The writing is better than in Morrowind, imo.
You bash in someone's head there, and all they can say is "STOOOPID!"
Not to mention Crassius calling you pumpkin pie and Vivec becoming 'best friends' with you after two dialogues.

I wouldn't call the writers bad, as the lore bits and books are done well. I especially like reading all the journals, even those left by bandits.
Radiant quests have nothing to do with the actual hand-made questlines, though. Your quote already starts off with 'RANDOM ENCOUNTERS'.

If that's the case then they should have just postponed. Postponing wouldn't have hurt their sales. And if your implication is right they'd have made a deeper/better game, with more happy customers as a result. Seems like a win-win to me.

The writing of Morrowind bad?
Seriously?

From a business point of view, postponing a release is very bad. Even if the game sells just as much, it is bad for the bottom line. For one thing, it pushes revenue into the next quarter or year, which means (for example with Skyrim) your miss your revenue for 2011. More importanly, it delays work on follow-on products (DLC, the next TES game, other Beth games). So basically you're hurting your revenue stream going forward.

Companies make trade offs all the time. Delaying a product a few months to make one facet of it better might make a few fans happy, but it rarely is worth it for the bottom line. That's just the way it is.

It must be hard to read. Truly.

The unfortunate aspect of videogames, it's still a business.

The writing of Morrowind bad?

"There, Nerevar was greeted by the Parliament of Craters, who knew him by title and resented his presence, for he was to be a ruling king of earth and this was the lunar realm. They shifted around him in a pattern of entrapment. 'The moon does not recognize crowns or scepters,' they said, 'nor the representatives of kingdoms below, lion or serpent or mathematician. We are the graves of those that have migrated and become ancient countries. We seek no Queens or thrones. Your appearance is decidedly solar, which is to say a library of stolen ideas. We are neither tear nor sorrow. Our revolution succeeded in the manner that is was written. You are the Hortator and unwelcome here.'
And so Nerevar carved at the grave ghosts until he was out of breath and their Parliament could make no new laws.
He said, 'I am not of the slaves that perish.'
Of the members of Parliament only a few survived the Hortator's attack.
A surviving Crater said, 'Appropriation is nothing new. Everything happens of itself. This motif is by no means unassociated with hero myths. You have not acted with the creative impulse; you fall below the weight of destiny. We are graves but not coffins. Know the difference. You have only dug more and supplied no ghosts to reside within. Central to your claim is the predominance of frail events. To be judged by the earth is to sit on a throne of wonder why. Damage us more and you will find naught but the absence of our dead.'

The writing of Morrowind is a hell of a lot better than that of any TES game before, or after.

Good job, you just proved that you can't read. What you just quoted are books, not actual quests themselves.

And the books are integral and neccesary to understand the events of the game.
My first quote was in-game dialogue however.

To call the writing of Morrowind bad is just...

At least npc have interesting stuff to say and none of that generic bull that the inhabitants of Skyrim give you.

I didn't see that quote as I was writing a post.
I think you also failed to realize that I never said that Morrowind's writing was bad.

I didn't see that quote as I was writing a post.
I think you also failed to realize that I never said that Morrowind's writing was bad.



NPCs in Morrowind have the same dialogue as everyone else, some may have additional options based on quests in that area... at least the NPCs in Skyrim all have something different to say (it still becomes repetitive after walking past them a few times though).

You can ask them about their background, trade, specific locations, specific persons, rumors, secrets and much much more

In Skyrim you can...Fetch a quest from them?

This would explain the short guild quests, the Civil war questline which didn't actually have too much Story in it, and the fact that a lot of characters seem very shallow, like shallower than a kitty pool.

I loved the civil war story. Great background. Very nuanced characters.
Among the best I've seen in an RPG.
Don't believe me. Believe the countless threads on this forum on the civil war which all end only by reaching the post limit.

I loved the civil war story. Great background. Very nuanced characters.
Among the best I've seen in an RPG.
Don't believe me. Believe the countless threads on this forum on the civil war which all end only by reaching the post limit.

I love Skyrim, I really do, but it really does drop the ball on writing. While the lack of choices involving quests can easily be forgiven (as that's never really been the focus of a TES game), I always wondered why the writing in Skyrim really isn't great. Sure, Oblivion and FO3 didn't have the best writing in the industry, but there were definitely signs in both of those games that Beth was really getting their writing chops. (Both Shivering Isles and The Pitt demonstrate that Bethesda can, in fact, write badass stories) I expected Skyrim to improve on this, but I really don't think it did. This fact boggled my mind quite a bit, until I remembered an article I had read prior to release.

http://www.nowgamer.com/features/921564/todd_howard_talks_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim.html from Now gamer.

Here is the important part:

Todd Howard on Radiant Story -

"In Fallout 3 we had this system that we wrote using our scripting language for random encounters. You would go around the Wasteland and it would generate based on what you did these random encounters. It was this big, brute force script: if this happens then this happens and so on. We thought about it and decided to systemise that. Build a system where we see what the player does and when they take on a quest, we can give them conditions. We thought this was the coolest thing in the world so we made all our quests like this… but it didn’t work. Ironically radiant story tells terrible stories because you can see right through it. So now all our quests are hand-written. We want to tell really good stories but we can have elements into those quests that are radiant, or random."

So Radiant Story doesn't tell the best stories, and they decided to go back and handwrite all of the quests. Not a biggie right?

Well, it depends on when exactly they realized that Radiant story wasn't the best fit for actually telling a story. Obviously, Radiant Story was to be a big part of Skyrim, and it still is. However, as Todd explained himself, they had to tone it down and handwrite most of the quests.

So, my conclusion is that because they had to redo a lot of the story elements of Skyrim, it was rushed because they didn't have enough time to hand write lengthy quest-lines, as Radiant Story didn't pan out like they originally wanted it too. They only realized this part way through development, and thus didn't have enough time to write epic quest lines like they demonstrated with both Oblivion and Fallout 3.

This would explain the short guild quests, the Civil war questline which didn't actually have too much Story in it, and the fact that a lot of characters seem very shallow, like shallower than a kitty pool. I don't believe that Bethesda are bad writers, I think they mucked up a little with Radiant Story. It didn't turn out like they wanted, and had to rush a bit. Which is why Skyrim is great in nearly every way, except for the rushed writing.

This is all an opinion, but I hope you find it interesting nonetheless.

Thoughts? Opinions? Pancakes?

Places like Frostflow Lighthouse, where the quest was mostly implied through journals and notes, was amazing and touching.

Would of been rather a lot better better if you weren't carrying out the final battle with like twenty people on each side. Pathetic. Remember the battle in the opening of Dragon Age: Origins? That was a battle, this was a joke.