I have a level 30 Orc who hasn't done jack with the main quest. Hasn't touched it. Recently started doing Legion quests and realized the Legionnaires have a funny way of greeting me. "Dragonborn, huh? So was it your mother or father that was the dragon?" No shouts learned. No word walls touched. No dragons slain. Nevertheless, my Orc mercenary is apparently Dragonborn. Why? Because.

So I'm thinking "holy crap that's a disappointingly pathetic amount of effort put into making the game recognize your character," because as anyone who's completed a faction quest chain (or the main quest for that matter) knows, NPCs don't exactly seem aware of your standing. But whatever, shrug it off, keep going about my day. Then while running around, I get attacked by a group of Thalmor agents. I think "wtf??" I'd never seen the Thalmor automatically be aggressive before. These came up as giant red dots and seemed to be coming straight for me. Sure enough, a fight ensues and once I kill them all off wondering why the HELL the Thalmor are attacking a random Orc mercenary, I check their bodies and find a note declaring me to be a MASSIVE THREAT to the Thalmor Dominion that must be executed. MY CHARACTER HAS NEVER INTERACTED WITH THESE GUYS IN HIS LIFE.


Skyrim has a beautiful landscape yes.
There's plenty to do, yes.

But I think Bethesda should be absolutely ashamed of the work that's put into making the world react to your character. AND the length of the faction quests. This isn't the first time it's happened, no. "Ah, you must be the Arcane University's newest recruit" is still fresh in my memory. The thing is though, those same Battlemages also recognized you as Arch-mage. The fact that they'd call you Arch-mage AND the new guy suggested that a dev simply forgot to deactivate the first line once a certain quest stage was met. It suggested that the devs ATTEMPTED to do it right, but made a mistake. This though? With my character automatically being an enemy of the Thalmor and Dragonborn? This is like they just couldn't be flipping bothered to give that event or that line of dialog a trigger. No, clearly making sure random rocky ledge #2467 looks REALLY nice was more important than adding a simple trigger.

At least PRETEND you're trying... :sadvaultboy:

..it's pretty clearly just a snarl in the files somewhere relating to status and greetings. Not some sort of sinister desire on the part of Bethesda to annoy you. Why do people feel the need to blow everything out of proportion?

I'm sorry but is there a point to this post?

Like seriously. It should be clear what I meant.

I just don't like when Arcadia tells me "Maybe a strong nord like you doesn't need a healing potion" when I'm a dark elf...

You obviously did not read a single word I posted. Otherwise you would see that I agree with you, but I am saying that your title makes no logical sense given the description of your problem. You ask a question, and then describe a different issue.

And your being hyper-defensive about it makes you what, exactly? Right? The winner? Better than me? Cool your jets

We pay big bucks, and for those bugs we expect quality. What is stopping me for choosing a different game? In product priority i would drop this in the top 10 simply because it affects gameplay so much.

So? Where did I say you didn't agree with me.

I said your post was pointless because all it did was clarify something that everyone could already figure out for themselves. I made that post because I don't like people being anol about things that are so obvious from the get-go; it's just a waste of breathe and a waste of time, as is this conversation we're now having.

So do me a favor and next time I make a post where I say "she is you're mother," please don't bother responding with "STAND BACK EVERYONE WHILE I CLARIFY THAT HE ACTUALLY MEANT TO SAY 'YOUR' INSTEAD OF 'YOU'RE.'" No I didn't, we all caught that already.

Those are bad, but the one that irks me the most is when I shoot a bandit in the face, run back while I'm still hidden in the shadows, and then after he walks like 15 feet to look for whoever just fractured his skull and pierced his brain with a projectile weapon, he says "ah, I guess it was nothing." as if he thought he heard a skeever running around or something. "Nevermind the arrow sticking out of my head, it was probably just rats!"

the AI is pretty bad.

Also, how about the Thalmor react to you differently if you're a High Elf, Orc, Nord etc?"

the fact that NOBODY in the entirety of skyrim reacts to what happens at the end of the dark brotherhood quest really ruins it for me.

Agree completely with the OP.

Other instances are guard comments along the lines of " I see you prefer light armor..." when I'm wearing all heavy armor, or "I see you prefer one-handed weapons like me instead those heavy two-handed ones..." when the guard is wielding a big warhammer. Its piss-poor scripting logic in the AI dialogue selection.

What is particularly annoying is that we saw all this in Oblivion years ago and it should have been fixed. That's why they should be ashamed.

They probably were going to make NPCs react appropriately to the PC, but then they realized that this isn't as high priority as finisher moves or 3D models of crap in your inventory.

wait, what?

Think about what you said for a second:

"Simple solution get rid of lots of the spoken dialogue, there is no way they are ever going to be able to have enough for people like you lot. Have just a greeting or something contextual that is flavour for the character then the rest just text. That way they could have a lot more dialogue, which adds to the game, and they can be more creative with it."

Did you think about this, at all? You are saying that the fact that speech is included is the issue- audible dialogue is the problem. Can you try to explain that please? I mention it because the game still needs to "know" what to show for text instead of audible dialogue. The game will still choose a file to use for interaction with the player. Avoiding the use of audible dialogue doesn't have anything to do with the issue. If text was being displayed, the text would still be the 'wrong' text. Your simple solution doesn't work.

The actual simple solution for the OP's case is to not allow the game to mention 'Dragonborn' until the player does something to merit it, whether text or audible dialogue is used.

Using mostly text means less work and effort, which means more dialogue and options. Audible dialogue is the problem because it will never never be enough, it will never be able to meet the needs of the people. You could provide tons more contextual text dialogue at a fraction of the effort and cost of audible dialogue.

Using mostly text means less work and effort, which means more dialogue and options. Audible dialogue is the problem because it will never never be enough, it will never be able to meet the needs of the people. You could provide tons more contextual text dialogue at a fraction of the effort and cost of audible dialogue.

Fallout New Vegas did a better job using voices and they had a shorter development time than Skyrim, and a smaller team too I think. It wasn't impossible for Bethesda to get this right, they just had their priorities elsewhere.

But with text you still have to match the response to the situation. Text in and of itself doesn't fix what you say it does. Now you're tossing in other things like "well it takes less time". Fine, but saving that time still doesn't fix the problem. Likewise less cost doesn't mean anything; the underlying issue was not addressed.

The problem is that they forgot to make sure that the dialogue matched what the player has done or has not done. I'm sorry but your solution doesn't do that.

You're not thinking this through

"I work for Belethor, over at the general goods store."
"I know, you've said that to me approximately 300 times, including 3 times in the last five minutes. I've bought hundreds of items and spent 300,000 gold at the store and you've been there while I did it."
...
"I work for Belethor, over at the general goods store."

Bandits saying "must've been the wind" to an arrow in the face, however, is a long-standing issue that I'm surprised they haven't fixed. Exact same thing that happened in Oblivion. Once an enemy takes damage, they should at least stay on alert status until they find you or they die. Really baffled that this is still happening in Skyrim.

Just look at the joining date of these complainers..... "joined today" "joined yesturday" They talk talk talk, they should make it better then just to talk....

Well crap.

There goes my mercenary roleplay.

He's saying that recorded dialog consumes time and space. You have to find voice actors, manage their payroll and recording dates etc, then you have to conserve on what's said because you have limited time and space for what you can record. With written dialog? You skip a ton of steps, you can fit a LOT of text into one MB of space and suddenly you've freed up so much time to write more. Furthermore, "the book was better." There's no reason why text can't be as thoroughly enjoyable as an actor can, since wtf, I'm sure everyone knows "the book was better."

I know what he said. I read his posts.

What you're both ignoring is that the problem is not with the complexity or size restrictions or cost or time investment with text vs. voice acting. Those things all do take time money and effort but they do not address the issue. the problem is not "we spent so much time effort and money on voice acting that we decided to not fix this thing that could have been made better with text dialogue". You might feel that this is the problem, but I'm telling you, on one hand that's your assumption, and on the other, even if it were somehow true, the time money and effort doesn't automatically go to fix any issue at all.

The problem is with design. They forgot to allow the game design to handle a situation in which the player has not "become known as" Dragonborn

Skipping steps doesn't fix the design hole. Using text options doesn't make them realize they made the mistake.

- It's VERY annoying when I'm having an actual conversation with another NPC, or even worse, I'm listening to another conversation between other NPC, and suddendly this random idiot runs into me and cover what I'm paying attention to with his inane blather *repress a urge to slaughter*