I think skyrim is a great game but it has a terrible story that is 1D and poor characters wich hold skyrim back a little in my opinion.

The problem with this thread is that the OP raised a point about linearity, and then used an example that wasn't to do with linear quests. So let's get this straight:

The problem of linearity: not many choices, if any, over how to finish quests (e.g. outcomes, methods, etc.)

The problem of scripting: an event happens when you walk past it whether you like it or not.

Different issues, different discusssions.

And now, people seem to have got on to how bad Skyrim's story is, which is a different discussion altogether.

Yeah, I'm being repetitive, but everyone else is, so why not...... no, I still don't see the fact that wandering past an event will stick a note about a possible quest in your journal as being "railroaded". But, then, I don't feel any coercion to complete every quest in my journal.


And this one I never expected, having played previous Beth games.


Just like Morrowind and Oblivion. Where picking a class did 100% nothing to restrict you from maxing out everything, with no training & no penalties (I won't say "no work" or "no effort", since that's not true of any of the games, including Skyrim).

Your talking rubbish to be honest. You can play any type of character as soon as you get out of helgen, I have run through the first mine with an archer, assassin, battlemage, mage, warrior, 2h warrior etc etc, only things like necromancers you can't as you haven't have chance to get yourself the spells yet but you can in Riverwood. 10 hours is nonsense.
I also think you will find in EVERY single other game after you have done an event you will know what happens the next time you see that event, Bethesda cannot erase your memory and you must know this, what do you expect them to do to solve this? It's all fine making a complaint but suggest a fix if you are going to. I would really like to hear how you would solve the problem, otherwise don't complain.

Also btw, this game is only meant to be played through once in terms of dialog, it doesn't matter how much dialog they put in the game because you will read it all the first time and remember it the 2nd playthrough. If alvor has 100 things to say in riverwood when you get there are you really going to think to yourself I'll save it for next playthrough? No, your just going to read it all when you meet him incase something is important.

Do you see how the problem is with you demanding ridiculous and impossible to implement features into the game rather than the game having lack of content and choice.

It is not what I imagine, it is what I see. You are only not seeing it or maybe you are leaving out the "big picture".

Skyrim is not linear at all. I get constantly interrupted by lots of little things. I plan to do one thing and end up doing another quite often. I run through town and have to smile over what a guard said again, a butterfly lands on the head of a Talos statue, I look at it for a while and then try to catch it, I see two giants beat up a bandit and make a detour, not to mention dragons or my own little mistakes, ... There is no feel of linearity to me.

Of course the quests are mostly linear and it is often just "Yes, continue now" or "No, continue later", but it is up to me if I want to follow it and thereby make it linear or if I choose to do something else. When I cannot think of something else to do but to follow one single quest line to its end then I stop playing. It is when I say that I played enough for today. The next time I start Skyrim it becomes an open world again, a new day with new things to do.

And by the way, it is not as if no quest line had no consequence for another. Depending on how far you get in one quest line can it have consequences on your success with another or just the guards may say something new. Factions may change their relationship depending on what you did. For example, worship a daedra and no Vigilant of Stendarr will help you or offer a service to you. What you may be looking for is in the game and may only need a few more tweaks and twists.

The way people imagine a non-linear quest design should be does often not include how limited it really becomes. Linear quests force you to find something else to do. Discussing it on the forum is one of the many things one can do. Non-linear quests will svck you in and tie you to their choices where in the end you will have made 100 decisions, but still only see 3 different outcomes. If all your 100 decisions are Yes or No then in theory will it have 2^100 possible outcomes. This might sound awesome if printed on the package of a game, but it will not say anything on how different these outcomes actually are. The lack of a noticeable difference in the outcomes is the reason why many non-linear quest designs in their end only offer you 2 or 3 different outcomes and often with only 1 big boss fight.

I do like Skyrim better and I have no problem with its quest design. To me it s a "work in progress", like watching construction works on a road, a house getting a new paint job or a building being torn down. That is actually something that I would like to see in the game itself - NPC maintaining their houses ... and in fact I remember a quest line where a place changed after some NPCs moved in, or where houses are being destroyed!

My advise to you is, take a step back and make a break when the game starts feeling linear.

Just wanted to add some points to the general discussion. First, while I get the general gist of the complaint about linearity, I have to ask - just how much have you played this game? Did your first character build go on to do every single quest in the game? Did you wander or randomly explore? Are you one of the players who will do anything to create the most powerful character they can through grinding or other means (ie the 100% in Alchemy, Smithing, Enchanting etc etc that lets you create virtually impregnable armor and stupidly powerful weapons)? The way in which you approach Skyrim will define your experience of the game. Myself, I can't see the point in creating an unstoppable killing machine capable of one-shotting a dragon or mammoth. Where is the challenge in the game after that? May as well set difficulty to novice at the start and be done with it rather than setting the game to master difficulty and then circumventing that difficulty through grinding...

Got slightly off-topic there, but anyhow...my point is that while replayability of a game is important, if you are re-playing Skyrim with different character builds, surely you flat-out love the game? Doesn't it take hundreds of hours to complete all of the questlines (that is an actual question, only about 50 hours in on my first playthrough - kids and a job...) with one character? By complaining that the quests are linear in terms of replayability, all you are really doing is [censored]ing that you didn't get enough bang for your buck the first time around. While branching questlines based around your actions sounds great, what you are really doing is asking for one of two things. Either you want the developer to put in far more time, effort and money into creating an exponentially larger number of scripted quests (lets say 10 different endings per quest depending on your decisions at different moments - like a 500,000 page choose-your-own-adventure book) OR you want randomly generated quests that will very quickly seem tired because they are generated by a finite set of parameters (ie treasure hunt, cave, trolls and bandits; or manhunt, forest, vampires; or guard 'x' from horde of 'y' enemies). Option 1 means we wouldn't have seen Skyrim for another two years. Option 2 would have us playing a first-person version of Diablo...

What do people think?

How is the open world linear? One dimension, sure. But linear? Come on I just started my second character and doing things totally different from the first time around.

It would be nice if the world/characters reacted more to the things you do to add some depth. But the game is not any more/less linear than prior TES games.

No they aren't linear, by your defintion all video games are linear.

I'm on my 4. sneaky character now, been perfecting my build over and over... Usually I get to like level 40-50 and then finds somethign I want different. This time it is a bunch of mods I downloaded that I want to play with from start, but this means I have to do the same quests, the same areas dungeouns etc. However I don't see this as a issue, this round I'm going to roleplay the character a bit more then before, explore more and not use fast travel. Sleep once a day or maximum go 2 days without a long sleep. My character has the build ready, I know what perks I want, I know what faction etc. Still I'm looking forward to it. I have also started thinking about a new character that should be either a Barbarian that uses two handed weapons and light armor combined with sneak and archery, or maybe a heavy armour person either a Paladin type build or maybe a warriormage. This means again I have to go through the same quests talk to the same people, but the beuty which for me makes this game not anything close to linear is that I can choose when to do it. I'm not being led in a specific direction, once I leave helgen I can do what I want too. I can let mainquest be main quest and just wander the lands and let my mind be distracted by whatever comes around.

And that is something few other games manages to give me. Looking at Dragon Age series, in origin you are led to believe you have a big world as quests are spread around, and it works, in Dragon Age 2 you really get the taste of what a linear RPG is. In Divinity 2 I also realised rather quickly that it was a linear RPG, but it worked there as story was nice and you was in a gentle way pushed forward without being forced to go forward. Those are games I played once and enjoyed, well except Dragon age 2 which was far from as good as it could have been, but to start them again for a new playthrough isn't really that tempting. TES games gives me the freedom to play them for hundred's of hours where normal RPG's last 40-90 max, and it is becayse TES games aren't linear, they are not forcing you to do this or that. you do it when you feel like, simple as that.

Gotta throw in on this one. I feel a lot of what the OP is talking about is down to player choice. I'll give two examples based on characters I have played so far.

My first character I wanted to be a mage hero. He took a full magic only path. From the get go I never touched swords, wore any armor, or did anything that didn't seem to fit the mage mold. He was also a good guy and his goal was to help others as much as possible. He got caught up in the Nord fight for freedom after his own people put his head on the chopping block without even so much as a trial even though he was guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I started off in the usual place and ended up in Whiterun and from there I went out randomly exploring the land, doing quests here and there as I discovered towns along the way. But mostly I was just exploring trying to find new places and clear out bad guys that were in them. I stayed relatively weak because I never put any points into health so I could be killed easily throughout the game. I had a companion to take for me for a while but dumped them due to friendly fire damage holding me back. But I never did any of the Thieve's guild or Dark Brotherhood or any other quest that involved doing something bad to someone to further my own powers. I destroyed those evil doers whenever the game allowed. Unfortunately some essentials could not be killed. I do wish that was different. But I did hear out most people in towns and followed up on their requests for help whenever it fit my characters desires to do good. I helped finish the civil war and did the main quest and explored a great deal of the land logging in near to 300 hours in the process with my character in the mid 50's.

My second character is a Thief/Assassin. He is not at all like my mage. He never used any magic and started out with only 1h swords, daggers, and bows, which is all he uses now. He wears only light armor, upgraded, but light to stay quiet while still having some protection for those unforseen circumstances. He cares for noone except where they can help further his ambitions and pad his pockets with more money. He did stop off briefly in Riverwood to do a bit of early stealing and pickpocketing and he did do the claw mission just to get some early loot and practice some skills in the process but from there he headed to Riften and started right into the Thieve's Guild and some other unscrupulous missions there. He made acquaintances and did deals with people my mage ignored. I was in the same town but somehow everything felt totally different. My mage did an entirely different set of quests in Riften. I was surprised by how unique the experience felt. The Thieve's guild took me quite a while and I was around level 48 when I finished it and over 100 hours logged. I then started the Dark Brotherhood. I've done some exploring along the way but mostly as an opportunity to pick up more wealth instead of some drive to root out evil from the world. My character has a completely different mindset and other than starting the dragon quest to get a couple of the shouts he could care less about finding out what's really going on there. He also doesn't care about the fighting that's going on between the Empire and the Nords. He prefers to sit back and watch the idiots kill each other and then loot their corpses for free cash. He sneaks and kills without being seen where my mage was all flash and noise. He revels in the kill where my mage only did it out of the desire to benefit others.

I've never felt like the quests are thrown in my face or that I have to do anything that I don't want to do. If I miss a quest along the way I miss it, so what. That's how life plays out. An opportunity missed is just that. Maybe my next character will catch it. Maybe not. All I know is that the way I played these two characters created totally different experiences for me. Yes I have visited some of the same locations. Yes I have repeated a handful of quests. So what? It's the same game just with another guy. I don't expect it to be 100% turned upside down different. Bethesda's games have never played that way and I didn't go into this one expecting it to. Quest conversations trigger and if I want to listen I do, if I don't I keep on walking. It feels more real because people are talking without me having to always go up and initiate things. I like that much better than the way it used to be and there are still people that don't give quests unless you talk to them so if I want something to do I go and talk to people until I find someone with a job and if it fits my character I take it.

It's not that hard to have a unique experience if you play your character according to what you laid down for them from the beginning. I really don't understand what difference it really makes if you pick numbers on a chart. It's all in your head anyway. You should pick what you want to be from the start and stick to it. If you end up with the same basic character every time that's your fault now, not the games. You have no will power to stick to your guns and play the character the way you originally planned to. Also nothing says you have to do every single quest on each play through. In fact it would not make any sense to do so. Again take quests according to your character's personality and desires. To me that's what role playing is all about in it's purest form anyway. It's all about your own imagination and how you see your character in your mind. I'm beginning to think a lot of you who swear to be hard core role players have become so accustomed to the games calling all the shots for you that you have no idea how to do it for yourselves any more if you even did to begin with.

Skyrim isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it's a damn good game none the less. I've enjoyed both playthroughs immensely and will be doing a 3rd with a warrior type character. My feeling is that if the world doesn't feel unique to you on each playthrough then you are doing something wrong in how you role play. I know there's isn't enough recognition for what we do in the game world and that is one area I feel they could drastically improve on but even so it is still possible to play different characters and get a unique experience while playing. My two characters have felt nothing alike and many of the quests they did were totally different. In fact the guards and other people now say things to my Thief/Assassin that I never heard on my mage. I can agree with some of what you said but not all of it since my experience has been very different.

I have to point out that your first character has 3 times the play amount that you second one does is there a reason for that?

I have made somewhere around 18 or 20 characters now imagine if the rate at which your play throughs diminished happened to mine you might start to see where I'm coming from.
I'm glad your happy with how this game has been for you.... but for me I can see through it like grandmas underpants.

To me everything feels the same.

I have to agree, that never happened to me in Fallout 3 or Oblivion (haven't played their earlier games). Well, in Fallout 3...
As for character creation, i feel that perk system does make characters more unique, in the long run. As has been said, in Oblivion one character could be a master of everything. In Skyrim one cannot due to the limited perks you can gain.

As for the scripted sequences the OP talks about, there are more of them than in their previous games, but they are nothing new. It seems Beth wanted to make finding quests easier without having to resort to the giant glowing ! above people's heads that Bioware uses in Dragon Age

???
Funny.....
I seem to recall a -lot- of howling and angsting when people maxed out that first attribute in Daggerfall.....and locked themselves out of leveling up any farther. Someone managed to do it around level 14 IIRC. Didn't matter how much he ground or metagamed; that character was stuck at level 14, with all the penalties that imposed. So while it may have been possible to continue, it wasn't going to be easy. So while technically yes, you -could- max all attributes to 100, after you locked your level the effect of that 100 was hardly significant, as the level modifier didn't go into effect.

Illuminosopher - are you effing serious? You are on your 18th character and are complaining about linearity? WTF do you expect? Tell me which game you have played that gives you a fresh experience on the 18th playthrough - I'm so in - but it had better not be a game that is only about random events that don't tie in closely with a well thought out meta-narrative. You just went, in my opinion, from someone with a potentially justifiable complaint to a troll that expects the miraculous from developers. What would you do? How would you 'fix' the 'problems' you highlight? You have been given an irrefutable response to your gripes, and all you can say is 'well, try doing what you've done another 15 times and tell me you're not over it'. ANYONE would be over it if all they have done since Nov 11th is play the same game over and over again - fresh air: try it.

The same goes for Morrowind or Oblivion, if you ignore or don't pay attention to the attribute-mechanics you will never end up with maxed out attributes, but unless you approach leveling like a moron, you will. Same in Daggerfall, if you pay some attention to the mechanics, you will never be stupid enough to lock your progression like that.

Sorry that I assume that people approach character development with some intelligence...

And the reason it feels the same has nothing to do with 18-20 characters?

every other effing elderscroll game go pick them up they are great.

Please read the original post and you will see that I never had this problem with the other elderscroll games.

Crazy thought here but have you considered it can be blamed on you being older today then when you played those games?

Perception of things does change over the years, when I was young I wanted a fast and sporty car. Today I drive a station wagon because it is practical. Same goes with gaming, the games I loved to bits back then if I try to replay them isn't as good as I remember them, and I have tried this... Part of it is nostalgia, part of it is that the games over the years has changed. Max Payne was a awesome fps game when I played it at first, but playing it today not so much. The bullettime is no longer unique and once you know that the game is quite generic. Serious Sam was a awesome FPS series where you just shot stuff at endless of enemies, playing it today it gets old really fast. If I want fast paced FPS action today Bulletstorm is the best there is, just as Serious Sam was once. And the reason I consider Bulletstorm a better fps then Serious Sam boils down to Bulletstorm added new stuff that makes it new and fresh.

I don't see Max Payne or Serious Sam as bad games, far from it I have great memories from those games, but when I take of my glasses of nostalgia and compare them with my current standards they are not that good games either. Aging does something with how you view things, as you grow older you also get more of a clear picture of what you want from a game, or a girlfriend or a car. No one stays the same all their life with regard to what game they want, I still have a wishlist combined from previous games, but none of the games I have the wishes from were perfect either. I simply have taken bits and bobs from each of them and hope one day a game that get's close to it arrives. There are things from Morrowind and Oblivion I would have liked to be implemented in Skyrim, but one thing I know for sure that if I tried replaying them today I would be a bit dissipointed as Skyrim does some things so much better then both those games and something is worse.

Making a new character and playing it Is only as linear as I allow it to become myself. Just as making characters in Oblivion or morrowind would be linear since you do the same thing. The only difference is that you have attributes and a class attached to your character and I don't need any of those to define my character or how he is played. After my current character I will probably take a break, allowing more mods to come and later this year start a new playthrough, with new mods, new ideas on character concept etc. TES games are one of the few series that allow me to play like this, most other RPG's I tend to play once, maybe twice then be done with forever because they are simply too linear to allow for making new characters over and over.

I could see how you would come to this conclusion however I have been playing morrowind again recently and I am enjoying it.

So then the question is what exactly is it that makes playing Morrowind time after time doesn't feel the same?

Because you don't start with a blank slate and your character is defined at creation allowing it to grow, progression is more evident and longer, and choices matter.

When I restart another character, it feels like everything all over again - but I am spamming crappy spells instead of killing everything in a few hits.

oh no it feels the same but it took years for it to reach that level of sameness, also it doesn't hurt that there are more options in morrowind then skyrim.