Thanks dude... you have restored my faith that there are in fact more competent than incompetent ppl around here.

Beth should create the maps. Buildings, dungeons, ect. Then Obsidian designs the game mechanics, the NPCs, the quests, ect. Best of both worlds.















(I know you can't just design a world without knowing what the mechanics will be or what factions are there. It's just wishful thinking)

The funny thing though, with using the same voice actors, they can assign the quest to an interested third party who would use the same voice and we couldn't tell.

I t would be a bad practice if they fix this in later games though.

I want them to innovate on goal oriented quest design. I'm on a phone so you guys brainstorm about this, it was hard enough to type all this.

Can't wait for creation kit.

In Oblivion I couldn't buy Rosethorn Hall in Skingrad, the best house, because the NPC that sold it literally fell of a bridge. It's a documented and frequent glitch, and I found his body below it. By making characters essential this is avoided. Even with Morrowind's system where you got a notification at the top of your screen when an essential character died, you cannot prevent deaths that happen uncontrollably on the other side of the map. This is why Beth has made so many characters essential. I hate having essential characters, but in my opinion it's a necessary evil.

Unless you make the NPC's unkillable, except by the player.

Ah, alright then.

How exactly do you do that? Just leave the current system with crouching in place unless you personally kill them with an attack? It would be a programming nightmare, they'd have to make the damage you do to opponents in some way different than the damage opponents do to others, or inflict upon themselves.

I personally would like it better if all NPCs were killable, then you screw yourself over if they had quests to give.

It doesn't bother me too much though.

I agree with what you said earlier. If you could have alternate NPC's take over less important quests so that there are not so many essential NPC's that would be the best solution. However, major quests would be significantly worse or impossible to do with a random successor. For example, significant characters such as Esbern can't simply die and be replaced without jeopardizing the coherence of main quests. In addition, major characters are the most polished and unique. If they could be killed and a successor was chosen, the game would lose much of its flavor because of weak characters. It is a quagmire really, each solution has drawbacks. I do agree that the number of essential NPC's should be reduced, however, because it seems like half the peasant's I stick a dagger in just get a side ache for a few minutes and then continue tending to their crops.

Most people agree that Morrowind's system would be ideal if you were the only one killing essential characters. However, essential NPC's die in a myriad of ways, many of them uncontrollable. If someone is foolish and kills off half the cast of the main quest, they can't complain about a broken quest. But if you get a notification that your game is broken because a major character got eaten by a dragon while you were fast travelling..... not too bueno

That is one solution, but that would bother me more. I love getting letters from couriers about people that died during dragon attacks and sieges, and if I knew only I could kill essentials it would make it pointless for me. Less fun, less random, you know?

I do see the issue with having them randomly die, but you could allow everyone to die except main quest essential personnel and guild people. All the side quest folks could die basically.

Exactly. Minor side quest characters could die and the quest could be picked up by another character. In my opinion, that is the ideal solution. It's what to do with the main characters that's the tough problem.

Thank you for picking my sarcasm, I am awful at it.

I just want to point we should and can do something about this but if we say "a necessary evil", nothing would improve.

My example is Lotr.

You can kill anyone but still the quest doesn't fail.

Fail proof quest, unless you actually, personally fail.

TY! I hate it when people say 'easy solution, just use mods or the console'. and I really hope Bethesda don't think this way.

He can't die because he's in an isolated place. That's how you handle the plot. If there's an NPC that is necessary to move the MQ forward you put him in a place where he can't die until the PC arrives there. Simple enough. Or you get creative and allow multiple avenues to get the info you need. Esbern could die but his journal could point you to the place you need to go next. Or you disseminate info in a cut/dialog scene as they already use like when you enter an area and it cuts right to dialog. The NPC gets his say then you can do whatever you want. There's a million creative ways to handle such situations. Unkillable NPCs are just dev laziness.

Well, Obsidian can use Beth assests like they did for NV. I'm sure they could somehow combine expertise if they tried.

Ugh a Bethesda defender. Had to happen sometime. Here's my take:

Keep the system in place where they go down on one knee.
When in that bended knee mode, the player gets a warning about the essential nature of that NPC to a quest.
If the PC still hits them while in bended knee mode, the "essential" is removed when they recover.
This essential flag is only removed IF the player has done damage to the NPC while in bended knee.
Other NPCs are coded to ignore bended knee NPCs (set agro to zero) so they never hit NPCs and remove their essential flag.

That should *not* be hard to code in! I'm not a programmer but given all the other things they code in this game, I don't think this would be akin to solving world hunger. What knowledge do you have that this would be so difficult?

If it IS like solving world hunger for Bethesda's shoddy coders (I'll throw in that they have brilliant art/music/world/lore designers just to show I'm not a hater) then come up with another solution like having essential NPCs in static safe areas or a player toggle in the games menu.

And in ANY event unflag any quest NPCs after the quest is finished for god's sake.

It's dev laziness not to come up with a better solution than having every quest NPC in the game be unkillable. The immersion breaking factor of Maven Black-Briar all up in my face and protected by some immortality code is beyond irritating.