After playing Morrowind and Oblivion for a while, I've noticed that I didn't explore for the sake of exploring. In Morrowind, some quests had you kill someone, but if you happened to have crossed paths with said npc then that quest would be broken. For this reason I wouldn't dare enter a cave unless I had a quest related to it, in fear that I would break any future quests. Tp fix this issue, your journal could act more like a journal, and less like a quest log. If you happen to kill someone quest related or find a secret cave on your own, then the quest could activate in your journal anyways, encouraging the player to go off on his/her own adventure without needing to seek quests from npcs. It should/could still be an option. What do you guys think?

Apparently, in Skyrim if you kill a quest giving npc a relative, partner, or someone else will take up the quest giving duties. Hopefull, this will mean you will have no worries of killing quest givers and breaking that quest.

I would like them to handle it kind of like Deus Ex. If you killed someone and ran into an NPC that would have asked you to kill them, then you could have the dialogue option of saying "Oh yeah, I think I killed that person a while ago." Whether you get the full reward or not is going to be up to the NPC.

I like the way they say they're going to handle NPC's dying and quest giving, but I don't think they addressed the other half; which is completing a quest by accident. The NPC should either thank and reward you in a surprised manner or at least comment that they're glad that their dilemma was solved coincidentally.

Can you name a specific instance of this?
I have never encountered a broken quest by the death of an NPC that had no main quest relation.
You can break the main quest quite easily and without a 'you have broken the thread of prophesy' message by killing an Ashlander villager but thats a fairly well known one and easy to avoid since they arent hostile.
A lot of main quest NPC's even only appear in the game world at the relevant quest stage, so you cannot possibly break the quest by killing them prematurely.
In every case not directly involving the main quest, if I recall correctly, the quest giver just thanks you for a job well done.
'Oh, hes dead already? Ok, here's the reward.' Is something I heard a lot on Morrowind.
Because I have a habit of killing anything that attacks me and I like to explore.

If I am careless enough to kill a non hostile who has some sort of nifty side quest, then I dont mind the quest uncompletable. Thats not broken, thats choice. In Morrowind I remember one instance of a non hostile quest giver in a location you wouldnt expect her, and I have accidentally killed her once. I think that in that case having the option to do her quest anyway would cheapen the guilt I felt over having murdered http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Search_for_Her_Father%27s_Amulet.

Oblivion was much worse in this. There you could actually completely break the fighters guild quest line by entering a cave at the wrong time. But his was a bug caused by an item required to advance the quest dissapearing when the cave reset after 3 days.

^I'm sorry, but I don't have that many incidents regarding breaking quests by exploring. When playing Oblivion and then Morrowind I started off doing my own thing and then figuring out how the game works and then starting over after learning a few game breakers. Oblivion's leveling system was just horrible, which completely changed the way I play the game, but I digress.

On the top of my head, when I was playing morrowind, I came across a cave with undead hostiles. One of them was a vampire that held a really awesome ring. I looked up my new ring on the wiki to compare it to possible varieties of said ring. Evidentially that vampire that attacked me was part of a vampire quest. Supposedly if the quest is active she will talk to you about wanting too die by the hand of a vampire, and then the quest would be updated when you kill her. I missed that because I didn't hear a rumor before entering that cave.
That's only one example, but I think you get my point. It would be nice if your journal updated regularly when you found something interesting regardless whether or not you activated that quest to begin with.



Yes, exactly!

Ah yes, Marara

She is part of a vampire quest, you can only do her quest if you are a vampire yourself.
If you are not a vampire she is hostile and you have to kill her.
So then you then cant do that quest when youre a vampire.

But thats not a case of a broken quest, thats an alternative way of completing the quest.
You still get the exact same reward, the very nifty Marara's ring, and the end result is the same with Marara being dead.
All you miss out on is a log entry.
Thats how Morrowind is, there are a lot of ways to get the same result and one isnt neccesarily better than another.

I had found Marara games before by chance I once went to her lair as a vampire.
I found her not being hostile and hearing her story a fantastic little bit of 'extra content.'
I was over the moon and went out to find all the other 'lone hostile vampires' in the game. Its how I discovered the Spellbreaker.
Morrowind rewards you for trying out things in different ways, seeing what is possible and I love that.


A broken quest would be that Dunmer lady in Balmora who wants rats cleared from her attic.
She can give you an 'extra comfy pillow' if you find an invoice of her in a shipwreck, and bring it to her so she knows what happened to her shipment.
Due to a bug alas the option to talk to her about an invoice dissapears when her rat quest is completed.
Its likely one of the first quests players will do and the invoice is in a rather obscure location so many people never even know there is such a quest.

Hmm. That sounds normal for an open-world game. You won't (or can't) do "everything" in a single play - you'd need to be following a guide to even come close...

So, no. Doesn't seem like a problem.


(I guess they could do it like Fallout: New Vegas, which would give you "You Failed " when you happened to kill off someone important. Of course, that was because you could be working for different factions in that game - if you were with the NCR, you could get a quest to kill a Raider boss; if you were Raider-aligned, that boss could give you a quest. So when you killed him for the NCR, it told you that you'd failed the Raider's quest.)

Did a loads of exploring in Oblivion also pretty much in Morrowind.
Oblivion did not have the broken quest if somebody was dead or dungeon explored, no quest givers in dungeons, and important quest related dungeons was empty or locked until the quest started. This might not be true for all side quest but none of the guild quest had this isue.

One exception, some master trainers was located at camps in the wilderness. If you killed them or they got killed you was unable to do the master trainer quest or later train high skills.

No, thats wrong.
At least in the vanilla version of Oblivion you could inadvertantly and without warning break the entire fighters guild quest line by simply entering the wrong cave before you had the quest.
Its what I did on my very first playthrough :/

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Mystery_at_Harlun%27s_Watch