I think you're equating quantity to world size and number of quests with quality. I agree, but I think the arguments that some people are making is that too many quests diminish quality because then they all won't be original and unique.

I disagree with that because I see nothing wrong with some "gopher" quests, but some people are saying that.

I agree with you completely.

Lots of quests doesn't mean they can't be quality.

And some smaller quests are fun.

I think you guys are missing the point, and assuming because something is mainly quantity, that it's a bad thing. Many of the examples say "a lot of land, and nothing to do". This isn't what quantity is at all. Tell me, what is more attractive. One hundred small cupcakes, or a large cake? They're both good, have icing, and serve the same purpose. Though some people don't like their goodness in a large dose, and want it fed to them in equally small increments. While others just want the whole cake.

Daggerfall was large, though generic, still provided great fun, storytelling, and gameplay. Although it was rather forced upon the player.

Morrowind was smaller, more detailed, with equally good storytelling and gameplay, and more flexible.

Neither of them are bad games, despite one being higher quantity and the other quality. It's just matter of taste on which you think made the game good.

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It's about time someone took the username of my favorite Daedric Prince(just had to say that). Welcome to the forums. http://www.uesp.net/w/images/images.new/c/c4/Fishystick.jpg

Are you replying to me? 'Cause I said that they're both important. :mellow:

Anywho, the OP was talking about landscapes, so that's why I specifically mentioned landscapes.

No, just those who assume Quantity makes a game bad if theres less quality.

well dark messiah was a very short and linear game with a mediocre story, BUT the combat and magic and stealth was very fun, and killing enemies never got old and the level designs were fun and interesting, while in diablo 2 loot was great and the number of spells and abilities gave it a great replay value, and battles were fast paced and explosive with tons of monsters and bosses, but the game had few quests, and got old after a few play throughs with all characters and u could not interact with the environment, Morrowind had great story with a complex landscape, oblivion had great combat and graphics and new technical stuff but the world seemed static and dead.

now put all thee in a blender then u will get quality and quantity

but ya good combat system and great story and map is better than large empty landscape

The amount of stuff in the world defines the quantity, not the size of the world itself.

It's volume vs. density.

quanity has a quality all of its own.

http://images.uesp.net//0/02/Peryite.gif!

It's the cool thing for us Daedric Princes. B)
(it doesn't actually matter)

100000 simple fetch quests is boring. Lots to do, but uninspiring, because it's likely all the same after not too long.

On the other hand, one epic multi-stage quest is a lot of awesome. Then what? Oops. You're done.

In the extreme, quality clearly "wins", in my opinion. However, if one considers that we are actually being asked what we prefer in a realistic sense, then it becomes more of a "how much quality will you trade for how much quantity? Or vice versa?"

Let's ditch TES for the moment, and move to Fallout 3, which will be declared neutral ground, being Bethesda's ONLY game in the franchise so far.

How many "A Sticky Situation" quests would you (give up/demand) in exchange for "Wasteland Survival Guide"?

For the unfamiliar, the former is a simple escort mission (or you can enslave the obnoxious whiner), while the latter is a collection of mini-quests that generally require only that a particular action be performed in a particular place for completion. Whether you bluff, sneak, or blast your way to success, it seldom matters (and in those cases, it matters for an OPTIONAL goal, not the main one).

Now, comparing to a TES game, the former is like many Morrowind wilderness quests: pretty simple, with few outcomes, while the latter is a single quest that is on par with whole factions.

Myself, I think a game needs, in side quests alone, a blend.
Example: Morrowind, Strange Man at Gindrala Hleran's House. EXTREMELY simple quest (cherry-picked, of course). Small quests like this can be useful, but they don't carry a game. Still, they can, if used correctly, help draw the player into a city. A bit more complex: The Angry Trader (yes, I'm aware you can find MUCH better quests in Morrowind), also from Morrowind. Multiple outcomes, a bit more to the quest, and something like what SHOULD be present in any town of size. Compare that to something like Oblivion's Caught in the Hunt quest (again, hand-picked because of the literary allusion). Perhaps a bit linear for some, but also a much tighter quest, and in general, higher quality as a story than the previous two. NOW compare that to Wasteland Survival Guide.

If you have to center a game around ONE of these four examples as "your standard quality and complexity of quest", which would you choose?

I think that's what the OP was asking. Say... 500 of the first degree, 300 of the second, 175 of the third, or 25 of the last...
I'd guess most people would pick in the middle, and of the extremes... "25"...

I'm more interested in roleplaying than being patronized. That's why I like simple gopher quests. Because that's the type of work you would be doing for people in real life.

When every quest-line is a big production full of mysteries and plot-twists and flashy visual effects, my intelligence is insulted and immersion is broken. I feel like I'm being told, "you don't have the mental capacity to make your own story, so sit back and watch ours. There's explosions! You love it!"

I seriously don't want to have to sit back and watch a pre-scripted production. I wanna playyyyyy!

Me neither. I couldn't bring myself to finish Dragon Age: Origens for this very reason.

This is why i could'nt finish the game too.
It's not in the same class as morrowind & oblivion in my view

Quality and Quantity aren't mutualy exclusive.

You know how many people on this forum have that as their avi? Psh.

They kind of are, I would say. Like if you charted every RPG made on a line, quality would be on one end and quantity would be on the other, with the games all falling somewhere in the middle. With time/budget constraints, technical limitations, and simply the limits of the human imagination, it's next to impossible to have a near-infinite amount of well-balanced, imaginative, fun, immersive things to do. The more stuff you put into the game, the more time you're going to have to spend making all of it work, so you won't be able to spend as much time making it work really well. So at one ridiculous extreme would be a game that's intellectually stimulating, lovingly hand-crafted, beautiful to look at, and an amazing gameplay experience full of never-before-seen concepts, all perfectly balanced and working together like clockwork, but the game clocks in at about 10 hours. On the other end of the spectrum would be a game with infinite quests where the only thing that changes are the location and target but are otherwise cut/paste from each other, where the world is randomly generated every time you change cells so you never run out of things to do, and where there's a nigh-infinite number of skills and abilities to master, but the vast, vast bulk of them are buggy, unbalanced, or redundant. A great game needs to find a happy medium between the two.

Again... balance schmalance.

Jiub, that's pretty much what I've said...

Really, the randomly generated quests I would get from the guilds in Daggerfall where great. It's a great example of quality is often = quantity. Random menial tasks like this really made the world seem alive and more realitic.

I mean, as I (and you) said, they aren't mutuallly exclusive. You need both for a good game. More dialogue is great. Though, if it's poorly written with "text speak", it would be ridiculously awful. On the other hand, one line of dialogue per quest, and nothing for random NPC's, written in the style of an epic novel would still be awful. You need the quantity of a lot of dialogue, alongside the quality of the well written dialogue. I think Morowind got this great. There was tonnes of dialogue, and it was all really well written. Everyone said something great, and made the world seem more alive. It's the same with many other aspects of the games.

We all want a huge game world (quantity), but we want it to be well made (quality)

We want a lot of quests (quantity), but we want them to be well written (quality)

We want more skills (quantity), but we want them to be well thought out and balanced (quality)

I don't see why we have to choose between one or the other, when we can (and often have) had both together at the same time.

I voted quality but is it too much to ask for both?

This is a double edge sword in game design, I have faith in Bethesda that they have the ability to have quality with quantity. I think at this point we will get the best of both worlds. Though people often miss the point of Bethesda's games. It's open world so you can create your own story. True, story helps with quality but in all honesty it doesn't need to be the driving force of the game in this case. The Story is the world how far you are willing to go through the lengths to discover it. Finding and reading all the books in morrowind and oblivion would be a monumental task, but it truely lends it's self to the lore. Which brings up my second point, the lore in a way is the main character of the game. The more you read the more you enjoy were you are going. I thought it was amazing finding lore and then actually going to those places.

I'll take Fallout 3's more detailed dungeons/buildings which made sense but with a lower quantity in the game world, over Oblivion's Imperial fort dungeon crawlers that were all over the place, any time.

"There is quality in quantity" -Vladimir Lenin

I think for the first game they should focus on quality. Quantity can always be added with expansions and mods, its harder for mods to add to the quality.

The game shouldn't NEVER rely on mods/expansions to be a good game. that's ridiculous. The standard vanilla game should define the game. I really didn't like that about Oblivion. Apparently, an interesting and unique* world from Shivering Isles makes up for what bored me in Cyrodiil? I'm sorry, but no. The game should be what it is without anything added to it.

*Interesting and unique is a loosely used term. It was pretty much Vvardenfell 2...