A Long List of Little Things I Want In: Elder Scrolls 6

It’s been ages since I last played Skyrim. But the fact that Skyrim is being revamped into a new addition yet again is weird. How many different versions of Skyrim do we need? Clearly more of them. In the mean time though, when it comes to the next Elder Scrolls game, we’re still pretty clueless. We know the game will be set in Hammerfell, but that’s pretty much it.

In the mean time though, there are lots of things I would like to see in the Elder Scrolls VI. Here is a small sample of them.

Better Followers.

Followers in unmodded Skyrim are hell. They run in your way, they start fights and they constantly block doors. And for the majority of the Dawnguard quests, you have a whiny vampire following you around. Because of this, many, many follower mods have been made over the years. And many of them have additional code to make followers better, easier to control and far less annoying in general.

At the same time, it’d be nice to have more followers as well. In unmodded Skyrim, you get one person and one animal and that’s pretty much it. Okay, sure, having 20 Khajiit buddies following me around is funny and impractical, but come on! Let us have a few more followers.

Allow for more downtime when doing quests.

One of my bigger gripes of Skyrim is that everything is in a massive rush. The entire quest keeps pushing you forward, without even a chance to take a break. Okay, yeah, sure, it’s the end of the universe or something, but Alduin is a patient being and destroys stuff at your pace. It’s genuinely weird how quickly you are pushed into all of this though.

Alright, sure, you can take your own breaks and do what you want, heck, you can try and ignore it completely. But Skyrim’s main quest doesn’t really flesh anything out, and every NPC in it is in a hurry.

More (suitable) actions and reactions.

On the flip side of the coin, Skyrim’s NPCs don’t really, well, react well to the environment. There are a few scripted moments, like being warned to not shout in cities, but they’re generally negative reactions. But whenever a dragon attacks, everyone tries to kill it. Even if they have a dagger and nothing else. But what they should be doing is running, preferably far away from the big, scary lizard. For some reason, a lot of NPCs will try to fight most enemies rather than running away.

It’d also be nice to have more actions and reactions for the main character too. In vanilla Skyrim, if you pick a flower, it just disappears then appears in your inventory. But there’s no animation for that. Things like locking, picking things up and going to bed all have the same lack of animation.

More dragons please.

I just want more dragons. Or, at the very least, a chance to hang out with Odahviing at some point. I very much doubt we’ll be seeing dragons in Elder Scrolls VI. Not only were they rampant in Skyrim, but there were dragons in Elder Scrolls online, and I don’t thing they’ll be willing to add any more. Especially since the dragons in Skyrim are actually pretty basic.

The ability to mod the game as soon as the game comes out.

This here is the big one. When you look at Skyrim for a bit too long, you realize that it’s… rather hollow. The gameplay is alright, it looks nice, stuff like that. What REALLY has been carrying the weight all these years are the people who make mods for Skyrim. It’s the modders who make Skyrim look and feel amazing, to the point that it could be considered a brand new game.

If Bethesda want Elder Scrolls 6 to be amazing, they’ll have to drop a way to mod the game right from the start. It worked with all their prior games, of course releasing some simple developers’ tools will make things much smoother…