Hahaha I think you misunderstood me. Maybe I was just being too hasty. I should have said the problem got worse in Skyrim. In Daggerfall and Morrowind, choices you made DID have an effect. Let me show you this quote when Daggerfall was being promoted:
"Reputation is the most important influencing factor in the game. Your reputation determines which people will talk to you, which quests you can get from a faction, have influence on buying/selling goods and services and, in case your skills are high enough, whether you can receive a promotion within the factions you have joined.
Your reputation can only be affected by doing quests. The outcome of a quest determines the gain or loss of reputation with the faction you got the quest from, as well as the effects on reputation with other factions. Many factions are aligned with a number of other factions, sometimes factions have allies as well as enemies too. In such cases your reputation gain or loss with the faction has an immediate influence on the reputation with the associates and its allies/enemies.
Regional reputation has apparently no influence on the way you are treated by the regional populace. It has however an influence on the justice of a region. When your regional reputation drops beyond a certain level the town guards will appear shortly after you enter a settlement and try to arrest you. If you are caught you will be accused of high treason, which will result in a severe punishment if the court finds you guilty. Even if the town guards arrest you for smaller crimes like lockpicking or vagrancy, the court will accuse you for high treason. There are several quests that lower your regional reputation for the duration of the quest, or if you fail, even after."
Were systems like these perfect? Heck no. But each game since has improved on some aspects and messed up others. Skyrim is, in my opinion, the first to scrap most of it and start from scratch to make a new system that would hopefully work better. A noble attempt that I think went wrong. To me, the game feels hollow.
TES has really become a contradiction onto itself. To me, it increasingly feels like a linear game in an open-world setting. Just going back one game, in Oblivion, I was exploring in the tall grass just north of Lake Rumare when 3 guards came running at me, swords drawn. They ran past me, in pursuit of a bandit that I wasn't aware of. I drew my sword and followed to assist them. It was a totally random incident, and it left me with the perceived feeling that I'm just walking around this living world where all this stuff is happening around me whether I'm there or not.
In contrast, I get the opposite feeling in Skyrim. Off in the distance, I see three people standing near a footpath, motionless. The other direction, a few more standing there not moving. They'll remain like that forever, or until I get close enough to activate their scripted calamity. 30 minutes into the game and the suspension of disbelief is already shattered. 30 minutes more and I'm running into several situations that felt strangely familiar. Oh yea, every preview columnist had the same experience and wrote all about it. Sorry, that's not an open-world game. When everyone is pretty much on the same Disney World ride, that's a linear game.
That personal observation, along with the abolishment of classes, skills, etc., all leaves me with the feeling that they're trying to shoehorn everyone into the same box. Like I said, it feels linear and static... and probably why I only put 30 hours into the game.
In Oblivion, your choices had less impact than morrowind and daggerfall, but you still felt like you were an actual person malong actual choices, living in a real world just based off of npc dialogue and their own personal lives. Yeah. I remember when guards had tons of dialogue based on player actions. I'm still finding new stuff in Oblivion. If you're an infamous criminal they'll celebrate if you surrender. If you've ever murdered someone, they'd ridicule you: "You....I've seen your kind before. You'vs got blood on your hands.....keep your blade sheathed you murdering bastard, or I'll put you down myself!" If you got them to like you, they'd let you go for minor crimes. Jail wardens actually had their own dialogue and would guard you. Evey npc would praise your actions after you completed major tasks. It wasn't perfect though. You actually felt like your actions had consequence, even if it was just roleplay. Scripted conversations were mostly the same, but it was better than skyrim because said dialogue wasn't constantly being said wherever you go, removing you from the experience. Morrowind and Oblivion were just deeper games in that regard. It wasn't perfect, but skyrim could have improved upon it. What do the guards do in skyrim? Same stock responses for everything. They never talk to each other, I'm not even sure if they switch shifts (they might). Jail wardens direct you to general goods stores even though you're a prisoner. These are all little things, but they came together to make the game feel more authentic and full of life. Skyrim just feels hollow at times, like it's just smoke and mirrors fooling you into thinking its deeper than it is.
So, hopefully you understand now what I meant when I made that post. Sorry for the long post haha. These are just my opinions.
» Fri Nov 16, 2012 2:46 pm 
