Personaly, what I would definately want to see in this game, is better written quests and characters. I understand that it is impossible to have any major changes in the game at this point, but I would never presume to "request" Beth to change their game to suit my tastes in the first place. The following rant is just my personal view of how storytelling could be improved in Skyrim compared to previous TES games. In the end, there is nothing that adds more immersion than a good story, and this is the reason why really good RPGs existed before 3d graphics and complex combat systems.


1. Side quests

I understand that a game with the number of quests the previous TES games had will invevitably have some generic quests. By generic quests I mean quests like "gather X amount of Y items", "kill a specific bad guy residing at the end of a cave", "find item X in the deepest chamber of cave X", that sort of thing. Let me also note that Oblivion handled this better than Morrowind did, especially the Thieves Guild quests and the popular Dark Brotherhood questline (despite the fact I disliked the way the brootherhood was depicted).

However, I feel that there is so much room for improvement. At least the quests you do for the various guilds should all be spiced up with unpredictable twists to keep players on their toes. It doesn't always have to be a plot worthy of a Hitchcock film, but you can always do little changes to deviate from the same old boring stuff we've seen done in so many games before. Maybe when you go to find item X, you don't find it.You discover clues that it has already been taken by somebody else. Perhaps a long chain quest begins, perhaps you just follow some tracks to a hidden exit from the cave, that leads to a nearby camp site. Perhaps the grave robbers that already took the item are there, perhaps you have to follow other clues or return to your questgiver empty handed. Perhaps if you do return empty handed, the questgiver tells you how he has received an anonymous note asking for an exorbitant amount of money in exchange for the item, and sends you to investigate. (I'm not claiming this would be an awesome quest, I just wanted to show how easy it is to make a quest more interesting without much effort). You need to keep players guessing what will happen next.


2. Characters and Dialogue

This aspect, I feel, Morrowind handled better than Oblivion. I do understand that with the sheer number of NPCs means that quite a lot of them don't need to have deep personalities. However, I believe that this has traditionaly been one of TES series' weakest points. I would love to see at least some of the NPCs you more often socialise with have more proeminent and interesting personalities. I would also like to see dialogues both more detailed and with a wider variety of issues to discuss - it would help you understand the personality of each npc, what makes him/her tick. Voice acting is a nice addition, but what difference will it make if the NPCs are not interesting enough?


3. Main Antagonist

This is where Oblivion got it very, very wrong. I understand that Mehrunes Dagon is the Daedra Prince of Destruction, but he is also the Prince of Change, Revolution, Energy, and Ambition. As a main antagonist he was as one dimensional as they come. They probably tried to counter this by introducing Camoran, but honestly, he wasn't much more interesting either. In my opinion, making the main antagonist the personification of evil without any aparent explanation, is the best way to make the main quest uninteresting. Dagoth Ur - despite the horrible voice acting and the minimal dialogue you could engage in, was a much better "villain". Because he was complex.

Think of all the memorable villains in RPGs, none of them was just pure "evil". Remember Irenicus, or The Master? Those were what villains should be, not Mehrunes Dagon. This is one of the rare things about Skyrim I am a bit pesimistic about: Alduin sounds quite likely to end up as just another one dimensional all consuming evil. I hope Beth prove me wrong - they have a rich material to work with.


4. Ambiguous Moral Choices

I have always enjoyed the degree of freedom you had in TES. But all actions should have consequences, and since often you were not given the opportunity to make meaningful choices, most of your actions had no consequences. Players should feel like their actions matter, that they have an impact on the NPCs and the world, and that they have the option to make choices. I would definately not want to see choices reduced to "good path vs evil path" with an apropriate bar to show me how good or evil my character is. Games have evolved past that state of infancy hopefuly. Choices should be moraly ambiguous, they should get the player thinking of the positive and negative consequences of their actions, wich people and groups they will influence and in what way.

/rant over

I see you had a few of your own rantings stored away.

About side quests and quest plots, I think one thing Beth needs to be careful about is extreme plot twists. In OB my first time through I felt unsurprised though still a bit intrigued with all the plot twists because that was one thing they all had in common. What, it sounds simple, the giver is optimistic, and the goal is within sight? Work under the opposite assumption and more times than not you will be correct.

I came in this thread because I thought it was about books.

But I agree.

Agree.

Hm, it didn't occur to me at the time but I can see how the title can be condusing - my apologies.

@schnell olfy

With a few over the top exceptions I think Oblivion was a step in the right direction. Although,as you said, you must make sure to not get repetitive by employing the same "surprise" over and over again.

Good post. Agree pretty much wholeheartedly with everything you say. Just a couple of additional comments, one smaller and one larger.

On your first bit about quest storylines. I think you're right that it is often fairly easy to take a generic quest type, and tweak a little to make it more interesting, in just the ways you suggest. The issue, as always, is making sure the extra complexity comes across in a satisfying way in the gameplay. So, for quests where you are asked to investigate, interesting and plausible dialogue needs to be written, locations need to be artfully arranged with items/clues, scripts need to be written for NPCs, and so on. Not saying this can't be done. I just want to try to flesh out the picture of what's involved in what you suggest. Because, in the background, there's the issue of what tradeoffs to make - if you have to spend more time on these things, what should be given up?

The larger, more nebulous comment I want to make is also about quest storylines, but it's less about the little twists and turns of each individual quest, and more about the larger narrative arcs of factions. The allure of TES for me, I think, is that they are like interactive fantasy novels. I enjoy fantasy novels for the creativity in coming up with a credible and creative world, with characters that behave in plausible ways given that setting. In TES, the promise is that you're presented with such a world, but it's up to you how the storyline will play out (to some extent). Morrowind remains a special game for me because it had that interesting storyline. The MQ was full of history and mystery and prophecy and cultural angst. But there were also the interesting meta-narratives with the factions: the corruption in House Hlaalu and the Fighters Guild, the underground war between the Thieves Guild and the Camonna Tong, the battles the Telvanni and the Redoran fought over settlements, and so on. In contrast, while Oblivion did better on the interactivity front, with better combat/magic/stealth/graphics, and while it did improve on the smaller scale storylines of individual quests, it just didn't have those larger narrative arcs to sustain my interest in the factions. Or, rather, they weren't really tied into the culture and social milieu of the world as well as I would have liked - the battle between the Fighters Guild and the Blackwood company just didn't have the wider resonance of the corruption in the Fighters Guild in Vvardenfell. So I hope we get some faction storylines which are better grounded in Skyrim's culture and current politics.

I agree whole heartedly about your assessment on villains. One of Oblivion's weak points. Hopefully they improve on this. It sounds like they're working a lot on the weaknesses of Oblivion, which is great. This could be the best TES ever! : )

I agree with everything you said, particularly your assessment of Mehrunes Dagon. The morality of Oblivion in general was very stark. The Mythic Dawn and the The Dark Brotherhood were both basically populated entirely by pantomime villains.

I hope the civil war backstory for Skyrim will provide a bit a room for more nuanced ethical dilemmas.