thanks to your link, .... well let's just say you owe me some syrup, that was worse than a subliminal popcorn message when at the cinema!

but yea I think you have a valid point... as with all games/ stories/ writing... games are especially pushed for time, because deadlines hamper creativity (keep people happy time-wise but displease them with quality/ quantity - expectation)

Needless to say it is inevitable with the current, "Coming in fall 2011" deadlines a couple of years before release. Christmas gets advertised as early as march, but the marketers that push those deadlines, make it harder for everyone to make it (which some sales are always off) - too many made - too few sold etc

summery - deadlines of ANY form hamper creativity

You can trust my words to be solid as I am a musician and have played sessions with many people - both with and WITHOUT managers... and the pushy managers always forced [censored] music - regardless of the skill/ talent of the musicians/ artists in the band

The quests are linear because they're trying to populate a big open world with hundreds of quests and dungeons. It's the same reason they use tilesets for designing their dungeons instead of modeling each dungeon as a unique mesh. It's the same reason they use level scaling and leveled lists instead of hand-picking each enemy. It's the same reason why they're experimenting with Radiant quests: to automate a very time-consuming task in the hopes that they can provide players with hundreds of hours of content. That's BGS's goal: to create a big sandbox filled with hundreds of hours of shallow content. Create any kind of character you want and go wherever you want whenever you want for as long as you want, but you'll have to do a lot of the story-telling yourself. That design objective means that quality takes a back-seat to quantity.

No one is arguing about the fact that hand-crafted stories with branching quests are better. Hand-crafted anything is pretty much always better. People complained about the bland wilderness in Oblivion because it was largely region-generated, so they hand-crafted the wilderness in Skyrim. It's obviously much better. In exchange, other areas of the game could not be given the attention they deserved. Maybe in the next game they'll put more effort into characterization and quests and use region generation to create the environments. In all likelihood, they'll just make the world a lot smaller so that they can focus more attention on the narrative.

You can't expect bigger and better. You can expect bigger or better.

I couldn't possibly agree more. I don't consider myself a fan of Fallout, but I have to admit that one Saturday when I was especially bored I booted up my brother's copy of NV and ended up spending the next two days playing through the main quest. I couldn't help myself, the pacing was so good that I felt completely compelled to complete the main quest and discover the mystery behind New Vegas, myself, and Mr. House.

I understand why they are linear and I'm ok with it. It can't be done otherwise. I don't agree with what you say that in order to build a hand crafted environment they had to make compromises elsewhere. It's not like the writers are also modellers, level designers etc. Plus they did make a LOT of quests. Why didn't they simply make less quests but longer and more interesting ones? There are 4 guilds in this game, 2 of which I played that had indifferent/too short quest lines (the other two I don't know but I'm not holding my breath). I don't understand why they chose to cut corners here so that they could make 5 more one-off fetch quests (and I'm not talking about the Radiant ones). The only reasoning I can think of is so that they get to say "This game has over 200 quests". Do you actually prefer those instead of in depth more vertical ones?

That is one thing I do like about Skyrim. The tribal gritty feel to it and it can make for some different role play also. I will play the game again. However I was suddenly finding myself getting bored and didn't want to burn myself out on it. So I am going to wait awhile. Just read that the ME team is taking a break as of today and will have 1 or 2 more DLCs for ME2 a few weeks ahead of ME3. So ATM I am finishing up my character to move her to the new game soon. I just hope Bioware doesn't drop the ball on ME3 like they did on DA2. Also found out they are going to use it with kinect options, I won't use it but I am hoping it won't affect how they are making the new game.

My Opinion: I'm just happy being able to play the game. Not really one to complain to be honest.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but are you giving this as an example why ME2 is better? To me that illustrates that even if everything else about ME2 is better (I don't think it is), it's still inferior to a classic RPG that lets me craft my own character. Shepard is forgettable but is forced upon me. Not a good combination.

On that metric, Skyrim is excellent. It just beats out Fallout New Vegas as my favorite RPG. If the writers are more hands-off because they want to protect this freedom, then I'm all for it, even with the cost to feeling more complete. There is a lot of excellent storytelling in Skyrim. It's just not packaged and force fed to you in long cutscenes. That is a compromise I am totally able to live with. In fact, long live its kind.

Morrowind and even modern Nintendo games get by just fine without full voice acting. I think requiring every character to be voiced is a mistake, especially in a sandbox game with extensive modding support.

I thought I was quite clear. Companion quests don't require any background information for the main character in Mass Effect 2. They could be ported to almost any sci-fi setting. They are still great writing. There's no reason why Skyrim couldn't have similarly great writing in its quests. If Skyrim was sci-fi, then you could pretty much copy over such a quest into Skyrim and it would work perfectly well. Heck, some of the companion quests could essentially be copied over anyhow with only minor changes. Heck, these quests offer more ability to express yourself and your vision for your character than Skyrim's quests do as well.

I picked the companion quests in particular as an example since they are optional, unconnected to the main story, and can be done at any time. They'd fit perfectly into a sandbox game and you only need do them if you feel that it is in character for you to do so (and you get numerous ways to express why that is so). It doesn't have anything to do with whether Shepherd is a forgettable character or not (he's not, for what it is worth).

The point, therefore, is that Skyrim being a sandbox has nothing to do with its writing being bad. There's no compromise that has to be made here. It has bad writing merely because Bethesda doesn't have writers that are all that good.

Edit: I get the impression you haven't played ME2.

I agree, Nintendo is doing just fine without full voice overs.

People also still laude over Final Fantasy 7, which has no voice overs that I'm aware of.

Yes, I have. Replayed a few times, in fact, and played all the DLC.

I'm not sure you have, though, if you say that companion quests weren't the main point of ME2. They were pretty much what the game consisted of. They were optional in the sense of, you didn't have to do them for every NPC follower to beat the game, but if you wanted your team to survive semi-intact then you needed to do them and in somewhat of a linear order. Also in order to get that level of presentation, there has to be a lot more cutscenes than Bethesda likes to put in. Quest design is about more than writing. Bethesda writers design a game with maximum flexibility and for a first-person rather than third-person experience. The more control they take away from the player, the less freedom you have to shape your own game the way you want it. Companions are minimal because they're not the focus, rather the PC's story arc.

I think they could have had a little more depth to the followers, but I would pick FNV as the model and not a Bioware game.

Also, ME's story is pretty bland. Serviceable as a space opera, but there's very little genius to it except maybe Mordin.

I didn't say they weren't a significant part of the game. I said their storylines weren't not connected to the main story. They were completely seperate stories. The ONLY effect doing them had on the game was survival of companions at the end of the game. That's it and that's an extremely tiny connection, irrelevent to what we're talking about here.

You certainly didn't have to do them in a linear order. Unless you mean that you couldn't do two of them at the exact same time in the same sense you can't explore two dungeons in Skyrim at the same time (e.g. you can only be in one place at a time).

Bethesda actually put a fair number of cutscenes in Skyrim if you count as a "cutscene" anything that stops the action so you can make story-based decisions. Being able to make more story-based decisions in the main quest lines of Skyrim wouldn't rob you of freedom, it would give you MORE freedom. As it is, they basically give you no freedom whatsoever. I mean, are you seriously saying the the main quest line and the Civil War quest line in Skyrim give you more freedom throughout those quests than companion quests in ME2? Because that's just ridiculous.


Wooosh, talk about narrow thinking. I'm not talking about having companion quests in Skyrim. I'm talking about the fact the companion quests in ME2 are better than the two main questlines in Skyrim. This is an anology. I pointed out the indepdence of those quests because in a similar way, the main quests of Skyrim are independent from everything else you do. So there's no reason the main quest lines of Skyrim (the Civil War and fighting Alduin) couldn't have a similar level of quality, giving you more choices and more freedom about what happens and how it happens.

If you prefer, I could point to similar things in Baldur's Gate 1/2 and the like. They certainly had less "cutscenes" and still provided a lot more narative power to the player.

Seriously, if there's one thing Skyrim fails at, it is providing power to the player to make decisions that affect the story. There's very little of that compared to the vast majority of modern RPGs or even western RPGs that are 10 or more years old.

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