That's not really the point. He doesn't need any kind of pre-existing link to our character. The fact of the matter is, he did absolutely nothing. We meet him a grand total of about 4 times in the main quest, and he never does anything significant besides burning down one single town and reviving a dragon. We don't learn anything about him from himself, we don't learn anything about him really from his subordinates either as most dragons don't speak to us or to anyone.

He never does anything morally reprehensible or otherwise on a large scale. He does nothing to earn our character's wrath, aside from "ho hum, the prophecy says". All he does is trash-talk us, we don't even have a proper conversation wth him ever. He's basically dragon-sauron, minus being an actual threat and detriment to the world, with minions who are completely inept and disorganized and never even come close to conquering anything.

fallout 3 writing is about the best Ive ever seen in a game. Some of the game's narratives stick with me to this day. Skyrim writing is just good enough.

But really the problem is the genre. There may be nothing new under the sun, but fantasy is a hundred years run into the ground and inherently trite, and both its writers and readers tend to be on the low end of dim. There's only so much they could do with elves and dragons and magic swords.

Dagoth Ur was very respectable. Sure you wanted to kill him, but the man would talk to you and tell you WHY he did what he did. He even had an air of "sorry it has to be this way and I wish you luck in our battle."
Mehrunes Dagon wanted to destroy Tamriel because that's his thing: that's his realm. He loves destruction and revolution etc, it's like his hobby. Some may call that a stupid reason, but I'm perfectly willing to accept that he's motivated by it, as are all the other Daedric lords with their own spheres of interest.
Mankar Camaron would give us a speech as to why he supported Dagon. He may have been right, he may have been wrong. It does not matter: either way he gave us the WHY of things. That's all we needed.


Alduin? Why do you want to destroy the world? "Becuz i iz dragon herpderp. it's wut we do."
Wow. Really? Did I miss something? Please tell me I did and they have an incredibly lengthy explanation for his motives hidden in one of the books.

Not going to argue with you about most of this because I agree with you. I'm not saying that one game is better or worse. They're different. Some of my favorite games have been incredibly linear: Max Payne is probably my favorite action game of all time. It's incredibly linear but it has a fantastic narrative.

I think that the more details you add to a protagonist at the start of the game, the more linear the game becomes. I found aspects of NV more linear than Skyrim, although the quests are a lot more interesting. That linearity serves to focus the narrative and enhances it. The fact that that history is there allows you to do things in a quest that you can't do when the character is a nameless, faceless void.

But being a courier is not the same as being a prisoner. You have to choose to be a courier. You had to be motivated to do it. You don't have to do anything at all to be arrested. Wrong place, wrong time is not a back-story. A career decision is. Same goes for being Dragonborn. It's something that happens to your character, not something you choose. Same with Fallout 3. You can't choose your parents. You can't choose to be born in a vault. Those details don't limit my freedom as much as trying to figure out why I chose to be a courier. It's a small detail, but an important one.

It's been 2 years since I played FO3, and it's been 1 year since I've played FONV. I can look back on those games and remember dozens of characters, character traits, missions, choices, etc. A little over 12 hours ago I just completed Skyrim after 300+ hours of gameplay and I'm having a hard time remembering what I did and why I did it.

I think they could manage good characterization for a dozen important character though, right? They don't though. They don't really provide much characterization for ANYONE. Not even Ulfric, Tullius, Alduin, or any other main characters. All the characters lack depth and are shallow. Some more than others. They could do this for a handful of characters, yet they don't. Honestly, they could also bother with some decent AI for their NPCs since they have this big open world, but the AI for their NPCs is pretty dang pathetic.

Obviously it is about quantity and they don't bother having quality in the story anywhere. Yes, they've always been like this, which is why the writing has always been poor. It isn't that it is impossible, it is that they just don't care enough to even make a few characters have depth and a lot of characterization.


Good stories in games always have characters you feel strongly about. People naturally feel strongly about their own character. Job done there. All that it needs beyond that is making the NPCS have strong stories and grip people. And that's not really the case in Skyrim or any Bethesda game.

I mean heck, compare it to Dragon Age. Your background doesn't matter much at all in that game beyond the fact you're one of the last two wardens. Yet it still has a strong story and it doesn't have to rely on a lot of character background. Bethesda could do the same with the main storylines in their games easily enough. You don't need a strong and determined background for a main character in an RPG as long as you let the player interact with people. The player will provide the background, motivations for their character, etc, making the writing job a heck of a lot easier in that regard. A ton of characterization about the main character in an RPG can actually take the player out of the story if it is supposed to be a sandbox, but a ton of characterization for NPCs? That brings someone into the story and helps make them feel part of it. Especially if they have meaningful choices to make.

The odd thing about TES games is that while they are sandboxes, the stories aren't sandboxes at all, especially the main stories. They rarely have meaningful decisions to make. The stories are about as non-sandboxy as you can get. It's a weird dichotomy.

Powder gangers-Great Kahns

Theives Guild-Brotherhood.

To me that just shows that on rare moments when they get lucky, there's a good story. The vast majority of the story, even the important stories in the game, are crappy. They don't really care or they'd hire better writers.

I think its more likely that their writers are pretty high in the pecking order, and would scream fowl if other writers were brought in who showed them up, despite the game having the possibility of being better for it.

As far as the stories in Skyrim go, they are incredibly linear and offer almost no choices to the player. They haven't gotten any real advantages out of blank slate characters, because they don't allow the player to do much story-wise. The strength of TES games has never been the story or the quests. Its that you can sneak up and kill people or rob them blind. You have a sandbox in the sense of interacting with objects (and with people insofar as you treat them like objects). They don't try to have a good story, and I don't think that's all that high on their priority list. I think the people, like me, who would like that, are a small part of their customer base.

Probably, but that's functionally the same thing. If they are that high in the pecking order, then they are part of how the company thinks and operates, and that means if they don't really care about good writing or are oblivious to the major shortcomings, then so is the company for all intents and purposes.

I think they certainly could have a better story with the resources they have on the table (or at worst, a trivial increase in those resources compared to the millions spent on the game). They just functionally don't really care and probably waste a lot of time with mediocre talent writing the story and don't care to hire anyone that can do it better.

Yep. No argument here. He's all those things. Could have been a lot better. I don't think he's any worse than anything else that BGS has done. So he's a dull character. Their games have always been full of dull characters and linear quests. I guess they should have made the world smaller so they could spend more time developing his character and less time landscaping. If enough people want that, I'm sure that's the direction they'll head since they always do whatever is going to make them the most money, right? Better narrative = fewer NPCs & fewer quests & smaller world. If only there were more games like that.

They had a lot of time to work on the game. Skyrim suffers from poor design decisions all around, that keep it from being the game it could have been.

I find myself wondering how often they fell victim to groupthink. Particularly with the UI.

It could also have something to do with the death of imagination and INSPIRATION in our modern forced-labor, corporate-centric, materialist culture. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.be33fda73987ff722e71ca3a18f1bfaf.351&show_article=1 are starting to realize their mistakes. It could already be too late.

When everything is about the almighty dollar, all art is reduced to mediocre crap because a world like that, it chokes out inspiration rather than fostering creative imagination. Everyone is left struggling just to make ends meet, doing only what they HAVE to do, working where they HAVE to, studying what they HAVE to, even if it doesn't interest them at all, since they are skill sets applicable only to short-term over-specialized office tasks designed to make a few goons even more filthy rich, all just to survive, to subsist, and the world they inherit is hardly worth writing home about.

That's where the "lowest common denominator" comes in. Dumb it down so even the massive influx of knuckle-dragging mouth breathers can understand, because we need the cheap labor to replace our jaded older generation of worker slaves, all so we can more holistically separate the masses from their money. Wave the flag, rally 'round religion, or the political hot potato of the day.

"Everything will be better if you just BUY."

Not saying that is the route Beth has taken, but our “modern” culture. Why we feel we need to devolve to compete with China in this regard is beyond me. We seem hell-bent on taking that nose-dive into the hive mind. Where everything is dissolved into cheap billboards and forced labor debt slavery, and the chorus of excuses.

I would argue, the biological war has already taken place, and the dumbed-down state of humanity isn’t the result of laziness and greed and stupid vanity alone, but rather the “zombification” of our physical brains with nanofiber networks that tell us how to feel, and only allow certain ideas or memories to surface...

I believe the thought police are already here. But don’t worry, I’m probably just crazy.

No, they could do a heck of a lot more with the dialogue given.

Heck, they could do more for the world in general. Why do guards with different voice actors use the exact same lines? That's just bad and lazy writing, because it would be trivially easier to come up with different lines that express the same sentiment. This sort of laziness is carried over into the main characters, who just have bad, and largely uninteresting dialogue.

And it isn't like it would cost a fortune for them to have Tullius, Ulfric, Alduin, Delphina, Esbern, the Greybeards, Paarthurnax, and Balgruuf have two or three times as much dialogue. They seriously get very, very little. Three times as much would still be very little compared to what we see in other games, and eminently affordable. Bethesda doesn't really care though, so even their main characters are shallow. Money says the customers don't care either, so this is unlikely to change. Make no mistake though, it isn't that they can't do it or that it would be prohibitively expensive.

Pokes stick at Baldur's Gate I & II. And Planescape. And A Game of Thrones.

Sure they could manage a dozen good characters. Easiest way to do that is get rid of a couple of guilds. They could also improve the AI and give each NPC better routines. Best way to do that is get rid of a bunch of them. BGS games have always been quantity > quality. The more choices you give the player, the shallower every choice will be. There's no weird dichotomy at all: the quests are linear because it's a huge world with a million things in it. You can't make every one of them super. More time spent on one NPC means less time on another. Same for quests. I don't really know where people think all this extra development time is going to come from. They confuse real limitations with laziness and ineptness. Could the characters and stories be better? Sure. Just have fewer of them. Then you'll have more time to spend on each one. Of course, making decisions for the player beforehand can be really handy, too, because it prevents them from making other decisions that you'd have to incorporate.

Big world, lots of freedom = shallow.
Small world, no freedom = deep.

Skyrim is very close to the first, very far from the second. The only thing that gives it any depth at all are the years of lore that they've built up around it.

One thing that bothers me, a game company has different games under their belts. Well instead of letting a game be completely separate, after a while they get the bright idea to start pulling things from this game and that game into this game.

IMO, I preferred the dialogue box in Oblivion, then I do in Skyrim .

Skyrim has the majority of their quests running off the radiant story system, which largely automates quest design into very simplistic, repeatable affairs. There already are very few actual quests in the game, and there effectively already are very few NPCs, since so many of them easily fall out of ones' mind due to being unmemorable. Fallout NV, was actually less linear quest decision wise than its predecessor made by Bethesda, and also had http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Ain%27t_That_a_Kick_in_the_Head_%28quest%29 side quests alone, than http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Baby_Steps of Fallout 3's quests in total.

What I meant was that this quantity over quality he brought up is stupid, every game has the same type of quests i.e:

Killing, fetch, and all that jazz, but having a story a point to them makes them unique even if they have basically the same goal. Beth opted for infinite quests with no story to them essentially making you repeat the same actions over and over with the only variation being where you go to do said quest.

Also giving the PC the ability define even just a tiny bit of their past before the game can make RPing better, and that could also help with the story.

Also now that I think about it, I really felt nothing toward Alduin even as I killed him... for an antagonist to have such little impact on the story and on the player is just sad. Alduin is also portrayed as an enormous jerk and incredibly evil, but really what dies he do to make the player feel that way toward him? Burn down Helgen? They were trying to cut your head off. Alduin does mote good than bad.

Im just hoping with the Ck being released that some creative modders can either extend the guild quests and or create some more guilds with lengthy quests!

i lost faith in bethesdas story writing but i have a lot of faith in the modders!

LOL from Morrowind through FOn.V. to Skyrim, FO3 has the WORST writing.... in fact it doesent really do the franchise justice.

That isn't writing... That's limitations due to the game
Which shows that limitations of the game are a big part of what makes the writing bad.

You should send them a resume. Make sure you highlight the part that says: "Never makes mistakes."

You're right. It must be greed and stupidity.

I hate arguments based on emotion.

Time for bed.