Elder Scrolls 6 Can Sidestep Annoyances Like Dragons & Oblivion Gates

The Elder Scrolls 6 should avoid the frustrating interactions forced upon players in Skyrim and Oblivion like dragons and Oblivion gates. Open-world games need chance encounters in the wild to spice up exploration and gameplay. However, the difficulty and quantity of dragons and Oblivion gates in both Skyrim and Oblivion now feel like outdated features in a genre of games that has grown beyond them.

To be fair, Skyrim‘s dragons and Oblivion‘s gates have important parts to play in both games. Both features are related to the main storylines of their respective titles, and they serve to enliven the experience of traveling across Tamriel. Randomly spawned dragons also offer the Dragonborn souls for Skyrim’s shouts and materials that could be used to make some of the strongest armor in Skyrim, and the opening of Oblivion gates is the central issue of Oblivion.

Nevertheless, the Elder Scrolls 6 needs to let those encounter systems go, or at least find ways to modify them. While dragons and Daedra can offer epic fights, these battles become less and less enjoyable the more they occur. Additionally, these enemies can feel imbalanced given the vagaries of level scaling, especially on higher difficulties, as dragons and Oblivion gates essentially serve as boss battles that can occur without warning, or at inopportune moments when players might not be prepared. This somewhat strikes against the heart of the Elder Scrolls series, which offers players a freedom of choice in terms of how they want to approach most situations.

Elder Scrolls 6 Can Learn From Breath Of The Wild

To amend Skyrim and Oblivion‘s encounter issues, Elder Scrolls 6 should look to other open world titles to see how they liven up their own environments and gameplay. A key example case might be Breath of the Wild. There, major enemies like lynels are spread across the map and can be encountered by players of any level. However, lynels will always be located around the same spots, making them possible to avoid if players wish to do so. What Elder Scrolls 6 can then do is fill its map with more enemies who are stationary. Empty-feeling world design was a problem in Skyrim, so addressing the encounter system by populating the map differently would both make its regions feel more lively and grant players the freedom to choose to fight larger and more epic enemies – without being pestered by them.

Additionally, Elder Scrolls 6 could take a lot away from BOTW‘s combat system, or those of other action-adventures and RPGs with a focus on combat, such as the upcoming Elden Ring. Fighting in BOTW takes awhile to master, but once the game’s mechanics like parrying and dodging are optimized, players can handle almost any battle. The Elder Scrolls series’ fighting mechanics have long been in need of a makeover. Those traveling across Tamriel must rely on hacking and slashing and focus on perks and stats rather than learning how to become a good fighter. Elder Scrolls 6 should address this combat issue by integrating a more immersive, skill-based fighting system that rewards players for taking the time to learn how to fight in addition to mathematical stat progression. This would, in turn, make the encounter system more bearable, as epic fights would not feel as overbearing if players had more active tools to handle them on higher difficulty settings.

Oblivion and Skyrim are beloved titles that impress event now, but Bethesda can still learn a lot from their flaws. Exploring a more robust combat system would be a welcome turn for the Elder Scrolls series as a whole. Even if Elder Scrolls 6 chooses to just alter the encounter system, though, the game is still an exciting prospect to look forward to.