THings I want from the Next Elder Scrolls game

[EscapistAccount]

What I would like from the next game:

1. Less bugs. Seriously, they're not funny Bethesda and they often ruin the game. Other companies can produce more stable games and patch out bugs, you can too. Fix your goddamn clipping too, that's not a bug per se but come on.

2. More weapons, like more real weapons and more differentiation. Not swords/axes/maces which are one handed swingy-thingies and big hammers/swords/axes which are two handed swingy-thingies. Put in spears, allow disarming so carrying backup daggers is actually useful, add mechanical differences between swords and maces beyond swing and damage sliders. Oh and to echo another comment, if I find the sword of Bjorn Skyrimsson the ancient Nord hero of legend, make it worth keeping. I know gear levelling is a thing but Excalibur shouldn't be outclassed by random bandit-chaff just because I gained ten levels. Add weight to the swings, add tactical play and counterplay in the fighting, don't have me hold down a mouse button and just wade through the battle.

3. Bandits shouldn't level gear at all, they're bandits.

4. Quit cutting down on the number of armour zones on a character, I want to assemble my clothing piece by piece, not put on a full outfit in one go. Likewise, add capes, cloaks, packs and stuff like that.

5. Add camping, weather effects, basic survival and so on, actually reward route planning.

6. Please add more voices, I am sick of hearing the same thing from the same six voices.

7. Don't make unkillable characters shits. Practically no one wants to roleplay killing children, they just want to shut them the fuck up because you made them utter dickheads.

8. Write more interesting quests, there's a reason the Dark Brotherhood quests and to a lesser extent the thieves guild quests are so good; tightly scripted and well laid out mission objectives.

9. Make sneaking fun. Add smoke bombs and stuff. In fact add more unique and interesting tool items. Smoke bombs, nonlethal takedown weapons, make peeling a dungeon apart fun and rewarding.

10. Allow home customisation in the base game and add plenty of space for storage of crap, people love collecting stuff in games and people love having somewhere to keep it. Make it worth having a base of operations. Hearthfire was good content but it should have been in the base game.

 

[Axelthefox]

1. Make everything you do have a effect on the world. Like how in skyrim i defeated vampires under the dawnguard and saved the world from a dragon,it would have been at least good if the npcs commented on it

2. Make it possible to marry a Khajiit female,i play as a male Khajiit and seems i can't marry any girl Khajiits.

3. Also make the kids notice the armor i got on,like i could go to Solitude wear ebony mail from boethiah's calling and the kids are like"i thought adventurers were supposed to look tough"

4. Better guild quests.

 

[Bad Jim]

No, Morrowind did not have fast travel. You had to actually take a boat or use magic. You cant just be one place, then another for no reason. Time passes or magic is cast.

Technically, you are correct. But effectively, you kinda did have fast travel. The essential point about fast travel is being fast, and you had guild guides, silt striders, boats, divine/almsivi intervention, mark/recall, and propylon chambers, so you could get close to pretty much anywhere in a short space of time, and all of these are essentially teleports.

When you fast travel in Oblivion/Skyrim you are ostensibly walking to your destination, and this does introduce limitations like not being able to Recall out of a dungeon carrying five times your weight limit and ending up next to Creeper.

 

[cjspyres]

What I would like from the next game:

Oh and to echo another comment, if I find the sword of Bjorn Skyrimsson the ancient Nord hero of legend, make it worth keeping. I know gear levelling is a thing but Excalibur shouldn't be outclassed by random bandit-chaff just because I gained ten levels. Add weight to the swings, add tactical play and counterplay in the fighting, don't have me hold down a mouse button and just wade through the battle.

Don't know if you were referring to my comment, but I do now know that Bjorn Skyrimsson (the ancient Nord hero of legend), is now canon in my mind.

Also, I agree with all of your other points as well. For god sakes, please make combat strategic and meaningful. I hate having to download mods to make the game not a yawnfest. I'm not exactly asking for one to one realistic medieval combat (although I'd download that mod in a heartbeat), but please make combat at least challenging beyond, "Don't fight this character because they're going to wreck you".

Just a few suggestions:

If I shoot a normal person in the head with an arrow, and they aren't even wearing a helmet, please let it at least auto crit or something. It makes no sense that they have an arrow sticking out from where their brain should be, and it practically tickles them. If I do that to a monster? Sure, go ahead, I can at least wave that away with, "Well duh, they're a monster. They might not even have brains"

Please work on balancing stealth. I swear that Bethesda only has two options for stealth. Either it's impossible to not be seen/heard, or you're a master shinobi who is a shadow of death. I wanna be a ninja or thief sometimes, and I want it to be fair and fun. Thrown weapons are nice. Maybe I can use them as a sound distraction to get guards to walk away from their post as well? That would be nice and fun.

Timed blocking. Make blocking actually a gameplay element outside of I hold my shield up and hope for the best. And actually to couple this in with another, add in more types of weapons as the above poster said. Actual different types. Spears, flails, Chakram, Katars. Hell, I can even give you ways to make them useful.

Spears- Can still be used to attack while a shield is still up. Expends extra stamina
Flails- Can occasionally ignore shields
Katars- Bladed punching weapons. Enough said
Chakram- Can be thrown and used as blades

Is it perfect? No, but at least I'm putting effort into thinking about it.

Magic. Just....rework magic. Please.

 

[Saelune]

If I shoot a normal person in the head with an arrow, and they aren't even wearing a helmet, please let it at least auto crit or something. It makes no sense that they have an arrow sticking out from where their brain should be, and it practically tickles them. If I do that to a monster? Sure, go ahead, I can at least wave that away with, "Well duh, they're a monster. They might not even have brains"

I wish they would add the limb system thing from Fallout. Dont need VATS or slowing time when I aim, but I like being able to cripple limbs and get criticals for hitting it or the head...then having it splat into a bunch of pieces. So yeah, I wish Bethesda would take that part from their Fallout games and add it to TES, and let us get a bit gorier too.

 

[cjspyres]

If I shoot a normal person in the head with an arrow, and they aren't even wearing a helmet, please let it at least auto crit or something. It makes no sense that they have an arrow sticking out from where their brain should be, and it practically tickles them. If I do that to a monster? Sure, go ahead, I can at least wave that away with, "Well duh, they're a monster. They might not even have brains"

I wish they would add the limb system thing from Fallout. Dont need VATS or slowing time when I aim, but I like being able to cripple limbs and get criticals for hitting it or the head...then having it splat into a bunch of pieces. So yeah, I wish Bethesda would take that part from their Fallout games and add it to TES, and let us get a bit gorier too.

Agreed.

Crippled Head: Concussion. Occasionally becoming staggered or vision impairment.

Crippled Arm: Can't wield a weapon/shield in it. Instantly makes having back up weapons an amazing thing if you primarily two hand weapons. Both arms get crippled? Run. Live to fight another day. Or if you don't want to make it that dramatic (Which I think would be cool), heavily reduced damage from that arm.

Crippled Legs: Obvious, reduced movement speed. Scouting before a battle and see a bad ass dual wielder? Cripple their legs with a couple arrows to even the fight up.

Crippled Body: Personally I would prefer this incur a stamina lock. Your body is crippled? You only have access to half your normal stamina. But that's just me.

Edit: Also, on the topic of the gore, yes. Please yes. If I power attack somebody in the head with a giant two handed warhammer, I want their head to explode like a goddamn Gallagher stand up routine.

 

[Trunkage]

Did we get this far and no one asked for a different game engine?

That would actually be my first improvement

 

[Bad Jim]

Did we get this far and no one asked for a different game engine?

That would actually be my first improvement

The game engine you have in your head is an improvement, the one that eliminates all bugs in the existing engine without introducing new ones, the one that does everything so much better. But if they were capable of rewriting the engine to be good they would also be able to fix the existing engine to be good.

 

[Axelthefox]

Oh, also make dialogue options catered to the race. I just had to facepaw when my Khajiit character asked a npc "what Skooma is" or the classic"Khajiit aren't allowed in the cities?

 

[Silent Protagonist]

To add my own suggestion on top of the pile of other excellent suggestions:
I'd like to see area quest markers implemented instead of the pinpoint ones used for everything. For example, say the next stage in whatever quest line you have is to go find and talk to some guy two towns over. In Skyrim you would immediately have a quest marker that pinpoints right on the guy's head. I propose that at that point the quest marker would cover the entire town. Then, after arriving in said town, you could ask around about the guy to get the area narrowed down to the local tavern, then in the tavern you could ask the bartender about the guy and get the pinpoint arrow on the guy's head. You could still bypass all this by simply stumbling onto the guy while searching the town. I think this would provide an excellent middle ground between the only get the vaguest of directions and maybe a rough mark of the location on the world map of Morrowind and the immersion breaking, instant go to this exact spot arrow on the screen or compass of Oblivion and Skyrim.

 

[immortalfrieza]

3 More werewolf options: There are other weres in the game. In Dragoonborn DLC you fight werebears randomly. But there are werecats, were crocodiles and so on in lore. SO why not that? Even if you only stick to the tried and true werewolf, one of the mods out there is to adjust the look of your lycanthrope like you do your character. So why not?

One thing I'd love for them to bring back is the ability to sneak and stay as a werewolf for several hours instead of just like 2 minutes. While being a werewolf in Skyrim is fun for a bit and the transformation is badass and everything, it quickly get monotonous. I'd like to see not only sneaking back, but some sort of stalking and hunting mechanics to keep things interesting, as well as reason to do so like passive in and out of werewolf form benefits.

4.More Dialogue from NPCs. It?s a problem with an open world game like this, especially with many an actor doing any ware from 3 to twenty different characters. And how many of us can easily make a dangerous drinking game out of: Let me Guess: someone stole your sweet roll; I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee; the warriors from Hammerfel have curved swords. CURVED SWORDS! Can you believe it? And so on and so on.

Espesialy since you are bound to run into the following voice types:
Guard
Grumpy Old Man
Young Girl
Typicle Dunmer Female
Typicle Dunmer male
Orc male
Orc female
Sleezy shop keeper
Drunk guy
Scary Big Guy


So maybe having ten to twenty lines they could say make this less obvious it?s the same guy dong the same thing in 10 different places.

One thing I think they should do is voice modulation. Alter the tone and pitch of any given random NPC's voice in a random manner, so that even though it might be the same guy voicing 20 different characters it doesn't sound like it, or at least isn't so obvious about it. Of course, there would have to be some sort of system to control this to an extent or we'd get some bizarre results. On top of that, I'd wish they'd have the lines both remain appropriate so we don't get lines about you just joining a faction and lines about you ruling it coming from the same guy and go down a randomized but consistent list so they didn't repeat the same couple lines over and over again. It would probably help too if NPCs didn't talk as much in general, so their lines would remain fresher for much longer.

As for my own, I'd like to see better more dynamic combat, one that relies genuine skill above all else and takes one's skill level at the time into account, especially when it comes to fighting with a melee weapon. For instance, take a page out of Gothic's book and have the player start out as just barely able to even hold a sword at the beginning and can only swing clumsily and warily, and as their skill improves they become more smooth and confident with their strikes and hold it better. By the time you'd max out your weapon ability you'd be a whirling cloud of bladed death. As for the combat itself, I'd like to see directional combat implemented, both offensively and defensively, as well as combat that makes use of timing. Instead of just standing there and mindlessly mashing the attack button, how about having to try to get through the opponent's defense by striking from one up, down, left, or right while blocking whatever direction they happen to attack from? Then, to further implement skill, how about the player being able to knock the enemy off balance by blocking at JUST the right time, and then counterattacking which would cause heavy damage if not kill them outright? Of course, the enemy could do that too, with feints that both you and the enemy could do to take each other off balance. On top of that, I'd like to see reaction to the blows on both sides, such as if I slash someone across the face they'll have a red bleeding wound following the strike. If they happen to be wearing a helmet then there would be sparks across the helmet at the time of the strike and a mark on the helmet itself instead.

 

[Trunkage]

Did we get this far and no one asked for a different game engine?

That would actually be my first improvement

The game engine you have in your head is an improvement, the one that eliminates all bugs in the existing engine without introducing new ones, the one that does everything so much better. But if they were capable of rewriting the engine to be good they would also be able to fix the existing engine to be good.

Look, I remember Witcher 3 being way more buggier than Fallout 4. Witcher 3 did have more fixes though (it still crashed far more than F4 for me). I wish Bethsheda spent some time fixing games.

I also wonder if making the game streamlined or simpler happens becuase they are trying to stop bugs from occurring. Personally, I feel like there are less bugs per game, and in F4 I got 2 over a 100 hr play through. During Divinity: OS2 I keep breaking the game becuase their quest structure is so complicated

 

[Saelune]

People always rag on the buggyness of Bethesda games...but they do fix the major bugs atleast. And sure, I do wish they were better about it, but they could be worse, and alot of the bugs are because they make huge, complex games, ones that are bigger and more complex than most.

 

[Bad Jim]

I also wonder if making the game streamlined or simpler happens because they are trying to stop bugs from occurring.

I don't think so. Look at the differences between Skyrim and Morrowind:

-Fast travel. The travel options in Morrowind are mostly teleports, so they function in the same way fast travel does in Skyrim. There is a greater need to handle NPCs or piles of crap that might occupy your destination spot, but this case still needs to be handled in Skyrim.
-Skill trees. Skyrim gives you a large number of discrete bonuses as you level up. I would argue that this is more likely to hide subtle bugs than increasing seven stats as you do in Morrowind.
-Towns are separate zones from the surrounding landscape. The Skyrim engine cannot properly handle people climbing over town walls and you aren't allowed to fly. In Morrowind, towns are part of the landscape so there are no problems going over walls, and the design is actually simpler with less potential for bugs. The motivation for this was probably to allow more detailed towns, but a future ES game could go back to making towns part of the landscape, and would be more robust if it did.
-Quest Markers. This is probably because directions given in Morrowind were rarely helpful. There wasn't much room for bugs, it was just bad dialogue.
-Not being allowed to kill plot critical NPCs. In either case, the job of figuring out which NPCs are quest critical is the same. The real difference is that the game has to handle the 'doomed world' gracefully. However, the consequent bugs are likely to be quest bugs, and the sort of person that persists in the 'doomed world' is probably just killing everyone for fun. And an invincible NPC can walk onto lava or something silly like that and won't be able to perform the function it was made invincible for and you won't get any warning.
-Not being able to fail quests. It is probably more work to ensure that a quest is always beatable than to detect ways to mess it up and end the quest in failure should they happen. Either way, you have to recognize potential quest failures.
-Being able to join nearly every faction. This is really just a matter of degree, as you still have to choose Stormcloak or Imperial, you just don't have to limit yourself to about half the factions in the game. I would argue that mutually exclusive factions reduce bugs because if two quests combine poorly you might not be able to do both anyway.

 

[maninahat]

Decent writing. No really, 9/10s of the problems stem from boring ass quests with characters I can't care about, to resolve some issue I have no relation to. Heck, in Fallout: New Vegas, a guy shoots me in the face for no apparent reason and I want to know why. That's called a hook; Use those, Bathesda! Sure you fucked it up again in Fallout 4, but it was a step forwards.

And also, maybe to step back towards its routes of having a less conventional, less Tolkienesque aesthetic?

Magic beyond mundane, mechanical boring stuff like launching fireballs and "see an object from 8 feet away for 27 seconds". The shouts were more fun and powerful, but the game rations them out so that you can't use the cool spells more than once every couple of minutes. Great.

Finally, fuck off with the spreadsheets. I don't know about the fantasy stories you read, but they tend not to involve scanning through hundreds of rows of inventory items. Skyrim was an Excel simulator with occasional fighting minigames. I don't mean dumb it down, I mean make it sensible.

 

[PurplePonyArcade]

Most people here already said what needed to be said and done so better than I. Still I want to say my opinions for games I enjoy and how I want their future to be.

Here goes. I want more khajiit lore, weapons, dialog, voice options and whatever else one can think of. I know I am extremely biased but that is what I want the most. Of course if I headed the project before stepping down I would make it 100 percent devoted to Elsweyr but that's hardly all I am about with Elder Scrolls.
Skyrim's gameplay is fun, like really fun. I do feel like they need to innovate some with a new game but its a good basis to start with. Fun as I still find Skyrim as long as it has been around and been released again just being Skyrim with no skin will probably not go over well and I really hope Bethesda will not be that lazy for their potential sixth title.
What I would like though is to be more like previous TES games and make it where you character is going to become better and better at something but always have their limitations and have other things they will always been mediocre at and just bad at others. Skyrim essentially lets you be the god of everything with enough time and buying lessons from people. I realize other games where not that great at "balance" but better than Skyrim. I also realize balance is a hard and mostly non-existent thing that is hard to chase after and really hard for a game of this scale. Speaking of buying lessons that shit should be canned entirely. At the very least if you keep it make it VERY rare and make it only purchasable once or twice and just as a reward for completeting a side quest or even sparing a character's life. It's better to kill it out entirely, but there is some middle ground if you are a bigger pussy than my tallest khajiit character.

On the subject of "balance" can we please have more limitations in story? Add as many options as you like. Heavens being a big game with so many things to do and most of those things and lore appealing to me is wonderful and maybe a bit situational but fuck everything I have fun. Games are fun. However when I am both the big time leader of of both the Dark Brotherhood AND The Thieves Guild that is kind of bullshit. In situations like that I should only be able to pick one. Maybe that can change my situation with the other like having a new set of missions where you fight alongside the opposite guild cult but differently than if you joined them. Ordinarily I would say that is too much to ask and hate asking too much. However Bethesda loves making this massive open world RPGs and have the money so I am confident they could pull something like that off. Basically let the player interact with whatever they want but put more limits on joining stuff depending on its importance. Skyrim and other games already have that but I guess I am asking to be a bit more restrictive.
Going back to the cats I love, get more writers for TES' fictional tongues. Maybe do more with the Dragon tongue. Show more of the languages and dialects of the races of not just Tamriel but as much of Nurn as the writer's imagination can fit into whatever scale of game it will be and how or where they are featured. This probably will only reflect in which land the game is based on though and I guess that's fine but I really want more. Of course in regards to language everyone including me wants me voice actors. Also hire a better Nordic voice or few. Skyrim's are not the worst I have heard(far as games I like that is Overwatch) but they could be better. Just hire more voice actors in general. Even if they fuck up the accents again if there are more around and they are decent fans will be forgiving regardless.

I guess the following request is really "Boiware-ing" things but while marrige in video games is not something I find appealing I do want the option for the player to marry any member of any race regardless of gender. Or have multiple options per race to suggest one character is hetero or homo. Probably best to make them all plausible bisexual because its less characters to have to put in and less of a clusterfuck. I think I'd be more interested in just having at least one child of each race you can adopt regardless of marital status. On that note maybe feature a at least one or more characters from a non-Tamriel race. I don't care if you can marry or adopt them, though adopting a kid from a totally different race out of the whole land sounds kind of awesome.

As other, smarter users have said removing fast travel is a great idea. Removing a map of some sort not so much. Here's to the Elder Scrolls fans on this thread, on TheEscapist and in general.

 

[Saint of M]

3. Also make the kids notice the armor i got on,like i could go to Solitude wear ebony mail from boethiah's calling and the kids are like"i thought adventurers were supposed to look tough"

I'm in full dragon plate armor, weilding dragon bone weapons, just slaine a dragon, killed the bad guys in Dawn Gaurd, ended the civil war, and that brat still says that. Also how many of the kids in Dragon's Reach or Braith have you just wanted to turn the Children's imortality for?

Or the Liononess to shut...up!

While I on a magitable follower, make it so you can take out their arms adn armor and replace it with your own much easier or: I think I will buy your set of armor...hunny, why are now naked when you have a shiny new set of armor in your inventory?

 

[immortalfrieza]

People always rag on the buggyness of Bethesda games...but they do fix the major bugs atleast. And sure, I do wish they were better about it, but they could be worse, and alot of the bugs are because they make huge, complex games, ones that are bigger and more complex than most.

Exactly, and I definitely feel like Bethesda's reputation for bugs in their games is way WAY overblown, though all I know for sure is I've hardly even encountered any even in a just released game.

People may cry a lot for Bethesda to make a new engine but they really fail to realize how stupid and self defeating of a thing to do that would be. The reason they stick with the engine they've had since Morrowind and keep improving upon it instead of scrapping it and starting from scratch is it's much much easier for them to make and debug games using a engine that's derivative of one they've used before. This means they already know the ins and outs of the engine and thus only need to be brought up to speed with the new things this version of it is capable of. If people think Bethesda's games are buggy NOW just imagine just how much more so it would be and how much longer it would take to make their next game if they had to start over with a new engine they aren't familiar with.

 

[RobertEHouse]

A larger world, more quest that didn't always spawn in the same bloody cave 131 times. Make the Caves and underground be randomly generated.

Have the ability to use potions once again to break the game, like flying from one end of the map to the next like in Morrowind.

Character NPC quests that were not ones which didn't ended abruptly and developed in pace with the actual story.

Add more glitches as "features" like Piranha Bytes games!

add more dogs,

 

[Darth Rosenberg]

I'd like to see a main quest line with the same depth as Oblivion, but with gameplay and progression similar to Skyrim. The main quest line in Skyrim was rather underwhelming. Esp. since there was no intro or ending cutscenes to bookend it. I know it's incredibly hard to one up an intro narrated by Patrick Stewart, but come on at least put the effort in.

I know I sometimes have a kind of seething animosity towards Oblivion, but... Oblivion's MQ had "depth"? Where? I found only a 'demons are invading! kill demons!' story.

I'd say both Oblivion's and Skyrim's [and Fallout 3's] MQ's were all awful, and all absolutely braindead. Morrowind certainly had less flash, and a lot of faffing - I'm not saying it holds up completely now - but jeese, that MQ had real thematic depth and complexity.

Here goes. I want more khajiit lore, weapons, dialog, voice options and whatever else one can think of. I know I am extremely biased but that is what I want the most. Of course if I headed the project before stepping down I would make it 100 percent devoted to Elsweyr but that's hardly all I am about with Elder Scrolls.

I've never played a khajiit in all my TES playing, and whilst I know it's a bit of a glib answer; mods? Mods certainly provide khajiit dialogue overhauls.

Wanting a TES to heavily bias towards one race is obviously a no-no, though, so I can understand why there's no real tailoring between all the races.

Speaking of buying lessons that shit should be canned entirely. At the very least if you keep it make it VERY rare and make it only purchasable once or twice and just as a reward for completeting a side quest or even sparing a character's life. It's better to kill it out entirely, but there is some middle ground if you are a bigger pussy than my tallest khajiit character.

I completely disagree with that, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, giving players more choice over how they level is a good idea.

Secondly, Skyrim frankly needed that kind of 5-freebies-per-level because they idiotically restrict so many of the interesting, genuinely useful perks sky high. Everything to speed leveling is a good thing. I'm currently using Ordinator, so I'm not having to put up with vanilla's dumb decisions, but still, the vanilla design was/is awful.

On the subject of "balance" can we please have more limitations in story? / However when I am both the big time leader of of both the Dark Brotherhood AND The Thieves Guild that is kind of bullshit. In situations like that I should only be able to pick one.

I agree there should should be more locks to factions, but I don't particularly see how it would've helped Skyrim, or even particularly made much sense. I don't entirely see why the player should pick between those two, for example.

Perhaps add some text/dialogue about potentially conflicts of interest, or mistrust from other characters, but that's about it.

Show more of the languages and dialects of the races of not just Tamriel but as much of Nurn as the writer's imagination can fit into whatever scale of game it will be and how or where they are featured. This probably will only reflect in which land the game is based on though and I guess that's fine but I really want more.

Methinks you're mistaken as to who Bethesda are and where their market lies... After Morrowind, they kinda left imagination and esoteric lore far behind. Bethesda these days excel at ignoring the bizarre potential of their own lore, so I wouldn't get your hopes up for anything re languages or dialects.

Also hire a better Nordic voice or few. Skyrim's are not the worst I have heard(far as games I like that is Overwatch) but they could be better. Just hire more voice actors in general. Even if they fuck up the accents again if there are more around and they are decent fans will be forgiving regardless.

Heh, Oblivion and Skyrim were awful in that department (ditto Fallout 3).

What made Skyrim's production truly sound quite amateurish was the lack of cohesion; in one room a Nord might hail, terribly, from somewhere in the States, and in another corner they're Scandinavian. Absolutely appalling, idiotic design/game direction. I think BioWare's approach to voice actors and dialects in Dragon Age is mostly superb; even when they tweak their own soft canon, they generally do so consistently, and so it helps to distinguish between cultures, and thus makes the created world feel more authentic/grounded.

Fallout 4 was a major step forward for Bethesda in this regard, so given the two IP's are so entangled I'm reasonably confident the next TES will address the quality control, at least, and hopefully see more cohesion of design/direction.

I guess the following request is really "Boiware-ing" things but while marrige in video games is not something I find appealing I do want the option for the player to marry any member of any race regardless of gender.

Given BioWare keep insisting on canon orientations and nixing player choice, I don't think that's very BioWare-y. Skyrim's system of, er, romances/marriage, is barely an afterthought of a feature, but it's ostensibly far better at providing choice to the player than any BioWare game (save DAII).

As other, smarter users have said removing fast travel is a great idea.

I detested fast-travel when it popped up in Oblivion, and whined about it spectacularly on forums...

But removing fast-travel's a complete no-no for a number of reasons. There are, seemingly, lots of lazy gamers with cripplingly short attention spans, but these days there are also far more gamers - typically older - with less time to burn, and so such disparate groups deserve player agency.

Given how it dealt with multiple options for realistic/immersive 'fast' traveling, Morrowind's a fine baseline to start with, if magi-teleportation out of the gate's off the table.

Removing a map of some sort not so much. Here's to the Elder Scrolls fans on this thread, on TheEscapist and in general.

Has anyone ever suggested getting rid of a map? If so, that's the first I've heard of it.

The cheating, immersion breaking compass is another thing, but I seem to be in a minority with my utter loathing of that thing... Thankfully mods can get rid of that nonsense very easily.