Throughout the coverage of the BFG 2011 Skyrim demonstration one thing I consistently noticed was that none of the previews went into any great detail about the quest design. Several of them mentioned that at one point of the quest you could have waited to allow an NPC to wander further into the cave and set off a trap. But other than that they didn't mention it. Didn't write about it at the end of the piece in their Q and A session. They just talked about alchemy, crime, factions, everything that Bethesda hasn't revealed yet and therefore won't comment on. Blind Freddy can see that Bethesda PR won't talk about features before they are ready so why bother asking.

Despairing at the game reporters focus upon triviality and minor features at the cost of talking about the actual part of the game that is one of the primary reasons for playing and things that will take up the majority of our time I sent Pete Hines a tweet asking if it would be possible to negotiate your way through the quest in the demo, if killing the NPCs was the only way was the violent solution typical of the rest of the quests in the game, whether the speech skill was as important as Fallout New Vegas or as worthless as in Oblivion, and whether any journalists had bothered asking those questions.

Pete replied later:



http://twitter.com/#!/DCDeacon/status/61873806465175552

This can only be considered good news. I don't think we should assume this means that there will be a branching main quest like Daggerfall or Fallout New Vegas, but if it means that more peaceful or diplomatic characters are now viable then this is an excellent design decision on behalf of Bethesda. I was worried since none of the journalists mentioned any of this in their previews (which is a reflection upon them and how simply they repeat PR comments instead of focusing upon aspects of the game which are actually important i.e quest design), but this has gone some way towards allaying my fears. I was also worried it wouldn't be the case since Bethesda designers deliberately didn't include different ways of solving quests in Oblivion due to the large number of quests in the game. I'm now kinda optimistic about Skyrim, it means that modding in new quests will be much easier than it was for Oblivion.

Let's just hope that they'll deliver.