part of making any RPG work, whether that would be a tabletop pen-and-paper title or a video game. The Elder Scrolls as a series is known for its beautiful open worlds and smart usage of a few mechanics to make the world feel alive.
Each game has streamlined or removed mechanics, for better or worse. Many veteran Elder Scrolls fans fear that the next entry will follow suit and remove more features. Instead of removing features, the best way forward for the series is to look back and reimplement ideas from the past. Here are 10 of the best Elder Scrolls features removed that Bethesda should consider implementing in future installments.
10 NPC Disposition
Technically NPCs have disposition ratings in Skyrim and most Elder Scrolls entries, but none have handled the system better than Morrowind.
In Morrowind, NPCs have a visible disposition towards the player that could be influenced based on the Nevarine’s actions or through dialogue. Bribing guards to get certain pieces of information can work, but you can just as easily do some work in the town and they’ll be just as willing to fork over the information you need. Combined with dialogue responses changing based on campaign completion, it helped make Morrowind feel much more immersive than any Elder Scrolls game since.
9 Mysticism
Schools of magic in The Elder Scrolls get fewer and fewer with each new entry. Seven schools of magic existed in Daggerfall, but Skyrim has reduced this to five.
Mysticism was one such school that was cut in Skyrim. This school focused on manipulating Magicka to enhance yourself or manipulate souls, resulting in it having ties with necromancy and movement skills like levitation. Morrowind had many hidden items that could only be accessed through levitating. Oblivion never took advantage of it, and the school was subsequently removed in Skyrim.
8 Climbing
Related to mobility, mages weren’t the only characters that could move vertically on surfaces. Daggerfall allowed less magically-inclined builds to scale up walls and various surfaces through the Climbing skill.
High ranks in Climbing allowed players to scale entire castle walls or multiple floors in a dungeon. Morrowind removed this skill for unknown reasons, although it was likely to prevent players from glitching through walls. With some refinement, adding Climbing back into the next Elder Scrolls game could allow for a new degree of well-crated levels and means to play as a stealthy character.
7 Spellcrafting
Skyrim saw many changes to the way combat worked by introducing dual-wielding and adding channeled spells. Combat has never felt better in an Elder Scrolls game, but it came at a great cost.
Spellcrafting was removed from Skyrim entirely. In previous games, players could select effects from known spells and combine them with other effects to make a new spell. The spell’s damage, duration, strength, and other stats could all be tweaked as well to allow for a wide degree of customization.
6 3D Dungeon Maps
Dungeons are a core part of Daggerfall and the progression system tied with Shouts in Skyrim. While dungeon design has gotten dramatically better with each game, the map has conversely gotten worse.
Daggerfall introduced a fully-interactive 3-dimensional map that players could pan around to see exactly how the dungeon progressed. It was necessary for the randomly-generated terrain that game used, but future titles went back to a 2D map that gives little information. It’s a small thing, but its inclusion would make delving in Dwemer or Ayleid ruins much easier.
5 Personal Carts
If Bethesda decides to implement any small feature from Daggerfall, however, it has to be its travel system. More specifically, the ability for players to have carts carried by horses.
Carts acted as an external inventory that players could dump their loot into while delving in a dungeon. Its carry capacity far exceeds what players could ever hold. The downsides were minor, making your horse slower and unable to jump. Adding this into the next Elder Scrolls game would give players a reason to bring a horse along while adventuring and allow for more interesting random events relating to defending the cart and its cargo.
4 Realistic Factions
You could be the dumbest person in all of Tamriel yet still have the Mages Guild or College of Winterhold accept you into their ranks. It allows any build to see all faction content, but it hurts the suspension of disbelief that the series was handling just fine two entries ago.
Morrowind asked players to meet certain requirements before joining any faction. Wanted to join the Fighters Guild? You better know how to wield a sword. Better yet, certain faction quests would conflict with each other. Besides being forced to side with one House, factions like the Fighters Guild might ask you to obtain an item from the Thieves Guild—something the Thieves Guild would dislike. It made factions feel much more realistic compared to future entries, even though Oblivion and Skyrim had much better guild questlines.
3 Layered Armor System
As with spells, armor itself has become much more streamlined as each mainline Elder Scrolls game has released. Skyrim allows for a helmet, chest, arms, boots, amulet, and ring to be equipped simultaneously. This pales in comparison to what Morrowind or even Oblivion allowed.
In Morrowind, players had unique armor pieces for each arm and shoulder. Two rings could be equipped at once, and standard clothing could be worn under armor. Fallout 4 went on to use a system similar to Morrowind’s with great success, so it’s only fitting the next Elder Scrolls game does the same.
2 Large Cities
Many might not get to the Cloud District very often, but Whiterun is lucky to have districts at all. Nearly every major city in Skyrim has no more than a dozen buildings in it and a few dozen NPCs populating it.
Compare this to Oblivion’s massive Imperial City. Despite being instanced with multiple districts, it still gave the feeling as a central hub for trade across Tamriel. Morrowind’s Vivec is another shining example, taking up a massive chunk of the open world to support its monolithic buildings. When you compare it to Daggerfall’s cities that take literal minutes to traverse, it’s easy to see that the cities in the next Elder Scrolls game need to make up for Skyrim’s poor excuse for hub areas.
1 No Scaling
This is rather advocating for the removal of a mechanic rather than adding an older one, but its removal would dramatically improve the immersion and replayability of the next Elder Scrolls game.
That would be scaling. Oblivion added scaling enemies and armor every time the player leveled. This fundamentally broke the balance of the game, which was addressed in Skyrim by lessening its impact and preventing the likes of bandits from obtaining Daedric or Glass gear. Morrowind didn’t have scaling and was widely praised for its hidden Daedric items and artifacts that wouldn’t be possible without the lack of global scaling.
NEXT: Skyrim: Ranking Every Playable Race From Worst To Best
