I'd rather Bethesda got rid of the main quest completely. Of course, if the player always needs to be a huge hero demi-god, then all minor quests will seem irrelevant. The main problem here is: It'd be no problem having multiple endings, in theory, but after all of them, the player is the hero of Skyrim (or bane of Skyrim or whatever), and of course it breaks immersion that people will greet him as such, but then give him FedEx quests (great term^^). Morrowind had that problem: You were the Nerevarine, you had slain a mad god and changed the province! People would love you for it and greet you with "wow, is that really you, the Nereveraine, who saved us all? Thank you so much!" - but then proceed to ask you to fetch them a book or a potion or a couple of Guar skins because they're too lazy to do it themselves.
If the player would make decisions that only have local impact and don't change the entire world, you could have lots of decisions, lots of different outcomes for all sorts of quests, and each playthrough would be very different, each player character unique - but you'd not suddenly feel as if people would not treat you appropriately. You ARE NOT a hero with the power of a hundred men, you are simply an adventurer, so people WON'T be expected to hail you and praise you and become your adoring fans (^^). The world would make perfect sense even though each quest could have a thousand different outcomes. Save the life of the witch or let her burn - it will only impact the life of that person and the ones who wanted her dead. The next village won't know nor mind nor care. Become the arch mage of the mages guild and the guild members will respect you as such, but to the rest of the world, you're still just a silly wizard - among those with higher education you could, as a new dialoge option, pull the "but I'm the mages guild's guild master, I DEMAND AN AUDIENCE!"-card every now and then without massive programming requirements - and from those people who'd care about you being the arch mage, you'd never get simple fetch quests anyway.
I long to see the role playing game where the focus is the personal story of the player character, and not a pre-planned epic written by the developers.
I know I bring it up a lot, but it's just such a great example: Mount & Blade. That game HAS NO STORY. Yet, it constantly comes up with interesting situations and forces you to make decisions and allow for excellent role playing!
A typical quest could be: Follow the marshalls army with your own men. That's it. You follow him. He starts to besiege a town. You wait there with him until he's ready to start the assault. Suddenly, your men complain about a lack of food - not because anyone scripted that, anyone wrote that story; it's plain and simple: Your food inventory is empty. Now you have a new quest that started without anyone ever having thought of it: You need to get something to eat before your men start to desert! But now you have to make a choice and live with the consequences:
You could abandon the siege and move back to your home lands as soon as possible, go to your favorite city and buy loads of food for your men. Yay, problem solved, but you missed the siege and the marshall won't be happy that you left him there to be outnumbered by the foe, and will later let you know that he's not pleased with your behaviour and won't trust you as much if you should ever need his help.
Or you could abandon the siege only for a short while and raid a local village to steal their food supplies. A sensible choice for most, but if I roleplay a 'nice' character, he might not want to burn villages. And even if I don't care; once we have captured the besieged town, the town might be ours, but the villages who keep the town supplied with food will now hate us because we looted their homes. And the town will be in poverty and overall we now have to deal with a looted village whose surviving inhabitants hate us.
Or we could wait and hope that not too many of our men will desert before the actual siege begins. This comes at the risk of losing troop morale and later losing the battle because many of our men decided to leg it.
Or we could disguise ourselves and sneak into the very town we are besieging, trying to smuggle some food out of there. This means we won't miss the siege, nor do we risk the lives of our men - but if we get caught, we might end up in the towns prison!
THAT's choice and consequence and an interesting story, and noone had to write it! THAT's what 'radiant story' should be like! And: I'm not forced into the role of an hero at any point. In fact, I can role-play! If I want to be a heroic knight in shining armour, I'll obviously not loot the village but rather order my men to discipline and attack the town despite the low morale. Or if I'm more of the sneaky guy, I'll try to smuggle the goods out of the town. Or if I'm the tactician to whom lives are only a statistic, I'll go and loot the nearest village to maximize my combat effectiveness. Or hell, perhaps I'm even a pacifist and decline to besiege a town in the first place and rather go elsewhere to trade or learn a few poems and court a lady to increase my influence!
I would much prefer this to a game that has three alternative "endings" for a main quest after which the game just ends.
» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:02 am 
