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?

I just think Beth has a mediocre writing staff, though I'm sure this contributed to it.

http://womanhonorthyself.com/wp-admin/images/pan-cake3.jpg

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.

Yes, they should have delayed the game. But, I'm sure that Beth was under a lot of pressure to release the game on 11/11/11, so I'm sure that delaying it wasn't an option.

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'.

Don't look for a tripple hidden meaning where there is none. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=FrriBr-46_I#t=300s the writing in Skyrim isn't all that great.

The story / characters in Oblivion and Fallout 3 weren't all that great either. Bethesda excels at world building (the landscape and dungeons are often breathtaking, full of little details), but the quests and characters have somewhat always lacked depth after Morrowind. Quantity over quality, I guess. My personal theory is that the absence of a well developed worthy antagonist to challenge and even foil the player is detrimental to the stories being told.

Some stories are better than other, still. The Thieves Guild quest and the Main Quest are satisfying.

It's simple really. They're skooma addicts. That's why skooma doesn't have any bad side effects anymore. They just don't want to hear it.

Morrowind wasn't exactly the greatest with quests either.

Yes, duh.

But that release date had no tangible effect on sales tbh.

But they at least had length. Guild questlines are laughably short in Skyrim. I remember when I made my Altmer mage, I decided to do 3 or 4 quests in the College to get me started, and then explore the world at my leisure with a little more experience under my belt. Little did I know that 3 or 4 quests comprises the entirety of the College questline, aside from meaningless randomly generated fetch quests.

Girlchan has invaded my brains, and I am in love it much hooray!

I'd like to know how much that type of thing happened during Skyrim's development. They also tried making everyone able to be a companion, but decided that was a bad idea and cut it way back. So how many other things did they spend a lot of time on, only to take out or cut way back on?

Harvey, I agree with you completely. It's too bad they didn't postpone the game to rectify this issue. In retrospect, I remember having a lot of doubts over the "Radiant Story" system they promised; suffice to say that I'm not very surprised to hear that it didn't work out for them in the long run.

I'm also interested in what else they cut.

It's inevitable that the original design won't look exactly like the finished product, but I don't like that the industry generally frowns on delays. Hell, Valve delays stuff all the time, but I would say that it is definitely a good thing, as they have a standard of Quality that not a lot of publishers/developers can match.

I would love to just sit down and do an interview with Todd and Ashley about the changes made to Skyrim during development. I just find stuff like that interesting as hell.

Morrowind's quests:
"You need this knowledge to help defend the Empire! But because I'm an [censored], you need to get this dwemer puzzle cube from a random Dwemer ruin before I tell you."
Advancing in one of the great Houses just consists of walking back and forth between two places (most preferably on opposite ends of Morrowind), with meaningless fetch quests.
After you do three quests in the Main Quest, you find out you're the Nerevarine. Now start walking around and do fetch quests and bribe Great house councillors who're supposed to hate each other, so you can become Hortator.
Before you can do the 'questlines' of the Guilds in Morrowind, you just need to do a heap of fetch or 'kill this' quests. And the questlines aren't even related to anything... no story, nothing.

well..
I dont know what to say,i Hope Bethesda really take time with Skyrim DLC

Blizzard often doesn't even give concrete dates. They usually just say "it's ready when it's ready" or "soon."

Fallout 3 had many great characters, like President Eden, Amata and Sarah Lyons.
Why it's justified to say Fallout 3 had mediocre writing is because Beth didn't give much love to minor characters, but the big important guys they did just fine.

Skyrim, on the other hand, has pretty much two thorough characters: Tullius and Ulfric, and even they leave a lot more questions than answers.
What this game needs is casual dialogue.

Very true, however I thought this was realistic in terms of guilds. When you're a new member of the fighters guild, you aren't going to be taking on high level tasks, you're going to kill rats for ladies down the street. In the amount of time it took for you to advance to a decent level in a Morrowind faction quest, you could already completed a Skyrim faction and then some. Believe me, I do not hold Morrowind on a pedestal. It had many, many flaws, but I do believe it had better faction quests.

Also, don't all quests basically boil down to "kill this" or "fetch this"? That's true for basically ANY RPG. I wish the writers would get a little creative with quests now and again.

Just an opinion.

I often wonder to what extent voice acting has to do with the limited stories. After Morrowind, gamesas made the decision that every. single. line. of dialog had to be voice acted. That makes it harder to change the story lines, or add more story, later in development, because you need to give the dialog to the actors and producers to record. Something like Radiant Story could be much better if it had the ability to create dialogue without voice acting. Even the hand-written stories could do more if they didn't need so much voice acting, seems like.

I think Borderlands did it right - there's voice acting in the game, but there's also a lot of dialog that's just text. I think this really unties the hands of the writers and game developers.

This. The Mysterious Stranger in F:NV had more backstory than 99 percent of characters in Skyrim.

And he was just a dude with a guitar on the side of the road, lol.

I too agree it's more realistic, and I would've liked some smaller tasks for the different guilds/college in Skyrim.
But the person I quoted complained about the Main Quest for those guilds to only be 4 quests long, the rest filled up with 'meaningless fetch quests'
Though there are some misc quests that you can do, they don't affect the main questlines for those guilds. It'd be nice that after the wards lesson, you'd first have to help your classmates with their spells, before going on a trip

Seeing how they published the game themselves, there is no excuse for rushing the game...push it back a whole year if you must ship it in a november for the holiday season, but release a good product.

That said, I have not encountered too much poor writing. IN all honesty ive only done the thieves guild quest line.

Part of it at least has to do with genre. I think it is getting harder to write epic fantasy stories that are truly unique, without borrowing so much from past epics that it ends up being over the top.

WoW get’s around this somewhat by playing the pop reference card a lot. Or they hang a lantern, pointing out the fact they are gratuitously milking popular mythos in the dialogue where they do it. (Though to their credit they do have some of the best original lore out there.)

The stronger political angle could also be a sign of the times. Many of the themes Skyrim touches on reflect events unfolding in our own societies.

“Dragons” could be seen as a metaphor for biotechnology, against which we are equally defenseless. Stormcloaks could be seen as a well meant but mostly na?ve and uneducated Tea Party of rugged self determinists, the Empire as the troops with outdated methods and technologies that make it hard to show support, the Thalmor as the globalist cabal, and the “just get back to work and ignore it” crowd in Morthal (the one near Dawnstar, not sure if that’s it) reflects the “immerse yourself in work” escapism of most rose-color-glasses Americans, etc.

The trouble with that is, these are not concepts that greatly interest most people. While I feel that Bethesda has done an amazing job making it work, there is a fine line with not wanting to make TOO many parallels, and the way around that is to leave a lot to imagination, or let past lore and books fill in the gaps.

It seems also that more of an emphasis was placed on smaller but highly unique and detailed dialogue. Like shop keepers talking about the corruption of a particular town, alchemist students reflecting on the frailty of life, and all the townsfolk and people at the inns bantering about their day, selling their goods, and interacting with each other with far greater diversity than any previous ES title.

This IMO adequately compensates for any lack of quest depth.