I feel that the lack of emotions in this game makes it severely worse.
Don't get me wrong. The game is amazing. But it could be much, much better.


You get the "epic feel" sometimes... When you're first learning the shout, blackreach, when you're climbing to High Hrothgar, when you're climbing to the top of the throat of the world, etc.

But epic is not everything.
The game should be made of sad, happy, depressing, angry, jealous moments too.

Fallout 3 was very depressing and sad. It made me feel different. I really wanted to help those people. And I was happy when I completed the quest about the purified water. Or when I fixed the radio antenna. When I saw the Brotherhood of Steel for the first time, I was like: Ohhh, hope!

You have like 20 quests in your journal at once, and you don't even care about helping people. You just want the reward or the adventure.
And sometimes you don't even remember about the quest itself.


I know It's hard to reach a post-apocalyptic emotional level, but some few changes would help.

- Better dialogue and voice-acting.... The guy lost an important item, but he's calm and relaxed. It's almost like you cared more than him.
- Animations... Well that wasn't a huge improvement really. The guy is happy, but you can notice it by looking to his head. And by the way he speaks.


And feel free to give your opinions

I agree, i posted awhile ago about how you can go on an epic quest with or for somebody and all you get when its completed is thanks heres some gold. It would be nice to feel some genuwine emotion when you help someone out in a major way, and all it would take is alittle better voice work and dialogue, that being said the games still friggin awesome! but yea some more emotion would be nice.

True to an extent. It's still a big improvement over Oblivion where the player had absolutely no personal connection with the crap that was going about.

Tbh many games don't make it personal enough, FF and MGS games are prime examples of making the [censored] personal. Morrowind was also a great example of a story that makes you wanna stir up problems in your own name, and not just because an emperor told you, or you heard there's a lot of gold, fame and chicks/dudes in the deal.

Many of the quests do feel a bit static, but I feel for the people who lose their heirlooms to bandits or lost fellow friends and kin. I even felt sorry for that hermit in the ice fields with the Dwemer thingamagig and was inclined to help him because he had schizophrenia, but when he asked me to do something against my moral code, I realized what his intentions were. Blood was spilled that day.

You don't think Skyrim is a sad place? I don't know what to tell you then. Tragedy is around every corner.

I find Skyrim to be very emotionally involved. Maybe you just relate to the more real-world setting of Fallout than to the fantasy setting of The Elder Scrolls. I know the opposite is true for me.

Im with ya 100% on that, theres one quest where a bandits stole a guy named amrens fathers sword, and the way he spoke about it made me want to retrieve it, quests like that im always up for.

@OP - I'm of the opinion that in order to effectively RP a wide variety of characters/personas (and the day to day emotions that go with them), the general atmosphere of the game setting has to be 100% neutral. If the atmosphere is pre-established in any other way, so too are the emotions of the character.

Fallout games are thick on that atmosphere (nothing against them), but it is that very atmosphere which restricts RP options by pre-determining the stark emotions of any character created within. By contrast, a game set within a normally functioning, neutral state society (Morrowind, less so Oblviion and Skyrim) has no pre-determined emotion tied to it and greater freedom to seek out or create opportunities to discover emotions along the whole spectrum.

The down side is, of course, that its harder to develop that wider range of emotion into a game, which is why i think its absense or the inappropriateness of the way it is portrayed is so readily noticeable.

I take that little immersion jolt on the chin though. A necessary trade-off for greater RP freedom.

If TES games ever start pre-determining the emotional backdrop on the scale of Fallout, they will be worse for it.

Not really. Other games have done it a lot better.

I teared up a little at the end of Infamous 2. If you've done the ending I did, you'll know why.

I'd agree with the OP and I don't think there has been a particular improvement over Oblivion here either. The main problem getting emotion in the game is that its hard to empathise with the actual NPC's, since they are really just lines of code. It generally takes high quality writing to do so, and high quality writing isn't Beth's thing. The other main way to make the game feel emotional is to put people lives on the line in the game. The only time I ever gave a [censored] in Oblivion was during the battles in the main quest where Baurus and Jauffre were in danger. Everything else in the game was linear with everything set out; it was predecided whether people would die or not and way too many characters were essential. Skyrim hasn't really gone anywhere here either; there's only a handful of similar opportunities (although I did feel bad when I was looting this guy's ancestors tomb and he got annoyed with me...maybe a bit ashamed).

In Fallout peoples lives and futures, on the other hand, are very much on the line, which is why there's a lot more emotion in that game. Consider Boone. His wife, with his unborn child inside her, had been dragged off into slavery after someone in the town betrayed him, and desperate to see that she didn't end up a slave, he was forced to kill her himself. Are you going to care more about him or some guy whose had his fathers sword stolen by bandits?

Skyrim has plenty of opportunities, but there's no risk that anyone you care about is going to be killed by a dragon or die in the civil war, so it really all goes to waste.

More emotions would be good IMO, but I have felt sadness, happyness, respect etc. several times. Maybe you aren't looking in the right areas.

After he'd chipped me for the 100th time about my poor shooting after I'd shot the eyes out of a ghoul a mile away, my sympathy for him waned.

It's rare that a quest in Skyrim makes me feel emotionally involved. I only really realized how disengaged I'd become when it came to a quest that required me to kill a dog in exchange for an enchanted weapon and I went, "Whoa. WHOA. Am I really about to hack apart a puppy just to get an axe worth a few hundred septims? I have over 200 thousand septims in the bank already and nothing to spend them on. Why would I do this?" At which point I refused the weapon and left the place feeling... tainted, somehow. A few days later I completely forgot the lesson I'd been taught and took down an innocent man for some super-special dagger or other. I don't even know anymore. I guess I just seriously broke immersion on that playthrough.

Hmmm... Maybe they should participate in the forums more... They would surely see what "emotion" is actually like...

Well, at-least "Drama"... Which is driven by emotion.

Yes, the game has a strong "Documentary" feel, cold, scientific, fact-telling... and very little emotional drama, or humanity in it. Reminds me of school, which I hated... Which seems to reflect in my emotion of this game. (I liked learning, just not the way it was force-fed, and demanded photographic memory, and had only a little actual learning, demanding little actual intelligence.)

There is a little humor, which is about as human as I have seen, in the game. However, that humor usually pulls you back out of the game, as it is obviously there to remind you that a programmer is behind the thing that is speaking at you... Yes, speaking at you, not speaking to you, or with you...

Not really. Bethesda really cannot write truly compelling characters, and when they somehow manage to, it is usually less than a handful that actually manage to be compelling. They sure can write characters that people love to hate though. But even then, generally they would have been better off handing their writing off to a different entity entirely.