I would want key people to go unconscious but everybody else is fair game. Although the AI hopefully will be improved so that random NPC's don't die in between cities like they did in Oblivion.

I like this. If the player can have a "finishing" attack not all the fights shall end with death. Some NPC may try to surrender, some may be more useful alive, they may offer money or secrets for sparing their lives.

Half mortal. They shouldn't be able to get themselves killed randomly by creatures (unless you're escorting them in a quest and it's a challenge to keep them alive). For the player, I like how one of the Gothic games did it. Instead of dying right away, NPCs get knocked down, you can take their possessions if you want, and you can then choose to kill them or not.

this

I would be shocked if they actually bothered to make everyone killable though.

Too many people crying about not being able to do X's quests after killing X, at some point the devs stopped seeing how absurd that is and gave in to it.

Hopefully Immortal NPCs was just another shortcut, along with Magical Compass and Teleporting Fast Travel, that Bethesda took to get Oblivion out on time, almost, for the launch release. I hope they put more time, thought, and effort into Skyrim...I'm not really expecting it though.

Death = death, thanks.

But I suspect it'll be down to mods to fix, just like half a hundred other essential (heh) things.

Everyone killable, alternate paths for quest lines, world explodes if character absolutely crucial to the main quest dies, guilds/factions elect new quest givers if original dies. That would be fun.
And nonlethal KO's are always good to have.

In Morrowind, everyone could be Mortal as the game did not kill NPCs. In Oblivion, NPCs could kill each other. In Fallout 3, they got it pretty good where only certain NPCs were immortal at certain times (where there was a real danger of getting them killed in the middle of a quest). In New Vegas, there is only one you can't kill, and that may be one of the last people you meet as I have not found them yet (nor do I want to know who it is...) In Oblivion and Fallout, I would have NPCs just go away on me, sometimes in the middle of a quest stage because the game killed them. As real as that seems, it still svcks from a gaming standpoint if I did not have anything to do with their death. So far in New Vegas, I have not had an NPC go AWOL on me. The only ones who die now are the ones I kill or generic respawners.

I have no problem when the game sets an NPC to Essential when it's aim is to keep them from certain death that would break a major quest line. As an example, you have to take a person from point a to point b, however along the way are scads of enemies that you may be able to avoid or battle as you see fit. However the companion has an easy chance to die before you can get them to the next place. But, once at that place, the Essential Tag gets removed as now the game can move forward whether you kill this person or not, even though you may break or alter other quests/quest paths.

However, in the evolution I have seen from Oblivion, I don't think Essential NPCs are going to be prevalent, or they might not even exist. It is not too hard to keep story specific NPCs alive as long as you can keep the game and the PC away from them until the proper time.

I hope you're right.

I can agree that NPCs being marked as Essential for escort missions is a fine idea, and yeah, NPCs dying while you're halfway across the world would svck....but that reasoning only applied to maybe a third of the NPCs that were made Essential in Oblivion.

The only difference I can really see between the MW and OB essential NPCs is that in MW I had to reload after a pop up told me I had broken the thread of ....blah, blah. That meant a reload and broken immersion when the knocked out for a bit actually allowed me to continue my gameplay without reloading and indicated I made a mistake by trying to kill them. I'm fine either way but did rather like not having to stop and reload my game to continue.

I think it may be important to have essential NPCs only when they're attached to a quest that you have the chance to accomplish. Once the quest is over and there is no more use for the NPC, then that NPC won't be essential anymore.

I say this because I had an experience in Fallout: New Vegas that broke a bit of immersion for me more than an essential NPC going unconscious. What happened was, a deathclaw killed a character that would give dialogue for a later mini-quest. When I came to do that quest, the quest arrow told me to go inside a building. Then the arrow told me to go right back out and talk to the next person for the quest. What happened was that since the first character was killed by a deathclaw, the quest had to skip over to the next part and I had to imagine I talked to the first character.


Also, eliminating the "[character] is unconscious" from the screen is a good idea. That can be immersion breaking.

It would be great if key characters can be killed by the player, but not by others. This makes escorting easier and less frustrating, IMO. Being able to kill key characters makes it actually possible to destroy towns rather than having an essential guard chasing you around or trying to assassinate an essential politician while roleplaying as some sort of assassin.

Personally I like the system as it is. Especially with quest-related followers, who follow the age-old sacred law of moving right in front of you when you attack your enemies. Being one of the fundamental principles of gaming, I can't see this ever changing. Although I'd never want to kill anyone important to finishing the game anyway, so I guess I just can't see the point of having that "only killable by you" option in the first place.

At the very least, really important characters within the context of the world should be immortal. I didn't like how you could kill one of the counts in Oblivion, and have absolutely no one in the city bat an eyelid or acknowledge his death (let alone replace the deceased count).

The difference is pretty clear.

The difference is choice.

You decided you didn't want to deal with the consequences of killing them, so you reloaded.

I for one see a bigger break in immersion from people being magically immortal, then from stepping outside the game when I make a mistake and reloading my file.

One of these takes place within the game world, one does not. Things taking place outside the game world have no effect on immersion within the game world.

See, after I had played through Morrowind and there was nothing left to do, I went on a rampage killing every npc on the whole island. That was so fun and I did not like in Oblivion that you could only knock out crucial npc's instead of killing them.

I remember when Oblivion came out they listed a bunch of things that were possible with the Radiant AI system. Among them was the fact that all characters ate food, and thus you could poison their food, et cetera, and lead them to an unfortunate demise. I liked this idea, and it was sadly only brought to reality by one scripted quest that could have been added without the unnecessary addition of Radiant AI.

Fact is I want to see a perfectly reasonable Radiant AI system that actually works, and while I do believe that the 2nd option is the best (And thus voted for that one), I think more thought needs to go into the implementation of this program. I want them to be both mortal to my direct attempts to kill them, as well as my more subtle and indirect attempts. I don't want my only method of slaying a primary character to be an assassination, or straight up confrontation, I would like to see the possibility of poisoning, hiring hits, and other similar role-play elements that add diversity, but would not be allowed by this rather simple solution.

Everyone mortal, with a message, of course. Skyrim can do without all the hand holding

^
That.

I think Fallout 3/New Vegas handled it well, but I like companions to be unkillable. if they don't come that way, it's the first mod I make, because otherwise I get so stressed about them getting killed I end up leaving them at home.

I can see where you're coming from, honestly I'm not sure if I would want them to be Essential or not.

I err toward Not Essential...but I could see the appeal.

On one hand it svcks losing a Companion and it would probably just make me reload.

On the other hand if you know your Companion is immortal it takes some of the tension out of it, and you can always abuse that to help you whittle down more difficult enemies (lock him with Umbra, hop on a rock, and shoot spells whilst Immortal Companion gets his gashes in)

I remember being frustrated in Morrowind, when side quest NPCs would occasionally disappear. I know there were a few who near at the edges of towns and would sometimes gain the attention of a cliff racer. Others would simply bug out and vanish, but that's a concern for another thread. The "essential" marking was one thing about Oblivion that I liked more than Morrowind.

Still, I know a lot of players prefer to cleanse the game of all life, so perhaps a simple menu toggle to switch whether they're essential or not?

Definatly half mortal, can you imagine the frustration when you're nearing the end of the main quest and the key character (like Martin) got killed for taking a piece of bread? It was fine in Morrowind because there was no AI, but with the new radiant AI, they need to be immortal to npcs, but i still think we should be able to kill them.

I mainly want it not to be considered a murder when random bad AI runs in front of the fireball/arrow I just shot. I racked up a 1,000 GP bounty fairly quick in Kvach when a guard decided to step right in front of me to attack the scamp I was killing. Farking annoying since the guard wasn't even on my screen before I cast the spell.

Well they made them unkillable until after your finished the quest they were tied to because there was a rampant problem in Morrowind of you killing a necessary NPC to move on and your last save point was a long time ago, then well, your screwed out of an hour or so. I really think it should be a balance between Morrowind and Oblivion. It shouldn't be everyone dies so oh well your screwed but it shouldn't be that oh I killed that guy but he can't die, so I'll kill this person they can't die either. It should be that only main quest NPCs are unkillable and after they are no longer crucial to the quest they are killable. A great example of this is Baurus in Oblivion. You can't kill him before you finish the quest where you meet the Mythic Dawn cultists in the sewers where he will die easily and is meant to depending on which option you choose but you CAN save him from dying and if you do you have an extra person to help at the Great Gate. This is a prime example of how good such a system is. You can kill Baurus if you want but you can keep him around if you want some extra man power for the Great Gate.

just remember, TOTAL realism, especially where the AI can wander off by itself and run into a band of minotaurs... isnt the best course.

so MORTAL to the player... IMMORTAL to everyone else, unless of course you're supposed to see someone get killed by an NPC, which would most likely be in a quest, they'd just need a simple script activated to remove the "immortal to everyone else" thing, and there you go...

its all a matter of how much work bethesda really wants to put into this game, i guess...

...while i'd love to be able to kill everyone, im going to assume they'll go for the easiest route and just make half the population unkillable again, which will be extremely disappointing, and make skyrim not much better than oblivion most likely.