Environment

The Solitude Marsh. Even tiny features are carefully detailed to bring more realism to the game.

Though created with a very old game engine, Skyrim is one of the most beautifully designed games out there, hands down. The lack of copy-paste designing made each field, forest, cave, or mountain uniquely picturesque in each area. It contributes to the joy of exploring new lands, excited with what danger and reward awaits you.

Sudden rainfall, heavier snow storms as you ascend mountain peaks, strong river currents dragging you away from your destination, Skyrim captured natural reactions of the real world, making the environment more realistic. Bethesda is doing great already in the field of game design. They just have to exert a little more effort on the next game to make the world even more vibrant and engrossing.

I’d love to see more interactive wildlife as a start: bears hunting fishes, gangs of elk running around the forest, bats, owls, and deadly predators lurking at night. How about beards growing on characters that are too lazy to shave? Rich men getting plump, slaves revolting against their captors, jails getting full of criminals, these subtle but natural occurrences adds more flavor to a game, creating a more vivid replica of the real world.

These kinds of changes have been implemented in recently released games, so it wouldn’t be too much to expect these graphical enhancements in the next Elder Scrolls game when it comes out in public.

Modded forest. There are lots of mods to enhance vanilla textures, meaning the graphics quality can still be pushed further.

The Elder Scrolls games are known for their vast settings that make players spend countless hours exploring every inch of it. Skyrim is big but we want an even bigger area to navigate.  There’s a certain kind of thrill and excitement in exploration that fuels the little adventurers in us.

Just like in the previous installments, it’s highly possible the setting will only involve one province. Having two in one game seems a bit too much in terms of production cost, game size, bug fixing, and plot concentration. Although we obviously want to get something bigger, one huge and enchanting swathe of land is better than having multiple locations blandly designed.

Quests

Visit from the Dark Brotherhood. One of the most morally challenging quests in the game.

One of the strongest points of the franchise is the enormous amount of quest you can explore and complete. Most of the time, it’s even more fun and rewarding to do side quests and faction missions than to proceed with the main quests.

As a strong suit, the next Elder Scrolls game will surely have a tad full of side quests, faction stories, dungeon missions, and relic-hunting adventures. The main quest sure is fun, but feels like it directly came out of a textbook. At some point in the game, I even thought that the civil war is more important than the Alduin storyline.

A much more mature storyline with deeper and more impacting events will surely make Elder Scrolls 6 the benchmark of RPGs for generations to come.