As the 1st hit the cap let's continue...

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1532932-choices-and-consequences/page-4#entry24276090

Bethesda's got to choose their battles. They could incorporate time limits, or lock you out of questlines based on your actions, or myriad other things. And those would be meaningful consequences in themselves. But Bethesda ought to be thinking of consequences in the context of a "dynamic open world" where "player freedom remains the top priority".

To me, that's less about making consequences meaningful by making them absolute and harsh, and more about making them noticeable changes in the setting. So, if you did some kind of trade-related quest, you might see the economy (prices, caps, and inventory of the shops) in one town improve or get worse. Or, your decisions in faction-related quests could improve the kind of equipment they roll with or the difficulty of quests for a rival faction.

They should also expand on the Radiant Story system, and use it to give more reactivity to little things. Having random/quasi-random encounters triggered through trivial choices (and especially failures, like getting caught stealing) helps to make the world just a little more interesting.

And if they can give us outcomes that motivate us to change the way we play the game, I'll be very pleased. Like, "egads, I shouldn't be svck a jerk all the time" or "there's no point in being the good guy any more, the wasteland has broken my spirit".

If the consequences involve time limits, I'm out. I have enough time constraints and deadlines to meet in real life and sure don't want them in my games. In my games I like to take my time and prioritize my own time.

I do like consequences for bad choices in quests however. They need not be monumental it can be as small as being disliked in an entire area of the game because someone saw you steal something or making the wrong choice in a quest prevented you from being able to trigger another quest or your actions and choices causing the death of a character you wish was still around.

But time limits make me angry most of the time in a game.

I think there's a place for time limits in games. I thought Daggerfall did it pretty well; although that's mostly because all of the quests were repeatable and failure only meant losing faction reputation and whatever the offered reward was (which could be made up by, hey, completing more quests successfully). And generally by the time I realize I won't be able to complete a quest in time, I've already collected enough loot during the quest to not really want to reload.

I think time limits can add to the game if done for the right reasons and are made crystal clear.

Certainly a burning barn deserves a time limit.

If you choose to ignore it for a few days, then when you come back it should be a smoldering pile of ashes with a few bones sticking out.

F4 is so built for replayability, I'm hoping certain faction choices will lock out some of the other faction content.

That is choosing to back one side for certain major issues does have some form of visible consequences.

I'm planning two play throughs already.

The first is Howard the ex soldier who used the GI bill to get a comp sci degree and the second is as Nora, a very smart power armor engineer and designer.

I want to see what differences the six of the protagonist makes, but I'll likely back different sides to see how much certain choices change the game.

Hopefully the differences between factions won't be totally black and white.

Me too, but just last night I was playing MGS Ground Zeroes and there was a mission that had a time limit but didn't indicate it. Being a stealth game I took my time setting things up perfectly, but then the game told me the targets were about to leave the base. I found out that meant only a matter of a few minutes, and with my last checkpoint just before that my only other option was to restart the entire mission. Stealth when out the window which annoyed me a bit but at the same time it was fun to be forced to figure out some other way to complete the objective because that's my job, it felt very real.

Of course that's a totally different kind of game and a totally different kind of time limit, it's not like I was off doing something and that other mission expired because I took too long, it's an isolated instanced situation. The only similarity would be the realism factor. In an RPG you have a lot of mini-stories or quests that you can neglect for so long it's no longer realistic, like that NPC sitting there waiting for ages or whatever .

But if I had to choose between time limits or other types of consequences, if I could only have one type, I wouldn't choose time limits, especially in a big RPG like Fallout.