Yeah but take a page from WoW making basic quests more fun with gimmicks etc.

Actually Game Informer talked about the Radiant Story/Radiant AI systems that will make certain quests and certain actions available through your allignment with people. Like for Assassins instead of being assigned a random target from your employers, certain people will give you contracts to kill somebody for reasons like "They slept with my wife" and such. Also, if you get somebody to have a high disposition towards you, you can take things off the table in their house, or walk in in the middle of the night and they won't be mad, as opposed to somebody with a low disposition. Also, also, if you kill somebody their wife or daughter or father or brother or son or whoever may attempt to exact revenge one way or another.

Oblivion did have very few quests with multiple solutions, but often, which one you chose really did not have much concequence. One example was the quest Paranoia, the one with Glarthir, where he would ask you to follow people he thought were spying on him and see what they were doing. And you could tell him whether they were spying on him or not, regardless of which answer was the correct one. If you told him at least one of them was spying on him, he would tell you to kill that person, at which point you could do so, or report to a guard that he needs to be arrested. If you told him that no one was spying on him, he would think you were working with them and would attack you. But that's one of the rare examples of a quest where you get a choice that does actually have an effect on things, as depending on what you do, several NPCs might end up dying. in Bruma, there's one quest that gives you a choice but really gives you're choice little in the way of concequence as one character involved will die whether you choose to kill her or not, so I don't think it's a good example of a multiple choice quest.

And yes, I do think that having quests that give players a choice would be beneficial to Skyrim. After all, the Elder Scrolls has always made freedom a major selling point, yet in Morrowind and Oblivion, said freedom partained to who you would be, where you would go, and what quests you would do, but once you chose to do a quest, there was really little choice in how to it. I'd like to see more choices in quests in general, and see my choices have more concequence, considering that Radiant Story is supposed to be a means of tailoring quests to the player based on your choices, though, I think we might see more of this in Skyrim. Because for such a system to work, there must obviously be choices worth making.



Or just avoid that kind of quest entirely if possible, since let's face it, gathering mushrooms really doesn't usually make for compelling questing. Though if they MUST have quests like that they should make it so that if you're told to find so many of a generic item, any of said item will do, and you could potentially find it before accepting the quest, I mean things like Ajira's boring mushroom and flower quests in Morrowind, where you could go out hunting for the appropriate ingredients in the regions where they would grow, or you could try shopping around at alchemists, if you happened to have them before accepting the quest, you could even just hand them to her right there without needing to go and look for them. If someone tells me that he just wants scales, there's no reason it should have to be scales found only on a specific type of slaughterfish that spawns only in a specific place AFTER I've accepted the quest.

Oddly, I've played FO3 more times than I have FO:NV (tried to start a second play, didn't get anywhere). Because NV doesn't have the "open world" thing going for it..... yeah, you can lead the Main Quest to alot of different places in the end, but it makes the basic game itself alot more..... linear?.... than OB/FO3. (Sort of. Yeah, the MQ in those two games were more set-in-stone than FO:NVs.... but there was more freedom to just run off in other directions. FO:NV was so focused on it's complex MQ that the rest of the world suffered for it. OB and FO3, I can start a new game and just wander off in some direction to see what's over that mountain and screw around. FO:NV..... you kind of have to follow the MQ down the highway. At least til you're far enough along, well equipped, and high level enough to survive the non-leveled encounters that are off the quest rail.)

THIS! And howabout being able to abandon quests in general!

They need a lot more quests that the player can actually fail, and have to live with. Like say, if you want to change a person's Disposition toward you, you can "Volunteer" to go and do some job they need done. Radiant Story grabs a cool template, assigns you a job (through the NPC you are trying to Persuade) and sets the conditions. You go and complete the task, their Dispostion towards you raises a little or a lot depending on the value of the assignment given. If you fail, you don't raise their Disposition, and they won't give you any more work for a week or so. So if you need their help to continue your quest, you really won't want to fail their mission for you because then you'd have to wait a while to try again.

Failure is not something the Main Quest threads are ever (apparently) prepared to deal with. There need to be some branching algorythms and contingencies prepared for more allowance for failure in Main Quest threads. You get one chance to succeed for certain quests and even if you reload your game, the failure was recorded into the last save automatically, meaning you can't try it again. One chance for these kinds of missions. You live with the consequences. But the game has backup plans for what to do if you fail these rare instances. So that you take another path, one where you can still succeed overall, just not as spectacularly as you would have. And you know it.

Then you will have a lot more interesting dynamic at play because the successes you win will feel all the more large and more grand.

There be GLORY here!

Yes yes YES!

cake :brokencomputer: