I played a lot of RPG's in the PC era but was away for them for a number of years. Can't stand JRPG's so skipped the Final Fantasies, never played the early console WRPG's. Oblivion was my first in a good, long time. It was a tremendously mixed bag. The open world was a jaw-dropping revelation and beautifully rendered but leveling was so broken the game was essentially unplayable. I gave up partway through the main quest out of frustration and boredom.

I recently played through Fallout 3 and am hacking and slashing my way through Skyrim. I'm enjoying myself a great deal but have some observations about storytelling.

Storytelling is an art, of course. Even when the facts of the story are established, it's one thing to read the dry facts and quite another to have a proper storyteller build them into a compelling narrative. And while those events might be unscripted, it's human nature to look for morals and themes. There's an art to the delivery, of doling out the details and keeping the audience hooked. Even everything the storyteller says is written down word for word, just reading the transcript still wouldn't be the same as experiencing it from him first-hand.

When playing pencil and paper RPG's, the DM is the storyteller. He can shape events, drive the story, and make sure that his willing victims will have an interesting experience. The story will flow in an orderly fashion.

Cracked has a great take on this.



You don't really experience this problem with a well-done shooter like Max Payne or the original Half-Life. The story is on rails. There's no question of who you are and what you're doing, you're doing it. The creators know that of everything they create for the game, you're pretty much going to see 100% of it on the first playthrough. Even for something like Grand Theft Auto, faffing about in the open world sandbox is only delaying the appearance of the next story mission. You can't do things out of sequence. You can't wipe out the boss' lair before you've ever met him. Just imagine trying to watch your favorite movie with the scenes jumbled and out of order. Try enjoying a joke when the punchline comes before the setup.

The problem with an RPG is that the creators want to give you choices. This means a serious amount of content that the average player will probably never see. For Fallout I hit Youtube to see the alternate consequences for my decisions since I wasn't planning on replaying the whole thing again.

But for all the branching dialogue trees and numerous places to go in Fallout, it ended up feeling a bit sparse because there was breadth but not depth. The options of what to do in Megaton got cleared out pretty early. There was never any need to talk to the locals again. Pretty much the only one I interacted with was Moira. No need to hit the bar again, no other quests generated from talking to people. But look, there's a group of vampires in the wasteland. There's a bug lady and robot guy fighting! And look, Rivet City! Except again, it's sparse.

I can understand the limitation with Megaton. You had the option of blowing it up. That would represent a lot of content the player would never see if he did it early. But by the same token, there really isn't much to lose from the meta-gaming perspective since the town doesn't have much to offer.

I'm about 30 hours into Skyrim and haven't seen even a fraction of what's there but I've seen the grumbles about there feeling like a lack of significance in the player's actions. I think this is compounded by just how many significant things are for the player to do in the game. You're not just Gordon Freeman here or some simple protagonist who can play nice or play mean. Even if you're dragonborn, if you play as a jerkface psychopath you could avoid the whole birthright thing and just be a bandit. But this brings us back to the problem of how much alternative content needs to be created to account for all of that. Anyone who becomes the master of a guild should be treated as such. If you have five guild quests, that's five reactions that must be crafted for every character you meet.

This isn't even getting into the problem of player leveling versus enemy scaling. Scaling is put in place to keep the game interesting even when the player is at a high level but get too good and you can still easily blow through stuff that was supposed to be more of a challenge. And keeping it challenging requires a bit too much meta-gaming on the part of the player. I know in retrospect that I wasted too many perk points on things that won't really pay off for me. A more linear approach could make this a little more sensible but it would also change what the game is.

I think if the developer remains completely committed to an open world with a wide range of "good" and "evil" actions, the depth will probably remain shallow simply because they're spread too thin trying to provide the breadth. I think that a better narrative flow would require a little more linearity.

Personally, I think I would like to see a little less put into random encounters I might never see for the sake of breadth and put more depth into the places I'll be the most. I like the idea of having a home base. In a game like Fallout, I'd like to see more to do in Megaton. Super-mutant raids, more quests from within town triggered by your progress through the game, etc. Have the place visibly change based on your actions. Rescue people from the Wasteland, get new NPC's. Improve the defenses, see a proper town guard setup, see patrols heading out into the wasteland. Spread some civilization. Some piss-poor town like Bigtown, share resources. You do that quest and the last time you interact with them is the Super-mutie raid. There's no followup.

I bring up Fallout because that's the last Beth game I played to the end. I suspect that none of this is happening in Skyrim either since most of the town quests I've encountered are one-offs from different people.

I don't know what most people are thinking when they say "I want to see the impact of what I've done in the game" but for me it would be the kind of thing where anyone who's played the game for 10 hours looking at my game a hundred hours in would say "Wow, what happened?" That could be from random statements of characters, cities, surroundings, etc. I'm a thane but have no idea the significance of that because it doesn't seem to have earned me any credibility with the people I talk to. I've seen mention that there's city sieges in the civil war storyline but I'm guessing it's not what I'm imagining. I'd want to see the cities in question devastated from the attack and then see them being rebuilt in the following months. I'm not sure if the engine is up to simulating the results of huge battles but I'd love to put that to the test.

I'm just not sure if there will ever be a way to satisfyingly reconcile the differences between linear and nonlinear storytelling. My suspicion is that the linear story will always be stronger than the nonlinear but the absolute freedom of an open world might make the trade-off sufficiently rewarding.

Yeah, much prefer the game not being on rails. Kind of the point of TES.

Read the topic title.
All I have to say is: Morrowind.

Lol, that was a hilarious quote OP. I'm just waiting for the CK to come out to bring sanity to Skyrim. I've already downloaded some "immersion" mods that really makes Skyrim fun. For example, your packing horse where you can put your loot; Wolves and Skeevers that either cowardly go away or are more cautious when they see you and have a random chance of attacking you; moveable bodies/objects! and much more. I love the modders. The CK isn't even here and already are creating magic.

This is a good thread an sums up my very thoughts as well.

Sadly, when the "city battles" take place, they're nothing more than a "changing of the guard" if you will. Things are burning superficially, and somethings get dented, but you zone, come back, and its all fine and dandy.

Fort battles are nothing more than scripted spawns that pop up in front of your face over and over, and the bodies disappear when they die to prevent consoles from exploding.

The depth is simply not here :cryvaultboy:

Just as a general commentary..... I play Bethesda games specifically for that broad-but-shallow ability to just wander around the world and find nifty crap. When I want depth, I play something more linear, with a more defined story. I suspect this is why I was disappointed by Fallout:New Vegas - since it was using Beth's Fallout 3 engine, I went into it expecting a similar Beth-style "open world" wanderer. But Obsidian isn't Beth, and made a more deep/less wide game (now, it was still somewhat open world, and had lots of quest branches... so it wasn't as narrow/deep as a more linear game. But it still wasn't quite Beth style.)

The problem with putting in so many options is that, with each option you add, the number of responses (and combinations of responses) that the world would need to truly reflect them grows exponentially. Which is really hard to program, both time and budget wise.

We've got the Witcher 2, which was depressingly linear, but had great graphics and story.
We've got Skyrim, which has dated graphics and weak story, and gives the depressing illusion of non-linearity.

I haven't played Witcher 2. Is it an open world, sandbox game?

Sounds to me like you were hoping for a mix between a world builder (sim city) a FPS (on rails story) and a RPG.


I would love to see a game combine what everyone has posted on these boards. Hell, if anyone made a game with the combined ideas of what people expected Skyrim to be, there would be no need to create any other game, ever.

Did you even bother reading the rest of his post. It's essentially "quality vs quantity" and in this case, Skyrim is all about quantity.

No, it's linear.

3 Chapters involving different "towns" and their "outskirts". Rich story, rich graphics. 100% railroad.
Sadly Skyrim has no rich story or graphics and, though open world on the surface, there are no true choices, and alas, 99% railroad.

Having an imagination helps a lot. 200+ hours and I'm still not bored at all or really scratched the surface questwise.

Railroading is an accurate description for the vast majority of video game rpgs in gaming history.

I can't stand replies like this. Not because they are intrinsically wrong, but because they apologize for terrible gameplay when suggesting this. A video game should not require much imagination outside of character building or strategy (if the genre requires it) to be enjoyable. You should not have to play inside your head imagining things that you could be doing instead of what you can actually do inside of this virtual world. They don't mix and if you're spending so much time in your head, why are you bothering even playing a video game? The medium is supposed to supply you with all of the necessary tools in the first place.




There has yet to be any kind of video game "RPG" that gets even remotely close to what can be done with PnP or just simple character acting. I've also never really felt the term "MMORPG" ever fit, even though I knew what to expect if a game was labeled as such.

yeah i stopped reading after last sentence but yeah its a little shallow but oddly i havent come across anything i already did but i have come across places where to of the questlines take place as in go here kill bandits and pick this up both being different objectives

Coming from a pen and paper rpg background myself. Yeah but I think there's an understanding that pen and paper has advantages over video games that it'll be a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time before things are even remotely comparable.]

Exactly this. Skyrim gives u the basic tools to enter a world of fabulous fanatsies and giant dreams. It's up to you to use you imagination a form a bridge to get you there.

I for one have not used my imagination like I am while playing skyrim since I was a kid.

It also helps to have a great modding community to keep adding things to help the fantasy world work a lil better. Hey just sayin Bethesda isn't perfect lol

I much prefer the freedom in doing things out of order, and it doesn't even happen to me all that often. The open-world freedom is what makes the Elder Scrolls special. It's a big reason why I play their games. Besides, don't you feel like a relative fictional bad-ass when you've already conquered/found whatever monumental thing it is on your own inititative before being asked for it? I do.

Which is completely a valid opinion to hold. What's not valid is someone who both says that and complains about a sparse world not reacting to your deeds. Because I really think you have to choose between one and the other. You can have epic storytelling done well on rails or you can have TES. I don't think it's possibly to truly do both. Willing to be proven otherwise.

Of course, there's a couple ways of looking at this. The failure of a lot of games is forgetting that story is something that provides context to gameplay rather than gameplay adding context to story. The worst games tend to feel like someone had a cinematic story idea and then some crappy and unenjoyable gameplay gets slapped in for an arcade sequence as an afterthought. The game itself is something to struggle through to reach the next bit of the story, assuming it's even interesting enough to endure. Looking at it the other way around, you feel like someone came up with a really cool game that's interesting to play and the story was built up around it to make it more interesting.

My favorite example of that approach is Star Control. Your first game had the ship to ship combat based on Space Duel and that was pretty fun. Space Duel was pretty much just the ships fighting. They built on the original by adding a strategic mode with the starmap and basic resource management. But even that could get old after a while. How to improve? Star Control 2 has an entire giant game with a novel's worth of storytelling to go with it. You're still basically coming back to ship to ship combat around a planet but now there's so much more at stake.

You strip the modern Bethesda games down to the basics and it's all about exploring deliciously detailed 3D environments and getting into fights, all the while tweaking your character to fit the style of play you prefer. That sort of thing could get boring after a dozen hours which is why all the other stuff is added in, to provide context. Everything added to the game should be about enhancing the enjoyment of the core play mechanics.

I'll take TES any day and here is why. Their story is in their breadth. TES has always been about being thrust into a world. Not into a story, a world. Hundreds of pages of books, land to be explored that can be measured in sq. mi. Lore galore. Not many games can give you that, though many can and will give you rails.

I COMPLETELY AGREE. TES is loosing what makes it great depth and feel. There is a reason why people are still talking about Morrowind and not daggerfall. Morrowind was a classic example how you can have good graphics and good story. We are loosig depth we are loosing what makes the Elder Scrolls better than the rest. Morrowind was the best of the Elder Scrolls (and that is not [censored] nostalgia talking it is fact) Morrowind made you believe you were in another world it svcked you into their world. It was a hostile land that was filled with hostile creatures. You could help the great houses and in return you would feel loyalty to them. I am not asking for much. I want a land that were you feel svcked in and not trying to be svcked in. Skyrim still feels like you are playing a game with a controller. The Elder Scrolls Morrowind is the greatest game in the history of the universe. you in completely. Skyrim was missing alot of things such as religious factions, political factions ,guilds(more than 2 locations), the feeling you are not wanted in that land. I just want depth and feel. Skyrim gave it to some but not to me. Morrowind gave you alot of tools for rp that you did not even have to try. Skyrim I do have to try to get svcked in. I would switch to pen and paper DnD but I do not know anyone who plays it.

The rest of the article is pretty good, too.

I haven't had time to hit Fallout Vegas yet but I like the idea of the hardcoe option, ammo having weight and needing to eat and drink. I think Dead is Dead play mode is a bit masochistic since Bethesda games are unforgiving and you really have to explore some areas in a "die, reload" fashion. But the whole idea of "save cheating" really makes me think about it. So, you want to take on a powerful enemy. You have a 25% chance of survival. What would you do in real life? Be careful as hell. What do you do in a game? Try, reload. Keep trying until you win. Save, continue. That's meta-gaming and abusing mechanics. Fine if that's how you enjoy the game but if you want realism, you come to realize you're ruining it for yourself.

I like having that sort of stuff as optional. That way both the casual players and hardcoe masochists can enjoy themselves in their own fashion. That's immersion.

That's what I was fearing.

There's stuff that's really hard to do for verisimilitude's sake like pathfinding, proper combat and the like but then there's other stuff that's not technically difficult but really makes things feel real. Years back there was an Aliens vs. Predator shooter. It had at the core a pretty good game but you could tell they released it too early because there were excellent play mechanics plunked down in a sparse world. You could play as Marines, Predator, or Aliens. The humans had a range of scripted responses based on just how terrifying you made your assault. Marines would freak out, spraying fire wildly. You'd hear them screaming and losing it. Some would drop their weapons and run. Civilians would run and cower, trying to escape your assault. Really not all that difficult to program but it felt so real. The whimpering cries of the cowering humans actually got to me. Made me feel like a monster. And it was a cheap, easy effect to pull off, too. The original Black and White managed that in a similar way. Terrible, broken game, waste of time for the most part. But the avatar monsters you owned were pretty realistic. And when you disciplined them, they reacted appropriately. You could smack the hell out of them and they would reel and cry and you felt like Joan Crawford. Not hard to program but it really took you beyond the feeling of playing a game, made you feel something emotionally rather than just dispassionately anolyzing play mechanics.

Along those lines, it's not all that difficult to create devastation models or to depict NPC's trying to rebuild. Might chew up a lot of developer hours but it's not beyond the ability of the technology.

Not exactly. I'm aware of the limitations of the technology. As a kid I was a big fan of RTS games. Played the demo for Supreme Commander. Was completely stoked by the new graphics, was looking for something that would be an update of Total Annihilation but fixing all the problems. It was a complete waste. The graphics were certainly better but all of the problems remained. Pathfinding is a wickedly hard problem to resolve and for all the advancement in graphics, it hasn't improved a jot since Warcraft 2.

What's really astounding to consider is that all of the tricks for NPC dialog in RPG's haven't really advaced a bit since the text adventure days. If anything, they've become slightly more restricted since everything has to be prerecorded.

You can try to simulate people in-game, you can try to create a role-playing environment where you get to truly consider the consequences of your actions but we've invented nothing new. We can go from Rogue-like ascii characters moving on a black screen to bleedin' Skyrim but the NPC interactions have not improved at all, not even for all our tricks.



Nothing can ever live up to the hype, ever. Anything you anticipate will likely fall short, even if you deliberately try to keep your expectations modest and reasonable. But there are some ideas that really wouldn't be that hard to implement, Bethesda just never thought of them. If there is hope, it lies with the modders.