since they are talking up their radiant story. im hoping that they are planning on using it for the mainquest as well or at least parts of it.

imagine that you had different NPCs for the quest each game, also since we will inevitably be looking for artifacts why not have them in different locations as well each game. might make it worth playing through more than once.

No to the different NPCs each time through, mainly because "Why does the world change so drastically?" but some artifacts being in different places would be fine. I still see from time to time that some people are still unsure what Radiant Story really is. It's not a random quest maker, it's a template for making quests. Also, most quests in the game are hand made but have some aspect of the Radiant Story in it. There really aren't any "random quests" in the game, they may have random locations and certain conditions for happening but they all have a set forth plot.

No, I think some quest will be randomized but not all of them. I don't think we will have radiant story for the main quest.

I believe it's been made clear that Radiant Story is not used for the main quest or guild quests, just side quests (Technically, it actually is used to make those quests, but the randomized elements of it aren't used, it's just the system used to create them, from what we've heard, as far as gameplay is concerned, the only quests that will actually be determined by Radiant Story are side quests.) and that's a good thing, because I have my doubts about whether Radiant Story quests will be able to match the level of quality a well written hand-made quest can have, if it's done for certain side quests and the results are bad, I can ignore that reletively easily, it would be a more major problem if the major questlines were bad. In any case, the main quest really needs to have a hand-crafted story, I suppose you could switch around when some of the quests in it are done, or the location of some items you need to acquire for some quests, assuming that the location of these items are not important to the plot in some way, but for the most part, it needs to be hand crafted.

Personally I would find it more of a problem if the side quests were bad than the main quests as the side quests are 170 hours of gameplay compared to the main quests 30 hours. This is why I liked Oblivion more than Morrowind, Oblivion's world felt more real and it's music was epic but also Oblivion's sidequests were really good and I love Oblivion because of the liveliness of the game. Morrowind had meh sidequests but an amazing main story but it was a minority of the game time.

Also, I'd like to point out that most of the side quests are handmade also just like the main quests, only a minority of quests are "random".

The Radiant Story system is more of an advanced safety net system for quest crafting. It can be used to prevent quest-breaking, as was outlined in the quest example when he said the other NPC would step in to replace the original one if he died. He also explained that they tried making the side quests all random and it svcked, so they threw that idea out and hand crafted them, with random elements such as when and where and who. He said it's not something they were planning to pursue further.

To be honest, I had really hoped the same as the OP, but sometimes idealism just doesn't work well in practice. Who knows, maybe it's as simple as having a lack of experience at making this kind of quest. All of their quests so far have been hand crafted and basically static and linear. It's almost a separate paradigm in quest-making. I wouldn't really mind having random side quests that fully utilize the radiant system, but the quests weren't the reason I like TES series in the first place. I wasn't really satisfied by most of them, especially most parts of the main quests. Some of the side quests in the previous games seemed to satisfy my desire for intrigue more than the main quests.

The world of Skyrim is not a random one. You can not have NPCs randomly placed within the world. You can make random events to happen during the playthrough, but you can't, to use an OB comparison, have a different son of the Emperor on every playthrough.

I disagree, quite a bit. The Fighter's Guild/Thieves Guild quests in Morrowind were much deeper than the quests in Oblivion, with the three way dynamic (Fighters-Camona Tong-Thieves) involved, the corrupt guild heads etc.

This have been sort off confirmed by Todd in an extended interview(GT I think). Some quests will be more rendomizad than others, but we have very little details on the matter.

Radiant Story just changes the parameters for side quests I believe. The Main Quest should be completely hand crafted.

I don't believe they would randomize the main quest. That'd be the last thing I'd expect, really.

i highly doubt and really wouldn't even hope they randomize it, but i want them to do something to make it at least slightly different each time, say you can choose to kill this person and let this person live and then you will turn down an alternate path and get an alternate result when you finish the main quest. give it like... 3 endings.

i honestly dont see how hard it would be. if you on a quest to retrieve the dwemer anti-dragon artillery, it might be in some dwemer ruins guarded by Bob "the ghost" Rubinstein, and in the next playthough it might be in Ned the necromancer's secret lair. i actually dont have a problem if the main characters were switched up as well although they would obviously be from small pool since that would mean lots of extra voice work if you did everyone in the game with i dont expect. maybe have a pool of ten or so people to choose from.

what i would really love to see is a situation where you are betrayed by one of your closest allies in the game but you never know who it is because it would be a different character each game kinda like how in the game "the thing" every game had different people who got infected. if it was the same character every game that betrayed you every game would be "oh its THAT guy again"

it wouldnt seem weird to me cause its not like your character is completing the main quest and then hopping onto a klingon bird of prey and zooming around the sun to travel back in time to do it all over again since it was so fun. you start with a brand new character who might even be an entirely different race from the previous one.