In all of the TES games so far, there has been a lack of choice. Your character is always the righteous hero on a noble mission, and there has been no choice in quests as to whether you want to do the good thing or the bad thing, and take whatever consequences are associated with your choice. If this factor would be added to the game, so much more replay value could be added. For instance, in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, if you could ONLY be the Hero, and not the Villain, the game would be dull, and I doubt I would have played it more than twice or so. Now I doubt lack of choice would dumb TES V down as much as it would KotOR or Mass Effect, but it could only make the game better as I see it. I would only want it done if it was done well though, it's much easier to choose to take the money from the already poor family if the voice acting is crappy and it's unbelievable. Beth did a good job with Fallout 3 and the choice and consequences (I felt like a complete ass after I burned Harold and Herbert), but you don't even need to really take a good and evil approach on it, you could still make it so the character's intentions are good, but how he/she executes the mission is different, like how Mass Effect did with the Renegade/Paragon roles. Just a hope that Beth would do this.

Edit: I actually take it back about the main character always being the noble hero, it's just a bit... odd. You just get done saving Cyrodill from the Daedra, and destroying a huge demon, now it's time to go kill some innocents for the Black Hand. A bit... anticlimactic I suppose? I would still like there to be evil factions to join and good factions, but possibly make them all not join-able unless you have a certain Karma (or equivalent of it, however you want to scale the good and bad) . Just something to ponder about.

I want results, and consequences....like Towns melting because you didn't kill the bandits in the cave nearby soon enough, or help them.

A lot of games with epic storylines have issues really allowing the hero to be a villain.

In Oblivion no matter what you did outside of the main quest you also helped Martin (rather Martin helped you) beat back Mehrunes Dagon and bring some semblance of peace to the kingdom.

In Fallout 3 no matter what you did outside of the main quest you also defeated the Enclave. Granted you could poison the water in this game...but it had minimal actual effect.

It'd be awfully hard to make an ES game where you could really take an evil or even just bad path through the main quest. For one thing they'd have to have that as a primary and essential focus for the MQ from the very beginning.

Would be nice though. Perhaps in ES VI the MQ could involve something more along the lines of siding with different political ideologies, one of which would be "I am your new god, you will all bow to me or die" or perhaps just weakening all sides and causing as much unnecessary bloodletting as possible.

Like I said, it doesn't have to divert from the main story-line, you could just take a more renegade approach to the situation. Principal stays the same either way, but the methods change.

For instance, you need to find an amulet someone has. You talk to the person and you know they have it but they aren't going to give it to you. You can try to talk it out of them with a high persuasion skill. Snoop around their house and find clues of its whereabouts. Or, you can simply roughen the guy up some and show him you mean business, but have to deal with the law afterwords.

That does sound good.

It always struck me as kind of curious that the little Imperial turd could send my hulking dreadfully armed Nord/Orc off on an adventure in return for his little trinket.

It'd be nice to have an option to say,

"No, you go off on the long trek to deliver your little letter. I'm gonna take the amulet now and have my way with your wife."

Not like in Fallout. Choices are fine, but no huge "good or evil path" nonsense.

And please, no morality meters. There's nothing more absurd than having dialogue choices unavailable because you haven't leveled up your goodness or evilness to X degree. My character should have free will.

even though the overal story was the same you could pick and choose your path in mass effect and come out at the end with very dramatic differences in how the world or in their case the galaxy turns out. dont see why they couldnt do somthing similar in TES V.

That's what I'm saying. Though we don't exactly know what the choices will affect until the third one comes out.

Sarcasm? Irony?

No seriously, Mass Effect got nothing in C&C. And what it's even more funny, is when you import your saves to Mass Effect 2 and all you get is e-mails in-game.
The dialogue wheel in ME is just stupid, it's the same asnwer for everything in different tones, sometimes it's even the same dialogue if you choose a different reply then you did before.

They don't affect the ending dramatically, the last choices in the last mission just decides who dies and nothing else.

Games that did well in terms of choice and consequence are usually those who approach a morally grey path:

-New Vegas (e.g choose between the megalomaniac Mr. House who seeks to conquer New Vegas but bring advancement to it, the bureaucratic NCR with all it's politics and corruption, or the mighty Caesar's Legion who uses cruel means to bring a greater good)
-The Witcher (e.g pretty much every big side quest or main quest in it provides two difficult choices for instance, save the witch who appears to have controlled the mind of various people to lead them to kill others or let the townsfolk burn her even though they are criminals, liars, rapists and smugglers)
-Most of the classic RPGs

this is off topic but screw KARMA!! anyone with me?..

Yes and No.

It is something that is quite difficult to implement well, but if well implemented it would be pretty awesome.

If I kill a necromancer and it is a positive karma gain it shouldn't be a negative karma gain when I loot his house.

I'd prefer a system where the consequences of your actions only became known later, so you might kill someone and only later find out that his cause was just...

But karma is likely the closest we're getting to that anytime soon...and I don't think ES will implement it.

Don't need and "Fallout w/ Swords" comparisons being made...though there shouldn't be many of those anyway since they're using a new engine....assuming their new engine isn't just a minor improvement over Oblivion.

so in your mind there is no difference at all in playing the rogue versus the pansy guy..........being that i played the game twice and it didnt feel repetitive im gonna have to disagree. also as i said the overall arch isnt going to change but you can make how you approach solving it much more enjoyable than the "heres my amulet now go fetch" crap that we got in oblivion. do you want to help skyrim out of pure self preservation, greed, altruism, to save a loved one........hell you could be an assassin that needs to get close to the king and what easier way than saving skyrim from dragons.

your choices at the end or ME have alot of impact on the next game. everyone hates humans on my ME2 game cause i let the stupid council die in glorious flames (i hope it took a long long time for them to roast to death)

id be perfectly content with choosing your start and equipment like some rpgs used to do, arcanum for example. what i dont want to see is that im a prisoner.....once again..... :facepalm: and i immediately run into the quest giver and for some mysterious reason im the only person in the universe that can save everyone.........its just stupid.

Yes I want more C and C for quests but I don't want multiple Main Quest endings. Thats the only thing I don't want them to change.

There is a few problems with it though if you choose the bad story when in the lore of TES says good prevails what would happen is you would be doing things outside of the lore an example of this would be in oblivion instead when your in the mythic dawns lair instead of doing what everyone expected you to do you join them then when oblivion breaks loose in the imperial city and everyone dies. By making a game like this you'd be going outside the lore of TES when instead the lore says oblivion is pushed back and good prevails. You would have to make it instead good still prevails and while you were in the mythic dawns lair you join them but someone else goes in and takes it. Or maybe you attempt to kill martin while in kvatch but someone saves him. The problem with it basically means you either go outside of the lore or you play as a minor character that doesn't really do anything but help a bit and instead of using karma like in fallout they could use the allignment choices in D&D Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, Chaotic Evil.

Daggerfall. No morality meters, when you screw a peasant, the peasants like you less. It's not good or bad, it's "bad for them". Also, I believe DF had about 6 different endings. You could help mannimarco destroy the world (not really destroy the world, I'm fuzzy on the plot, it's been a while). I think that's what OP wants, no? DF had so much potential.

There was a book about the morality of magic in DF. "Destruction could be thought a bad thing, since it destroys. But if it destroys an evil thing or protects innocents from bad people, how is it evil?" ( <-- paraphrased) People hate. People help. not "Some people hate, other people help." The maniacal robber baron bent on taking over the world isn't evil, he's "selfish". The maniacal robber baron bent on DESTROYING the world could be called evil, maybe. Some people say robbing people is a good thing (ask the IRS). Its a matter of perspective. Evil is more abstract than "whoever hurts you is evil" the robber-baron is helping people, how can he be bad? (he's helping himself anyways) the IRS pays for welfare, is welfare evil? (I disagree with their means and motives, but I wouldn't call them evil). Morality shouldn't be an issue, only God cares if you're a good person. Religion in games is good RP, games trying to tell me the decisions I make are evil is preaching.

In my opinion, the best way to avoid this problem is to have 2 main quests. Related to each other, but through prophecy you shall play the evil part, or the saint part.
Both in Lore shall prevail, in their own tasks. I think it could be done

This

Heck, the Witcher was all about siding with a side that svcks, or completely morally ambiguous situations. You have extremely racist humans (a bunch of whom don't even like you) who push around the non-humans for the lulz and to get a chubby, and racist non-humans who are terrorists, harm innocent civilians without caring and to see humans back in the stone age. There was no black or white, just a complete morass of grey. There is also hardly any neutrality in most situations.

In other words, no good or evil. Only what is good for side X and what is good for side Y and what is good for side Z.

Can't really agree with the OP, because unless I'm severely misreading (which is always a possibility, to be sure) it sounds like a request for just more of the same. More of what has infuriated me to no end in countless games- the claim made, in some phrasing or other, "Choose whether to save or destroy the world"- and the reality is "Choose to ride the main quest on its train rails to save the world as a shining hero, or to ride the same quest on the same rails and save the world as a foul-mouthed ill-tempered greedy jerk."

Been there and played that game more times than I care to count under more names than I care to count. And don't get me wrong here- I don't mind being railroaded into saving the world. Really, I don't. But it chaps my ass something fierce to be lied to and told "Be the hero or the villain" then be railroaded into saving the world and the only real choice is whether to be gracious about it or be a jerk about it.

Just once, even knowing the difficulties it would pose, I'd like to really have the option. To actually choose whether to save the world or take the Joker approach and watch it burn just because.


And with Phase I covered, Phase II:

Real consequences, just once, please? Instead of training wheels on the game, make it require a license, helmet, and training course because once you leave the gate your hand will not be held and real, meaningful consequences will be imposed. Again, the "more times than I can count"- someone makes some request, and you tell them off- which means they stand there and patiently wait until you come back later and offer it again? No, no, no, no, no! You calmly beg off until later, and they wait thus. You tell them off, and that quest is gone forever. If they're powerful (not to mention vindictive or spiteful, depending on the situation) enough, you might even be hunted relentlessly. Is actions having greater consequences than a stern look from someone really so much to ask? Nevermind that it works the other way as well...tell the Emperor to take a flying leap, he gives you a dirty look and waits for you to (inevitably) come around. Pick up an owned spoon, and here come the death squads bellowing "Stop right there, criminal scum!!"

tl;dr: Yes to choices and consequences, conditional upon the choices being real and the consequences being both real and proportional to their triggering choices.

Hey, the silverware may seem worthless, but they're needed to keep an empire on its legs. They're more valuable than you think.

In my opinion the most linear thing in Oblivion was the main quest. It leads you on a railway from second one to the end. The "be whoever you want" is only available in do/don't do side quests and join/don't join factions. I think a new approach is possible, maybe in Skyrim, maybe in the future. My view is to basically melt the main quest into the game world to obtain a "flexible" main quest where you are really free to approach the story the way you want:

Change the main quest mechanics: so far the main quest is on a rail Q1>Q2>Q3.....>Qn. You only get to finish it if you do all the successive quests in the exact order the game asks you. The main quest "line" could be redesigned as main quest "circle". Imagine many concentric circles. The line of each circle is the border that advances you in the main story. At the very beginning you are in the center. You can take any path you want, you will still reach the first circle border. The first circle is a milestone that acknowledges that you have done what you need to advance the main plot. And so on, until you reach the biggest circle where the story ends.
I think this graphic theory needs an example.
Let's assume you start the game as prisoner, you are freed and given a very vague (or no) idea of what to do next. The game shouldn't tell you the entire story ahead in the first minute or so (remember Oblivion). Now you are in the middle of all the concentric circles. You can go wherever you want, join any faction you want. It's them that tell you details about what's happening in the province. So, you'll start assembly the story piece by piece as it is told by the people. The beauty in this is that you'll have many different angles of view for the same story to help you create your own view. If the first npc that you meet is the king, who also tells you that he dreamed of you, it feels like a huge spoiler, you are indoctrinated about who you are in the very beginning, who you will be and what you must do. If you are let alone in the world to search and find the main story yourself, you will have the opportunity to learn the events from various social categories of people. The warriors, the peasants, the merchants, the nobles will all have different approaches to the same events, so you will actually get to feel how the world feels about those events. This way you'll be able to choose who you want to help/join related to the main events.

Eg (first circle) You can pick a political career and join the local court to be errand boy for the prince until he trusts you enough to advance you to his personal guards. That is the moment you reached the first circle and the main story can go on (he sends you to negotiate with X);
Or
You can join the local bandits and earn their trust via quests until they promote you to some degree. That is the moment you reached the first circle and the main story can go on (they send you to steal from X);
Or
You can join the assassins and earn their trust via assassinations until they send you to kill X. That is the moment you reached the first circle and the main story can go on;
Or
You can choose the peaceful way of the trader, join the traders guild, work your way up the ranks, make good money until you are trustworthy enough to go do business with, guess who, X. That is the moment you reached the first circle and the main story can go on.

This X may be a person, a place, an object. It is the milestone, the trigger that confirms you are ready to advance the story. You may decide to save him or kill him, to steal from him or to help him, depending which way you came, sent by who. But at some point in ALL the possible paths, someone will send you to X and the game will know it's time to unlock the next events. You don't have to be good or bad, you don't have to complete specific quests in given ways, the only prerequisite to advance in the story is to just reach a rank/location/reputation level as whatever personality and social status you want.

This way you can actually be whoever you want and still beat the main quest and you can change your moral, legal, religious and political allegiances on the way, to adapt your role playing to the events. In Oblivion you don't adapt, you just execute orders.

I'm aware this circle system would require a lot more work from the devs, to continue the story aware of what you chose to do at every trigger point. It means more details, more options, more dialogue which is not bad I suppose. But I guess that's why a game like this takes 4 years of development, if only they are willing to focus on such features of freedom of choice instead of other technical improvements. As far as I am concerned, graphics wise the games have reached a stable highpoint. I don't want photorealism at least not in fantasy games. I think they could start improving the story/storytelling/freedom/consequences/roleplaying part because it's suffering in most of the games since the race for graphics wow-factor started.

I'd be happy if the had 3 different narratives for the ending like fallout 3, one mentioning the noble hero woh saved Skyrim, one mentioning the Mercenary who saved Skyrim and one mentioning the evil villian who saved Skyrim. Play whatever is appropiate according to their Fame/Infamy. At least that way even if you have to save Skyrim, you get the credit for being Evil, Neutral or Good.

To me, a good example of the kind of choice/consequence system I'd like to see more of in TES V would be similar to the one used in The Witcher.

I loved how your choices weren't simply "good/evil" rather morally grey and sometimes they could even backfire and take an unexpected turn. It was also nice how your choices weren't quickly shown, IE Something you did near the beginning of the game could have an affect on something much much later. This meant that your choices actually felt realistic and also that you had to stick with them, there was no simple "quicksave, make a choice, oh I don't like the outcome, quickload and go again."


There should definitely be no magical "good/evil" bar that tells each npc "oh this guy is EVILLLL!!1" your cohices should simply affect those people/story that it should logically affect, nothing more and nothing less.

There's a Nobel prize for game brilliance, right? Right? Because you need a nomination.

Are we talking here the ideal game or what :biggrin:
To be honest I don't think Bethesda can pull that kinda thing off (provided they wanted). Look at how things evolved from Tes3 to Tes4 in terms of linearity.