how were you told you were saving the world in this game.. first its
ZOMG i almost got killed
ok i'm safe
wow, we did it we killed a dragon!
i appear to have a power

in oblivion yes, you became important right away.

The "save the world" thing is rather clishé and I love stories which does not involve it, but I rather have a good story that is clishé than a bad one that is original.

This exactly. I actually feel guilty for avoiding the main quest with the one character I actually had progress in it. I'm strolling down a nice mountain road, thwacking skeevers over the head and picking mountain flowers when I see them, and all I can think about is the fact that Alduin is raising dragons to terrorize innocent townsfolk and kill kittens as I, the only being alive who can stop him, blithely ignore their plight. I ended up making a new character who avoids all dangerous quests period (include the MQ) just to escape the stress of it. Which makes me wonder - what exactly would happen if the Dragonborn lived out his days without so much as uttering a single Shout? Without ever discovering who he was? Would the world just stop and... wait for him? To complete the prophecy?

Drop out point or not, the urgency is still there and a little bit of freedom is still lost. You'll always keep hearing "dragon this" and "dragon that". Is it not also impossible to become Jarl and own a house in Whiterun without officially starting the MQ?

Oblivion did the same thing. Couldn't get too close to Kvatch for fear of triggering those fkn gates.

I was 100+ hours in before I knew I was able to absorb dragon souls.

At the point where you 'split' there is no indication that quest involves dragons.

And yes, it does make Whiterun Thane-hood impossible....when I first heard it I immediately regonised it as a drop out point...but one that has just been stuck in there later on.....it hasnt been thoguht through.

It's also impossible to do the Civil War quests without starting the main quest.

Interestingly, Far Cry 2 put you in a world where you really didn`t change much of the world, or even the country. You just explored and did your jobs. It gave you freedom without making you really important. I really liked it.

A lot of people didn`t. Many complained about being directionless and not knowing what to do.

It is strange. What is the point of killing the Biggest Baddest Dragon if it does nothing to stop the rest of them from harrassing you and everyone else forever after? But then again, it would kind of svck to not have them anymore.

My only other contribution is much the same as a lot of others. It would be nice if it had two MQs; one good, one evil; but I don't know if that's possible to do while managing to keep the graphics etc. I guess if you get powerful enough you can go about destroying entire populations of towns. But then what?

I don't so much mine becoming head of organizations but I wish you would have to work for it more or you had some underling doing day to day opperations.

Like the theives guilde, it makes sense I demonstrated my bad ass theiving skills to an order that owe wait can never tell about any of my bad ass thieving skills because that stuff is secret. Kidding aside you should have to undergo a bunch of sidequests and stuff.

Now arguably the events in these games spans years and land that we just don't get to visit. Skyrim is the size of Washington State I heard on estimate. So that means the cities are actual city sized and there are about 1000 towns, farms, and other good stuff scattered around the nation that we just aren't seeing.

I imagine if they went to remake Skyrim in 10 years the land mass would be way larger, have way more dungeons, and villages. Remember it is a game and while expansive it is still limited by technology when it comes to scale.

That aside I think this game does a good job setting up how you take over leadership in each of the guilds with the last leader dying and some event happening which shows off your epicness but where it fails is in the respect catogory. What you do afterward is the same grunt work you did beforehand. It would be cool to haves something like Assassins Creed Brotherhood where you can dispatch and train members of the guild to carry out various functions.

I don't mind saving the world, however I do wish that the main quests were more involved and had more meaning. It's hard to feel a connection, or real driving purpose to do anything when the bad guy is basically dragon-sauron, without the backstory or even sense of potential power and threat...and the citizens of the world are largely irrelevant and uninteresting and not all that compelling.

We don't ever learn much about the antagonist, and he really doesn't do anything to personally earn our ire. He doesn't do anything, that enrages our character, or makes us actually want to put an end to him aside from, "ho hum, destiny says we need to kill him."

I never once felt threatened by Alduin or his dragons. They were pests, and generally all rather weak and not particularly vicious. There weren't any holds or towns destroyed, or taken control of by dragons. There weren't people lining up and being brainwashed into being the new dragon cult, or being tortured and turned into slaves to the dragons. The dragons were not particularly powerful or destructive, and did not even make much use of their own shouts to cause widespread destruction or anything.

Nothing had any pull, or any sense of real danger, not once did it seem like our protagonist may lose, not once was there ever a situation that could make us temporarily feel that hope is lost. It just wasn't compelling. We know, the whole time, that everything is fine, that nothing will ever go wrong, that we will never lose. Nothing.

Come, join the force to put Role-Play back into games...

No hero, unless that is what you are trying to be...
No ending, because time never ends...
No "Good and Bad", because those are perceptions that should be up to the player to decide...
No "Right and Wrong", because those are unrealistic opinions in any culture...
No endless economics and treasure, as that is the biggest complaint in every game ever made...

Gods... Believe what you want... You are truly on your own...
Fate... You are only alive, until you die... What you do along your journey, is your own business...
Destiny... Pffft... Grow up... Leave your ego at the door... We will not provide one for you...

There is more to life than fighting, six, and possessions... Why limit yourself to such primitive and simple-minded tasks and actions that could be managed by monkeys and ants?

Real worlds need more than just a few dozen creators. Successful worlds adapt and grow with demands. Thriving worlds have some form of natural balance to sustain them. Become part of your world, don't let your world dictate what you must become.

LOL... Sorry, working on my MOD write-up.. this seemed like a great place to insert it... I agree with everything read so far... still...

"Dreams are the foundation that we all rest upon." Jason DAngelo ? 2007

IIRC one of the biggest complaints with OB was that you weren't in fact the one who saved the world, you were his little helper. I guess that's why they reverted back to the MW way of life

Fully agree with OP. Saving the world in 3 different ways (number of characters) may be fun, but ruining it (thus becoming the cause of the end of time) would also fit nicely with recent Bethesda stuff: in FO3 players could have an evil ending, TWICE. First poison the water before initially "dying", only to wake up and ruin the biggest factor of the well being of the people of the wasteland, the brotherhood.

i don't mind saving the world in main quests. if i wanted to live a mundane existence vicariously i would play the sims or some such game. it all comes down to characters and writing if the story works well or not. two areas beth is painfully bad at.

what really annoys me is becoming guildmaster of everything. even guildmaster of one guild is too much. in skyrim, the ways they 'open' up the guildmaster position is forced and most with a moderate amount of game/story/movie experience saw it coming a mile away. isn't dragonborn enough?

after the first MQ mission, where you absorb the dragon soul, everyone knows who you are. shouldn't i get some freebies? wouldn't people be bending over backwards for me? trying to use me? i become an instant celebrity, the first dragonborn in centuries, but as with everything else in the gameworld, it doesn't matter. bethesda, you need to get writers and stories worthy of your beautiful world. skyrim suffers greatly from only being a 'half game'.

I agree. In Oblivion you should have had the option to join the Mythic Dawn and in Skyrim you should have the choice to join Alduin.

The reason I believe why these options are not provided is for the sake of lore. Then again maybe the outcome could be the same, just getting there could have different options?

Damn, I wished I could've joined the Enclaves in Fallout 3.

Yeah would have been interesting. It's just funny to me that Bethesda say "Go anywhere and be anyone you want" and then they deny you the most obvious option when playing through the game.... too join the baddies

Going back to the OP to make an important reply to the remarks made regarding Baldur′s Gate II

One of the things you miss to point out which sets the plot in Baldur′s Gate apart from the one in Skyrim and other ES games is the fact that in the plot for Baldur′s Gate you not only go after the bad guy, you also discover a hidden story and secret about your character. This makes the story draw your character in on a personal level, creating a motivation for moving in the direction of the plot because you instinctly want to uncover more of the truth behind who you really are. To me it′s not the save the world vs. personal revenge theme behind the story that creates the attraction, but the fact that the story and plot unfolds around your character (you might even say that in some aspects you do save the world in BG II since the villain is trying to drain the divine soul from you or your sister in order to become more powerful and it′s quite possible that the renegade mage would be able to threaten the entire world if given such powers).

This was done in a similarly clever way in KOTOR (and not entirely successfully repeated in KOTOR II) and in Planescape Torment.

Though in some ways the role of the Dragonborn in Skyrim is a path of personal exploration, it is not revealed with the same sense of dramaturgy, the Greybeards pretty much explain the entire plot during your first encounter and the rest of the story is about how you solve the problem.

I believe what you are looking for is Dramaturgy in the storytelling and unfolding of the plot, it′s in the fine details of how you slowly reveal clues to the plot to keep the consumer interested without giving away too much too early. A more hidden and slowly revealed plot about the Dragonborn could have done wonders for the main plot in Skyrim, rather than the current state of opening your journal and being reminded "oh yeah, it was the whole Dragonborn-save-the-world thing I had to do to as well...".

Story was never a strong point in the Elder Scrolls games, in the end the Elder Scrolls games are merely sandboxes for the player to play hero or do whatever he wishes in a world without consequences.

This is a common problem in TES series. I always play a TES game by RPing but in the end I always end up becoming the boss of all good and evil factions, saving a province from it's destruction, being the champion of every [censored] Daedric Prince, etc. This wasn't like this in Morrowind. Sure, you can become boss of every faction but it took a really long time. You had to work on your skills and do quests a lot more than Oblivion and Skyrim.

Why is this happening?

Because Bethesda wants you to experience it all. Ever wondered why everyone starts having fights and discussions when you visit a new city? Because they don't want you to miss anything. Whenever I visit a new city to do one quest I end up walking out of there with more than +10 misc quests because everything has to happen when I'm there and I can overhear everything. That's why most quests are linear. You are always walking around with more than 30 quests which you forget about because your journal doesn't explain more than "kill x" "talk to y" etc. It's so easy to become a demi-god. In Morrowind you had to choose between 3 houses. If I rembember correctly there was a bug that allows you to join House Hlaalu and one other house though.

Skyrim universe isn't bigger than Morrowind. It appears bigger because Bethesda is making you swallow everything in the game. Doing quests turns into a chore after some time.

TES got a really good potential for story. Lore is really interesting. Beth can't just pull it off. Civil war and stuff like that sounds good in theory but it fails in reality.

This issue was launched by me before Skyrim realease.
There should be someone else saving the world if you don t do it in X time (put a long delay in that) or simply the world ending or a new era emerging.

As for thieves guild Bethesda have choosen the X box platform, that way anything that would be throwed at them would be blamed on X box space limitation (no quest description, no dialogue, low resolution, incomplete crafting, shallow game, and so on)

But i don t see this trend going away as long nobody step in Bethesda backyard.

For me skyrim ain t the best game by far, if i was to make any comparation i would say:
Oblivion was Windows ME
Skyrim is the Vista
And Morrowind was the XP.
A really good game has YET to be released.
All in all, taking GFX off, Arena and Daggerfall were more interesting games.

there could still be a main quest without saving the world. You can still be a hero even though there wasnt a world eater you had to defeat. And you could still be a hero without being the chosen one and master of [censored] everything. Would be so much more realistic and fun to be a part of a world, not the master

Fallout: New Vegas is great for this too.
First part of the main quest is about you and Benny, not about the world or any force that is going to destroy it.
Then after reaching him you get more options that all makes sense.

Caesar doesn't really "need" you, he just admires your determination and decides to give you a shot, but he never really "needed" the Courier.
NCR on the other hand are fearful of what House has in store and want you to come work for them once they figure out you have the chip. But they're not gonna advertise how capable you are as that'd make them look bad.
House is who you're suppose to return the Chip to, with Victor and his meet and greet right at the gate he wants you to come work for him, but he also says that he could at any moment just storm The Tops for the platinum chip, but he'd prefer not to.
And Yes Man... Is evil.

Anyway, none of these are going to throw the player up on a pedistal as "oh you are so important to everything around here!"
No, none of them actually "need" you and none of them are gonna give you any special treatment, unless you get your reputation up with them.
I love New Vegas for this reason. I am not that important. I'm just a pawn to be moved around by the major players.

And ultimately I have 6 endings.

I can go with House, for comfort and luxury.
I can go with NCR, for loyalty and patriotism.
I can go with Caesar, for change for the greater good.
I can go with Yes Man, for a nation of my own.
I can go with Lanius, for [censored] and giggles. (Seriously, who would ever find it feasible to have Lanius in charge and win? It's a 'stupid evil' situation.)

And finally I can go with Greed from Dead Money.
It's a perfect ending for a greedy character who only cares about her wealth.


None of which are about "saving the world".
You just get dragged into a battle you never asked for.
But like Ulysses said in Lonesome Road: You can always just walk away.
The main quest not suiting your taste? Then walk away.
You might not find any climix to your storyline, but not every story has an ending.
Sometimes it's very open.

tl;dr