I am playing the vamps side currently and I am seeing first hand just how bad this can get.
I’m trying to get the quest The Gift, where you turn your wife, so I’m doing a lot of the random vampire quests trying to get it. Well some of the random quests require me to kill a notable NPC in a town so I’ve been offing food merchants mostly. Also there is a quest where I have to turn an NPC into a vamp. The problem is when I get the quest again for the same person (a bug obviously) the only way to move past the quest is to kill the NPC vamp so that the quest fails.
In addition to that when the vamps attack the cities I am leaving them alone. I don’t see any reason to attack my own kind and since I’m a rogue my character is more designed for stealth kills, not charging into melee. So I just watch and enjoy the show until the guards finally kill the vamps (then I loot them).
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Thankfully I am only playing this current character to do the Dark Brotherhood (finished), all Daedric quests (finished) and the vamp side of Dawnguard. What I have created for myself here is a nearly unplayable world, which oddly enough is by design since all I did was follow the quests given (other than having to kill the vamp NPC’s due to that bug). I really can’t say this is good game design.
But the game is designed for you to take action; the game is designed for there to be consequences to your actions or inactions. You are
choosing to let people die, and you're ending up with a wiped-out game world. This is
excellent game design. If you only did the things in the real world that you wanted to do, and ignored everything else going on around you, your life would become a mess, because you have responsibilities. Ignore them at your own risk. In the game, you're ignoring a global threat that you
can influence and prioritizing working for assassins, vampires, and (evil-ish) forces, and when the (game) world becomes a mess, you're saying its bad game design? You just stated that all you wanted to do were the DB, Daedric, and DG quests. And you did. You also ignored everything else. So if assassins, vampires, and daedric princes ruled the world... how else should it have turned out? A thriving community of happy and productive people?
You and I may simply have opposing viewpoints here, so I'm not trying to be this antagonizing guy - lots of gamers would probably agree with you - I'm debating your point of view, not you personally.
You make some good points here, but I see an essential difference between dragons and vampires. Dragons are flying around or up on someone's roof where the NPCs are not in the way. Even when they land they are really, really big. So when 6-7 NPCs charge it, I still have room to get in there and whack it. With vampires, OTOH, many times I am helpless. The NPCs surround the vampire and I can't get at it without hitting a friendly. This is quite frustrating. Another frustrating aspect of vampires vs dragons is that with dragons you know they are there. With vampires this is not always the case. Instead, you only find out later there was a vampire attack by running across a body or ashpile. I really like trying to save the townsfolk from a dragon attack. Makes me feel like the hero. I can't feel that way with a vampire attack because the townsfolk all get in the way of me doing anything.
I'll agree with you that the vampire attacks are way more clandestine than the dragons - that's true - although (to my knowledge) I haven't lost NPCs to attacks that occurred when I wasn't at least in the vicinity. I've heard some folks claim that vamps spawn in cities when they're
not around, and that shouldn't happen because then the choice and action is taken out of your hands. I hate when I arrive somewhere at night and hear clamoring, but can't get a fix on where it is, and by the time I get there, the vamps have killed a named NPC. No doubt, I'll reload. But I play a character that wants to kill the vampires and dragons, and I'm a gamer that wants to control the game world, so I make every effort to attend to these things, because I want to keep my future questing options open.
And I hate when the idiot NPCs get in the way. sometimes I'll just play it through angry and kill everyone in the area - just to get it out of my system, and then reload and try to get it right.