A hitman does get charged differently to murderers actually.

Yeah waaay too many of them... Spoiler maybe, but after you complete the Civil war questline you are told there are still camps of whoever you didn't side with and they say to go kill them if you find any of the camps and if you do so there is always a high ranking officer of sorts that is essential and you can't wipe out the people you didn't side with... Annoying and extremely stupid... Oh yeah and Jaree-Ra shouldn't be essential, his useless quest wasn't even fun...

A hitman does get charged differently to murderers actually. I'ts besides the point anyway. Killing everything in this game is not needed, it will only create more problems than it solves and wastes the dev's time as they could be spending it doing something not useless.

Exactly how much dev time was wasted making sure you could kill npc's in Morrowind, that therefore wasn't spent on something useful?

A hitman does get charged differently to murderers actually. I'ts besides the point anyway. Killing everything in this game is not needed, it will only create more problems than it solves and wastes the dev's time as they could be spending it doing something not useless.

It actually wastes development time to keep those NPC from dying.
Every character by default is able to die, which means new code and animations will be needed to insure that certain ones don't die.
Now that they've wasted time making this code/animation, they further waste time by implementing it to tons of useless NPCs

Skyrim is Skyrim, it is not Morrowind. There is an obvious reason why they use this system instead of the one tried and tested in Morrowind. To them, it didn't work.

It's a perfectly legitimate topic for discussion, especially when you see the sheer http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Essential_NPCs of essentials.

Skyrim is Skyrim, it is not Morrowind. There is an obvious reason why they use this system instead of the one tried and tested in Morrowind. To them, it didn't work.

Thats how I believe it works, because having the whole game world running simultaneously would be a great stressor on the game and load times would be a painstakingly long.

Mabey the officers are set to essential for respawn purposes? Mabey there has to be at least one there for the others to respawn there, in this case it's been done to keep the camps full of targets for you to kill instead of wipeing out every camp and then complaining that there are not enough opposeing soldiers on the map to kill. It's done the same way in Halo, I will respawn next to or close to my team mates if they are respawning as well, If I'm the only one that died then my respawn point is random and I could end up right on top of the opposeing team.

More code is needed when you have to tell something to die. Plus the game already has been made.

More code is needed when you have to tell something to die. Plus the game already has been made.

More code? Fact that can be proven with evidence, or statement pulled out of thin air to back up an argument?

Where do you pull this from, do you do any development to know what is and isn't need, and how much is needed?
Like I said everything by default is killable (not much code), now you want to add a feature that will make some unkillable (more code), and now on top of this new code you want to assign it to certain NPCs (more code again)
By adding things like the essential markers and the feature altogether you are adding more code, and you are wasting time on hand holding features.
Do you really need this much hand holding?

The default is the character does absolutely nothing.

No I don't need this much hand holding, but the newbie thats been playen CoD their entire game life might.This is the point, Beth. are tryen to bring in more business and more gamers to TES and to do this they made Skyrim the inbetweenie of a hard core RPG and a first person action adventure game. And more then likely this will be the trend, todays gamer has a slight case of ADD and it takes alot less these days to turn todays gamer from a game.

Something I've noticed increasingly over the last week is the number of essential NPCs there are.
This has gotten rather annoying to deal with, when I'm getting bored of doing quests and looting places I just want to vent some anger by massacring a whole town but I can't because the vast majoirty of them just keep getting back up.

Why is there a need to have so many essential characters, most of whom aren't related to the main quest - like the Dark Brotherhood for example, what is the point in joing such factions if you can't just all of a sudden turn on them and crown yourself conquerer of Skyrim
If there is going to be a TES VI I'd like to see every character killable, even if they have quests attached to them - people have to deal with those consequences.

Does anyone else find the amount of essential NPCs annoying and momentum breaking?

Best suggested fix so far IMO:

.....So it's EA jr?
Nice money grabbing technique then

Obviously you can't come up with anything better to help your point but would rather post crap.
Since you wanna play like that though, by default actually the NPC doesn't exist.

No I don't need this much hand holding, but the newbie thats been playen CoD their entire game life might.This is the point, Beth. are tryen to bring in more business and more gamers to TES and to do this they made Skyrim the inbetweenie of a hard core RPG and a first person action adventure game. And more then likely this will be the trend, todays gamer has a slight case of ADD and it takes alot less these days to turn todays gamer from a game.

your whole thread has been filled with trash, just face it, your idea is never going to happen and I'm happy with that.

When you code you are basically telling something with no brain exactly what you want it to do, if you don't tell it to do anything, it does nothing. If you don't tell it to die, it will not die.