But, Federally.... some of us aren't into killing the innkeeper to move a minor plot-point forward. What Whiterun Courier is saying is that in cases where Beth has programmed part of a storyline, it's disconcerting that it never progresses UNLESS the player does something (and in the case of Ysolda, that something is personally not an option for any of my toons, even the "edging up on not nice" ones).... Not to mention that unless one spends an inordinate amount of time reading the wiki or reading this forum (admittedly, I do both time to time....) one may never know that one COULD move a plot-point like Ysolda's forward....

Yes I definitely agree with that point. After the civil war I was immediately arrested by a storm cloak soldier your crimes against skyrim. I mean I'm a [censored] war hero and probably saved your life on the final battle, you really going to attack me because I killed a couple guards who were there with thee imperials? Really?!

Your theory breaks down when you look at Morrowind. Just as much scripting (heck, maybe more) on the back-end of the game -- I'm talking quests, not graphics here. "Get this. Talk to so-and-so. Find a book. Read it. Then talk to so-and-so, etc." That took just as much scripting know-how as the stuff we have in Skyrim. But the writing was much better, much deeper. The lore in Morrowind was more interesting. The little books -- hundreds of them -- were terrific and entertaining. Skyrim, like Oblivion, just recycled all those old books and added a handful of new ones. And the new ones svck. That wasn't so much the fault of the writers. In Morrowind, Todd (or whoever) said to the writers "write a little short story that fills out the lore of Tamriel while explaining something like Destruction magic." In Skyrim it was "Uh... we need another book to +1 Smithing skill. Write something quick about smithing." And so we get crap like "Light Armor Forging." In Morrowind, that would have been an interesting story about a smith and his apprentice debating the merits of light vs heavy armor or something. In Skyrim, we get "Light armor is lighter than heavy armor. It is made from leather and sometimes glass." Herp derp.

It's easy to blame the writers, but the blame is really on the top guys at Bethesda. They were clearly focused on graphics, animations, dragons breathing fire. Also, superficial stuff like marriage and the hundreds of "took an arrow to the knee" one-liners we hear constantly. It's actually remarkable to me that at one point in the history of gaming (12 years ago or so), a developer actually hired talented writers and paid them to write hundreds of short stories and poems. That's astounding and something we will never see again.

That easy vs difficult dichotomy is non existant in the game. I'll explain.

I'd like to make a distinction that I am going to use in my argument against TheMagician. There is a difference between action based role play and dialogue based roleplay. Right now, I just want to make the distinction between what an NPC does and what kind of story it would tell.

You can use any NPC as an example but lets take Ysolda. She has dialogue and has her scripted actions. She can compliment the player according to an unknown variable - the player's character - or act in a way to characterize her own personality. This is the important part.

It does not matter what the player does with regard to role-play (i.e., not regarding choices affecting the outcome of quest, etc.) The player is dovahkiin, for all that is worth. I wouldn't be bothered to notice if they call me thief, companion or mage, if I were one. (Incidentally, I am called a thief even though I certainly am not one! This is also wrong!!) The problem is that NPCs do not leave a mark. The game is open in the sense that we follow the adventure where we want. The action is what makes the game enjoyable, not reading background info about each character.

The problem is characters have half-cooked behaviour that have potential for great memorable stories but just fall too short of it. That is what dooms the concept of roleplaying in Skyrim. There is this central design where action takes precedence over reading (see my previous post) and you have to imagine some of the story. That is not so bad at all. What is bad is to have characters that stay the same right after a moment that was scripted on purpose to make some memorable change in the world. By making the characters return to the same as before, that change in the world dissipates and it just feels wrong.

Back to the Ysolda example, I would bet someone forgot to finish her line or something. I think it is just very bad to assume the player will become some kind of romantic freak and kill the current owner just so she can have the bar.

I agree that the pacing of this game was HORRENDOUS.

(five minutes in) Lets see execution make character and OMGWTFBBQ ALDUIN ALREADY?
(next mission) There's a dragon outside of hel- YOU ARE BASICALY NORDIC CHRIST COME AGAIN!!!

In my opinion, Dragons returning should have been MUCH later on, and you being the Dragonborn should have been a mid plot twist on a par with Morrowinds.

This is an excellent point.

Unfortunately, the game was marketed to the public as you being the dragonborn... see: All trailers for the game.

Personally, I'm gonna have to side with TheMagician here in this thread. The feeling I get from reading all of these posts is that the OP and some others were expecting to taste cherries when they took a bite of chocolate pudding. Could there have been better followthrough in some plotlines, in terms of crafting better or different reactions from the people you have helped or hindered through the game? Sure... it could have been better. But the game engine has limits... thus, Bethesda hires writers that know the game engine.

To the OP: If you really want a job with Bethesda, write a mod that addresses some of these concerns you have after the CK comes out. It might prove to be more difficult than you imagine.
-Loth

Loth you're wrong. Skyrim shows it has the capability of being more deep. Example is something that happened to me in Riften, I pick pocketed some random priest and got caught, when her and thee guards attacked me something unexpected happened. Npcs I had helped through quests ran over and fought thee priest and guard to help me. With their help escaping arrest was much easier then normal.

This did a lot to add to my perception of how my actions affected the world and probably wasn't all that hard for Beth to accomplish. Sadly it's a very rare occurrence, usually npcs just act like I'm nobody or behave totally opposite how you'd expect. Example, during the battle for whiterun on the storm cloak side, in the middle of the fight in the keep the stormcloak soldiers turned against me and tried to arrest me because I accidentally hit a civilian during the fight. Immediately after thee battle for Solitude I was arrested by stormcloaks for crimes committed while Imperials were in power. I'm a damn war hero and they arrest me because I terrorized the town when it was under Imperial control?

I don't expect in depth story lines for every npc. Don't expect a story line that dynamically adjusts to my character. But how about npcs and factions that just behave in a way that makes a bit more sense, shouldn't be that hard to do.

Right... these kinds of reactions are programmed by adding/subtracting actors from factions. You helped some NPCs, and they were added to a behind-the-scenes faction that would pitch in and help you if you were in trouble. The same logic applies when you accidentally hit an NPC during a battle... the other Actors who are in an aligned faction help the NPC out against you. IMO it would be easier to polish the scripting if Skyrim used a reputation system.

-Loth

Edit: You can have a lot more variation and grey areas by using a scaling number (reputation system) instead of a simple 1 or 0 like belonging to a faction. Also, developing the story in a more sensible manner could have been achieved by incorporating minimum reputation scores at vital junctions. For example, becoming archmage of the college requires little to no experience with magic. With a rep system, this oversight could have been avoided entirely, making the college questline much more sensible and realistic, while preserving the openness that TES games are famous for. You could have been required to work for one or more masters at the college, building your rep with them, before being offered the next tier of the questline that advances you eventually to archmage. Sadly, there is no reputation system in Skyrim, and thus, we possibly have non-mages barely able to cast apprentice spells becoming archmage. Hell, my first wizard playthrough got to archmage at level 14 because I skipped the MQ and went straight to the college.

I'm surprised no one actually thought this through. Or maybe it's because I have experience in the industry...

In the game industry, especially the AAA world, almost no one joins as as a pure game designer unless they have lots of AAA titles under their belt as a designer, and there aren't a lot of people who fit that description looking for jobs. Almost always the companies promote internally to game design positions that involve more thought exercise than scripting and coding. Good game design for a AAA title is part storytelling and part marketing -- you're making a book for the masses like JK Rowling, not a piece where the selection of words itself are a work of art like with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Basically, becoming a real game designer for a AAA game is like getting your movie/TV script actually greenlighted by Warner Bros., Universal Studios

Making a work of art, and games ARE a medium of art, that appeals to the largest audience possible, while also appealing to people that want it to be intellectualized, is the very height of game design that only a relative few can do.

Unfortunately, the success of AAA games seems driven not by how well they're designed from an artistic standpoint, but how well they're designed from a marketing standpoint to get the most sales possible, regardless of what we would think is "good design". The FPS Multiplayer Genre is an excellent example of this. They're all basically the same game with a few tweaks. When was the last time you saw a truly innovative multiplayer FPS? Yet an insane number of people are willing to shell out $60 for the next Call of Duty or Battlefield title, having about 4x Skyrim's sales. If you look at what's changed and matured in these games between the different iterations vs what's changed and matured about Skyrim, you'll notice Skyrim has changed much more in the ways you guys wanted.

In short, game development is a for-profit business and balance needs to be made between what seems profitable and everything else. If everyone was given two choices for a Skyrim expansion: really really epic storytelling with mediocre encounters OR mediocre storytelling with cool encounters, what do you think *most* people would honestly choose? And yes, it can come down to one or the other in the eyes of marketing, since they haven't actually proven they're good at epic storytelling, they HAVE proven they're good at cool encounters. Why take the gamble and invest the man hours?

But with Steamworkshop coming up you can always make your own mod with epic storytelling and sell it...and maybe Bethesda will pick it up if it sells well enough, buying it from you, and make it into a DLC for consoles.

I look at Skyrim as a group of short stories. This isn't Tolkien's LotR, more his Silmarillion, or Lovecraft's Cthullu-verse, or Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Individually, each storyline is lighter than an individual masterpiece, but as a whole they are greater than the sum of their parts.

The main quest definitely could have been deeper, but as a whole, the game does an excellent job of creating the Skyrim world.

The interesting part is that there is a great deal of background information and lore in the books.

Trouble appears when NPC do not react according to the changes in the world. Those changes can only be made by the player and should not depend on unknown variables - they are "allowed" to happen, in the first place.

This is a great thread. My brother just called to complain about how weak the main quest was. I love that first post about storytelling. This game would have been much better had the dragons done something. Alduin led forces... razed villages. A seemingly impossible task to fight them off. People desperate. You seeing hundreds of dragons all at once tearing the world apart. Fire, ice, death and destruction.

The only hope is to read the Elder Scroll and take on Alduin...

The game needs better monsters too.

I feel that the world is frozen in time, while my character is constantly in motion. When changes do happen, which is rare, they are always seem to be one step behind my character.

Bethsaida created many frustrating and puzzling dead ends. One of them is the role of the mercenaries. They say that there is trouble nearby. I can persuade, intimidate, ignore, or bribe them at an effort to get the location. However, the map never updates and the quest list never changes.

And, in the cities, I hear people start conversations that in other games would have signaled that there is a quest here. Nada here.

And, did Bethsaida have to create a situation where locations could be the focus of so many quests? If I do one quest, I may cancel out another quest. This is seen in the Main Quest where if you start the Thieves Guild questline early before a certain point in the MQ you may cause the latter to break. Or, if I get mammoth tusks before speaking to Ysolda, I will not get a quest from her for the tusks and I can't offer her the tusks. This is the first RPG for me where I feel I have to constantly be on alert to potential quest breaks. This is not free roaming exploration.

I've never had the issue with Ysolda - I always have a tusk before I ever get around to messing with her.... In fact, on the latest (15th) toon, I forgot all about her until I wound up with a tusk from some dungeon or other at around level 18. Boom, walk into Whiterun (not doing MQ at all this time....) - yep, talk to Ysolda, get the dialog option, then hand in the tusk to complete that quest.

can we just enjoy the video game instead of putting every freakin detail under a microscope and if it doesn't appeal to YOU personally then it is the fault of the writers and developers of the game for wasting so much of your precious time and money.

hey, i certainly enjoyed it. it was different, unique and i didnt try to resist so hard the path that the game puts us on from the beginning. i certainly have never played as a dragon-slaying nordic barbarian in any elder scroll game before so why not? i certainly have played as a dark brotherhood assassin or sneaky thief in every game before that so i enjoy a little variety. so the game doesnt match the epicness of a hollywood feature film but thats just the price you pay for having endless different ways to enjoy and percieve the game from.

I think you make some very good points here, although I do feel the need to point out a couple of things.

1) Firstly, I agree that there is no sense of pressure to get the main quest done, and the Dragonborn doesn't face overwhelming odds and adversity. Many people skip the MQ entirely and nothing terrible happens to Skyrim, so that is a major flaw in the design of Skyrim. But Skyrim doesn't have a pull factor toward the main quest; in other words, the game is meant more for exploration than to complete the MQ. It's practically a sandbox RPG, and you can't have that 'open world' feel without sacrificing some of the pressure to complete the MQ. If things were to escalate to the point where you have no choice but to complete the MQ asap, it takes away that sandbox feel for a portion of the game. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

2) Personally, I think encountering tough moral decisions is really based on how you play. If you just play Skyrim like a regular MMOer instead of an RPer, there won't be much appeal - the best weapons can be gained easily, and the MQ finished fairly quickly. But when you RP, that's where Skyrim really comes alive. Immersing yourself fully within the game and playing according to the personality that you want your character to have makes it far more engaging. For example, there were a great number of tough choices my first, generic "neutral good" character had to make: to side with Kematu or Saadia? The absence of proper background information for that particular quest made the choice a tough one, and kept me wondering for days afterwards if siding with Saadia was right.

Joining the Empire was another tough choice - I'm not a big fan of how they carry out things, and I absolutely hate the Thalmor, and I had to choose between the lesser of two evils after comparing the pros and cons of joining either faction. This choice would later affect my questline for the DB, as I didn't want to kill the Emperor, since I'm RPing as a neutral good character who's already sworn an oath to Titus Mede II. As it is, I'm still deliberating on whether or not to advance that questline - getting rid of him clears the way for a new Emperor, perhaps ushering in a new age. But to do this I have to assassinate Vittoria Vicci, who hasn't really done anything to deserve her death and who's my damn neighbour in Solitude.

Each choice you make affects another one later on, I suppose. And when you immerse yourself within the game, as Bethesda intended you to do, then the choices you have to make become so much harder.

Here's another example: I'd like Nightingale Armor since it looks so badass and stealthy-like. If I were playing from a distance, detaching myself from Skyrim, then it's easy to attain. Do a couple of quests, scroll through dialogue, etc. But I roleplay as a regular Nord who wants to go to Nord heaven, especially after having seen it once. Pledging my soul to Nocturnal willingly is not something I'd like to do, and as a neutral good character I don't want lawlessness and theft running rampant through Skyrim.
Similarly, to obtain Daedric Artifacts (my backstory is that I'm collecting them so that they don't fall into the wrong hands), I've had to do a number of things that go against my character's moral compass - such as sacrificing a follower to Boethiah, killing Logrolf for Molag Bal, etc etc.

TL;DR: Tough moral decisions are existent, but they are not thrust onto you. Most of the time, they only arise when you choose to immerse yourself within that open world.

Thank you for this insightful reply. The decisions you mentioned along with whether to kill Paarthurnax or not or kill Cicero or not were all tough choices for me as well. If people want to really get picky about the writing, I felt the DB quest's to be just plain old stupid and pointless. I had to just pretend they did horrible things and somehow deserved to die for it to make any sense to me which I'm totally OK with. It's just one pointless murder after another. I mean it started OK with the old hag you kill at first was a little satisfying. Hell, I wanted to kill that witch even without the DB. But after that it seemed that they were all just jobs to do and stay completely detached from. (I guess such is the DB though.) I wanted to at least have some reasons they deserved to die, not that someone just wanted them dead. But I usually play saintly type characters and murder and theft in not usually one of the things I enjoy, so I'll admit that plays a part in it. I thought Cicero was done really, really well if not a bit annoying. And the first time "Mother" spoke to me I was grinning ear to ear, so parts of that faction did have it's moments. I just can't really see doing them again.

One thing that people seem to forget however, is that this is a video game. You simply do NOT have the same storytelling capabilities as a huge novel or even a movie. So what that Delphine didn't give me her life story all the way back to when she lost her virginity. There's enough of her story there that I can put together the pieces and imagine her story plenty enough to be meaningful to me. It's called imagination.

People are also forgetting the HUGE number of books (over 100 new plus ones from Oblivion) in the game. There's a lot of depth there if you choose to read them. It also seems strange that so many people rail about "hand holding" and when some things in the story are left open for you to create on your own world they say it's poorly written. Whatever... I just don't get it I guess.

Greetings! I'm really into story-writing and am definitly going to write novels when I'm older. I have the foundations for 2 series already (one being a fantasy). Usually I am a modest person, but they do take Skyrim's Main Plot for dinner. (I'll stop rambling now.)

I don't understand why a story-writer needs to be a programmer as well. Could JRR Tolkien program computers? No. And look what he came out with.

Skyrim's story lacks another antagonist in my opinion. I thought the Mythic Dawn in Oblivion were awesome, accompanying the Daedra. It gave the sense that the enemy were everywhere; trust no-one. The main quest in Skyrim consisted of Dragons... and more dragons.

Given how uptight Delphine is about everything, it is highly doubtful that she ever lost her virginity...but I digress

I was quite dissatisfied with the DB questline too...I guess it was the whole aspect of the Dark Brotherhood. As secret, covert assassins, the whole religious feel with the Black Sacrament and everything didn't sit well with me. Assassinations by nature require a very cold, clinical execution of the mission, and to me the idea of getting hired via some ancient ritual sort of clashed with that archetype. The DB family makes it clear that they are emotionless when killing, because they do it for money and then keep contracts highly confidential. That process in itself suggests a highly organised and meticulous nature characteristic of secular, amoral hitman groups, something that the DB are anything but.

On top of that, the side contracts are ultimately useless. I don't feel any sense of purpose when killing these random targets, and even worse is the fact that they're innocents. After being forced to kill Lurbuk, I felt it was going too far at that point. I also didn't want to kill the Emperor, so I guess I'll just leave the questline to fester unless it ties in with an awesome DLC in future.

You make a very good point about linking events and pieces of information with imagination. That helps to shape a character's depth and development; imagination was what made me start collecting Daedric artifacts so that they wouldn't be misused. It plays a huge part in immersion, and detaching yourself from the game simply makes it a series of unlinked, fragmented splinters of story.