Take yourselves seriously, as the world needs you!
It's 2012 and we are still doing countless one-dimensional quests with an incentive of sorts (gear, gold, stat upgrades), and it simply won't service anymore. It's time to look at quests as a form of art - a benchmark of how good an RPG really is, rather than a "means to and end" type of filler content that's only purpose is in forcing players to explore or engage in other gameplay mechanics.

There needs to be a complete shift in priorities. Quests need to be realized in their full potential.


How Skyrim handles questing
Every quest has the same formula. Go there, pick up an item or kill an NPC, bring it back and get rewarded by a next quest, item, stat upgrade or resources. It all sends a clear message - the developers only looked at quests as a method to force players to explore. Thus, Skyrim ends up feeling like an Exploration/FPS, rather than a real RPG.

If the quests are done right, players are encouraged to explore every inch of the beautiful world in order to find chances to exhibit their character's personalty. And each new playthrough feels unique.


The untapped potential within quests
A quest is a gameplay experience defining moment. A chance to bring the NPCs and the world alive. It cannot be downplayed into this randomly generated "content" that you do for their meaningless rewards.

The thing that makes role-playing games different form other games is that they should, ultimately, be replayable. Skyrim offers none of this. All characters will eventually end up doing the same quests and all the quests have same outcomes, choices don't matter and there are no consequences to speak of. This is wrong! Lazy! We are supposed to be playing an epic role-playing game (as advertised), not an Exploration/FPS game with swords and sorcery.

Playing a role is not about min-maxing and making a character "build" (what armor type he wears and what weapon he uses). It's about how he chooses to behave in the situations the quests put him in, and about dealing with the consequences. Old games, like Baldur's Gates (1998) realized this and used a primitive alignment axis (good/evil, lawful/chaotic) that would shift as a player would choose different reactions to different quests.


Quality>Quantity
One quest that has three possible outcomes is better than 3 quests with one possible outcome. It relieves a lot of pressure from the art department as the same graphical content, voice acting and story can be reused in the form of expecting players to revisit it during multiple playthroughs. Also, if you manage to get players guessing what might've happened if he had chosen differently, you have them much more emotionally invested within that character. Everybody wins.


Summary? TLDR?
+3 points towards Evil and the hateful, fearful reaction from NPCs is an infinitely better quest reward than Iron Boots of Peerless Magicka. Here's to hoping. Maybe next time.

I'm an Elder Scrolls player and I approve this message.

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I agree with this. Why don't you give us a couple of examples, OP?

Good post, completely agree. I don't want to always fail a quest for killing the quest giver instead of the bad guy. You're forced to play the "good guy" in 90% of the quests which is boring, definitely reinstalling Baldur's Gate after reading this!

In example, the quest where you deliver the Greatsword to Balgruuf could have four possible endings.

1. Keep the sword (equipping it would trigger the effect)
2. Deliver the Sword
3. Persuade options for extra payment in both ends
4. Reject the quest

And any of these options would add to how that NPC and other NPCs treat you around the world. It could be the age-old lawful/chaotic and good/evil slider with a reputation slider added atop of it (Baldur's Gates route), or something more eloquent.

As you keep choosing the way you want your character to develop his/her relationship with the world, you start gainining notoriety on NPCs that identify with this or that side, opening some doors while closing others, giving you a completely different feeling playthrough and a true RPG experience. And the beautiful part is that all the mini-quests would matter. The character would be the summary of his experiences.

Yeah, I could see that. My question is how many would know about your choice? I doubt that the whole town of Whiterun would know if you failed to deliver one Greatsword. Not trolling or anything, just trying to help with some constructive criticism.

I've just posted this in another thread, but I'll copy + paste it here in answer to the OP

There's a lot of this kind of complaint made against Skyrim Crixus - and it's perfectly valid. Choose decision x, and it turns off path y - choose decision y and it tuns off path x type of quests appear in a lot of games. Also in a lot of games you get quests which give you a choice to have a good or evil conclusion to them - which puts points into morality meters.

While they are good character defining mechanics, I have never felt I am making those decisions for any other reason than to see what content is revealed after those decisions have been made. When I got halfway through Fallout 3 playing as an evil character, I gave up. It just never felt like I was evil and the only reason I was doing it was to see the content that the devs had made or to gain evil karma points.

By not having any of these mechanics, Skyrim succeeds in allowing you to create a multitude of characters with many more facets to their personality. The way it does this is very simple - you are given the choice to accept a quest or decline it. Take "Discerning The Transmundane" for example: you can always tell Septimus Signus to shove it if you're playing as a good character, or if you're particularly evil you can accept his quest.

It's this accepting and declining of quests that make your character who they are. There's really no need to have conent locked out or have some score to keep track of. It's allowed me to create wildly different, multi-faceted characters, thanks mostly to the shear amount of content on offer. I'm looking forward to playing a pacifist Khajit based on my pet cat, and a Breton serial killer - Sutclif, The Riften Ripper. No other games even come close to that level of 'roleplayability.'

I don't mind trolling, a bump is a bump. (;
*moderator note: don't do that see this rule:


It's up for the real game designers to come up with something that's balanced, intuitive and eloquent for players so that they can understand it and play with it. Some quests could have more dramatic effects than others.

@.joe.

Great post, I can definitely see the argument, but I think it's too black and white. In Skyrim's end of the extreme you simply end up playing a single playthrough that does it all, or multiple that do selected few. And in any case, the world can't react to you in any way, which has a dramatically negative impact on immersion.

Also, there's a gross imbalance between the "main questlines" story and the randomly generated fetch quests story and rewards. What does one really gain from doing a burglary job for the thieves guilds? Or clear a bandit camp for the bounty?

It's very anticlimactic to progress the main questline up to the point where you're announced a Dovahkin, and then treated as a whelp within companions. This is why I think the character should be the summary of all the choices done in quests, rather than have isolated quest experiences that feel somewhat meaningless to the world as a whole.

I think Skyrim offers tools to find that middle ground between alignment and freedom. You could start off as an evil character, do a quest that flips you over the edge and continue as a good character, doing generic quests that then give you your reputation back.

If your idea of 'wildly different, multi-faceted characters' stems from being able to hit the esc button to abruptly end conversations you don't like, then I think you may be fooling yourself. Haven't you noticed that a lot of quests don't even have a 'No thank you, sod off you evil fellow' option?



I can think of one. Hint: It was released before The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion but after The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall...

Edit: I know the above sounded a little rude and I didn't quite mean it to be. But in response to .Joe. I really think that you're using your very active imagination to give yourself these great experiences and characters. This is a credit to you, not necessarily Skyrim or Bethesda. Think about it 'Sutclif the Ripper' will never be talked about by the people of Riften. No NPC in the game will gasp in fear as they whisper about the 'Riften Ripper', and if you commit enough murders then pretty soon Riften is a town of guards and NPCs too important for the game to risk you killing them. There's not any quest, infrastructure, faction, or in-game anything to support the idea of Sutclif the Ripper, it's all in your head, which just means that you're making up for the game's shortcomings with your great imagination.

One point I would like to make is that Skyrim is a "real" RPG. RPG stands for Role-Playing-Game, Role-Playing means you assume the "role" of the character and players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, acting through a process of structured decision-making or character development. Skyrim offers this and I disagree that it is more of an exploration game, but I do agree there needs to be a lot more choices in quests and offer more options to enhance the Role-Playing experience.

There is no structured decision making at all and this needs to be addressed, something that can be done as I read on gaming site that the devs of Mass Effect 3 may change the entire ending of the game. So if Beth really wanted to they could add more into quest decision making rather than Kill Cams that add nothing to the game.

I agree with you, skyrim just doesnt feel like a good "RPG" that doesnt mean its a bad game, its still one of my top 3, but still a RPG should be more RPG then FPS.
one thing i hated about this game was the forbidden legend quest, once your player has one of the amulets he automatically knows where the next one is WTF???!!
it should be much deeper, sure sure skyrim has a TON of quests, but thats not always a positive thing since the quests arent even that deep

That's my main problem with Skyrim.

Questing needs much more variety.

Amen, brothers and sisters! Can I get a witness!

Yes, Skyrim is a great adventure/exploring/tourist game, and an average fighting game, and an awfully crappy RPG/questing game. There is no reason it (future TES games) can't be great at all of those aspects. None of them are mutually exclusive.

Of course it's up to the real game designers but it's also up to us, the fans, to let Bethesda know what we like, want and helpful suggestions. That way they have something to build on.

Very good post. I hope the devs read this and (why not?) participate in these discussions, now that the game is finished, sold and played I don't see why they don't talk to their fans more often.

They'll be busy working on the MMO

It's been discussed pretty thoroughly with many saying the game lacks depth and substance once the more significant adventures are played through. I find it interesting that with Oblivion, many said the questlines were too lengthy and a bore. Now with skyrim, we've an inverse, they are too short and lack substance. Damned either way is Bethesda.

I do think it was a mistake to spoon feed so many quests to your character, that you practically gag at them. Sometimes all you need do is walk through a door, and guess what, you've initiated a quest via text just splattering across the screen. It's a cheap trigger. I do think Bethesda tried to mix it up with the quest launches, but the random generated quests, just come across as , well, mechanical !

How about meeting an NPC in a cave, having the adventure, then moving on. The character then re-appears sporadically , maybe to save your Ass, maybe you save them, or maybe it's just another chance encounter. There's some of this, but it's so hollow in its execution, and so infrequent, that no sense of connection is made.

The followers are thinly veiled automotons, and have no character development or backstory to flesh them out. Those you discover in dungeons, come off a little better, but as the hours go by, you realize they have no hope of depth or growth in personality. Would it be so hard to have questline adventures written which would flesh them out better, and create a sense of mutual connection? It happens, but its the result of random circumstances more than anything else, and pretty much battle related.

Yes, but what you are doing, is just doing all the roleplaying in your head. Congratulations on having a really good imagination, it's a worthy attribute. Your version of 'roleplaying' involves simply choosing not to do things. Not doing quests, not doing things with your char (pacifism, etc.), and so on. It's purely in your head, because the game quests sure dont encourage or actively facilitate it. Everything is either do it and get the single canned result no matter what, or don't do it and get no result. What the OP and so many others of us would like to see, is at least some of the game's quests encouraging roleplaying by actually providing *active options* in them that allow for different ways to approach, react to, and resolve the quest givers and the things they want you to do. And not just the quest givers, but also the NPC's who may be the fulcrum of the quest objective, in many cases. Instead of just going and killing some NPC, you may choose the option to talk to them instead, and evolve a different course of action due to new options that they may have if you talk to them, etc. Perhaps the original quest giver was an evil SOB, and you could either choose to also be evil and get paid to kill his target, steal his item, or whatever- or you could choose to double-cross them or even help their victim to turn the tables and have your char do a good deed instead.

And all of these choices could affect how you are treated by factions, single NPC's, town populations, quest givers, random encoumters. etc. Right now, I'm playing my third character in Skyrim, and I dread even bothering with so many of the quests, as I've done them already once or twice, and no matter what, if I do them again, the result will be exactly the same as it was with the other chars I've played, no matter what mental 'roleplaying' gymnastics I might employ. Samo-samo. No variations, no different endings, no branching opportunities. Just the same go there, kill that, come back, get 100g or potion of whoopdedo. B_o_r_i_n_g. The replayability would be SOOO much better if the questing system actually lent itself to that purpose, and wasn't just a means to send you haring off to check out the cool scenery you've already checked out.

As for no other games coming close to Skyrim for it's level of 'roleplayability', I had to seriously LOL at that.

I approve the OP's Message, and really have nothing to say that hasn't be said via OP

Well, with Skyrim, Bethesda did a beautiful job in putting more variety and detail into the game world, and dungeons. T'was a big complaint with Oblivion. (Love to see what an Ayleid Ruin would look like in the new graphic scheme!) So with TES VI, Bethesda should concentrate on improving quest story lines, seeking more depth within the writing and graphic execution of each tale. But they may need a new game engine to pull it off tho....

riting, and character development.

No fully fledged quests will be out for months.

1. Updates and patches break quests. New versions of popular mods break quests (ie. script extenders.)
2. Making quest mods is a huge task. Waiting on voice acting along can take months. Writing can take a few weeks, building and scripting work within the CK can take months, testing takes another couple of months.

Really if you're waiting on anything big and expansive, you're gonna have to be patient.

An old game I had put you in the role of a fighter pilot it was also a strategy game allowing you to control and plan the campaign. If you went on a mission to bomb a bridge to stop enemy tanks crossing a river but your bombs missed. Then the enemy tanks would role across the bridge and give your infantry a hard time. You could plan a new mission to hit the bridge or forget about it. The point is as the game played in real time there was consequences to actions something which skyrim is largely missing.

(un?)fortunately they're not doing the said mmo, it's a different studio.