I think it would make the game deeper if your actions had more weight on the world and people. The thing I like about Gothic 3 is that you cannot walk into any village and accomplish your goal because you have to gain trust. Also, Skyrim contradicts itself a bit by letting you to not talk to people who you've just been told by someone else not to do .

Well they do because if you convince your friend in the police station to let you in, he comes back later after being fired for it and that's a consequence of your actions. Also, if you rescue people, you get tips off them to make your mission easier.

You mean like how in Skyrim after helping the empire al lthe stormclock supporting guards get replaced becuase of it.

there is consequences to your actions.

Any game that lets me become an Archmage of a magic-based college without casting a single spell besides the entrance-gaining flame atronach (which I had to chug potions for, mind you) doesn't take being an RPG seriously.

Skyrim is an RPG, yes, but only in the mildest sense. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just disappointing. Still plenty to like.

????
I didn't know there was a contest on.......

But since there is.....

First case: To have said dragon attack said city correctly, there would have to be alternate geometry for destroyed buildings. Thus there would have to be a status buffer for the city cells. The longer the attack, the more damage. The more damage, the more flags are set. Dragonborn comes in, does his/her thing. The number and type of swap flags set determine how extreme the danger was. That sets the reaction level for the city to the saving. Voice acting would be viable only if you went with non name actors and large storage solutions; otherwise, an old fashioned text parser, which pulls from status weighted script sections. So you could have conversation ranging from 'Damn that was close!' to 'Hail the hero, you saved those orphans and my cash cow of a shop!'
But this is one kind of event. Killing the citizen... Were you caught? Were you seen? Were you ratted out? Each of those would have different consequences, and which one it was could be used to feed the conditions to start or modify another quest. And all you would need is a judicial register that was fed from the reputation flags of the murder and the event status flags of the dragon attack. If the event status was high enough, you were pardoned. This wouldn't affect your reputation with the family, or close friends. It just means you are too much the hero to execute. See the added complexity that would provide? You might have earned that statue (assuming they -did- that), but if things happen before it goes up, then it doesn't. After, well, set another flag and you find it defaced (a simple texture change).

And this holds for the other examples. Looking at it, this seems like it would be hideously complicated. But the trick is to establish rules and monitor events, and set behavioral rules to govern this. After that, it comes down to addition, and passing the results on to set flags, then playing back the actions and events that those set flags enable.

And yes, if you join the DB and get found out, you =should= be tossed from the Companions......maybe even outed as a werewolf by them to try and drive you out for good. With story pathways to rejoin. Or destroy them for the brotherhood. Or vice versa. Or become a spy. How difficult this is to structure depends on how well you create the rule parser, the lookup tables, the flag registers, and the text or speech parser. Others have done it. The core elements of this was in Daggerfall, so I know they can do it, and things have advanced enough that it should work a lot better than it did.

It becomes non-linear and therefore an absolute pain in the butt to do QA for, let alone get basically stable so that your allies don't murder the other half of the town. There are already innumberable bugs just trying to do things relatively straight.

What's the consequence on you after that? I've just finished that quest and there is not consequence to me as far as I can tell. Stormcloaks still attack you if you get near their left over camps and I don't see how it changes things. I like to do it the other way around and see what effect it has but my guess is that it's the same.

Dale B:

I won't quote or we'll end up using a hundred thousand vertical pixels.

First Case: We're now into the realm of destructible environments, something the engine doesn't support. Dragons attack at random. The engine can't distinguish between a dragon attacking the city and a mudcrab attacking a local townsman, it just classes both cases as combat. It also has no way of measuring how long combat with a specific thing lasts without actually scripting specifically for that event.

You've just added literally about three hundred new lines of voiced dialogue. In addition to hundreds of new script lines. The engine doesn't work in tracking event handlers, you'd need hundreds of different scripts constantly running in the background just for each individual scenario. And one developer (or many) can't possibly make a different action for every possible combination of events.

Lastly, again, hundreds more lines of voiced dialogue, hundreds of different quest stages. The more quests you have running simultaneously, the more likely you are to have game breaking conflicts. Dialogue and quests are horribly complex and time consuming to make in Bethesda's games. Daggerfall was pretty much completely randomly generated, excluding the main quests and locations. It's so much easier to do something you mentioned when all you have to worry about are sprites, written text and non-existent AI.

I am dragonborn and save whiterun from a dragon

Reaction: the jarl recognizes my efforts, names me thane, allows me to buy property in the town (when beforehand outsiders weren't allowed in town) and I am given a housecarl.

The game acknowledges what I just did.

I help out members of the Mages Guild with their tasks.

Reaction: they become my followers. Game acknowledges what I did.

I kill a dragon outside of town.

Reaction: civilians gather around and comment on the dead dragon and the fact that I just absorbed its soul.

The game is acknowledging my deeds.

I get the Mace of Molag Bal.

Reaction: people tell me to get that accursed mace away from them.

The game acknowledged my character.

I join the mages guild and people comment on it.

The game acknowledges what I've done.

I steal from someone, and they put a hit out on me.

The game acknowledges what I did.

I kill paarthurnax and the greybeards dont deal with me anymore, or I keep him alive and the blades no longer aid me.

Game just reacted to my choice.

This game does just fine in reacting to the players choices.

that is how morrowinds mages guild was like yet everyoen raves about how great it was.

You're mentioning just a few incidents in important questlines. On the whole, the game does a poor job of recognizing your character's actions. You'd think that after saving the world from Alduin, at least SOMEONE other than the guards would recognize your actions? Nope. In Morrowind, EVERY NPC would practically kiss the ground you walked on after saving them. Yes, I know that was easier to do because it was the same block of text repeated for each one, but that's irrelevant. They could have done much more than they did, and the fact that you continue to defend this baffles me.

Also, Morrowind's Mages Guild was great because it was REALISTIC. You couldn't just waltz in there, do four quests, and become the Archmage without using any spells. You had to level the relevant skills in order to advance in the guild, which actually made sense, and the quests didn't go for the overly dramatic, poorly written stuff we get now. It was realistic. There isn't always a major conflict going on, and sometimes you have to accept that. Morrowind's guilds made you do realistic (if slightly boring) quests, but ultimately the simpler quests were more satisfying because they were well-written, and you couldn't just complete the guild questline in an hour.

Not really, that's just using one line of unvoiced, repeated dialogue. I fail to see how that's a good thing. Oblivion did similar because everyone had the same bloody voice from each race.

Recording a line for each NPC voice type, matching it to each NPC, for every quest outcome (even just the important ones) is just a ridiculous amount of work. Why do you think the guards all sound the same?

Thank you guys for all of the replies. While I don't think it will be the epitome of an RPG to him, I think my son will enjoy it at least moderately. I just ordered the PC version from Amazon for him. I hope he likes it.

In addition, I decided I would give it a try myself and ordered a copy for our living room PS3. I haven't played video games since Mario on the Nintendo, but I might as well start up gaming again. Hopefully I still remember how to play video games.

Do you know the soldiers who killed Osama bin laden? Would you recognize them if they walked down the street?

Why would common citizens recognize someone when they weren't there when the deed was accomplished (it happens in sovengarde, not even in the realm of nirn) and there's no CNN or internet to report the story.

So how exactly would belathor in whiterun know it was you?

WelshGuy: So if voice acting is reducing the quality of their game in how repititive it is, why not just remove it? If anything, reading text dialogue gave me more immersion than Skyrim's repetitive, poorly done voicework. But I guess they have money to make, and no one wants to read these days... *sigh*

Nell2Thalzzay: If a courier can instantly appear in front of me when someone dies that I know, I think that he can do the same thing to a couple of NPCs. Yeah, word gets around.

I'd assume, they would put the fact your dragonborn and Auldin is gone together, and come to a realzation that you killed Auldin.

ChubbyHubby - Don't worry, it will hold your hand through out the whole ride.....movie....I mean game.

-No one saw you kill Alduin, NO ONE. frankly I was peeved even the guards knew becuase it makes literally ZERO sense anyone would know.
-No one should know your part of the DB becuase ou are an assassin and everyone who saw you is dead
-No one should know your the leader of the Thieves Guild but the Theives Guild memebers becuase no one but them would know
-The lack of people commenting on how you are the Arch-Mage is understandable since most of the populace hates then and doesnt bother keeping up with thier affairs.
-No one should comment on your status in the Companions becuase you aren't thier leader ou are just a respected memebr.

Franky how you can keep defending "SKYRIM SHOULD HAVE MORE RANDOM NPC DIALOG FROM WHAT YOU DID" when NO ONE saw you do 99% of it baffels me.




Also Morrowind guild system blew becuase you could just pay trainers to get through it, I only once cast ONE spell for the Morrowind mages guild and got trainers for the rest. It wasnt realsitic. Also the smaller quest were not well written they were almost always "go here and kill X becuase he/it is harssing people".

Not to be disrespectful but I don't think you have the experience or knowledge to say that. People saying such things without experience of such things just have an opinion about how it works, not how it actually works. Believe it or not, developers have a much easier time now days since the tools are much better than 10 years ago and so is the API, this is even more true for consoles. The PC platform is in a much better state than it was 10 years ago, since you had more GPU vendors to think of and more graphics API's.

Okay, but don't you think Farengar Secret-Fire, who is a mage, could AT LEAST realize that I'm the arch-mage of the college? I walk in the arch-mage's robes, lightning bolts in my hand ... "You know if you've got the aptitude, you should thinking of joining the Mages College eyn Wynterhuld."

I killed him right there.

Kewl, nice to hear you will finally get a chance to use the PS3 you have set up in your living room. You may wish to wait till the next patch comes out before you create your character, which should address some lag issues with PS3. It should be out before the end of January.

Yeah, because you had the CHOICE of using trainers to get to the skill requirement, now you can be a backwards Nord who think spells are for elves and become the archmage.Also Dragonborn + disappearance of Auldin = people ought to know.

You still have the thu'um which is a form of magic, a rare form of magic, and being a master at that should count for some serious respect.

Since you were born with that ability and didn't *really* have to learn it like the other arcane arts, it doesn't really count for anything.

You are correct, however its a diffrent form of magic. Shouts require no magika, only cool downs and any one who is willing to take the tme to learn it can, while only certain people are able to use magic.

You do have to learn it by killing dragons and taking thier knowlage.

also I could reverse that and say becuase you got some random jackoff trainer to train you it shouldnt count becuaseyou didnt work for it yourself.




Everyone can use magic if they learn how.