There should be no essential NPCS : V - Skyrim

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 1:15 pm

i think most people agree that there should be no essential npcs..i loved how it was in morrowind, it was so great and made you really think about who you killed..i don't see why they don't do it like that again. it might have something to do with radiant ai, i mean people can get killed easily because they make their own decisions...

I like killing everything. I don't like breaking my game because I want to kill annoying NPCs. There is no way of telling whether or not an NPC will be essential or provide quests or advance your storyline later. The best you can hope for is to have Essential flags in the game and when they are no longer essential, they drop their flag and you can kill them. Cicero is a good example. After you complete the wagon & DB line, you should be able to kill or sacrifice him to Boethiah.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:36 am

I'm relatively new to the whole Elder Scrolls thing, with Skyrim being my first game. I say this to apologise for not being great with remembering names and stuff.

I was on a quest where you have to make a sacrifice, preferably a "non-essential" follower. I wasn't sure who is essential and who isn't. I had J'zargo following me at the time and thought oh well, and gave him up. Reading this thread, I am guessing that because I was able to kill him he wasn't "essential" to another quest??? I pray he isn't, at level 43 I'm too far in to start again now!

I don't know if it is a bug or not, but I can't kill Louis Letrush? I did a quest with him involved and gained ownership of Frost. Before Frost died in an unfortunate accident (I am a bit wreckless with fire spells, lol) I noticed Letrush appeared next to Frost at the stables. I picked a fight with him several times and got his life bar to the last bit of red but he would never die.

Sorry if the above is a little "off topic". As far as the thread goes, I fall into the camp of wanting a role playing game to be just that. If you kill the wrong person or animal, tough, you pay the price. Obviously it can be painful at times if you miss out on the bounty from a quest but I like to play the game with a mind of "doing the right thing", albeit in a fantasy environment. I try to live my character with some of the traits I have personally and only enter fights when attacked. I may be missing out on something having lost Frost and J'zargo but I will have to live with the consequences of the decision I made.

Essential means the NPC is unkillable, so yes, because you were able to kill J'Zargo means hes not essential.
Most if not all followers have you perform a quest before they will follow you and so would would have done his and as such you will not miss out on any content.

Essential means that the NPC is essential to the game and therefore cannot be killed. They just crouch, but do not die, unlike for instance a follower who is crouching and gets hit by stray damage will die. Letrush is indeed a good example, its not a bug. He is classed as essential by the game and therefore cannot be killed.

There are some quests involved with NPC's that can die, and if they do so before the quest you will miss out on it.
But all of these quests are miscellanious so you will not miss out on any main quest content, or any other 'important stuff'.

Some NPC's are essential until a specific point in a quest or until the story of a quest requires them to die.
This is one of the reasons for essential NPC's. If a person is supposed to be killed at the end of a quest, but got eaten by a dragon some time before, that could mess things up a bit.

I would really like to see NPC's that are only killable by express actions of the player, and none that are just immortal, but I dont know if its technically possible.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 11:41 pm

Edit:

The option to kill children, and actively choosing to do so, reflects on the player as opposed to the company don't you think?

Yes but we have idiots in the world that will sue for almost anything. This is something I do expect someone suing against.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:16 am

Ok, I dont have a problem with truly essential NPC's (ie main quest essential) But Skyrim has made loads of unessential NPC's essential just for the sake of it. Take Maiq the liar for example, and the camp commanders. Whats worse is when essential NPC's start attacking you.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:31 am

Skyrim needs to adopt a fallout system where everyone is killable...if you kill them you fail the quests they offer. Simple as that

the only thing that is annoying is i wouldnt want quest givers to die when a dragon attacks a town. quest givers should be kill able but then should be flagged as essential until the attcking dragon is killed. as for essential charaters at legion/stormcloak camps they should be killable as soon as you've joined a side

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:35 am

This person is a hero. Agreed fully.

I wouldn't go that far, but thanks!

I'm new to the Elder Scrolls but have been playing RPGs for nearly 30 years, back in the days of books, dice and your mates telling you the outcome of your actions. Although the theory is you can do whatever you like, if you want to really enter the spirit of the game and get the most from it then you have to play using a certain degree of realism otherwise you might as well be playing Call of Duty.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 8:32 pm

Thanks for the reply Merari, really useful info.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 2:24 pm

I'm all for none essential NPC's - They (That is to say, Essential NPC's) make sense from a game-play point of view, however from a developer who claims they want to make a world where you can 'Be anyone and do anything'', it seems a bit strange. Almost a bit lazy too, if i may say so. The unkillable generals, for example; just makes me feel like they were forgotten about. It's hard to win a civil war when the generals are immortal. ^_^

But, of course, if everyone was killable then problems may occur - the way Morrowind pulled it off was to have the NPC never move from a certain area. No danger, no dead NPCs. Skyrim, of course, has dragons and NPCs move around freely, so something like only giving the player the ability to kill named NPCs would be a good idea. This means that Mr. Quest giver doesn't die from a dragon attack, bandits and guards do, and i can still run around and murder everyone. Its a win-win situation!

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 4:14 pm

Maybe a happy medium would be if an NPC would come back if you start a quest requiring them.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 3:22 pm

Maybe they could be semi-essentail, meaning a random dragon or bandit couldn't kill them, but you could

Personally though, this doesn't concern me, I tend to not kill innocent people unless it is for a quest/achivement. Even Nazeem deserves to live, (unless the dark brotherhood asks me to)

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 1:10 pm

i don't see why they don't do it like that again.

I'll tell you why: Radiant AI. The instant Radiant AI was introduced to the Elder Scrolls series so were essential NPCs. As Silverfox says, non-essentialNPCs worked in Morrowind because the world was static. No one went anywhere, no one did anything. They stood in one spot for all eternity, waiting for the player to walk up and speak to them.

To put it in its simplest terms: NPCs are not essential because the player might kill them; NPCs are essential because the game might kill them.

You might be willing to suffer the conssequences of a Skyrim full of killable NPCs but I can guarantee that there would massive outpourings of anger and outrage from many players if the game killed off important NPCs before they were even able to interact with them.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:57 am

Bioware initially made it possible to kill off companions for Star Wars: The Old Republic. But the huge outcry from beta players convinced them to change it.

So although making every npc kill-able may be realistic, it may have the consequence of angering many people who have invested a lot of time in the game, only to ruin it because they didn't know that npc was an important quest giver. The anger is closely associated with people who have invested a lot of time in the game, only to have a bug prevent you from completing a quest.

So it's probably for the best that important npcs are not kill-able.

So blinking true.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:38 pm

Skyrim needs to adopt a fallout system where everyone is killable...if you kill them you fail the quests they offer. Simple as that

I agree for the most part, at least with most townsfolk. I'm not sure if I'd like the idea of a very important Faction questgiver being killed by a wolf on a character I've invested 200+ hours in. I'm not on PC so I don't have the luxury of just adding the NPC back into the game.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 1:25 pm

Im my opinion they should get down on one knee.

The game would pause a message will appear saying so and so is related to this quest, are you sure you want to kill him

you say yes and finish him off

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 5:25 pm

Im my opinion they should get down on one knee.

The game would pause a message will appear saying so and so is related to this quest, are you sure you want to kill him

you say yes and finish him off

Yea but everytime I wanna kill somebody I don't want a message to pop up..maybe have only essential Npcs go to their knees when your about to kill them so you know there essential then you can finish em off with a finishing move of some sorts

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:27 am

It's all very nice when it is only the character who can kill them off...but currently I have at least a couple of shops in my main game where I can't trade because the shopkeepers are dead due to dragons.

Todd Howard said in pre-release interviews that if a shopkeeper died, someone would inherit the store and keep the business going. Guess they never got around to implementing that . . .

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:06 am

Would people stop acting like Skyrim's inability to kill certain NPC's is some great crime. THE FACT IS its completely normal and in line with 99.999% of all other RPG games in the history of video games. In most RPG games your not even allowed to attack people at random let alone kill them. There are hundreds of people you can't kill in Dragon Age Origins simply because you can't use your combat abilities until someone becomes hostile against you. And hiding quest essential NPC's so they only appear in cutscenes or when they've outlived there usefulness like some video games isn't much of an option either.

This is not 99.999% of all other RPG games. It is a TES game, which places it squarely in other the 00.001%. Just because that's how Bioware does it in Dragon Age does not mean that's how Bethesda should do it. Bethesda designs games where you can do what you want. Well, guess what? That includes killing people who are not "hostile" to you. It's been a part of TES since the beginning and it is a part of their other bestselling series, Fallout.

The best suggestion I have found so far is the semi-essential state mentioned above, where only the player can kill them. They could even offer this feature as an option in the toggle menu (with a warning) so folks who did not want to "accidently" ruin their game by assinating the wrong person would not have to worry about it.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:21 am

I like killing everything. I don't like breaking my game because I want to kill annoying NPCs. There is no way of telling whether or not an NPC will be essential or provide quests or advance your storyline later. The best you can hope for is to have Essential flags in the game and when they are no longer essential, they drop their flag and you can kill them. Cicero is a good example. After you complete the wagon & DB line, you should be able to kill or sacrifice him to Boethiah.

Yes there is. In Morrowind a box would pop up after you killed an essential NPC informing you so. You then had the choice to load a previous save and not kill them, or continue on.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:14 am

I would characters important to the plot remain essential (Tullius, Ulfric, Greybeards, Elenwen, etc.) until they are no longer necessary after which they could be killed.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 9:39 pm

Fallout had essential characters.

Just nowhere near as many as Skyrim.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 6:03 pm

Or at least most characters are non essential and important ones are semi-essential

And no such thing as essential. I hate when I accidentally piss somebody off and have to revert back to a save because they keep wanting to kill me and I can't get rid of them.

» Sun Jun 10, 2012 4:38 pm

I agree 100% that there should be no essential NPCs. Its part of the Role Playing Experience deciding who gets to live. You are robbing the player of a gaming experince by making NPC invincible. Collateral damage could be avoiding by making essential NPCs unable to be killed by other NPCs and Monsters (i.e. dragons).

But every single living entity in Skyrim should be killabe by the PC.

Its incredibly annoying when so many NPCs are flagged as "essential", it just makes the game silly sometimes when so many NPC are invincible. I don't know about you but I like to go on killing sprees once in awhile and I feel like the player is entitiled to do so. The player should play the game the way they want to and is given that right when they purchase the game. Sometimes I want to kill EVERYONE, but I can't and I feel cheated because of it. Morbid as it may be its how I feel and I know im not alone with this.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:06 am

I'll tell you why: Radiant AI. The instant Radiant AI was introduced to the Elder Scrolls series so were essential NPCs. As Silverfox says, non-essentialNPCs worked in Morrowind because the world was static. No one went anywhere, no one did anything. They stood in one spot for all eternity, waiting for the player to walk up and speak to them.

To put it in its simplest terms: NPCs are not essential because the player might kill them; NPCs are essential because the game might kill them.

You might be willing to suffer the conssequences of a Skyrim full of killable NPCs but I can guarantee that there would massive outpourings of anger and outrage from many players if the game killed off important NPCs before they were even able to interact with them.

The bolded part is essentially the reason why we have Immortal NPC's in the TES/Fallout games since Morrowind (Not counting New Vegas since it's not a BGS game) and probably the reason why we will continue to have essential NPC's. It's the lesser evil but it can also be a huge problem too. The best solution is one of two ways, make who needs to be essential, essential and then after their business is done make them unessential or you can go the Morrowind/New Vegas route but also have notes on the NPC's (That can't be pickpocketed) telling the hero what he has to do for the particular quest or situation if he were to kill the NPC.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:11 am

I hate essential npcs unless it's an escort mission. Other than that, it's my fault and my fault alone if they die. Or it's poor planning if they kill themselves, which should never happen in the first place.

» Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:48 am

Only the Player should be able to kill essential NPC. Having all NPCs being vulnerable with radiant AI is in fact stupid. But making the player able to choose to kill who he or she wants just makes sense in a role-playing game.

Your not really given a choice, they are just too many invincible NPC's and its ridiculous.