I really don't think it has to do with the "first person shooter market'. The RPG market in general has a long history of violence-focused titles, and while Black Isle bucked the trend for a short time back in the 1990s and early 2000s their games have never been the norm (and even Bioware's games, while they've definitely offered better dialogue than Bethesda's, have been pretty heavily combat-centric). When dealing with the kind of content a lot of them involve it simply doesn't make sense for most RPGs to allow you to effectively play through the game as a pacifist, and Bethesda's games are definitely no exception (the only TES game I can think of where it's been even remotely practical to talk your way through a decently large part of the game is Battlespire, which was a pretty special case... and ironically, probably the most action-focused title in the series and one of only two with multiplayer).

gladly! I would pleasantly surprised if we were granted the ability to sit down with the dragons and talk out our differences (as the lore indicates they are capable of) rather than simply seeing one and knowing it's evil just because it's a dragon. That's called racism.

Good point. I really just used the 'FPS market' comment as a general statement to portray younger gamers, to be honest. The whole 'kids these days' rot and all, but it's pretty clear that Bethesda is shifting the focus of their games to reach a wider market.
EDIT: sorry to double post

Bethesda was involved in testing the game, and bug tracking. I am sure, that they learned at least a bit, if not a lot, about using speech during their testing and multiple gameplays with it.

But you are right, the setting seems a bit too hostile. Well, it doesn't matter, what matters is whether or not, I'll have fun playing it.

"Great games are played, not made." - Pete Hines.

But the point I'm trying to make is that I'm not sure they're shifting anything, at least in terms of the focus on combat. Arena was a game with virtually nothing else. Daggerfall had a better plot and more dialogue, but at its core it was still a game made up of "go here, fight through a bunch of these, and then get/kill this". Morrowind was similar: usually it was only the earlier quests that you could do without combat, and even those would often send you somewhere filled with inconsolably hostile monsters waiting to rip your face off. And Oblivion... well, nobody denies that Oblivion had a lot of combat, so it's not really necessary to talk about that one. But combat has always played a gigantic, central role in this series, and if that's the case with Skyrim then it's not going to be a "shift". It's just going to be a continuation of what they've done with the rest of the series.


I'm not sure that they were all that involved in the QA for the game, but even if they were... well, QA teams are not game designers, so that really wouldn't have had any impact. When you're talking about game design and QA, you're talking about two entirely separate groups of people.

But don't you think that, everyone in Bethesda played at least one playthrough in FNV? Back before FNV release, and also after it, you could see in the "What are we playing?" blog posts that most of Beth's crew was playing it, and in that list there were a lot of Skyrim developers.

It's a game they published after all, why wouldn't they play it?

Well I don't really agree with you. Combat has always been at the heart of the TES series and the same with most RPGs. In fact, Daggerfall, Arena, Redguard and Battlespire were all heavily combat and they still managed for deep roleplay. I don't see how being a pacifist is synonymous with the roleplaying aspect of the game. If you like to be a pacifist then fine, that's your way of RPing but being heavily combatative doesn't mean your losing the RP of the game. What alot of people misunderstand is that they think there is only so much of a game and if you put more into combat to make it much better and engrossing then you have to lose from the rest of the game which is not true at all. You can have amazing combat and still have amazing and large amounts of content in the rest of the game. Oblivion had better combat and just as much quality content as Morrowind. Most people don't realize this because they think that the main quest IS the game when it is only part of it. Oblivion tried a shorter main quest compared to Morrowind but had far more and deeper side content than Morrowind did. Now if Skyrim has a main quest line like Morrowind and the side quests of Oblivion, we are looking at the perfect game lol.

Of course they played it, but that doesn't tell me anything meaningful. I'm sure all of them had played Fallout and Fallout 2 before making Fallout 3. I'm also sure most of them have played Planescape: Torment, both Baldur's Gates, and maybe even Arcanum, but that doesn't seem to have changed how they approached dialogue in Oblivion or Fallout 3.

EDIT: I'm not saying that Bethesda can't make a game in which speech plays a larger role (I'm not sure they can do it well - they don't have especially good writers on their end - but that's not the point). What I'm saying is that a focus on speech and dialogue is not and has never been Bethesda's style, and I don't see that changing solely because their parent company published a game that took a different approach to its design.

Well your right in the instance of FNV that the QA group wasn't the development group. But in most instances, QA groups are the devs because devs can answer questions in more depth than those that were just given the rundown of the information. When we get around to the QA sessions they will most likely be devs.

True, you are right. But who knows? Maybe they changed, a man can dream...

I would argue that there is a difference between combat being one of the main focuses of the game, and combat being the game. In daggerfall and morrowind combat was about 50% of the game. Many things you did were for combat, but many aspects weren't so focused on it (let's free some slaves and take them to a mission, or find a peaceful way to finish this quest, ect.). In oblivion, combat was about 70% of the game; now nearly everything you did was either combat or directly influenced combat and I fear it's going to increase to an even greater scale in skyrim (80-90% combat).
Although, the promise of crafting does give me hope!

First off, redguard and battlespire weren't as much role playing games as they were action games, but that's beside the point. And while making a game that is both action oriented and deep in story and culture IS possible, how often are games like that made? Hoping for skyrim to be like that is extremely optimistic, and I would rather not be as disappointed for it as I was for oblivion. Also, not to spark a morrowind V oblivion fight, but how did you come across the conclusion that oblivion had more/deeper side content than morrowind did? While playing oblivion, the only times I was tempted to fast travel were those where I convinced myself that there was nothing between the plot points other than bloom smattered filler and copy paste ruins, to put it bluntly.

QA as in quality assurance, not question and answer. Quality assurance is something that typically isn't handled by the developers of the game except in small-scale studios (and Bethesda isn't nearly that small anymore).


It's entirely possible. They've apparently become capable of creating characters that look a reasonable amount like human beings, so maybe they've gotten better and writing and started focusing more heavily on dialogue. I'm not sure why this is something so many people want, though - one of the main appeals of this series for me has always been the fact that it offers a basic, simple dungeon-crawling experience at its core and supports that with a huge, complex open world built to give flavor to that dungeon crawling. Shifting the focus to something more speech-centric seems like it would make it lose that.

From what I read in the GI article, quests and situations can change depending on your skill levels. If you have low fighting stats and high speechcraft (or whatever skill might replace this) stats, then you might get different quests that require those skills.

One of the things I really liked in FO3 was the ability to convince people that we could come to a peaceful solution. While you couldn't do that to everybody, it worked out great in quests.

In the case of Morrowind you could argue that, but I'd still say that the non-combat parts were more or less trivial (and in the main quest in particular, they were the definite minority). But for Daggerfall? No, combat wasn't 50% of the game. Combat was nearly the entirety of the game. Almost every single quest in it, random or otherwise, required killing something (and usually several things), even if the guild you were doing it for was one that shouldn't be inherently violent (like the Mages Guild). Trust me, having played both of them plenty Daggerfall is far more combat-centric/violence-focused than Oblivion. Far more. Even if I concede that Morrowind isn't like that, I'd be conceding that it's an exception from the rest of the series rather than an indication of the norm.

It would be nice if there also were non combat related quests, oblivion had some, like the one you had to spy on people because that crazy guy felt he was beeing watched, some other that you had to gather items. But certainly none that felt like you had done something great, like stopping a war or a big conflict or preventing revenge.

Killing isnt always the best solution and special rewards should sometimes be given if one takes the diplomatic approach

I actually would disagree with you on that. Oblivion was more like 50-60% combat but they sent you to places that you could easily get into fights if you want to but also easily avoid it if you want to. Skyrim however, from the way they are talking will actually be more like 50% or less on the focus of combat. The AI have different patterns like not every NPC or creature will be hostile to you like the other games so it is safe to say there are places where you will be safe. Just because Skyrim has more exciting and brutal combat doesn't mean that it's the focus of the game, just means that you may be more inclined to do it when it becomes available because it is fun. They aren't forcing you into combat just like they didn't force you into it in Oblivion even though you might think they did. If you don't believe me, play Oblivion again. You will notice alot of quests don't require you to kill anything and you can just slip by the enemies with stealth or invisibility.

you could always just cast a 'command humanoid' spell on your enemies & sit back and watch them kill each other.