Maybe they're just so well trained with a state of the art communication system... :whisper:

It at least made a little more sense with The Aureal and Mazkan Guards in The Shivering Isles. They are Daedra, and who knows the depths of their ablilities. Still, it was highly annoying over all, and with the human guards of Cyrodil it was DISGUSTING.

Stop right there criminal scum. Call me disgusting will you? You should've paid the fine!

After all the flak Oblivion got I have high hopes for their guard system in Skyrim.

guard: i sense a disturbance in the law.

Hell, the guards would know about my crime even if nobody saw it! Example: "I'm hiding, I draw my bow and shoot someone in an Inn, nobody sees it, nobody reacts. Check bounty, 1,000, wtf, then as soon as I go in to a town a guard runs up STOP CRIMINAL SCUM!" how does that work out?

But it's an improvement. I personally hope that, in addition to the removal of guard ESP (obviously, because we all agree to hate that), they add a lot more factions to the game. A faction or two per city sounds pretty solid to me, doesn't have to be more than that, but it's enough to make a lot more sense. Also, factions could be allied as well, so that -X faction points (fp) could give you -Y fp with its allies.


The reason is actually quite simple, it's because the victim himself counted towards it. He was the one that gave you the bounty (because he detected you - you got the bounty because you got detected by someone), even though you killed him and therefore no possible way for him to have told the guards. This could be easily fixed by simply requiring the individual NPC's script to check if he is alive or not. If killed NPC = the detector NPC, then the detection is NOT legitimate and thus no bounty is produced.

Similar solution to the "Assault Bounty". The bounty isn't determined until after a few seconds, maybe half a minute after you assaulted someone. Again, if that NPC is dead, then he doesn't count as a legimitate detector of that assault earlier. Thus, neither the assault nor the kill produces a bounty. An exception to this could be that the "assaulted NPC" could be a radioactive effect, hitting other NPCs within range of that NPC. So that, in order to not get the bounty, you need to eliminate everyone who's detected (come within a certain range of) either that NPC or you, the attacker. But then you need to make sure that those new assaults aren't detected by other NPCs, either. It would make complete sense, and it's should be a simple matter of just creating timers.

Bethesda, are you reading this?!!