Firstly, I hope we have some really challenging quests in the game. Quests that actually require some thought. But what happens when you come against a quest that you really cannot solve, no matter how long you spend on it? Do you give up? Look for a solution on the internet?

What if there were certain NPC's in the game who could offer some assistance. I'm not saying they would solve the riddles for you instantly, or even at all. But say you have a strange dwemer contraption you needed to get working. You spend hours with it, trying to figure it out, but you can't. You take it to a mages guild, to see if they can help, and they direct you to someone who is a renowned expert on dwemer mechanics. You find him, and give him some money to look at the contraption. After a while, you return to him, and he gives you his thoughts. Note, he may not necessarily give you the answer there on a plate. Just some hints.

I think this would be a very natural way of giving the player a nudge in the right direction when they get stuck.

Your thoughts?

And when the nudges don't work? Then thats hours of development time lost.

How do you accuratly judge how much of a hint is a simple "nudge in the right direction"? For some it might spoil the challenge unexpectedly, others it will leave them more confused then before.

Thanks for your input!

I would say the hints would be fairly large. Those who don't want the challenge spoiled are under no obligation to seek help.

At first I thought you were suggesting co-op and I was about ready to troll this one (I've honestly had enough of the multilayer suggestions, stop asking Bethesda to break their own game), but yeah, if you want to spend 500 gold to get an idea and have to travel around half the provence, you could easily implement it.

The only problem is internet walkthroughs....

Since everyone has their own level of problem solving(?) if you think about it, only taking about people having problems solving the puzzle without hints, a good portion of them will either have the puzzle solution realized immediately once they get the hints, and also same people would be no better off or worse, leaving a small portion of people who actually found the hints both helpful and not posiling the puzzle right away.

The only way to ensure everyone is accounted for would be to have an incremental level of hints from very vague to "this is how you solve it", but again, that brings into question, is it with the development time to do all this extra work, only a handful of people would even need or use?

I rather they had more to say in general that spend that space on incidental hint system for every possibly challeging instance, that's pretty much all the dialogue doubled and it still wouldn't wrk, you either wanna 'no' or don't so I'd rather it wasn't there, sorry nice idea but may in a few tes games but for now there just isn't the resources available.