To start, I will say that I absolutely love Skyrim. I have spent more than 1,000 hours on the game, and I still play it at times to this day. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the game isn’t perfect, and there are some ways that Bethesda could improve upon the next Elder Scrolls game.
Have Enemies Be Weak Or Resistant To Different Types Of Damage
This isn’t entirely non-existent, since frostbite spiders, frost trolls, etc. are resistant to frost spells and flame atronachs are resistant to flame spells. In addition, spriggans will take more damage from flame spells, so this element does technically exist in the game. But this is probably the most basic and obvious form of enemy strengths and weaknesses, and it would be great to have this expanded upon. The Witcher 3 is a good example of this done successfully, where almost all different types of beasts and creatures have different immunities or susceptibilities.
Don’t Group All Miscellaneous Quests Together
While each part of the major quests are obvious and easy to keep track of, miscellaneous quests are a nightmare. After picking up a random quest during your journey, you will have to spend a good chunk of time trying to come back to it later, because you must search through a seemingly endless miscellaneous quest list to find it again. Perhaps one way to help with this would be to break up the miscellaneous quests into two categories: story-driven quests (of which are more involved) and “location quests,” in which you simply go to a place to pick something up.
Improve The Clunky Melee Combat
Using a bow and arrows or long-range magic in Skyrim is beautiful. But with hand-to-hand combat, it sort of leaves players with a “well, I hope this hits” feel. There isn’t really a way to aim where you’re swinging your sword—not to mention, you never know when an allied NPC might step in the way and get themselves killed. Having any type of target-lock would be a good start for improving this.
Fix The Unorganized Inventory System
There are categories in your inventory in Skyrim, but these categories are still too vague. For example, aside from favoriting your healing potions or poisons to use quickly during combat, trying to find a potion you want to use takes up way too much time. Considering the massive amounts of different potions that exist in the game, you’ll likely spend several minutes just trying to scroll through the list to find the one you need. Having subsections for healing, poison, magicka restoration, etc. would eliminate the tedious scrolling and reading.
Put More “Role-Playing” Into This RPG
As it has been mentioned countless times, your choices in Skyrim don’t really affect anything. If I want to roleplay as a character with a “good” alignment, I’m obviously not about to join the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood. But by not doing that, it’s just cutting out a bunch of the game's content. Instead, there should be a way to either join a different group or have different quests set up to take down the Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood. You could be the character who restores Riften’s reputation from being known as the shady place filled with thieves.
Improve the Loot
This isn’t to say that every time you kill anything you should get better loot, but it should be randomized more. While it makes sense to not be picking up a bunch of rare treasure when killing an animal in Skyrim, you can pretty much tell which NPCs are going to be worth searching and which will not be, based purely on how they look. Randomizing the loot more when taking down bandit or enemy camps would give the player more motivation to do so, in hopes of a decent reward.