Not here to discuss whether it is an RPG or not. I just noticed Skyrim lacked a roleplaying factor. I made a whole playthrough with my Redguard and was eager to start a new one but I found myself uninterested in a new game for the following reasons:

Edit: Skip to the last part of the post if you don't feel like reading.

1. Skills increase too quickly: In my opinion, there should be kind of a class system to restrict just how good you can become at everything. It's not really realistic that your character can be a master at 100 different things that are completely unrelated to one another. I became a master Blacksmith in like 30mins.

2. Lack of combat versatility: Combat feels great and brutal, but I had hoped I could make a character who could mostly avoid confrontation with eloquent speeches and personality. In the end, there is only one skill related to personality and it's practically useless.(Yes, I would love spears, crossbows, throwing knives, darts and setting up traps)

3. Races are meaningless: That's the one thing that killed it for me. I wanted to roleplay a barbarian, unarmored Nord for my next playthrough but I gave up. There is no unarmored skill and my Nord didn't feel different from my Redguard. Something that really breaks it is the fact you DO NOT see your character in the inventory. I don't know for you but it reminded me I was playing as a specific race and I enjoyed looking at my character in the inventory.

4. Overall lack of roleplaying mechanics: Frankly, I don't care about jumping higher, however, I do care about running faster. Before Skyrim came out, I had planned on making a nimble Khajiit who was a great talker. A rather weak fellow who would settle matters with his tongue and run away if he couldn't. I couldn't do that. I had also planned on making a uber strong Orc who was terrifying to the masses...couldn't do that either. Like it or not, attributes and stats help us define our characters better, it makes them feel more different and if the stats reflect in the gameplay, all the better.

tl;dr: Skyrim lacks a roleplaying factor, there isn't much difference between the playthroughs. You end up choosing mostly the same skills because some are just too useless. There are basically three builds, Warrior, Thief and Mage. Not many choices and combining them doesn't feel that different either. Some wanted to create a martial artist or a faithful paladin. I for example, wanted to create a wise monk with good hand to hand skills and speech but yeah, no unarmed skill. I find the roleplaying mechanics severely lacking. This is a great game but I don't know. It kinda lacks the replay value a pure RPG has. I really don't feel like playing another character because I know he'll end up roughly the same as my last one.

That is all. I hope Bethesda fixes this in the next Elder Scrolls game. More skills and roleplaying mechanics to add replay value would be great.

Disagree, the roleplaying is there and there are a lot of oppotunities to do so. I'm in my 4th character and each one felt complete different from each other.

It does require some imagination from the player tho. don't expect the game to deliver everything to you in a silver plate because it doesn't.

Really, what are the 4 characters you made?

Edit: Also, I want to roleplay a powerful, destructive mage but I keep hearing how useless Destruction is so I avoid it like the plague.

The giant problem with roleplaying in Skyrim is that so many quests railroad you down a singular pre-determined path and give you no option to even quit the quest if it leads you to doing something you don't like. The only way you can actually play a character that can do all the quests is if you go with one who is completely indifferent to all questions of morality.

Companions and Theives Guild comes to mind here

Agreed with that. I think that's why there are so many quests though. Most of them have the same outcome each time you play and there is a lack of choice on how you want to be in TES games. I sometimes feel like being an arrogant ass a la Commander Shepard but I don't have the dialogue options to do so. If the 300 quests all had 3-4 different possible outcomes, the game would take decades to develop and the bugs would get 10x worse.

Don't say Roleplay, Role playing takes place in the head, general folks constrew it to mean, the player must make up mental cannotations of events that occer not only with their own character but with all the other characters in game as a substitution for the games lack there of.

say Choice, variety, Dynamics. those are missing.

anyone can roleplay hell you don't even need skyrim to Roleplay just sit in a chair and let your mind run wild, but when the excuse is Roleplaying should be used overtime to make up for the games lack of Dynamics, Variety, and choice. well then in my experience it gets ridiculous.


and it wouldnt take Decades to develope, just look at obsidian who made actual sprawling outcomes in the time they made New Vegas, compared to the bs statement that FO3 would have 200 endings.

Exactly. Cannibalism for the lose...

Destruction, useless? Nonsense.

To me the bethesda style RPG is more more "roleplaying" than any of the choose-your-own-adventure style interactive storybooks that seem to pass for RPG's these days. A good amount of quest story arcs are linear but there is so much content you can do or avoid any of them that you wish.

So, what's a roleplaying choice?

Is choosing to go assassinate people, eat bugs, and wabbajack random strangers while doom threatens the entire world a valid choice?

Or, should you be forced to deal with the pressing issues and have a few different paths to saving the world...while lacking the ability to say, "I'm not the dragonborn."

Your answer in large part determines how you feel about open world rpgs. If you think the purpose of a crpg is to push you through a story a TES game will probably be satisfying for one run-through. If you think the purpose of a crpg is to enable you to tell your own stories, you'll still be here playing off and on when TES6 comes out.

It's always required imagination. That's the most important part of any roleplaying game in my opinion. The game is only the foundation for you to build your own story.

You shouldn't do everything with one character anyways.

And it's easy to quit a quest. Just walk away.

Thief breton: He came from High Rock to Skyrim because he was wanted in his home town. He didn't want to join the thieves guild tho. He doesn't go well with hierarchy, you know? He was no assassin tho, as the old man who raised him thought him that he could take anything from other men excetp their lives because that was too precious. He lives in an aboned shack near Ivarstead and visit cities at night to do his bidding. No dungeon crawling here because he is as coward as a little cat. He was my first DiD character and died at level 10.

Altmer Mage: Comming from a noble family in Summerset Isle he was sent to Winterhold by his rich father to become a powerful mage. Just getting to winterhold as soon as I arrived in Skyrim was an adventure on it's own as he lacked any combat skills and could barely cast some weak spells. He was also a DiD character and ended dying at level 15 when doing a quest for the College.

Imperial Warrior: He was an ex-legionaire that quit the army during the civil war and was captured as a dserter only to find out h's actually the dragonborn of the legends. My goody two shoes character that completed the main quest and nothing else except the odd side quest. I left him at level 22.

Dunmer Assassin: The char I'm currently playing. He's level 25 and came to Skyrim to join the thives guild but he's slowly discovering that he likes the feeling of killing people, specially bad people. He will eventually try to join the dark brotherhood but for now he's focused on restoring the TG to its former glory.


When I finish this one I'll creat a red guard barbarian that will join the companions and become a mercenary for the Imperial Legion. Then a nord rebel that will join the Stormcloaks, a healer that will complete the College's questline, and Talos knows what I'll come up with next.


See, lots for RPing opportunities.


Edit: I forgot, I stll have an Argonian Treasure Hunter and a Kahjiit hermit in mind.

The game doesnt roleplay for you

I roleplay at home. But perhaps thats for a different forum.

Court Wizard: So... you wish to master the arcane arts?
Me in RL: No idiot, I just came to sell this shiny crap I found. I'm an orc in full ebony set with a zwei-hander in my back. Is that how mages look like from your place?
Court Wizard: I had you figured for a mage, I think you'll appreciate this...
/RP

it's funny for an open world game it's really linear and sure you can not do the quest but think of it this way you have a quest to steal something or sneak into a base for the stormcloaks my character isn't a sneak kinda guy i say the option "I'm not really for sneaking" they say don't worry I believe in you, there should be another option if you say you don't sneak

1. In early levels yeah, but if you don't go too crazy it does slow down in middle-end levels.

2. While I don't want to see any TES game becoming like New Vegas (you have to do the main quest and atleast kill some sort of monster once, it's the law) I think quests like the Bards college should have steered away from the dungeon exploring aspect (even if the quests were crap to begin with) and there should have been more speech pacifist options.


3. True, but I imagine the reason there isn't an unarmoured skill level is so people wouldn't be able to level up as easily lke you stated in No.1

4. Again, its trying to stop people from leveling up to quick. The only way they could change this is to revert back to the Morrowind/Oblivion leveling style which seems to have lots of resentment.

While it did lack aspects of roleplay, I still felt immersed into the word. I think it was more of the fact there wasn't as many pathways to go down in quests. I think it wasn't an issue of Bethesda not caring but rather an issue of time constraints -

I thought it was a good story, and while you could have remained a total pacifist thief in Oblivion if you had the patience, I think the Skyrim end fight would have been anti-climatic if you used a persuade option. Unless it was something akin to the Legate in NV, where you needed a top speech skill to think of the long debate. Plus, Maven did give you a pacifist option to take care of the bodyguard Vald.

Plus, I don't see how you would have gotten Namira's ring if you didn't endulge yourself into the lifestyle, unless you got the Vigiliant of Stendarr involved, and gave you a purified form of it.

This, essentially. If you want to make a character with a specific backstory, motivations, and playstyle and do only things compatible with that character's world view, TES games support that emphatically, and will reward you with over 100 hours of content per character.

On the opposite end, if you want to have a well defined character and also complete every single quest in the game...you're applying the wrong playstyle to the design philosophy used. That playstyle works in Bioware games because you don't define your character's personality or history except in the most generic forms possible, and you are *expected* to do everything in the game, so that it gives you 40 hours of playtime. Bethesda games are built more to give you a variety of content and options regardless of the type of character you build. Not to give you robin hood options when you're applying to join the medieval mafia.