Ok, I know the programs can't prepare for every eventuallity. I understand this. But Morrowind had no essential NPCs.

Skyrim has nothing but.

I love the game, I really do. I like the quests, the story, all that fun stuff. And then I hit Riften. And this isn't a spoiler since no one feels the need to hide anything.

The theives guild is functioning like a real criminal organiziation instead of Robin Hood now. Ok, fair enough. I want to be "good" on this playthrough, so I'm gonna smash them in the face.

Oh hey, look, they're all essential. Ooooh, and there's no quests to end, disband, or punish them. Only join or ignore them. That's... that's great. I hear they get nicer is you take them over.

Well, certainly I can take care of the matron Blackbriar? I mean she openly admits to using assassins to maintain a rule of fear. Since I can't weild any political influence to take her down, I'll just hit her with... oh. Essential. Well at least there's a quest to do to get rid of her I've heard.

It's just...I'm not asking for dozens of diffrent options here. Just a chance to join, or destroy, each faction. And for you to account for the chance that maybe when someone walks up and says "Hello, I eat babies. I'm going to go eat that baby over there." I may want to hit them in the face.

I don't know why there are so many invincible NPCs, something that can easily be fixed with a future mod, but the player does have a choice to ignore just about every situation, so I wouldn't say the game is linear. You can punch whoever you want in the face, but just like IRL, it doesn't change a thing and you wind up in jail.

My main character is a Khajiit thief, but I totally agree that there should be a way to take down the thieves guild in Skyrim. Many of the NPC dialog options hint at it and most of the population would welcome it. In a game that is supposed to be all about choices, Bethesda needs to add this as an option through DLC.

On a related note, I much preferred Morrowind's warning after you killed an "essential" character that you could "reload a prior save or continue in this flawed world" to the unkillable essential characters of Oblivion and Skyrim. But I am afraid that's one change we are stuck with in the name of "simplification" for a broader audience. Best we can hope for is some DLC to give us an option to take out the thieves guild.

You can fight on either side of the civil war, you should be able to choose which side of the "law" to fight on.

Immortal NPC's are a necessary evil due to how random Skyrim could be. Don't want a thief random encounter in Riften accidently killing Maven, the Jarl, Brynlof, and possibly Mjoll. If that were to happen and they weren't immortal then your locked out of quests and that's lost content in my eyes. Better to have the necessary evil of them being essential then having ruined quests, Morrowind like New Vegas was able to not have important characters be near combat areas hence why they weren't Immortal, Only NPC's that I can see in that group are the Greybeards and their leader.

I never heard skyrim claim to be a sandbox.

Piggybacking off that idea, it seems like almost all of the questlines are completely linear with no options once you've started them. Peryite? Do what he says or don't, leaving the quest eternally uncompleted in your journal. Molag Bal? Ditto. Companions? Oh sure they give you the choice to refuse... But you can never actually take it since the quest will just remain unresolved in your journal. Quests where you have an actual option (uh... Markarath conspiracy maybe? Being able to kill the DB?) to do anything but the obvious path the developers laid out for you are extremely rare, and that's just a shame.

Legion? Join the legion and you'll be given tasks for which there is only one way to complete. I imagine the Stormcloak questline is similar.

What we end up with is a world with a lot of breadth (tons of dungeons to explore and randomly generated loots to find) but almost no depth. It's very disappointing.

Your complaint is with the journal as much as it is with the quests, then

The journal is awful. But truthfully, the journal is not your 'instruction manual'. It is in some ways truly a journal- you've written down what was offered and recorded what you completed.

At the very least, immortal NPCs should become mortal after any quests associated with them are complete. Maybe they do ... I don't tend to kill NPCs that aren't trying to kill me very often.

Yeah if the games is flawed Ignore the failures and go on...cause the company is wonderfull as the game...
Some people will eat S*** all they re lives wondering why they ate it all their lives.
I m being gross but thats exactly what it turns into.
If all people had this mindset, we will still live in caverns, hunting with stones.

No, my complaint is that there's no way to actually resolve most questlines if you don't like the only option provided. It wouldn't be a problem if there were more options, but most of the time there's just one or maybe two if you're lucky. This is fine for very basic radiant storytelling random gen quests, but for actual quests made by a human developer instead of an algorithm, I really want more depth.

Example: My character really, really hates the corruption in Riften. He's a Legate of the Legion, Thane of everywhere but Riften, dude who's saved the world, etc. But there is no option to work with that girl who wants to fix things. There's no option to impose martial law on Riften, using your character's pull with Tullius to have Maven hang. There's not even an option to walk up to the thieves' guild and say "Fus in ur Ro Dah, criminal scum!"

Nope. Only option is to join the damn thieves guild and play through a quest with enough logical holes to ride a dragon through.

Or the companions, who "say" you can refuse the ceremony but the developers helpfully don't give you that option. Instead you get "sure!" and "Eh, let me think about it."

That's what I want as a gamer. Depth. Options that actually matter and have a tangible impact on the game.

...then you should not have keyed in on things staying in your journal, in your prevvious post

I agree with your frustration with the inability to turn Riften around or at least disband the Thieve's Guild, but I just chalk it up as a social problem that can't be fixed overnight. Riften is scum central and the prevalence of the Guild and Black Briars prevent it from changing. Nobody can do a thing about it.

yeah I have been feeling this for a while for a open-world rpg there are not many choices and any difference from your choices

you should try new vegas, anyone can die, i mean anyone! no matter how inportant

TC got a valid point, I agree with him.

I guess Bethesda wanted to roleplay everything in the for us, kinda like: LOOK, THE DRAGONBORN JOINS THE GUILD, IT'S CANON AND YOU CAN'T CHANGE IT, DEAL WITH IT LOSERS !

That's the thing. Logically, your character *should* be able to do something thing about it, given the kind of pull your character has at the end of other quests. Heck, I'd be happy with a simple "kill 'em all and then watch as the city collapses into anarchy/someone even worse fills the power vacuum" ending because at least it would give me another option.

But Beth doesn't give us any options. We can join the Thieves Guild or stick our fingers in our ears and pretend they don't exist. (Also ignore the entry in our quest log.)

It's why I was so surprised and pleased at how they let us kill the DB. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see a lot more of.


I'm a pretty big fan of NV. But that's rather off topic for this thread, so I shan't say more on that matter.

glad im not the only one thinking this. I mean you have a lot of freedom to make your character how you want but you have no say in quests. most of them have only one way of completing them which is kinda sad especially because they could do it in fallout. So I really dont get why they didnt get it right in their flagship title.

Yeah but in real life at least you could prevent further crimes of that person by killing it. In Skyrim, you end up in jail, and the person lives on.

But I agree, essential NPCs, quest items that cannot be tossed away, compass... what kind of demented morons do they take us for? XD I don't need babysitting, if I get lost in the woods or kill a quest NPC it's my problem.

Did the exact same thing and got as equally frustrated when i first went to Riften

Yea, this is a problem. I also wish the NPCs would be more detailed orally so I didn't have to rely on the journal and marker system to complete a quest. I understand random quests, but with structured quests how do you get more information in your journal than was actually said?

Yeah, but even tho I'm a Mrrowind really devoted fan I have to defend Bethesda from stuff people don't really know a measure of. Morrowind had really detailed dialogue, but the reason behind that is the fact that they could write off a wall of text for a single topic. Now all that needs to be voice overed, and those files take up a LOT. People asking for 1000 of choices, much mroe voice acting and whatnot need to realise that they have a size limit they need to frame they work with. So we could really only have what we have now (albeit a bit improved), or thousands of dialogue choices, but way less quests and other neat stuff we currently do have.

You're right, and if Skyrim had a dialog system similar to Morrowind, I'm sure the choice to do whatever would be there. So it's not Bethesda to blame, it's economics and technology. Most people don't want a text dialog system when they can have voice acting because it's more engaging, but like you said, it's expensive and takes up space. I think Bethesda gave gamers as much choice as they possibly could to keep the Elder Scrolls an attractive brand while being an immersive and exciting RPG.

Well, at least Todd now knows what it would look like if Apple made a game.

I completely agree with you on the point of nearly everyone being essential. The impression I got about NPC's being essential before Skyrim was released is that you would be able to kill everyone, and then you would still be able to complete a questline due to Radient AI allocating a new npc to offer those quests. Even in Fallout: New Vegas you were able to kill almost all NPC's if you so chose.
I was slightly disappointed by the amount of essential NPC's when previously given the impression of it being a bit more like Fallout on that front.