Daggerfall has a fairly simple quest map, but have optionals and possible starts and endings: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Main_Quest_Walkthrough
Morrowind has a very simple quest map, very limited optionals optionals but free choice of order in some: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Main_Quest
Oblivion has no quest map, it is utterly linear but with a couple of optionals: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Main_Quest
I'm starting to see a pattern here, so...
Skyrim may have no quest map, and there won't even be optionals? I hope and actually expect more.

Why this negative trend?
Are the players of low intelligence?
Do Beth assume we are dumb?
Are the story writers incapable of writing quest friendly stories?
Are the quest planners incapable of planning such things based on the story?
Does the engine impose problems on actually executing it?
Is it the time constraint on creating the actual content?

Daggerfall was the only game that had quests that was outright hard to solve wrt mental work having to be done. I don't believe I ever had to internet cheat in MW and OB to have progress. However, I think a great improvement would be (especially main) quests that involves a little more brain work, and that this brain work was made in such a fashion that a simple solution couldn't exist on the net. You could find out *how* to think to solve a particular problem, but you'd still have to think to get a success.

But instead of ending up stuck at such quests, you could choose to "No, I wasn't able to", and then have the game give us different angles to advance through the obstacle, like having to do more quests that are simpler in nature. So what was originally a downer is now an upper as you get to see quests that others may not see. So complex that actually drawing the quest map for the wiki page becomes a quest on its own When presented the optional route, maybe something happens that blocks off access to the original one.

So if there are 40 main quests parts in total, we typically end up playing 15-25 of these. It allows easy multiple end quest locations. Different locations that really plays out the same quest, but locations makes it easy or hard (traps, puzzle difficulty, creature level bonuses etc) depending on how you've solved the rest of the game.

So we can have different introductional quests to the main story, depending on time check and what guilds you are active in. Multiple endings that doesn't affect the story. Different playthrough each time, at least enough to make replays interesting. Spinoff quests that leads to new quests in guilds, that may or may not be optional. Optional quests that trigger a shortcut or prolonging of the quest line. Pretty much endless possibilities here if it's planned for from the start (may already be too late for Skyrim).

Any thoughts?

Brilliant- absolute genius!

And by my admittedly pessimistic reckoning, about as likely as 3 feet of snow in Death Valley.

I figure if we're really lucky, the main quest won't completely be on laser-beam-straight rails. But based on the prevailing trend I've seen in the last 2 or 3 releases from Bethesda... :shrug:

I'm not worried about how Skyrim will be mainly because don't know nothing about the game. Oblivion was a big success and I did enjoy the story. I think there is a reason to it being a little linear, mainly because you can throw down massive amount of hours in the game, one really don't want to exactly feel like they made a real mistake. Then again I could be wrong. I'm sure there will be options and the pattern may just be coincidence. Besides, in Oblivion's storyline on the main quest, there isn't really much alternative to it. So I say we wait and see some details on Skyrim.

I suspect that at best, we can hope for something akin to Morrowind in terms of the layout of the main quest. In other words, very little room for alternate paths, but a few parts that can be skipped or don't need to be done in a linear path.

The idea of alternate means of advancing the main storyline if you fail at one part of it actually seems like a pretty good idea. For one thing, it would allow for more replay value, if done well, it might also allow Bethesda to do some greater challenges or even adding the possibility to fail without needing to reload without risking alienating too many main stream gamers. Really, though, I'd like to see more alternate approaches to things in general, not necessarily just for when you fail at one option, but just for when you choose to do a different one.

Yeah I would hope for a Mass Effect 2 type of main quest line with all of the different angles, endings, and NPC deaths.

I totally agree with the OP. 'Win-win-win-win' is not a particularly interesting story. The possibility to mess something up - maybe making later quests / battles more difficult - and still succeed in the end would make the player feel MORE heroic, not less. It also feels strange in Oblivion that, if you can't manage a quest, the whole gameworld just waits until you succeed.

(My mage is too low-level to beat Kvatch right now with the mods I'm running, I tried reloading a couple of times but to no avail... so now he's told the guards that he will help them later, and moved on.

I would love it if this meant that I 'failed' Kvatch, didn't get recognition as a hero until much later in the game, but the main questline continued somehow - maybe with a few survivors crawling out of the rubble later).

In my experience, most trends tend to behave like pendulums, they don't keep developing in the same direction for ever (I mean in general, as in life). You reach a point where counter-reaction forces development in the opposite direction. If that proves to be the case with TES, one could hope that the pendulum is about to start swinging the other way. I certainly do, and I actually believe that this will, to some extent, be true. I think Skyrim will be a move back in the direction of multiple choices from Oblivion. Obviously, in incremental steps. I don't think there will be consequences, but the idea of a civil war is one of the things that makes me believe it might be possible to choose sides at the start of the MQ, and still have a pre-determined outcome. (Inconclusive end to the civil war because of dragons, reunification after defeat of dragons. Whether you supported side A or side B doesn't matter) Shivering Isles introduced very small pieces of this, and that is amongst the things that lead me to believe the pendulum is about to start swinging the other way.

There was (as far as I know) a single quest in Oblivion where this worked out in your favour - the Thieves Guild initiation quest. Most people don't realize that if you somehow flopped the race quest, that Armand would give you a "runner up" quest to go steal something from someone in the city.

I wish ALL quests could be like that.


Quest Giver: "So, did you kill Rolf the Uber?"

Player: "No, I ran like a scared little girl."

QG: "Well, there may be another way to take him out that can work with your schoolgirl nature."

P: "Whoohoo!"

What gets me about Beth's current philosophy is that they seem to be at cross purposes with volume of content vs. simplicity of content. They seem to have this desire that no part of a quest will be skipped and players must at all points have access to all the content they've produced but at the same time they put so much stuff and so many quests into the game that no rational person will see half of it in a playthough.

What has impressed me so much about FO:NV (among many things) is how unsentimental Obsidian have been with some of the fantastic content they've created. A quick choice can see you miss out on a fantastic location, a ream of quality dialogue or even a protracted quest line. They've also done a very good job of adapting to the player doing things out of sequence. Beth seem to want you to follow the story they want to tell exactly and leave the choice down to your motives for doing so and the 3 lines of dialogue at the end of the quest.

Maybe FO:NV's world wasn't as full of stuff as Beth's are but i felt that stuff they allowed the player to discard added to the playing experience where Beth's quests that you haven't done, caves that you haven't explored were merely there.

I can only give my full approval to the OP.
I fear that we face two opponents in our fight for alternative pathes :

1/ Players who want to svck every single drop of juice from the game with a single character. Those players consider a game as a challenge you have to overcome in the most optimal way to feel gratified. Doing all quests, achieving all possible progressions and getting all the best artifacts should be done with one character. The replay value is not considered because I feel they want to achieve one single perfect game session, rather than 2-3 different partial ones. It is a computer/console game point of view rather than a RPGish one I think.

2/ If devs build 100 quests of 1 hour, it is probably more profitable from a marketting point of view to say that a player will have to play 100 hours to do everything, rather than 20, because choices will lead him not to do some of those quests. I think I read something about this for the Witcher 2. The devs say that a single game will be shorter than in the previous one, because they build more alternative pathes. So the question is weither Beth devs will prefere to emphasize the replay value of a branched game or the utterly long gaming time required to finish all the quests of a linear one.

As a side note, I was not satisfied by the option of MW to simply allow you to do all the mandatory quests in your favored order. I think we could have choosed more personnal and colorfull pathes. Instead of the souvenir of a long linear story, we could have finished with 2-3 really different stories in mind.

Well... I liked how Morrowind handled it. I didn't mind only being able to succeed actually, because the main quest story was AWESOME.
So to keep it short, I care most about the story itself and not about mulitple endings. Although multiple endings can be nice too. It makes it more fun and interesting to play again

Anyway, to explain a bit more:

I'm not specially for different endings, but for different pathes. Obviously, in most stories, and it both happened in MW and Oblivion, there are times when you think your character should do something which was not proposed. A trivial example is that in both games, your character could have choosed to side with the baddies.
Other times, you are asked to do something your character wouldn't have naturally accepted to... and when it combines with an obvious alternative path, it becomes frustrating to be forced into a role to fit the existing story. The main interest of RPG over non interactive storytelling arts is the interactivity and the hability to grab the story, stretch it and push it the way you see it going.
A CRPG do not allow the diversity and flexibility of a PnP RPG, but at least, devs should think to alternatives pathes at different time of the story, to fit the natural diversity of roles and behaviours (which do not prevent them to bring back smoothly the character into the story line later!).

Well I hope Andrimner is right, in that the pendulum might already be swinging the other way. Never played OB:SI so I don't know how that worked out. I read with some shock in other threads that some are highly against anything random, that everything has to be unique and hand placed. That may increase quality of what's there, but there will be a lot less of it.

Around 20 special quests for the guilds is pretty decent I think, but 20 jobs total to reach top rank is nuts. Maybe 1 special quest among 10 random ones for one rank, then 1+20, then 1+40, then maybe it starts to reduce again to 1+20, then 1+10 again. There should be a point where extreme devotion is required to make any progress. That's what I enjoyed in DF, there was always something to do, even if you've done similar things before. Although there is quite a lot of decent quests in OB, it's unavoidable to run out (without mods anyway). So in OB, you're forced to restart, except you have already done everything you can do

I don't think it'd be a good use of time to make a lot of alternate failure outcomes; just make alternate choices. I'd rather not start a second character and have to think like, "okay, to see a different path I have to do this quest, then fail the next one intentionally".

The idea was to have this so we can have more advanced puzzles, requiring more thinking and clue reading and deciphering (like a real RPG). Made in such a way that you can't look up a definite answer on the internet, only instructions on how to think. But if you get stuck, alternative routes are available. The main quest shouldn't be as simple minded as it is today where it's just hack & slash to get to a marked placed on your compass.

Agreed it would have been cool to have helped mythic dawn take over tamriel

I'd rather be able to continue playing after the main quest than have significantly different endings. With one ending it's much more feasible to show how completion of the MQ affected the world, which I would find more rewarding than either different endings that didn't make much difference or different endings + jump to Epilogue.

Minor SI-spoilers below



This is how I think Skyrim will do it. Specifically, I suspect you will be able to choose sides in the civil war, and that this war won't be decisively settled because of dragons. Later on, reunification. So it didn't matter which side you chose. That way, players can choose different paths, but it won't lead to multiple endings. (Maybe different bonuses for the player, tops)

I was hoping this would be the case with Oblivion, should you take too long to close the gates around Cyrodill, things would ge progressively worse, and the longer you waited the more likely a town would fall. and at the end come should Martin fall at IC you would have to find another way to stave off the crisis, like how Bao Daar was handled over Vivec

The biggest problem with multiple paths and interlocking quest lines comes when they have to test it all. If the conflict is known and spelled out for the player, where the quest giver tells you "no, we can't let you do that because....., but here's another mission for you", it's not bad, or maybe even a good thing that promotes trying it in the future with a different character, but when you complete the mission and it simply isn't recognized, and you can't advance, that's a "bug".

I'd like to see more quests with "gray areas", where you may decide that you don't WANT to finish the mission, even if you can. If there's a way to deal with the aftermath, instead of simply stopping further advance along the faction questline, then it allows more moral choices and "playing the character", rather than strictly "doing the missions". There were a number of MW quests where you could find an alternate way to do the quest if you looked around hard enough. An example: the first FG quest, where you can either forcibly take the item in question, or gradually unravel the whole story and have it sort itself. The "FPS gamer" will hack and slash through the quest line, leaving a trail of carnage, whereas the "RPGer" can pursue other approaches and complete the faction line without such a "heavy hand", in time. Of course, MW had several quests with significant bugs, due to the complexity.