WHAT IF every door led to a room.

moleculardrugs

Even though it wouldn't add to any of the current stories, if the Devs could go back and make every inaccessible door accessible, it would really add to the quality and storyline of the game.

For example, all those buildings in Orcrest (the town wiped by plague and fire where disease-ridden Daedra worshippers go to hug zombies), would be nice if I could just explore that city and see the homes/rooms destroyed by the plague. To know what it was like for someone living in the city by seeing whatever little evidence of their existence existed beforehand. There's a shed near the crafting center in Leyawiin, Blackwood, what the heck is in that shed! Even though it doesn't matter, to see it being used to fill firewood would just make it more believable that people really inhabit Leyawiin.

I read somewhere, I don't remember where, that the appeal in TES series is that every door leads somewhere. I think that should be implemented in ESO. Yes, it is a lot of work and work hours to the dedication, but at the same time, it is a means to add more to the current content versus creating newer content. This would benefit both ZOS, Bethesda, and the player community (existing and newer). It doesn't have to be all at once, it can be slow changes over time. Just saying, but running into a door that doesn't go anywhere makes it feel like a Hollywood set rather than a game set for exploration and having fun.

Sylvermynx

If they made all those doors lead to rooms, the game servers would probably implode.

moleculardrugs

Sylvermynx wrote: »

If they made all those doors lead to rooms, the game servers would probably implode.

Yes, true. I forgot about server load. Pragmatism is something what needs to be taken into account. [Purely for theoretical discussion here] I wonder though because the game is downloaded and is already considered a very storage-heavy game, how much of the game can be downloaded when it came to creating these rooms.

I think right now the game sits at 80-90gb of storage. Would this add 10 more gb?

Sometimes I wonder if the graphics of the game get in the way of making it feel more like TES. You know how in Morrowind and Oblivion (TES series) the world was so huge and there were trees everywhere but the graphics weren't as beautiful as today's graphics? Honestly, people play Minecraft and Roblox and those games have very low quality graphics compared to ZOS but look how much of the world you can create or add to them. The less pixels is sometimes better

I don't know, this is not really a suggestion because lower quality for more quantity is not realistic and it just forces another playstyle onto people who already love ESO. My post here is more food for thought of the balance between what could have been and what is. Your post inspired it more for discussion versus an actual solution, because TBH that is not a solution.

ESO is a really amazing and beautiful already.

Amottica

It would add to the size of the game we store on our machines. All that information is stored locally.

And it would not add much at all to our enjoyment of the game. They would be unused rooms that do not serve a real purpose.

Sylvermynx

Considering that I counted a thousand "locked" doors in some of the cities (not each, just in toto) I'd guess if they made the rooms actually behind the doors, we'd be looking at a LOT more than 10 GB.

And I wonder if they even have enough graphics/housing employees to make all those rooms and furnish them. I suppose they could "template" them, have I dunno maybe a dozen options and just salt them around "rolling the dice for what goes where".

ESO is very beautiful. And I do still love my gloomy grey TES V Skyrim as well as the beauty of Oblivion (if I could just get past the potato heads - even with OCO2 they're still not very good). By the time I'm back in Morrowind, though, the graphics are a dud.

moleculardrugs

Amottica wrote: »

It would add to the size of the game we store on our machines. All that information is stored locally.

And it would not add much at all to our enjoyment of the game. They would be unused rooms that do not serve a real purpose.

Well, some people like to explore dungeons or cities. So it would add a lot of enjoyment for some. I guess the real question is if it would add real enjoyment to the majority. When I do random dungeons on norm and I see a lowbie enjoying the dialogue of the dungeon's NPCs, it makes my heart warm so much.

SPOILERS, Castle Thorn:
Like I walk around and read every little shiny paper I have not read yet. Lady Thorn's Castle for example has a letter from an architect that addresses the state of her castle. It added to the game for me because I realized that's where they got their nobles from. It added that this was someone from Daggerfall, a place that views the undead with so just fear and hate, putting his trade and profession before his culture's fear of vampires. That speaks a lot to me!

The rooms in Castle Thorn, if you go through them, you will see that any guests could use them right? But have you seen the furnishings on the dressers? The yellow bile. That indicates that some experiment was taking place while the guests were sleeping in the beds. The rooms were probably more of an infirmary where people were triaged while being experimented on versus guest beds.

Also, there are doors in that castle that cannot be explored that would lead to the holding cells. Not saying for them to change the dungeon but it's just cool to realize there's so much more going on than the main objective, you can quickly get lost and fall in love with something by adding more details to the picture.

LoneStar2911

I would absolutely love if there were more interiors to explore. Even if they were simply there for atmosphere or roleplaying, or whatever!

moleculardrugs

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Considering that I counted a thousand "locked" doors in some of the cities (not each, just in toto) I'd guess if they made the rooms actually behind the doors, we'd be looking at a LOT more than 10 GB.

And I wonder if they even have enough graphics/housing employees to make all those rooms and furnish them. I suppose they could "template" them, have I dunno maybe a dozen options and just salt them around "rolling the dice for what goes where".

ESO is very beautiful. And I do still love my gloomy grey TES V Skyrim as well as the beauty of Oblivion (if I could just get past the potato heads - even with OCO2 they're still not very good). By the time I'm back in Morrowind, though, the graphics are a dud.

I used to wander Vivec City for hours when I was a kid playing Morrowind in Middle School! It was such a grand city and the fact that you could go underneath the city and encounter undead, well as a kid it scared me because it was such a holy city with Ordinators patrolling and killing you for the smallest crimes, then to have such a grand and dangerous underworld beneath it. It was really cool!

Or how the worshippers of Daggoth Ur stacking furniture upside down. Like WHAT THE HECK! That's so not really visually impressive but so freaky to see, especially in a dark room with those infected by corpus whatever.

I wonder if the new machine learning AI thing that ZOS had done with Intel (I think it was Intel), I wonder if it could do more than just have our mail sent quicker to use without needing zone changes, and if it's a step towards this future "Utopia."

moleculardrugs

LoneStar2911 wrote: »

I would absolutely love if there were more interiors to explore. Even if they were simply there for atmosphere or roleplaying, or whatever!

In Runescape when I played it in middle school, there was some city called Varrock or something and exploring the White Knight castle was really fun even though it led nowhere. There was a party hall there too I think, didn't know much about it, but I would meet so many people who just wandered there to explore. The fact that you needed a membership to explore the parts of the game is nowadays unappealing to me, but there's just something about having a door that leads somewhere that makes a game feel more real! (And no, I don't want to have to pay to use the doors, was just adding a fond memory to add to the discussion of doors leading to somewhere and their appeal, especially for people who like to world build).

To stay on topic, there is a mineshaft or something in Newt Cave in Cyrodiil. It's guarded by 2 bats and you can't enter there. However, if you enter the delve, the description says that people in Bravil use it for smuggling, if "there were actually smugglers on the Bravil docks" or something. If you are there in Newt Cave, look at the pool of water and you'll see a Welkynd stone, which hints at Ayleid design. I don't remember from Oblivion if Newt Cave had more to it, but I think what's behind that door is an Ayleid ruin. I could be wrong of course

Just another example of this strange "door leading somewhere" phenomenon that I feel incline to talk about haha

duagloth

what if every door led to a room and there were no loading screens in between them

Amottica

moleculardrugs wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

It would add to the size of the game we store on our machines. All that information is stored locally.

And it would not add much at all to our enjoyment of the game. They would be unused rooms that do not serve a real purpose.

Well, some people like to explore dungeons or cities.

I understand some people would explore every nook and cranny, but it is unlikely many would. But this is asking for increasing the size of the game stored on our PCs and consoles (which often have a storage limitation) and very possibly increase the server load which is already a problem. Then we have the added cost to develop the game because that costs money.

All of that without adding anything that is actually substantive to the game. So it is a great idea but it has a high cost without any real benefit to the game.

Vevvev

I for one would love for more areas to explore and loot look at.

But really, I'm incredibly disappointed with a lot of the new zones being added to the game these days with whole entire buildings just there for props. I want to break into them and try my hand at seeing what valuables are inside. Cities where if you delve into the underground criminal activities where there's actually places to explore are honestly the best.

Cities where you might only have a couple of locations to actually break into with a whole bunch you can't even get inside of just takes away so much from it's enjoyment. Same thing with shops without strongboxes... those make me sad. Like Solitude is almost devoid of any kind of legerdemain gameplay.

bmnoble

Nah just make all those inaccessible doors destructible and have a concrete wall on the other side with a sign that says "under construction"

That said I would not mind more buildings that you can actually explore instead of them being just scenery in the same way rocks and trees are.

RoseTheSnowElf

It would be amazing if there weren't so many locked (chained) doors. I would personally enjoy it. But, unfortunately with the current state of the game and available tech, it's probably not practical.


And this would be the icing on the the cake here:

duagloth wrote: »

what if every door led to a room and there were no loading screens in between them

Kiralyn2000

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Considering that I counted a thousand "locked" doors in some of the cities (not each, just in toto) I'd guess if they made the rooms actually behind the doors, we'd be looking at a LOT more than 10 GB.

Eh, it would depend on how they did them. Most would be super cut&paste, just remixing standard already-built interiors with different arrangements of placeables.

Ex: A mod I enjoyed for Fallout 3, the DC Interiors Project, added over 100 working doors to the game. It even added some meshes & textures. It's just 124mb, because it's almost entirely made using things already in the game.


That said, it did get quite repetitive. Doing something similar for ESO would be the same - it's nice to be able to go into those doors at first, but it's all just filler in the end. And yeah, it would take a ton of work even just for some interns to throw together a ton of generic "house interior" and "shop interior". Making them actually interesting, on the other hand, would take vastly more work and would increase the file size.

phaneub17_ESO

One patch later there will be fewer doors.

mocap

there are over 9000 unmarked NPC with little-to-huge dialogs. Do you speak with all them? Ok, with 0.01% of them at least? I think no. Same will be with doors.

Lalocat

This game already takes up way too much space on my hard drive. I'm upgrading soon (I hope) but on the current PC I had to delete two other games just to install it, and my SSD is now permanently in the red.

Jim_Pipp

There is an elegant solution; each locked door is assigned a "size", and is matched with a similarly sized player inn-room from the housing system...

... going through a door takes you into a random other player's decorated room, if they have volunteered their property for this.

It wouldn't be perfect, but it is no less immersion breaking than having loads of empty houses, and would make owning the small properties really meaningful because you will be adding your creation to the game. Exploring those locked doors would be optional, and probably quite interesting; and wouldn't require anything from the servers that isn't already there.

I have a theory about why this game has so much dead space.

When the game was developed it was intended to be funded by a subscription model, with new content being added incrementally but available to all players; e.g. Craglorn. As everyone would have access to all new and old zones, you can add new content to older zones, so it made design sense to leave "blank space" to use in later releases. We know some "updates" were in development before launch, they teased the Dark Brotherhood pretty much at launch, and like the thieves guild these required going back and forth between zones.

Unfortunately ESO quickly realised it wouldn't succeed under a purely subscription model, so it transitioned to cash-shop DLC's, which not everyone will have. Unfortunately they were already committed to a design style of big feeling zones full of "blank space" so it has continued, even though there was little hope that empty space would be used later.

Vaoh

Yes ZOS can do it but it would require some load screens. You just have to understand how ESO works. I’ll try to explain:

• When you interact with a door in ESO, your character is *teleported* into a new cell.
• A lot of times this cell is directly under the ground, meaning no load screen since it is all already loaded. This is the ideal way for things to be. It is why your quest marker leading directly into a house sometimes says the marker is below you lol.
• When you get a load screen it is because a *lot* more stuff has to load. This is due to your character being teleported much farther away, into an area where the terrain isn’t already fully loaded yet. ZOS does this because they have to avoid making the game load too many objects at the same time or else you will lag. We see this more frequently in DLC towns (like Markarth or Solitude) which have way more more stuff than base game towns.

So yes - ZOS can do it from a game performance standpoint, as long as you are fine with those new areas requiring load screens.

Now in terms of game size.... maybe they can cut back on the sheer size of the outside of map portions of each zone??? You can literally travel from the Glenumbra zone into Alikr Desert landmass, or from the Alikr Desert zone into Stormhaven/Bangnorai landmass, and find a massive amount of assents/houses etc. The amount of stuff you find is SIGNIFICANTLY more assets than what it would take to create interiors for each of the locked doors in each zone.

Paulytnz

What if every door lead to a room.............................with another door....... O.O

heaven13

We can't even keep our characters' tracking properly because the game is in such a poor state in terms of data management. No way they can add more accessible buildings, as nice as that would be. The game can't continue to expand, not without serious upgrades and investment to the underlying structure. At this point, it feels like the dev team is just in a boat with a giant hole and they're trying to keep it afloat by using buckets to toss water back to sea. How much more can they squeak out before it sinks?

Kwoung

heaven13 wrote: »

We can't even keep our characters' tracking properly because the game is in such a poor state in terms of data management. No way they can add more accessible buildings, as nice as that would be. The game can't continue to expand, not without serious upgrades and investment to the underlying structure. At this point, it feels like the dev team is just in a boat with a giant hole and they're trying to keep it afloat by using buckets to toss water back to sea. How much more can they squeak out before it sinks?

Yup, it is already filling faster than they can bail the water out. My personal expectation is, the game will become neigh unplayable with the release of the next chapter, as the last two have literally brought the game to it's knees in many areas. I strongly suspect that ZOS thinks the PVE crowd will simply suck it up as the PVP crowd has over the years, but find that highly doubtful. Not to mention the fact they have already lost 75%+ of their PVP player base over it, and I am pretty sure losing that much of the PVE crowd will kill the game.

They have milked this cash cow well past it's prime, and needed to invest in a new cow long ago, but apparently are waiting for the current cow to die, before they do anything about the milk shortage.

the1andonlyskwex

Can/do you go through every door you see in the real world?

Deter1UK

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

Can/do you go through every door you see in the real world?

No

But, unlike Alt #3 I'm not a fully paid up member of the local Thieves Guild!

Leftover_Pizza

If all doors would lead to a room, there'd simply be less doors in the game, to prevent servers from taking off and end up in an orbit in space.

katanagirl1

Wrothgar has every door leading to a room, and that zone works fine. There are a lot of doors. There is also considerable space inside these buildings, and a lot of lootables.

They used to be able to do this.

moleculardrugs

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Wrothgar has every door leading to a room, and that zone works fine. There are a lot of doors. There is also considerable space inside these buildings, and a lot of lootables.

They used to be able to do this.

Did they just think people wouldn't care if a few buildings were Hollywood sets versus actual buildings?

moleculardrugs

mocap wrote: »

there are over 9000 unmarked NPC with little-to-huge dialogs. Do you speak with all them? Ok, with 0.01% of them at least? I think no. Same will be with doors.

I actually explore the zone when I use Zone Guide and interact with everything. This is why it takes me so long to complete a zone! I don't rush through it for the skillpoints, I enjoy talking to the NPCs and a lot of them have quirks that make them really unique to the zone lol

moleculardrugs

the1andonlyskwex wrote: »

Can/do you go through every door you see in the real world?

I'm sure you can if you paid for the door!

twev

I was in Orcrest just last night, and all the chained doors make me feel cheated.
Additionally, locations with 1K containers with nothing lootable feels like a cheat, too.

edit to add: Multistory buildings everywhere with no staircase inside always feels like a waste that makes exploring feel pointless too and always bothered me greatly. It's the main reason I hardly even try anymore.