I know, I know...Another one! But this is constructive and I think I'm right. I love Skyrim, I love TES and I love Bethesda. I think Skyrim is a really great game, but the quests are pretty boring. I think most people would agree that Beth haven't outdone themselves in terms of quests. This got me thinking back to why I love Fallout 3's quests so much and I realised this...

In FO3, you had multiple ways to end each quest. There was normally a good, bad and grey area way to finish each quest.

In Skyrim, the majority of the time there is one way and one way only. Same with dialogue.

In the future, Beth really needs to focus more on player choice and diversity in quest endings, like they did in FO3.
You should be able to talk to a quest NPC and have multiple dialogue paths, which take you in a completely different direction to what another choice could have.

I think the only quest that has done this is the Alikir warriors in Whiterun quest. That is the only quest I have played so far that gave me a choice and actually had me torn and made me think about what I wanted to do.

Sorry if this has been done to death. I just couldn't quite put my finger on why quests felt a but "hollow" and now I think I've come across why.

P.S

Skyrim is still my all time favourite game.

eeyup, I agree.

I disagree that every quest needs to have this depth, but certainly more do. There's also an imbalance between "good" solutions, and "evil" solutions and the rewards you get for them.

I can't disagree with that.

It would allow for better Roleplay, and over all more satisfaction.

But just like in real life, there are multiple ways to tackle a task or problem. In Skyrim it's like "That Vampire is evil, you must kille him!" But why can't I talk to the vampire? See his side of the story. What if I'm an evil character and I want to side with the vampire?

That's what the Alikr quest did really well, it played devil's advocate and actually made me think about my decision. That's what FO3 did with pretty much evert quest and I think that's why I never once thought that they were dull.

yea, even if i'm not for mixing things from one game to another, i wouldn't mind seeing the whole karma-thing in a TES-game

Same here, allthough even after completing either side of that quest, you still don't really get the full story or who was the telling the truth.



Good example of that is a certain companions quest
"who were those people trying to kill you? (silver hand)"
"Bad people"

yeah.. thanks Farkas

Yep, I think it is an absolute necessity that NPC's view you differently depending on what you've done. I think Fable 2 actually did that pretty well.

I found with Fallout 3 and New Vegas there was little point or reward to choose the "evil" dialog option or quest endings OTHER than role play reasons. Instead of situations where acting "morally ambiguous" would garner your character some sort of gain, such as a nice weapon or a pile of caps, it always seemed like the only reasons to act "evil" was to be a jerk.

I think every quest should have as many options as you might have in reality. A `yes, no, maybe and I don`t care, do it yourself and what if I do this instead?` alternatives.

Problem is ,even today, audible speech greatly limits game space of what can be done and it COSTS Bethesda money to employ voice actors (although they have enough money in my view, its just how they allocate it).

You`d get many more options if it was text speech mostly, with the odd audible.

But then people would whine about not enough speech.

I was evil in FO3 and it was pretty fun. Also, don't forget, the reason that people do a lot of things in TES game is due to roleplay reasons. At the moment, there are a lot of limitations on roleplay.

Agreed. NEED MORE OPTIONS. Can't stress that enough.

I like Zelda and that was all text speech. I think TES benefits from voice actors, but I can see how the extra costs would pile up. They seemed to do it in Fallout though?

They probably could have done that along with more cause and effect changing future mission paths,but then the game probably would have taken 20 years to complete

Really the attention to detail in this game is already utterly staggering. And I thought people had a heroin addiction problem, I think Skyrim addiction is worse can't stop playing it!

swtor. look at it. You'll see a good example of it being done right, even in a multiplayer environment.

Is that the MMO game? I'm a console gamer.

Yeah that would be great. And in Fallout I like how if you have a high enough strength or a certain perk for example you unlock some additional dialogue

dialouge in general was more fun in Fallout 3

I felt FO3 had about 15 quests..... with maybe 10 that made me think.

I am for what you suggest as long as it doesn't mean a lame number of quests. FO3 had no guilds.... it was basically just a big sandbox to explore.....

Now if you had said FO:NV I'd agree 100% - it had amazing content, # of quests, guilds/factions, and a lot of choice!

J

I haven't had the chance to play FO:NV yet. I didn't have my Xbox with me when it was released. I'm definitely picking it up after I'm done with Skyrim...

I'd like it if there more options on how to end quests too! My sister and I were literally just talking about this the other day haha

Of course there should be the choice to side with the vampires in such a situation, but only if you'd be a vampire yourself. Otherwise, after a short dialogue, the master vampire would refuse peace between you and send everything at you, while the outcome of that dialogue would have been very different if you'd have been a vampire as well.

While the solution is simple, it takes a lot of time and effort. Not only the additional voice acting, but the additional coding and thinking as well. Basically, in a years time, we'd either get 100 quests with one outcome or 33 quests with three outcomes. (of course the numbers aren't that exact, but it's something along those lines)

No kidding. It's ridiculous the developers chose not to do good and evil paths. One huge negative for this game.

To add to your point, the new Zelda had quest choices believe it or not. In many of the side quests yyou could come out with different outcomes depending on how you handle things, from having a ghost fall in love and haunt one of his fellow knights, to having the it girl in school fall in love with her prince charming. Was pretty nice to see that from flirting with the item check girl and making her love you to breaking it off with her and having her dad reward you for doing so.

TES does need more choices, would have been fun to choose to assassinate some of my victems or tell Nazir to go puck himself. Or the client... But since they reward you for some of these things it kinda mutes the point of wanting to do some good as an assassin instead of bad, I really liked the first assassination, kill the abusive lady in orphan hall. That had a good outcome for most of kids, cept the lady who helped her she freaked out.

It wouldn't be so bad, wouldn't a lot of the restrictions to how quests have to be solved feel so terribly artificial. Even the most simple approaches or alternatives were not allowed, no, you must do this and you must do it like that. Guess they were afraid someone might break a quest or something.