Suggestions for the future of ESO

VerboseQuips · July 31

Apologies in advance for this is gonna be a very long post. So long in fact that I’ll have to split into several messages because I exceeded the length limit by something like 27K characters.

I started, stopped and resumed writing it several times through more than a year. First it was a way to bid the game farewell when I ceased playing. Then it was a response to the communication shift as the game turned to its Seasons model. Since the Devs promised they would pay more attention to player feedback, I saw this as an opportunity to list what was still missing for ESO to become a “complete” ES game by looking for systems that existed in past Elder Scrolls games and that have yet to be implemented here. Now and considering the dire situation in which ZOS seems to be, posting this is more of an attempt to show how there is still room for growth in ESO.

So here comes a very long list of suggestions, wishes and unreasonable fantasies I gathered to enhance (at least in my opinion) ESO in its future. I tried to order it in a way that would make sense and would make it easier to read, but it’s still very “bullet-pointy”. Furthermore, as English isn’t my mother tongue, some phrasing might be weird or erroneous, for which I apologize as well.

Revamping older zones

It’s been mentioned that older game zones would be revised and improved, at least by receiving new textures and some newer models, beginning with the starting zones.

This is an opportunity to add new places where it makes sense. For example, in the Rift, the unused empty space between Arcwind Point and Angarvunde could be filled with Autumnwatch, possibly in the form of a group dungeon or trial. One could even add an entire new Blackreach section, and several new places giving access to it. For example, we could explore the Elven (Ayleid or Falmer?) ruin under Greenwall. Similarly, Arcwind Point might be enriched with a small old Nordic tower and with the Varlais Cavern. Mount Trolhetta could gain a new small cave with Bromm’s Pass. Another entrance could be gained by adding the Crystaldrift Cave just South of Jenedusil’s Claw. A small section of the Jerrall Mountains could contain the Darklight Tower, yielding access to a great Dwemer lift in Rkund, and possibly even parts of the Serpent’s Trail.
We could also explore the Sandstone Caverns under Kvatch (of which we might already have a glimpse through the collapsed wall in the Erstwhile Sanctuary) and meet the Sunken One.
Specifically in Vvardenfell, I'd like to see some questline for the Bal Molagmer, leading to daily theft quests. A variety of player houses could be added there, including an Ashlander yurt, an ancestral tomb, a Vvardenfell-styled Dwemer ruin, a Kwama mine, a Velothi stronghold and a Velothi tower. The Dwemer ruin of Arkngthand could be made accessible, possibly as a group dungeon.
In Artaeum, a player house could be added inside the Ceporah Tower, using its peculiar architectural style. Crafting surveys should also be added to Summerset, where they are missing.

Revisiting older zones would also give an opportunity to add new creatures and plants to those zones. It could be mounts, pets, bugs or other passive creatures from the Crown Store whose presence would make sense in said zones from a lore perspective. It could also be new or returning foes (giving an opportunity for new trophies, leads and so on).
For example, in Vvardenfell, Kollops would yield Powdered Mother of Pearl and ancestral tombs would host Bonewalkers and Bonelords, while the Clockwork City would feature hulking Fabricants and the Clockwork Dreughs mentioned in Vivec's sermons. Skyrim would have trollkins and snow wolves able to cast ice-based elemental magic through their bites, and also “shrieking winds” created by Lamae Beolfag (I imagine them being some kind of vampiric version of ice wraiths or air atronachs). The Rift could also gain some new unique Rosewood Trees models in the Smokefrost Peaks area (which could then be turned into player house furnishings). Spiddal sticks, Harrada and Bloodgrass could grow in the Deadlands. Hackgwings could venture into Shadowfen, Cyrodiil would have boars, pumas, mountain lions and Minotaurs, while Craglorn, the Reach and the vicinity of the Crypt of Hearts would have wormmouths, fanged gouti, floaters and rays, Orsinium would host Orc-rats, Wereboars would roam the Glenumbran countryside, Hippogryphs and Cockatrices would gallop and fly in Valenwood, Nymphs, Medusae, Sphynxes and Centaurs would rarely be seen in mysterious places, wights would haunt Ayleid ruins and Dwarven ballistae, drone-flies and turtles would welcome travelers at Dwemer doorsteps. Faerie fire atronachs and shadow atronachs could also appear, and one could even add new types of atronachs, like “Ice-fire” or “frostburn” atronachs near Sunspire.

Adding such new creatures would also allow to add more gender variations to humanoid creatures : female giants, imps, ogres and minotaurs, male spriggans, nereids, lamiae, perthans, shrikes, winged twilights and wispfathers, for example.

While reworking the zones, one also could include a reference here and there to the Betrayal of the Second Era tabletop game.

Seasonal variations

Such a zone-by-zone reworking could be an opportunity to introduce seasonal variations that would make sense for the considered zones. In High Rock, for example, one would get the marked variations one would expect in a european tempered climate. In Alik’r, one could get one week of rain followed by ephemeral fields of flowers and inundated wadi. In Pellitine, one could get “Moonsoons”, during which heavy rain occurs, and some creatures like Nereids venture away from their usual rivers. It could lead to zonewise seasonal “events”, like new random encounters, or increased chance at finding specific loot or harvesting seasonal plants. One could even introduce seasonal repeatable quests, like “harvest this rare plant while it flourishes”. They would come with their specific achievements and rewards.

One could even imagine in-game events triggering off-season variations in a zone, like a potent ice dragon or an incursion of a frost-monarch triggering winter in the midst of the summer, or a powerful Maormer vampire sorcerer triggering heavy downpours in the midst of a dry season. Such off-season events could last until the threat is defeated by the players.

Standardizing game zones

Here I propose to go further in the reworking and ensure each zone ticks a number of boxes, so they are brought on par with the newer ones. This is also probably the most boring and list-y part of this thread.

Every zone (maybe even every subzone) should have at least one player house. Starting islands could get one zero-trait set crafting workshop, one delve, one world boss, one public dungeon, one world event zone, crafting surveys of each type, an outlaw den, and maybe even one group dungeon or group delve. All larger zones should have two public dungeons (or, more ambitiously, each subzone could get one). In each public dungeon, mobs would randomly drop both collectible fragments and motif pages. The outlaw dens should also always contain a more or less hidden eidetic memory book, as was the case in the base game.
Eyeveya, Artaeum, Stirk, Dranil Kir, Norg-Tzel, Grayhome, Tideholm, the Earth Forge, the Mzark cavern, the Five Fingers Dance, Grayhaven, the Maelstrom Arena and Fargrave could also be expanded to receive a similar treatment and get treasure maps, ensuring that each zone or subzone would have at least one location of every type. The Rictus Islands could also be added to the game so as to give each alliance the same number of zones, delves, and so on.

As with the locations, achievements could likewise be standardized. There should be achievements for finding all wayshrines and using all Ayleid wells (and the latter should appear on map). Each zone should have at least one roaming, unleashed world boss for each of its subzones. Defeating them all would of course yield an achievement. Every zone could also have its « museum quest », asking us to explore the whole zone to find various lost items and bring them back somewhere to be exposed. There should be a well-guarded luxurious lockbox somewhere in a restricted access area in each zone, awarding a master burglar achievement. Pets (and mounts?) should be made… well… petable everywhere, and each zone should have its own pet-them-all-achievement. There should also be some bounty hunter achievement everywhere, asking you to find and kill some named enemies hidden in the wilds. A « leap of faith » achievement would require you to survive a jump off some remarkable, highly elevated point in every zone or subzone. A book series achievement would require you to find and read a series of books specific to each zone. There should be a random encounter chain (like the adoring fan or Choixth) achievement in every zone. Other random encounters and deeds could be also tied to their own achievements : helping beggars, defeating bandits attacking traveling merchants, buying local beverages or suspicious food from roadside merchants, accepting or refusing a local priest’s blessing and so on. Some specific quests or questline could also award achievements, and maybe even collectibles. For example, completing the Sapling quest or the Restoring the Order questline in Stonefalls could award an Ashreed hat cosmetic collectible.
Also, and most importantly, M’aiq should be allowed to travel everywhere.
Thanks to such new achievements, players could unlock access to the dyes that are currently dye-stamps only (for example, the hundred-pumpkin orange).

Every zone should have, like Orsinium and the Clockwork City, a chef asking for help and rewarding the player with special, local provisioning recipes.

Newer containers like jewelry boxes (and older ones like heavy crates) should be made available everywhere. Also, newer harvestable nodes like apothecary satchels or giant clams could be added more rarely, in places where it’d make sense. Containers obtained by fishing should be boosted with a bunch of zone-specific items like recipes, furnishing plans, pieces of furniture, motifs and style items, …

All the base-game dungeons should have both a I and a II version. This addition could possibly allow the Undaunted to give each type of foe its own monster mask set and style, as some don’t have one yet (fire or stone atronachs, welwas, sea sloads, wispmothers, …). Older dungeons could be also slightly expanded to be more on par with newer ones : hard modes for all bosses, more achievements, hidden routes, optional bosses… Such a reworking could also give each dungeon its own undaunted weapon sets, making use of the undaunted styles that are periodically available in the crown store but are otherwise never used nor obtainable in game (except for their opal versions). If one wants to go even further, the item sets dropping from I and II versions of the same dungeon could also be distinguished.

Each zone would also receive new antiquities, ensuring each one has leads dropping from all possible sources, including :

reading bookshelves or book heaps
reading a bottled note
harvesting resource nodes
fishing holes
fished containers
filetting fish
passive creatures (deers, insects, …)
random containers
chests
treasure maps
jewelry boxes
safeboxes
pickpocketing or stealing from corpses
random mobs
mobs from specific locations (delves, dungeons, …)
specific mobs (bloodknights, miregaunts, …) or mobs of a specific type (goblins, automatons, …)
daily quest rewards
specific bosses
world events
random encounters (for example, bandits attacking a merchant, invocation rituals going awry, vampires about to feed, …)
general or specific merchants
bonus item obtained while unearthing other antiquities
non-random specific locations (interacting with a specific item in the world, witnessing a specific event, talking to a specific NPC, …)

Furthermore, each zone would also have at least one antiquity of each type : mythic item, « museum antiquity » (like the tapestry in Blackwood), old map, piece of furniture, motif, style page, collectible (mount, pet, emote, memento, tattoo, …). One could even expand the antiquities types to include recipes, furnishing plans, dyes or even eidetic memory books.
Antiquities could also be added to Blackreach, and to PvP zones, while new skills could offer a temporary and limited protection from other players while excavating. One could even consider adding dig sites to dungeons, delves, trials, quest locations, outlaw refuges and other specific locations. Members of the team that won in a battleground might even be authorized to stay there for a limited time in search of an Antiquity, or to gain access to a special set crafting station.
Such a large expansion of Antiquities numbers would also make room for adding the various missing “ancestral” racial motifs to the game.

Furthermore, each zone could get a full set of daily repeatable quests leading to new achievements and rewards. More precisely, each zone would receive the following daily repeatable quests :

a delve quest
a world boss quest
a world event quest
another quest leading to revisit one of the zone story location like the ones in Murkmire or the Reach
a material gathering quest like the ones in Clockwork city
a hunting quest like the ones in Vvardenfell
a fishing quest
a crafting quest, targeting specifically the special workshops from the zone, possibly awarding a furnishing writ targeting furnishing plans
an antiquity excavation quest
a thief quest requiring to do some illegal business
an assassination quest
a « tavern game » quest (for example Tales of Tributes or any other new game introduced into ESO in the future (Strife, drinking games, ...))

Each of these would lead to a number of new rewards, motif pages, furnishing plans (some of which could be structural), antiquity leads and so on.

In addition to those zone-bound quests, the main factions of the game could get new dailies sending to other zones, introducing new cross-DLC content. The Undaunted, the Mage and Warrior Guilds would thus get new dailies sending the player to starting islands and DLC zones, in order to accomplish objectives in one of their Delves, Public Dungeons and World Events. The Psijic Order could send you in various other zones to investigate magical anomalies. The Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood would have new tasks sending you in starting or DLC zones. The Dragonguard could have new quests sending to Craglorn, Skyrim, the Reach, Blackwood, the Telvanni Peninsula or even Apocrypha in search for ancient draconic knowledge. Even the Antiquarians could send you in various zones to recover antiquities, either from special hidden chests or by excavating them from unusual zones (for example : interior of delves, dungeons, …).
Progressing in the ranks of those factions could also unlock access to more services in the faction hub (for example new merchants, better prices, portal seeds allowing to teleport back to the hub quickly, …)

New craftable sets should also be introduced to the base-game zones in order for each of them to have three unique special crafting workshops, instead of having them repeat across alliances. All the aforementioned factions would also have a special set craftable in their main hub (Warriors, Mages and Dragonguards already have one or two), available to those who progressed enough in their ranks. Earning specific achievements in arenas or trials would also unlock the possibility to craft new sets from the workshops at their entrance. As a quality-of-life upgrade, all those set workshops would be made feature-complete, with provisioning, alchemy and outfit stations.

As with antiquities, a bunch of motifs could be added to the game, so that in any zone, one could get motif pages and style items from all possible sources, including:

treasure chests
antiquity
bonus item while unearthing antiquities
public dungeon mobs
world event rewards
daily delve quest rewards
daily world boss quest rewards
daily world event reward
other daily quests rewards
pickpocketing from citizens
looting Thieves troves
looting lockboxes
fished containers
bottled notes
bought from merchants

New motifs could include criminal factions or Daedric sects plaguing the zone (e. g. red rooks, supernal dreamers), knightly or religious orders (e. g. knights of the Flame, Ash'Abah, Benevolence of Mara, Beldama wyrd,…), specific local communities (Silverhoof Horsemen, Wood Orcs, …), monster races (imps, ogres, giants, riekr, …), Daedra (Banekins, …), specific materials (adamantium, mithril, troll fur, wamasu scales, ironwood, aetherium, coral, madness ore, …) and so on. Bandits and other enemies encountered in the zones could also wear and display such new styles, making each zone more unique and thematically coherent.
The diversity of sources for recipes and furnishing plans should likewise be generalized across the game zones. This would also allow the introduction of furnishing plans for jewelry boxes and structural furnishing in older zones, as well as plans for the currently crown-locked Imperial furniture. To this list, one could also add the constellation stones that are also locked in the Crown Store. Their plans, or the furnishing themselves, could be acquired at some new Astromancer merchant or questgiver in Craglorn, for example.

VerboseQuips · July 31

Sleeping bonuses

This would introduce a new way to log out of the game by interacting with a bed. If the player does so, they could receive various bonuses when logging back in, depending on how long the concerned character stayed offline. There would be short and long rest bonuses, offering, for example, accelerated experience gains or better odds of successful attempts at enhancing an item or breaking a lock. Players could either use an in-house bed or rent one at an inn. There could be special beds allowing to gain specific bonuses. Double beds would allow you to sleep either with a companion or with another player, unlocking special bonuses when playing in a group with them, either extra XP, more effective combos, or maybe even an enhanced version of the Lover stone bonus.

If you sleep in specific locations, during specific events, or under the effect of specific potions or beverages, you could maybe even wake-up in an instanced cell, experiencing either a vivid dream or a nightmare. This could also function as a way to obtain specific leads, plans, style pages or materials, linked, for example, with Azura, Vaermina or Hallowjack.

Enhanced lockpicking and new “stealth” options

This would add some variety into the lockpicking mini-game. Some enhancements could be entirely cosmetic, like modifying the look of the interface depending on the type of chest or door you are trying to open, giving it, for example, a Dwarven or Ayleid flavour. It could also be done by increasing the diversity of chests looks in the overworld, so that you don’t just always find the same old wooden ones, but maybe some newer ones, that reflect either the zone they’re in or the difficulty of their lock, with master chests sometimes looking a bit more fancy.
New kinds of puzzles could also be implemented, with different types of locks. Some chests or doors could maybe even have magickal locks. Using a specific “unlock” spell would then allow you to open them without lockpicks, by solving a new type of mini-game.

One could also find trapped chests or door, that would require to use a “new” type of thieves tool, that was present in TES III: the probe. Traps would have different levels of sensitivity. The most rudimentary ones would only have a chance of being activated on a failed lockpicking attempt, then some more vicious ones would be activated whenever the container or door is opened, even after successful lockpicking, as long as the trap hasn’t been properly disarmed, while the most sophisticated traps would fire on even just a failed probe use. Some locks could also be enchanted, requiring a “disarm” spell and its specific mini-game.
Here are some examples of trap effects.

Activating a nearby mechanical trap, either dealing instant or over-time physical, fire or poison damage to the player, or making further progress more difficult in a dungeon corridor.
Making noise, attracting nearby guards.
Imbuing the unlucky or incompetent thief with magickal light, preventing stealth for a short duration or within a given area.
Exploding, destroying the container and its content
Snaring the player, slowing their movement speed
Casting a spell, doing immediate magical or elementary damage, or siphoning their magicka, stamina or ultimate resources
Teleporting the player outside of the delve, or into another location in the same delve, either packed with a swarm of enemies, or high enough for the player to incur falling damage in order to come back.
Waking the player up, in case they logged into a dream instance
Summoning a daedric or undead guardian, or even, in rare cases and in specific locations, a secret boss.

Another opening option could also be offered to less stealth-inclined characters: brute force. Using a crowbar or an axe, to attack the door or the container until a solidity bar is depleted would result in opening it. It would have some drawbacks, however: it’s noisy and will attract any nearby foe or guard; it’s not very subtle and will fire any active trap; and it might even destroy part of the chest content.

Some new types of containers could also be added. For example, mechanical enemies might sometimes have a secret compartment that would need to be unlocked on their broken remains. Some plantlike foes could have a pod on their body that would need to be carefully opened with a probelike tool if one doesn’t want to waste its content. And some chests could turn out to be mimics, that would need to be killed before they can be opened.

One could also get the ability to throw a small pebble or cast an illusory spell to make some noise from a distance, and thus lure guards or hostile creatures out of your path and away from precious goods.

Finally, you would also gain the ability to steal stuff from hostile NPCs and some humanoid creatures (Daedra, goblin, riekr, undead, ogres, giants, …)

Hunting, gathering, fishing, taming

A new skill tree could add new hunter-gatherer skills. This would allow us to harvest stuff or fish more efficiently, to obtain new ingredients while looting passive creatures, or to enhance the likelihood of getting special roes when filleting fishes. It could also allow us to have more interactions with passive creatures or with “yellow-hued” plants like the ones in Murkmire, for example, looting it for new ingredients or for a sapling to plant in a player house, or even using it to attack a nearby foe.

New types of fishing holes could be added across the game, allowing us to fish in lava, acid or quicksands, for example. Special fishing holes could appear where the water catches and reflects the light of the stars, the moons, or the sun, especially in regions like Elsweyr or Craglorn. New baits could be especially efficient in special fishing holes, like azure plasm or oil. One could also craft customized fishing rods with various perks.

Various fish, algae or underwater creatures could be used to populate in-house aquaria for decoration or resource harvesting.

New skills could also allow us to try to capture and tame wild creatures. Tamed creatures could have their own skills, and could be trained and used like companions in battle, albeit admittedly with less varied possible interactions. The animal companion skill line from the Warden class could also have interesting synergies with this system.

Finally, new “thanatopraxy workbenches” could allow the players to craft trophy heads, taxidermized corpses, stabilized plants, fossilized skeletons, galvano-plastered metal-coated statues or floral ornaments. Maybe some kind of new material could be available during the Undaunted event that would then be used to create opalized fossils. Crafting such furniture could require specific hunting trophies, rare fish or be locked behind specific achievements.

Agriculture and breeding; flavors

The player could also be allowed to grow plants and breed cattle or fish in their home, turning it into a farm. One could also magically cultivate Welkynd stones, or other minerals, for them to be harvested daily or weekly.
Growing a plant would require some kind of new in-house interactable surface, like a plot of land, a lattice to hold vines, a fertile pond or a tree stump to host mushrooms. New harvestable furniture could also be created, like pots or planters.

If one wants to go even a bit further, one could even expand the alchemy and provisioning skills so that players can create fertilizers or soil amendments on an alchemy station, and fodder for bred creatures on a provisioning station. These could then be used to bolster the productivity of the cultures.
Such fertilizers could also be an opportunity to add a new layer of complexity to alchemy and provisioning. Indeed, giving the crop substrate special properties or controlling cattle alimentation would give ingredients a peculiar flavor.
Flavors would be adjectives qualifying consumable and acting like traits for the gear. They would either add small bonuses or create synergies between meals and potions. One could even consider allowing players to have both a food and a beverage bonus active at the same time to allow for more combos.
Flavors could also have an effect on poisons. For example, a bitter flavor could turn into an “emetic” trait for poisons, that temporarily diminishes or suppresses food bonuses.

VerboseQuips · July 31

Mercantile skills and tokens of promises

A mercantile skill could be implemented either as a full skill line or as various perks or cp stars dispersed across other skill trees, or even as a guild skill, if you’re allowed to join a commercial company and help it grow. Here are some examples of perks that could be acquired.

Bargaining: For a limited number of times a day, you can try to change the prices at a shop. If it works, good for you. Don’t be too greedy, however. If you ask for too much, you risk vexing your commercial partner, which might expand all your remaining daily attempts, or worse, have to cope with worse prices for a day, should the merchant feel insulted.
Talkative: Increases the daily number of bargaining attempts.
Silver-tongued: Increases the range of your bargaining ability.
Skillful negotiator: Increases the odds of successful bargaining attempts
Damage control: Mitigates damage from failed bargaining attempts
Cambist/Forex trader: Can convert limited amounts of a currency into another at a variable rate
Pawnbrokers: Increases the size of the “buy back” inventory of merchants.
Mule: Unlocks a Companion inventory.
Business associate: You can give gold to your companions. If their inventory is not full, they occasionally spend some of it to get a random item, for example a consumable they can use in combat, or a treasure you can sell, or a recipe, or a style page, or a lead…
Deep pockets: Upgrades your inventory.
Return on investment: when an item disappears from the “buy back” inventory of merchants by being “pushed out” by newer items, you get X% of its price.
Interests: get a monthly mail with a small percentage of currencies stored in your bank
Swimming with sharks: Ability to contract a loan. If not reimbursed in time, the player becomes permanently flagged as a criminal until they have paid their due, or can become the target of a “wandering justice boss”. Should they be defeated by a guard or by the roaming loanshark, the borrowed money would be taken back from their inventory with interests, if possible. If not, all their money would be taken, and a new, shorter deadline would be set for the reimbursement of the remainder.
Exclusive sales: unlocks new items in the merchants inventories.
Special deliveries: allows you to order a special delivery of materials from specific merchants ; the next hireling mail then contains better ingredients.
Advertising: allows you, once a day, to pay for advertising one of the items you listed for sale on a panel. There would be a limited number of panels in the game world, each of which would have a limited number of displaying slots. An ad would feature the sold item, the seller's name, their guild, the guild trader's name and its location. It would automatically disappear if the item ceases to be listed (if it is bought, if it expires, if it is taken back by the seller, if the seller leaves the guild, if the guild loses its trader or is disbanded, …), thus freeing a slot on the panel. One could even imagine that such panels could be acquired weekly by a guild, which would then set prices for guild members and exterior sellers.
Well-informed: gives advantages with the upcoming rumor system.
General trade: creates various kinds of merchandise that can be bought at a given price in some cities, then sold at another price to commercial companies in other cities, generating either a benefit or a loss. Some products might be legal in certain zones and illegal in others. There would be safeguards preventing the system from being exploited which would lead to excessive gold flow, like, for example, limitations to the quantity of tradable goods that can be bought each day or stocked, a tax system or a perishability system decreasing the value of some goods when they aren’t sold for too long, creating a tension between the urge of selling them to gain a small benefit or limit the loss, and the hope to find better prices later.
Insider trading: You sometimes get insider knowledge when interacting with the upcoming rumor system. This would work a bit as a timed treasure map or survey. It would contain clues about a given merchandise and a place where its price will surge. For example, insider knowledge may read as “I’ve heard the Mistral bank was about to elect a new accountant who is a traditionalist Bosmer. He’ll probably refuse to write on paper made of sugarcane fiber. Which means the bank will have to buy a lot more parchment." If you then go to Mistral while this “lead” is active, you can sell one batch of parchment for much better prices, which expands the insider knowledge you had gained.
Weatherproof packaging: Slows down the deterioration of perishable tradable goods.
Logistic expertise: Increase the quantity of tradable goods you can buy and sell to commercial companies every day, or stock at any given time.
Tireless worker: The first few daily quests accomplished by this character aren't taken into account towards the daily cap on repeatable quests you can accomplish.
Accounting expertise: Sneaking into a restricted area and peeking into an accounting book might give you a new rumor, a treasure map, some XP or an antiquity lead.
Fiscal optimization: Get a partial refund on automatic guild taxes, mail sending fees or other game systems gold fees.
Caravanner: you can hire a bodyguard to escort you for a short duration, he will fight alongside you on the road, in addition to your companion.
You owe me one: You can earn tokens of promises by completing various tasks, like doing bonus objectives in a daily quest for some specific Guilds or factions, helping a merchant during a random encounter, selling specific goods to specialized merchants, paying beggars, meeting extra style and trait requirements for crafting dailies, helping a fugitive NPC to escape guards, interceding for an NPC and spending one token to another NPC to get two tokens from the first one ...
Knowing the right person: Allows you to spend earned tokens of promises to some NPCs to access special services for a given duration.

(I initially named tokens of promises "favors", but since the latter was just added to the game, I had to change their name...)

Here are some examples of "special services" that could be bought by trading promises.

Better prices at a specific merchant for one day.
A merchant who wouldn’t normally buy stolen goods will look away for a day and for a limited total value.
Hostile NPCs in a given delve will be turned non-hostile unless harmed (yellow-hued) for a day. This might even unlock access to a black market with specific merchants.
A beggar will make a scene, attracting nearby guards while distracting passers-by, making pickpocketing easier for a few minutes.
An NPC will ask the guards about something and capture their attention. This won't decrease your bounty but will decrease your “heat”.
A guild hall or faction hub is added to the wayshrine network for a day.
An NPC will give extra information on a Rumor.
You can bribe a guard to get a pass, allowing free movement in a normally restricted area for an hour, possibly unlocking exclusive merchants of a grey market.
You can convince a competitor to cheat or spare his efforts in a match or run, in order to more easily win a bet.
A guard will “forget” to take the stolen goods and just take the bounty, or the other way around.
A merchant will accept to hide you in a barrel. You can start exploring a delve or restricted area not from the usual entrance but from a hiding place inside it.
Neutral NPCs will accept to hide you among them while they enter a normally hostile or restricted area, allowing you to follow them inside without being attacked on sight as long as you stay with them. This could also give access to black or grey market merchants.
An NPC will let you, as a vampire, drink their blood (non lethally).

Housing improvements

Besides ensuring each zone or subzone has at least one house, one should also make sure each architecture or landscape style is represented in at least one player house. Here are some types of locations that are still not represented.

A Psijic study in the Ceporah style
A Sloadish pocket mind-realm (possibly having the same use for the player as the Mnemonic planisphere for Sotha Sil?)
A Bosmeri community manor, consisting of three connected hollow trees, as can be seen, for example, in Cormount. Possibly coming with a cave under its roots.
A Bosmeri Temple
A Cyrodiiliac military fort.
A Breton military castle, in the style of Aphren's hold but maybe in a better state
A Breton cemetery with a crypt
A Nedic Tower (I know there is one in Seaveil Spire, but the focus there isn't so much on the tower itself as it is on the underwater area)
A Khajiiti temple like the Temple of the Mourning Spring
An ancient Nordic temple/barrow
A Draconic temple in Elsweyr
A Redguard mausoleum, in the same style as Magnifico Bahraha’s
A sewer section, possibly connected to an outlaw den
A Barsaebic structure with large walls as can be seen in Murkmire, with a connection to Eld Angavar
An Akaviri or Rim-Men house, perhaps in Hakoshae
A black pyramid in Coldharbour
A Daedric ruin in the base game style (We already have one in the Vvardenfell style)
A Vvardenfell-styled Dwemer ruin
A Velothi stronghold
A Velothi tower, like Arvs-Drelen
A Dunmeri ancestral tomb on Vvardenfell
An Ashlander yurt
A Falmer camp
A Dragonguard sanctuary
An icy cave
A mossy cave
A volcanic cave with flowing lava
A mine
A Kwama mine
Some castle in Evergloam
Some webbed cathedral in the Spiral Skein
Something in the Fields of Regret
Something in Greyhaven
Something in the Maelstrom Arena
Something in the Five Fingers Dance
Something inside of a Hist, like the Remnant of Argon
Something inside the Nightflame realm
Something inside the Mages staff
Something inside the Coloured rooms
One boat for each playable race, a Maormer boat and a Sea Giant boat

It would be great if talking mounts (I’m thinking to some Senche-Raths for example) could be turned into Houseguests inside houses instead of regular mount furnishings.

Housing could also be enriched with new options and functionalities.

As a first example, a new type of merchant (let's say an “architect”) could sell structural modifications for houses that are not furnishing. For example, rebuilding a broken wall or window, evacuating a pile of rubble, creating a window in a plain wall, digging a hole, painting a wall,… Houses could thus come with unlockable “options” that could be ticked on and off for a price. Some of these options could be locked behind specific achievements.
Such merchants (or the Crown Store) could also offer an “upgrade to furnished” option. Assuming there are enough available slots in the house inventory, this option would add and place into the house the extra furnishing that is present in the furnished version of the Crown Store. This option could be purchased once per account, and would be automatically ticked off when the furnished version of the house is purchased. This option could maybe even “piecewise” available : one could upgrade the garden, the first floor, the kitchen, and so on, as was the case in previous TES games.
Another option offered by the architect would allow to “reset to standard” or “reset to furnished”, provided all the necessary furniture is present either in the house or in the furnishing vault, it would put all pieces of furniture back in their initial position, and deposit all extra furniture back into the vault. Similarly, a “clean slate” option could empty the house and put everything in the vault. Such resetting options could also come with partial versions, vaulting furniture in specific areas of the house, or vaulting specific types of furnishings, like "parlor" or "houseguests".

For another example of new functionality, houseguests could offer services, like playing songs (bards), selling a random assortment of goods to visitors (merchants), or offering a special kind of sealed crafting writs or other requests (questgivers). Their inventory would change daily and would mainly consist of anecdotic stuff, but could also sometimes contain a limited number of rarer ingredients, exclusive recipes or antiquity leads. The player owning the house would receive a daily or weekly mail with a fraction of the gold spent at the in-house merchant. Similarly, a houseguest could offer access to one of the tenant's trading guild store, or could even hold a very small number of items from the player, to be sold to visitors. A houseguest could also allow to create trade offers for visitors, for example a given motif page for another page, or a given piece of gear for a proposed price.
If an agricultural skill is implemented, allowing players to turn their houses into farmsteads, some houseguests could then be hired and assigned a routine to take care of crops and animals, harvest them when suitable, store the harvested materials or even sell it to visitors.

In addition to player visitors, houses could also randomly receive NPC visitors if the player allows it. They would appear in the house, answer to players when talked to, sometimes commenting on nearby furnishing, sometimes petting animals, sometimes interacting with houseguests and buying stuff from their inventory, sometimes buying services like resting for the night on a bed-typed furnishing in the house, sometimes even selling stuff themselves, like treasure maps, leads, materials… Therefore, if a houseguest merchant has enough gold and inventory space and a NPC visitor comes by, the houseguest could sometimes buy new stuff and either mail it to the player or put it in his own inventory for sale.
Of course, such functionalities could be enhanced if a mercantile skill line is implemented.
Additionally, NPCs visitors could possibly be pickpocketed (or worse, if you’re a very bad host).

In addition to their route, houseguests could also be assigned tasks, that is, be required to perform some actions or emotes when on certain nodes of their routes. Similarly, mounts and pets could be assigned behaviours and asked to play some animations on specific nodes, e.g. hunting a bug, being idle, sleepy, playful, sitting, lying, jumping, howling, eating and so on.

A daily or weekly log of visits and sales would also allow the player to see who came to see the house and what kind of stuff they bought.

All this – tasks and services for houseguests and random NPC visitors – would help make the player houses more lively, and could possibly turn guildhouses into nice commercial hubs.

In addition to such new systems, the existing furniture system may also be expanded upon.
Scribing could receive its own kind of furnishing plans. New crafting materials could include parchments, vellums, papyrus and all kinds of papers, other writing substrates like silk, wax, cork, slate or aluminium, and also various kinds of inks. Maybe they could have a chance to drop together with other furnishing materials? Scribed furniture could include display scrolls, schematics, blueprints, annotated maps, city plans, and so on. New scripts could also allow for the creation of new “furnishing spells” to be used in Houses, like a local atmospheric effect, a luminous decorative rune, a permanently summoned Daedra used as a houseguest or training dummy, a couple of marks used for quick teleportation inside the House, or even permanent AoE spells (either beneficial or damaging) to spice up the House tour for the unwary visitor.

Furthermore, the good old dyeing stations or the alchemy skill could receive an update, too, allowing to craft dye stamps to use with costumes and hats. For example, the player could receive a new type of crafting material, pigments, as a byproduct of other crafting activities. Deconstructing a wooden object would yield charcoal, deconstructing a metallic one would yield rust or verdigris, unearthing an antiquity would sometimes also give pulverized lapis-lazuli, mining ore veins could rarely also produce other pulverized gems. Assuming the player has unlocked the corresponding achievement, any known dye colour could then be added to a dye stamp.

Then, a new workbench would allow players to customize furniture by applying dye stamps on specific zones, the same way we already do with outfits.
If one wants to go even further and offer another quality-of-life update, the same new workbench could also be used to deconstruct furniture for materials.

VerboseQuips · July 31

Consumable spells

A crafting expansion could allow the creation of several new types of “consumable abilities” to be used from the quick access wheel.

A new type of solvent and new reagents could allow to create alchemical grenades to be thrown in battle, generating AoEs like elemental damages, curative mists, bright light preventing stealth attempts or obscuring clouds extinguishing guards’ lights.

New types of inks and scripts could allow to craft scrolls with new spell effects, which do not consume resources but consume the scroll instead.

The mysterious fourth type runestone, the Celerity one, may allow to engrave new glyphs on a fragile mineral, releasing its effect when it is broken. Applications could be to smash it immediate effect, carefully put it on the ground and then watch it activate when someone treads on it, or activate it by casting a spell on it to make it break from a distance, or even encase it in a piece of armor to gain a one-time-only boon when a specific requirement is met, that would break the encased symbol (e.g. : armor deteriorates past a certain threshold, player is critically hit, incurs a specific damage type, is healed while below a certain health or resource level, or is hit by an undetected stealthy opponent).

A new “arcanic forge” or “atronach forge” could allow to create small self-destructing homing head automatons like skeevatons or Dwemer Dovah-flies, or larger golems to be summoned in battle. A necromantic altar could allow to customize specific types of undead and golems to be summoned in battle. Examples could include stitching a weapon into a zombies arm, adding new limbs, reinforcing the body structure with metallic or chitinous plates, or imbue it with magical energy that makes it attack with elemental power or explode when defeated. Such golems and undead would be consumable in the sense that they would fight until defeated and could then only be repaired in the right forge or altar. Maybe they couldn’t be healed by conventional means. For example, healing an automaton could require to summon another dedicated automaton, to use a specific repair spell, to build it with a self-repair trait or to unleash a consumable swarm of repairing fabricant termites. Healing an elemental golem would require to consume soul gems or throw an alchemical grenade containing elemental salts. Healing an undead would require a specific “necrotic healing” ability.

New provisioning recipes could allow to alter eggs, creating ready-to-release bugs to throw on enemies, like a breakable piece of fetcherfly hive, an albino spider infused with the elemental power of some mineral, poisonous wasps, young chauruses, vampire-feeding blood-filled hoarvors, luminous torchbugs preventing other players to use stealth, soulbugs autofilling soul gems or altered, healing scribs.

New plants could also be harvested in the wilds (and cultivated in player Houses), and yield explosive pods or tiny skeever-sized short-lived “lurchers” that could be charged with elemental power and released in battle, either to heal allies or to harm enemies.

Brush of Truepaint: An Elder Scrolls take on Photo Mode

Through a questline involving the House of Dibella or the Order of the Lily, the player would get access to a Brush of Truepaint, and unlock several of its features.
This would consist in a photo mode with various filters and options (e.g. remove player characters, make them perform emotes, changing the time of day, make the picture look like an impressionist painting, make it look like it’s watercolor or pencil-drawn, add a creature you’ve already painted before, and so on)

If one wants to go one step further, players could register a limited number of favourite paintings, and then use pigments or other materials to craft a framed version of their painting to be displayed in their house. That could lead to a new type of furnishing called frames, that could be spread into various crafting disciplines.

The Brush of Truepaint could even come with its own “painted house” inside of a canvas, where everything would look painted or pencil-drawn.
(This could be expanded with other player houses in various painting or drawing styles. For example, one could find an “inked house” inside a book in Apocrypha, where everything seems outlined by ink, and appears in black, white and shades of beige and bistre, with occasional colors in the zones that would be considered “accent” if a furniture dyeing system was implemented. Similarly, one could find a “stained glass” house, and so on… )

Oghma : A player journal overhaul

Over time, the player journal has acquired new sections (antiquities, hireling mails, …). I propose here further steps to turn it into a full-fledged encyclopaedia and player log.

The “Oghma” (player journal) would host a list of completed quests with a description of what happened.

New eidetic memory sections would host system mails the player received (for example, as a PvP or leaderboard reward, as a chapter’s initiation or as an in-game reward for preordering or purchasing a DLC). Another new section would thesaurize treasure maps and crafting surveys: if they are collected once, the player can read them at any moment even without currently owning one, and a tooltip would indicate how many such maps and surveys the player currently holds in their inventory and bank.

A “crown store” section would allow you to re-read crown store motif books, and include the preorder exclusive treasure maps. A new ESO Plus bonus would also allow the players to sometimes find such exclusive pre-order/collector edition maps during their playthrough (for example, a second, exclusive, bind-on-pickup map could have a small chance of dropping when the ESO Plus player finds another treasure map) so they are able to complete this section as well.

The stickerbook would also be expanded to include the Broken Soul and Prophet sets. A new option “include variants” would also display the unique versions of the set items the player might have encountered (quest reward, rare boss drop, …) together with their descriptive blurb. (That could also include “setless” gear like the one that could be found during the Morrowind and Elsweyr tutorial quests or the old Aldmeri stuff which could be found in Balfiera.)
The stickerbook could also contain a new recipe book, a motifs and styles collection and a furnishing catalogue section, allowing the player to know how much of a given type of recipes/blueprints they know, how much they still have to learn, and similarly, how many furnishing pieces they already acquired at least once and how many outfit styles they unlocked. A tooltip in the recipe section would allow the player to know whether they already learnt the recipe or not, whether they crafted it at least once or not. Progress bars with two sections would display, for example, in “empty” the unknown recipe proportion, in blue the known one and in green the crafted one. From the furnishing section, a tooltip would allow the player to know how many pieces of the said furnishing are in their inventory, in their bank, in their vault. It could also allow them to previsualize the various pieces of furniture the player has already acquired at least once. Similarly, the style collection could offer dye-less previews of the known styles.
(Here too, one could move all crown-store exclusives to a specific tab, so as not to bother players with permanently unfinished progress bars.)
A new section of the stickerbook would also include the fish the players can encounter, as well as the treasures and trophies they can loot on mobs, find in reward boxes or containers or steal from NPCs, again with their description. If one wants to go further, one could also include information about where to find them, like a gradually completed table of pickpocketable goods by NPC class, race and location.

The bulk of this journal expansion would consist in the Encyclopaedia. This would be a new journal or Eidetic memory tab, with a collection of entries. Entries would be various keywords and topics about flora, fauna, minerals or other materials, magic, geography, architecture, historical events, people of Tamriel, craftmanship, about anything. Each entry would have its page with links to other pages, and various items that can be unlocked by playing and accomplishing some tasks.
Such items could be descriptions, letters from Antiquarians’ Circle members, Shad Astula professors or other savants, genealogic trees, transcriptions of NPC conversations, illustrations, maps and concept art, and so on.
Unlocking items could require, for example, to finish a given quest, talk to a given NPC about a given topic, kill some mob by fulfilling specific requirements (e.g. use of a given weapon or poison, kill it while affected by a given condition, within a specific difficulty tier, without incurring unblocked damage, …), sell a specific item to a specific NPC merchant, acquire a full stack of a given item, take a Brush-of-Truepaint picture of a given type of in-world item, unlocking a specific achievement, fight, kill or pickpocket a precise justice NPC, crafting a given piece of gear or a given consumable, buy something from an NPC merchant, reach max level in a certain skill, unearth a bonus item while digging for an antiquity, place some item in-house, acquire all variants of a weapon and so on.

Such an expansion would also give the opportunity to create new Eidetic Memory, Stickerbook and Encyclopaedia achievements for completing given sections.

New ways to play PvP

There are still new options for PvP that haven’t been explored.

The most obvious one is a battle royale. Maybe it could be done in some daedric arena?
Stealth-based PvP with missions like extracting an agent, obtaining a piece of information, escaping from an enemy fort, while other players try to prevent you from doing so. These could be carried out for the Circle of Daggers, the Eyes of the Queen and the Hidden Armigers, which are the intelligence organizations of the Three Banners. They could even unlock a third, stealth-based PvP skill line.
Asymmetric PvP. Here’s one way it could be done. An “abomination hunter” skill line could be added to the game (think Stendar’s Crusaders or Silver Dawn) so that at any moment, players have access to exactly one of these three skill lines: Vampires, Werewolf or Hunters. (This could of course also be useful in PvE or in PvPvE).
Then there would be some kind of alternative battleground system that would be played in 1v4. For example, a player would play as the Prey and would have to escape a maze in Hircine’s Hunting Grounds while hunted by a group of other players. The maze could be filled with traps or powerful foes. It could also contain alternate objectives like a gilded rabbit, a ghostly deer or a unicorn to catch.
One could also think of ways to tip the scales off. For example, if the Prey is a werewolf, they could have a chance of finding the Saviour’s Hide or the Spear of Bitter Mercy, which would grant them with a powerful boost in power and a temporary skill line, similar to what happens with the Volendrung in Cyrodiil (for example, the Prey player could be able to turn into a werebear, a wereboar or a werewolf behemoth). If the Prey is a vampire, they could obtain an artifact related to Molag Bal or Lamae Beolfag, or even to Hircine’s werebats (the Wings of the Queen of Bats?). If the Prey is an Abomination Hunter, they might find an artifact related to Stendarr or Auriel. When such a tide-changing event happens, the “battleground” rules change, as the Prey becomes the Hunter and the hunters become preys.
Races and jousts. This would require introducing mounted fighting and casting, and maybe even mount gear.
Treason quests (which would be repeatable maybe once per season), maybe related to Boetiah. The reward of the questline could be an Alliance change token.
Non-lethal tavern brawls. A fun reward for them would be a “stool” or "wine bottle" one-handed weapon style and a “bar stool” two-handed one.
Other tavern games: three-sided chess (Strife), drinking games, …

VerboseQuips · July 31

Unarmed combat skill, non-lethal fighting, NPC reactions to violence

A new hand-to-hand “weapon” skill could be added to the game, allowing the player to use martial arts to fight their enemies with their fists and feet. Such a skill could be hybrid, offering both stamina- and magicka-based spells. Passive skills would allow the hand and feet gear to count as two set pieces each for the sake of set bonuses, when the player remains otherwise unarmed. Similarly, hand and feet gear could receive two glyphs each, both defensive and offensive. This might mitigate the gameplay costs of renouncing to wielding other weapons.

New options could be afforded to end fights less violently.

For example, by stunning, restraining or incapacitating the enemies, or by trying to talk it out before bringing out weapons. The player might also propose a ceasefire again during the fight, with varying success likelihoods according to the enemies’ current number and health.

Sometimes, enemies could choose to try to flee or to beg for their lives, offering some gold or some item in exchange for safety. The player could choose to forgive them and let them go, to take the loot and spare them (or betray them afterwards), to negotiate for a better offer (at the risk of restarting the fight) or to simply ignore it and resume the combat, either against a still aggressive NPC or while the enemy takes a chance and attempts to flee. Spared enemies could turn yellow-hued and remain peaceful (albeit bitter) unless attacked again. Some enemies could however fake surrendering and then treacherously attack the forgiving player, inflicting them damage and a debuff.
On the contrary, when the player health is sufficiently depleted, an enemy NPC might offer to spare them in exchange for gold or other currencies, crafting materials, oaths pledged to their gods, or other proposals.
Should the player fight with enough finesse, countering their moves, parrying or dodging on the right moments, an enemy boss-level NPC could also recognize and respect their fighting skills and might instead invite the player to their encampment, turning the surrounding NPCs yellow-hued and possibly leading to some drinking games instead of the fights.

Restrained NPCs could be talked to, for example, they could be offered mercy if they promise to cease fighting, they could be asked to drop their weapon, allowing the player to loot it, they could be threatened and ransomed, just taunted if the player wishes so, or knocked unconscious. Restricted or unconscious enemies could also be forcibly looted, but would probably not lead to the same loot table, as one might not get a pelt from a breathing wolf. Forcibly looting a weapon from a still-alive NPC might lead to him being disarmed and having to unsheathe another, concealed weapon or fight unarmed, should they wish to resume combat. Looting gold or jewellery from them might raise their anger level and make it less likely for them to surrender, or in some circumstances it could be considered a crime.
Killing a foe who was asking for clemency might also be considered a crime, and could enrage its allies and make it impossible to find a peaceful resolution with them afterwards, or scare them and prompt them to flee.

One could also have new hues for NPCs and creatures: we already have red for enemies, white for justice, yellow for peaceful unless attacked. One could add, for example, blue for fleeing, brown slowly turning red for restrained enemies trying to get rid of their links, becoming hostile again if not convinced otherwise, or orange slowly turning red for unconscious foes who would turn hostile again when waking up, should the player still be in their vicinity.

Restraining a creature might also be a necessary first step for taming it. Restraining or stunning a vegetal creature might not make it tameable, but this could also allow the player to loot some alchemical ingredients from it that could only be taken from a living specimen.

Faith, alignments and reputation

A system of reputation or approval, similar to what exists with companions, could be put in place for various factions and deities.

Reaching higher levels of approval for given factions would allow to unlock services (crafting stations, new skill lines, ability to buy a player house, recruit a houseguest or a new companion) or “blessings” awarded by Gods, Saints, worshipped Ancestors, Celestials, false Gods or influent Daedra (blessings could be temporary buffs or new spells to cast).
On the contrary, high disapproval from some deities or factions could lead to hostile random encounters in the wilds, in cities or in dungeons, e. g. surprise daedric incursion, criminal henchmen or a group of righteous avenging knights.

A large number of actions could influence such “alignments” : doing a daily quest, choosing how to react to a random encounter, and so on. Choosing to spare enemies or refusing their surrendering, punishing or forgiving a foe during a quest, giving a helping hand or stealing, and so on, would of course affect the player reputation for various factions and deities.

New character customization options : barbers and tattoo shops, flesh sculptors

The outfit system could be enriched with the various general clothing pieces that can be acquired by looting containers or dabbling with the contraband system.

Nail art and new rings motifs could be visible when hand gear is hidden or reveals the fingertips. New body hair grooming options could also be introduced. New amulets motifs could also be displayed by more revealing attires. New undergarment styles could also be added for more variety.

Barbers and tattoo shops would allow you to change some of the played character features without need for an appearance change token. They could also sell new hairstyles, hair dyes, tattoo or body decoration collectibles for gold.

Satakal Priests and other flesh sculptors could go further and allow to change any body feature or even the race of the character. It would be great if there was a way to occasionally (maybe once per season) gain a race change token to be used in their sculpting cabinet. They could also sell new collectible skins for gold.

Body painters in Alliance forts, Imperial City sewers, Gladiator’s quarters, Undaunted enclaves and possibly other faction hubs could sell war paints that would give players slight temporary boosts in battles (these would be hidden by any active body marking the player is using). Purely cosmetic collectible versions of these could also be sold there for gold or other currencies. A “hide body markings” option could also maybe be implemented.

Fur paintings, fur grooming and fur dyes could also be applied specifically to werewolf forms.

Aliases

With a more granular reputation system and the presence of flesh sculptors, one might allow each character to have a small number (maybe even 1) of aliases.

An alias would be some kind of powered-up disguise, a secondary appearance (possibly even from another race) together with another name for the same character. Players would need to go to a flesh sculptor (or use a new flesh sculptor assistant) to switch from alias to main and vice versa. Any crime or reputation-affecting action taken as alias wouldn’t carry over to main nor the other way around.
However, if the player is witnessed switching to or from an alias, the two identities would coalesce and any bounty or reputation gain would carry to main. Some guards might also wield truth-revealing lights, which would force an alias to transform back to the main, and thus also negate the benefits of the aliases. Truth-revealing traps might have the same effect.

New weapons

I guess introducing new weapons would be tricky as each new one would have to be adapted to the numerous motifs and styles that are already in existence (though I guess it could launch with a restricted number of options, and then progressively be diversified through multiple updates).

Here is a list of new weapons that could be added to the game

Polearms: they would include spears, halberds, and (Lucerne hammers/goedendags/becs de corbins) as equivalents of swords, axes and maces, respectively.
New staves types, for example illusion or alteration staves.
Quarterstaff: this wooden weapon might be easier to introduce as it would share its models with the staves that already exist, but it would be either stamina-based or a magicka/stamina hybrid.
Scepters and shillelaghs: Scepters would be one-handed versions of staves. Shillelaghs would be their stamina counterparts, thus a one-handed version of quarterstaves.
Talisman: A magical protective hand-held device crafted through jewelry, which could play the role of a magicka-based version of a shield.
Wands: A wooden and magicka-based equivalent of daggers.
Crossbows: Slower but more powerful than bows, it would add diversity to the marksmans’ artillery. Bows could also come in three versions : short bows, bows and long bows
Curved blades: Redguard scimitars and Daedric crescents were already in previous games, and one could be added to ESO. These would account for both one-handed and two-handed versions. Sickles or billhooks could be dagger equivalents, while scythes could be a polearm equivalent.
Broad blades: Heavier and slower than usual swords, these would be something of a middle ground between slashing (swords), cleaving (axes) and blunt (maces) weapons. Here are some possible weapons that would fit in this category : machete or cutlass (equivalent of daggers), gladius (one-handed), claymore (two-handed), fauchard/bardich/Lochaber axe (polearms)
Thin blades: Specialized in piercing and thrusting. Shivs, which were present in TES V, could be a dagger equivalent, rapier would be a one-handed version, estoc would be a two-handed version and pike would be a polearm.
Thrown weapons: previous TES games had shurikens, darts and thrown knives. New ones could be added: javelins, thrown axes, thrown hammers, …

TES III made a difference between shields and tower shields. One could go one step further and add shield variations to fit inside the light, medium and heavy armors framework. For example, bucklers could be light shields, shields could be considered medium armor pieces, and larger, body-covering tower shields would be their heavy counterparts.

Though less likely, here are some other, more exotic weapons that could be added to the game.

Parrying weapons: versatile, defensive-yet-offensive one-handed weapons. There would be five of them: swordbreaker, romoraugi, qauata, parrying dagger and forks, which would be the respective parrying equivalents of swords, axes, maces, daggers and spears. If one wants a magical version, one could differentiate between two types of talismans: protecting (blocking) and deflecting (parrying).
Boomerangs and chakrams: Thrown weapons that come back to their user. One of them could be stamina-based while the other would be magicka-based. The boomerang would be wooden and the chakram would be metallic.
Rope weapons: thrown weapons that are at the end of a rope. Could include, for example, ropedarts, flying claws, meteoric hammer, hooks, aklys (javelins), …
Propellers and missile weapons: these would offer new options for marksmanship, somewhere between throwing weapons and the more traditional bow and crossbow. Sling would be the rope-weapon version of a propeller, atlatl would be one-handed, slingshot would be two-handed, and fustibale (polesling) would be a pole weapon version. The blowgun could also be considered.
Constricting weapons: These would be used to restraint or suffocate enemies. Garrote would be a two-handed version of it, “loupe” would be a one-handed version (a double-looped coil on a short stick), capture staff would be the pole weapon version, bolas would be the throwing weapon version, lasso would be the rope weapon version, weighted net (the one used by retiary gladiators) could be a parrying version, and some kind of uchronic low-tech version of a net gun (net crossbow?) could be imagined as a propeller version.
Claws, cestus, katar, push-daggers and so on: weapons worn around the knuckles, in replacement for hand gear, offering less armor but more offensive power in hand-to-hand combat.
Chain weapons, articulated weapons and flexible weapons: Flails, whip, chain whip, urumi (whip sword), nunchuks, two-sections or three-sections staves, and so on…

VerboseQuips · July 31

Subraces, Origins, New races

Subraces would offer more options at character creations that fine-tune the racial bonuses. Example of subraces would be, for example, Nibonese, Colovian and Rim-men for Imperials, or Naga, Naka-Desh and Izta-Ahuak for Argonians, or Ohmes, Dagi, Cathayand other furstocks for Khajiiti. Nibonese could, for example, have slightly better affinities with magic, while Colovians would be better at using armors and Rim-men would have some advantages for stealth.

Origins would relate to the character’s history and represent the culture they were raised in. While some origins would be available for all characters (for example: Gold Coast), some might however require specific races or subraces and initial alliances choices. For example, any Breton could come from the Systres or from Glenumbra, an Orc affiliated to the Aldmeri Dominion could be a Wood-Orc, an Argonian working for the Aldmeri Dominion could be from the Gray Mire, an Aldmer working for the Covenant might be a Direnni, and so on. Origins might give a slight bonus on XP gained from specific activities, reflecting the cultural background of the character, and unlock some specific dialogues here and there.

New playable races would be a major event in The Elder Scrolls, as none has been introduced since Morrowind, and I’m sure it could garner renewed attention for the game.
Here I propose three new playable races with some explanation of why I think it would make sense to add them.

Maormer is the easiest one. ESO has already fleshed them out quite a bit, and should sections of Pyandonea ever be added to the game, it would be a perfect opportunity to add them as a playable race. Furthermore, racial resistances currently cover cold, flame, poison and disease, but not lightning. It would make sense for the famous stormcalling Elves to have a lightning resistance, hence filling a gameplay gap in a lorewise justified fashion. Maormer subraces could include chameleon-skins (with an obvious stealth bonus), glass-skins (whose skin would be translucent like jellyfish or glass frogs), pearl-skins, salamander-skins (with a rotating bonus to elemental damages), snake-skins and fish-skins.

Goblins would be another possible choice, maybe with Mountain Goblins and Riekr as subraces, although it might be more difficult to justify that they’d be allowed to move freely and not be considered pariahs or a plain threat anywhere except in Orsinium and some areas of Blackmarsh. Maybe they could have some resistance to bleeding damage, some “stoneskin” cicatrization bonus that would substantiate their hypothetical link with Gargoyles. This would make them fill another gap in racial damage resistances.

Finally, Reachmen could be a third additional playable race, provided they wouldn’t be already considered a Breton subrace.

New classes and skill lines

We currently have pet classes covering Daedra (Sorcerer), animals and plants (Warden) and undead (Necromancer).
An Artificer class would allow for another type of combat pets: animunculi. Artificers would specialize in summoning them, but also in blowing up things (and thus inflicting blast damage) and in controlling the battlefield by modifying the terrain (setting up traps, summoning elemental barriers, domes, Fabricant brambles and brass walls, vapor vents and so on …)

Of course, a new class would also be an opportunity to add a new companion.

Other new classes or faction skill lines could also be introduced. Here are some examples.

Bards would use songs and instruments to cast magic.
Atromancers would specialize in summoning elemental Daedra and bending them to suit their needs.
Astromancers would summon celestials and could also unlock constellation skills, allowing players to gain more benefits from the standing stones blessings.
Dragonguards could have a skill line which would boost grappling hooks.
Alliance-specific or Gladiator team skills might help differentiate PvPers on the battlefield and give each Banner its own identity.

New locations and story elements I’d also love to see

The upcoming High Seas of Tamriel stuff makes me hope for more underwater exploration in the future. This would be an opportunity to flesh out the Dreugh civilizations, and maybe visit their Castles of Glass and Coral off the Morrowind coast, and their ruins in the Illiac Bay. This would also be an opportunity to explore the link between Dreughs and Molag Bal and reveal some awesome new lore. One could also add an underwater section in the PvP zones with the depths of Rumare. Other zones could also get new subzones, like Lake Honrich in the Rift. Also, we could learn more about Deep Druids, Yaghras and Hadolidhs, and the country of Ul’vor Kus could also be explored.

There are already Mind-shriven and Soul-shriven in the game. There is a gap in here, and thus room for Body-shriven. Those could maybe be ethereal people who aren’t undead but rather separated from their body, which would be used by Molag Bal for unholy purposes, for example to craft mortal/Daedra hybrids. A precedent of this in lore might be what happened to Vivec during the Pomegranate Banquet, if one interprets Vivec’s head as their mind and will, detached from their body.

There's a ton of places from older games that still could be explored anew.

Northern Skyrim would be nice to see again. I would really love to see Shalidor’s Winterhold in its full glory. Dawnstar and Frostheim could also be interesting, and shed some light on Trollkins and the Ice Tribes. New sections of Blackreach could be unlocked, maybe through Irkngthand, which would also reveal new Snow Elves lore.

The Forgotten Vale would also be a great place to revisit, as well as Snowline and the Fearfrost Caverns, which might also connect to Blackreach.

The Northern islands of Dagon Fel, Solstheim, Giant's Tooth, Rockjoint Island, Blackbone Isle could be explored again.

Central Skyrim would also be a great place to go back to, so we could see Second Era Whiterun, and discover more about the Skyforge and the Lunar Forge, perhaps also about the Rhojiiti. We could maybe also see Valtheim in a better, less withered state, go to Neugrad Watch and wander in the sacred grove of Oakwood. We could maybe even pay a visit to the Greybeards in High Hrothgar, and unlock a new Thu’um skill line (since the Thu’um comes from Kyne and not necessarily a Dovahkiin stuff). We could also go on a nostalgic trip to Riverwood and Helgen, and see a part of Falkreath hold. Here too, new sections of Blackreach could be added. I think it would make sense for them to contain the ruins of Heldon, since this Hold was once part of Cyrodiil and as Heldon was taken by Pelinal’s armies after consolidating the holding of the Men-of-’kreath, which might have then become the Falkreath Hold. Maybe we could even visit old Bromjunaar through a time-wound and learn more about Konahrik and the mysterious unknown original wielder of the Wooden Mask. Going back in time might also give an opportunity to harvest yellow Nirnroot.

We could also go back to Cyrodiil, in the Colovian Highlands and the Bloodfall Kingdom (which may be named something else in the Second Era), as well as in the Nibenay Valley and the Valus mountains. This might be an opportunity to visit places named in lore but never-before seen, such as Heldon, Delodiil, Mir Corrup, Caer Suvio, Sarchal or Artemon.

An Imperial Battlespire, maybe accessible from the Imperial City, could also be a nice new smaller-scale PvP zone filled with interesting lore.

The Tenmar jungle would allow us to “finish” Elsweyr, and it would be an opportunity to add sphinxes and werelions to the game.

As already said earlier, I’d love to see Pyandonea be added to the game. Other islands like Rictus, Axer Rock, Pankor, Herne and Cespar, the Chain, Kevalla, Caecilly Island, Dellesia, Olenveld, Roscrea, Cathnoquey, Yneslea, Esroniet and Vounoura might also be available as future zones.

Outside of Nirn, it’d be great to have access to the Shivering Isles (and maybe also Jyggalag's realm), to Sovngarde and the Soul Cairn.

I’d love to visit the Fields of Regrets and learn more about the Hist there. Similarly, we could have new zones in Evergloam, in the Spiral Skein, in the Hunting Grounds or in the Pits of Pestilence.

I’d love it if some plot device allowed us to get back to the Keywrights’ Gallery on Balfiera and from there redo all the Prologue quests with any character. (It’d be even greater if one could then get the various skill points that were awarded with each of these quests. )

Existing companions’ stories could also get prolonged with romance options.

Finally, I’d love to see new Vampire and Werewolf companions (or any other werecreature). Or maybe even something more exotic like a Daedra or an undead, or an unplayable race like a Lamia, an Ogre or a Harpy.

New pets and mounts

It’s getting harder and harder to find new pets or mounts that wouldn’t have been added already. Here are a few I could come up with.

Double-humped camel as a two-riders mount.

Creatures which could make great new pet and mount pairs: Unicorn, Draugulf, Hellhound, Flame Hound, Wormmouths, Alits, Vulk’esh, cows, oxen and bulls, deers and reindeers, addaxes and springboks, Lion-ibis quasigriff mount and Lion-ibis fledgling pet, Duneracer and Duneripper, Giant Snake, Silt Hopper, Death Hopper, Horker, gliptodon, llama.

Creatures that could be added as mounts, and already have a pet counterpart: Kwama, Echatere, Scutlers, boars and pigs, Bristlebacks (which could go with Daggerbacks), Nix Hound, Wamasu, Haj Mota, Salamander, Bog Dog, Fellrunner, Terrorbird, Chaurus, Verminous Fabricant, Dwemer scarab, Infernium (which could go with Skitteris), Daedrat.

Creatures that already exist as mount but could get a pet counterpart: Antelope, camels.

Insects (or other arthropods) that could be turned into pets: centipede, glowbug, sandroach, Alavlin beetle, regular beetle, cockroach, gravelclaw, cicada, Kotu Gava, fly, fetcherfly and fleshfly (or swarms of them), Soulbug, ants, termites, winter moths, new types of spiders and new colors for butterflies and Torchbugs.

Birds that could be added as pets: pheasant, pine thrush, rock warbler, cardinal, canary, painted bunting, blackbird, red-winged blackbird, green jay, tropical bird, seagull, Felsaad Tern, Bonehawk, Snowhawk, Nighthawk, Ice Eagle, falcon, Glow Raven, spirit crow, vulture, Guzzard, Cliff-Racer, Cliff-Darter, Hackwing, Gristlewing, herons and spectral herons, parrots, ibis, peacock, …

Other small creatures that could be turned into pets: Mud Hoppers, Magma Frog, regular frogs, regular snakes, mice, skavengers.

Daedric creatures, constructs and magical things that could be turned into pets: Daedric Spiderlings, Dwemer Arquebus, Dwemer Drone-Flies, Dwemer Turtles, Stone Husks, Lurchers, Seekers, Apocryphal Wisp-Lanterns, Hemonculous, Wafts, flying Savage Books, Conjured weapons, Magical orbs (like Burdening Eyes, Power Orbs, Hemo Helots, Abyssal Pearls, …), floating crystals, Dark Anchor Pinions, floating Lich phylacteries, animated statuette, sliding stones, floating Dwemer puzzle box, …

Pet and mount reskins that would make sense and be interesting: Ghostly senche-rath (like Tasam-ri) and senche-tigers, Glowing gilded blackwater rabbit (like the Golden Jack), Moon-Kissed Jelly, Copper-tongued skink, flame, storm and Azureblight Wyrms, Mirrorplasm and coagulant, …

Cute creatures that could be added as pets: dormice, hamsters, lemmings, marmots, weasels, mongooses, wombats, chipmunks, puffins, flying lemurs, flying fox pups.

Funny creatures that could be added as well: more half-hatched eggs, of chaurus, wamasu, birds, a creature whose head is stuck in a small cauldron, …

Finally, there is the topic of “mount and pet themes”, that is a style that can be applied to the different mount types akin to a Crown Crate season flavour. Many obvious themes have already been covered in the past so it’s harder to find new ones, but here are some examples:

“swarm golem” theme: for example, moth swarm elk, hive golem gouti, termit clay golem senche, beewax bear, coral guardian ornaug,…
Mournful aegis theme
Stone-based mounts like Stone Husk Direwolf, Hollow Reindeer, Stone Atronach senche, animated quasigriff statue, Voskrona pangrit, …
Sand or earth-based mounts : maybe an Anka-ra theme ?
Air Atronach theme
Flesh Atronach theme
Icereach wicker construct theme
Land coral theme (a mix of Summerset and Vivec Antlers corals)
Fabricant/Clockwork city theme
Nix/insect/spider theme, possibly linked to Selene, Namira or Mephala
Crustacean chitinous theme (including Mudcrab, Dreugh, Yaghra and Hadolidh-themed mounts and pets)
Voriplasmic mounts theme
Ethereal undead theme
Other undead themes like lich, mummy, draugr, …
Mara/Dibella/Lover constellation theme (maybe with two-rider mounts)

Well that's it.
Thanks to anyone who would take time to read parts of this and react to it. I haven't played in a long time by lack of time and also as an attempt of staying away from addictive behaviours. However, I keep an eye on what's added to the game, and the Elder Scrolls series is still important for me and close to my heart. I thank the devs and ZOS teams for all the additions they made and will make to the lore, and I wish them all, past and present, for the best.

LunaFlora · July 31

i commend for you writing this giant post.
i agree with some of the ideas.

Have not read all of the thread yet and some is harder to read.
it would be helpful to have dots or hyphens in your lists.
example:
Class ideas
- Bards
- Atromancer
- Astromancer
Faction ideas
- Dragonguard

Happy you mentioned
- Rictus, the islands south of Valenwood would make me very happy to see in Elder Scrolls Online and actually visit.
- Cow mounts and pets for years so nice to see that here too.
- playable Maormer
And Ornaug mounts also do not have pet variants.

it is cool that you mentioned things from lore or from Arena that i did not know about or forgot about like Frostheim and various creatures i did not know existed in lore.

Agriculture, furniture customisation, and photo mode would be awesome.

Some of your ideas are probably possible and i can some see them happening soonish like
- pets.
- mounts.
- the Northern Skyrim zone as from the trailers and livestreams it does seem like the upcoming Skyrim zone includes Winterhold.

I hope some of your ideas happen in the coming years, some are pretty common requests and others i have not seen requested before.

VerboseQuips · August 3

LunaFlora wrote: »

[...] various creatures i did not know existed in lore. [...]

Not all of them actually exist in the lore. I added the lemming, flying lemur, flying fox and mongoose just because I found them cute.

If you're further interested, you can find a list of creatures, too numerous to be all cited there, that are mentioned in TES lore but never seen in games, on this UESP page.

VerboseQuips · August 4

I prepared it carefully, re-read it to ensure I wasn't forgetting anything, yet I forgot two things, and can't find how to modify a post nor a reply.

So, forgottent pet/mount theme : Briarheart

And forgotten broader suggestions:

Localizations to newer languages. Portuguese would open a huge market in Portugal, Brazil and other lusophone countries. I think there are active TES communities speaking Italian, Dutch and Polish. Also, Korean could open a new Asian market.

Renewed support for Mac. New official support for Linux and maybe also Chrome OS. This would make ESO accessible on a broader number of computers.