TES hasn't relaly been an rpg to set the bar when it comes to having lots of various choices that can greatly affect things within the game world. You have quests, you complete them or don't, play your character how you will but your choices during certain events didn't really have a long lasting impact or affect things greatly later on in the game.

I would like to see TES V make your choices in the game, how you handle certain situations and what choices you make throughout the game have an actual impact that ripples throughout the storyline of the game. Choices which aren't just simply "good/evil" like in many rpgs, but rather choices that are just in the grey.

For those that played The Witcher they did this part of the game great. Your choices actually felt like they had a large impact on the world, and the consequences of your actions might not even be known until much m uch later in the storyline (so you couldn't simply save, make the choice, then reload if you didn't like it).

I'd really like to see Skyrim have something similar. Make you feel lilke what choices you make, even on some small sidequest, could actually matter down the road in someway.


Imagine for example, you are starting out in the game and you come across a wounded guy on the side of the road. He asks for your help, but he admits he was wounded because he was stealing someones horse. Now if you choose to help him, later on down the road you end up coming across a murder scene on the city streets, and you see the same guy you helped who had just killed a guy. Likewise you can make the choice to not help him, in which case he dies. Then later on you end up getting attacked while traveling and find out it's the guys brother, who tracked you down and blames you for his brothers death.

So see, it's not a simple "good = good, bad = bad," evne doing the right thing (helping the guy) can still lead to something unexpected happening, just as in real life.

You're referring to Oblivion, yes?

I'm all for having player choices that effect events later on in the game, but I was never really a big fan of The Witcher's moral greyness. Whatever choices you made always ended up hurting someone close to you or generally causing a lot of mayhem and destruction, with little or no "greater good" achieved. It left me feeling very ambivalent and non-plussed when the credits rolled. I'd pick a cliched yet well told story of good vs evil over the Witcher style any day, to be honest.

it all depends on the morality of the decesion made, often times in oblivion i would accidently kill someone, and then reload a previous save not just because the character may have some value or worth, but because i felt as if it wasnt the right thing for my character to do

Lol I've done that too, woops! :rolleyes:

But I actually think you always got away with things like that too easily in Oblivion. No one mourns when people in the city die, and although it might not be important in Daggerfall size cities, there aren't really that many people in cities in Oblivion, I dare say someone ought to know each other and throw some sort of funeral service at least!

How about good, evil and anything in beetween? I'm fine with grey choices with not immediately apparent effects and long term consequences, but i also like the extremes, like ruining someones life just for my own amusemant without thinking about future consequences, or sacrafising a limb to save a kitten.

Bethesda has failed / completely missed theese kind of stuff from their games so far. Bioware USED TO be so much better at this (not anymore...), and in New Vegas my choices actually had long term consequences, but again while Obsidian did grey choices far better than F3 there were no options for the extremes. In fact it was almost completely impossible to be evil in NV. I slaughtered every non critical villages and ate their corpses, made every evil-ish choices possible and i still was the savior of the wasteland in the end.

It'd be good if your actions had a lasting effect on the game. If they could somehow measure the impact of what you've done based on the seriousness of the task.

I.e. Each 'quest' choice is labelled from 1-10 in magnitude. A level 1 would be a small task for an NPC and a level 10 could be a town affecting quest. If you fail or do something evil during the mission, then the radius of who knows and how people treat you could be measured against the 1-10. So if you fail the level 1, then only that particular NPC will be hostile towards you. If you fail a level 3, everyone in that house/bar etc. and so on up until level 10 whereby the citizens of that general area are off with you.

I think the example given was a bit nonsensical to be honest. However, it would nice to see quest choices affecting quests futher down the line or something like that. I'm not sure I'd like people attacking me at random because I happened to walk past their relatives in the wilderness though.

I liked how Shivering Isles offered multiple choices with most quests. I didn't like how most of the choices had no bearing on anything else in the game though.

I would like to see some side quests with multiple choices but no main quests. Multiple choices in the main quest would ruin the game specially since the main theme of the games are The Elder Scrolls: "The Elder Scrolls are Aedric Prophecies of unknown origin and quantity, the Elder Scrolls (whence the series takes its name) are, simultaneously, archives of both historic and future events." That's probably why none of the games in the series ever gave the player any real choices. I mean its pretty impossible to make a game about ancient prophecies when everyone can choose what ever outcome they want.

Something that was great in the Witcher was that you had to react in some dialogs and take an immediate decision, often before being really prepared to it and without all the cards in hand, as in real life. In Oblivion, you could too easily stop a dialog without any consequences to come much later when you feel prepared. In the Witcher, when you are urged to take a decision, you often have the choice to stay neutral, but not to say "I will come later to make my choice". And the best is that the neutral path is often interpretated badly by NPC who ask you to side them.
I have nothing against being able to play mister good guy or the psychopath baddy, but I think that in many situtations, it should not be that clear where is the good and where is the bad side. I think most baddies being part of the society know that wearing a red flag in their back saying "hey! I'm really evil" would probably end-up with a worrying outcome for them. Look around you, everybody pretend to be honnest, straight, generous and nice. I never heard someone telling that he is a selfish pervert.
I think it is a big part of RPG challenge : to overcome the appearances to find what is really lying behind.

Why cant we have all of them?

Sometimes I want to be good.

Somtimes I want to be bad.

Somtimes I want to be a little bit of both!

Nah, because being that we can do anything and everything from the main quest, It would not only diminish the main quest, but longevity of the game. I swear I don't want no light, dark, or grey. You know when you done wrong with your rep and a side of bounty on your head. Nor diffeent endings.

What? So having idifferent choices which affect various things throughout the game somehow affects the longevity, etc? That doesn't make sense. Which choices that actually mattered and not having direct-after consequences it would lead to both a more personal/unique story for each persont hat plays the game as well as replayability for longer longevity.