This is a question I've been wondering myself for a while. Games that have less quantity seem to have more quality, due to natural events.

So, what do you think is most important in the Elder Scrolls games?

Do you prefer games like Daggerfall, where the landscape is immensely huge and giant, but somewhat lacks in important detail? (Note, storytelling and lore doesn't fit in these categories, to some extent)

Or do you prefer a game like Morrowind, which is incredibly smaller than Daggerfall, but delivers much better detail and beauty?

Oblivion focused on creating a larger world, which caused it to lack in fine detail and uniqueness. At least, to me it felt like it did.

Anyway, what do you think is more important in the creation of an Elder Scrolls game? How big the world is, or how much detail is put into it? Obviously with good enough gaming mechanics, both can be delivered equally well. But with Bethesda's current trend, if they give in to the masses, they won't deliver the goods we love as elder scrolls fans.

Also note, I'm not taking generation graphics into account. Daggerfall created in today's graphics wouldn't allow it to be as huge and epic as it was.

Also also note, I'm not saying Daggerfall was in any way better than Morrowind, or vice versa.

Neither is important to me. Both are important to me. It's not like I sit around saying "I don't care if it's piss poor as long as it's HUGE!" or thinking "It's ok for there to only be five npcs and one village in a TES game as long as the quality is outstanding."

Well quality is a matter of opinion, while quantity is a concrete number.

So, your pretty much asking whether I want a game with a large number of stuff to do, or if I want a game that I feel is good quality.

I can't vote because I want both.

And, if you're implying that having less quests means a higher quality of quests, I completely disagree. If you have a good quest writer, the quests he writes are going to be good, whether he writes 1 or 300. Yeah, the more he writes, the more off-ones will be in there, but the more good ones there will be, too.

I wasn't, but in terms of your example, do you want one large amazing epic quest, or a bunch of smaller quests, though still equally interesting?

I'm not really implying the difference between good and bad, but merely how much good do you want, and how long do you want it? (Yeah, that sounded a little wrong, but you know what I mean.)

I prefer the latter, because it allows for more replayabilty, in my opinion.

If you only have one large main quest, you really only get to do one quest at a time. And it's the same quests in the same order every play through.

If you have lots of little, disconnected quests, then you can choose your order and choose to ignore ones you did the first time around.

For example:
One character can be a stealthy guy and to Balmora and Ald'ruhn thieves guild and Hlaalu

Your next character can also be stealthy but do Sadrith Mora thieves guild instead of Balmora and Ald'ruhn and do Morag Tong and Imperial Cult almoner instead of hlaalu.

This makes way more possible combinations for a stealthy character than simply Dark Brotherhood or Thieves Guild or both. And I loves me my stealthy characters.

I think there's a "goldielocks" zone, and they are still trying to find it.

Quantity IS part of Quality. But if you want me to think Quality means Eye Candy, and Quantity means more skills more items more fun, then quantity it is.

Quantity is one small part of quality. It's the difference between a dozen McDonalds burgers and one steak.

I prefer not to be forced to choose, but if I must I would prefer something smaller that's better than something that's bigger but more mediocre. It's like the saying "jack of all trades, master of none"-- a game can have a ton of systems that are good, but by focusing on a smaller number of them, it can refine them and make them play more smoothly or make sure everything is more balanced. Or, with quests, you could have an infinite number of fetch quests that are literally just swaps of the thing you're killing/looking for and the place you have to go, or, on the flip side, a smaller number of quests with branching paths, meaningful choices and, generally speaking, a better experience overall.

Ideally, I would like to have a lot of great stuff (and with regard to quests, both types can coexist in the same game, and I believe they should), but if I was forced to choose, I'd go with a little of something great than a lot of something good.

A note-- this post is all theoretical. I'm not specifically comparing the games here, or saying that game X did it better (or indeed, that any of the Elder Scrolls games thus far have done it the way I feel they should have).

Obviously both play a part in creating a believable game world. Equally? Well, if they were equally 50/50, that'd be the perfect game. But that's a little hard to do. Bethesda sure has come close though with Morrowind.

Tough choice. I'll use this as an example: In Fallout 3, there were far less side quests, however, those side quests were of greater quality than those of Oblivion. Oblivion has a ton a of side quests, which were all decent, but not as good as Fallout 3's. I found that played Oblivion several months without quest mods than I did with Fallout 3. I enjoyed the quests more in Fallout, but I also enjoyed the amount of quests in games like Oblivion and Morrowind, even though the side quests might be rather "meh".

So, really, I'd like both.

This

Some magic balance between the two.

how Todd Howard is doing it

I can't believe 4 people actually voted quantity. :facepalm:

Why? Some people really preferred Arena and Daggerfall's style. :shrug:

A lot of terrible contentI don't care if it doesn't last long, as long as I'm having fun while I'm doing it, that's what counts. I don't play games that aren't fun, or don't have good quality content.
Of coarse, this is all personal opinions.
Just blows my mind that there are people who actually ADMIT that they prefer quantity over quality. That just makes no sense.
It's one thing to think something lame is actually fun to you, but to ADMIT it's not fun and still play it?

Well, the people who voted for quality are probably those Oblivion fans who say fewer quests and factions are fine because they were higher quality.

I voted for quality but in the example if you gave, what if instead the options were:

A lot of good / ok content vs Few amazing content

I think that's a hard question and I'd probably choose quantity in that case :shrug:

I disagree. See my above example about burgers/steak. Sure, the steak won't be as filling, but which will I enjoy eating more?

The burgers

Just kidding. That's ok but imo I prefer to have 1000 "4/5" quests rather than 100 "5/5" quests...

So Oblivion having a thirty hour main quest, you'd be alright with having a three hour main quest as long as it was well performed? You'd have to make something like Portal to pull that off. You're saying you don't want an rpg, and that the story should have very little development.

That isn't my point at all, because the story having very little development means that it's not high quality. But yes, hypothetically speaking, if the story was blow-your-pants-off amazing, full of rich lore and atmosphere and populated by memorable and believable characters, if it made me laugh, made me cry, and made me walk away feeling like a better person for having played it, and it somehow only took three hours to experience this story, yeah, I'd take that over a 30 hour campaign of Oblivion's quality.

Instead of the ambiguity of an anology about meat, look at my example using actual TES quests.

I think a single amazing theatrical narrative experience should be left to action games.

RPGs, to me, are more about providing a blank canvas for creating a unique story every time.

I think, long or short, a single story line leaves a lot to be desired, as opposed to several disconnected quests. There's no impressive narrative being created by the quests. But, then again, you can make your own narrative when you pick and choose the order you do the quests and have the freedom to turn down a quest or two without screwing yourself out of all future quests.

Where do you get that Daggerfall lacks important detail? You said Morrowind has more beauty? Daggerfall has beauty as well. For it's time Daggerfall was one of the best looking games for it's time. So you can't compare graphics.

That would be like saying Crisis is so much more beauty than Pong. The only time you can compare graphics is when a game released now has worse graphics that were released years ago. You can't compare a 12 year old game graphically to an eight year old game. Different times, different technologies.


I didn't vote because it looks like you are basing on graphics. Can you please clear up what you ment where Daggerfall lacks detail and beauty? I find Daggerall has more detail than Morrowind.

It's not about graphics, it's about the detail of the world. A world where the details (rocks, towns, set pieces, NPCs, etc.) are auto-generated is by its nature going to be less detailed than a world where it's all hand-placed. Daggerfall's world and environment were very generic.