How about expanded radiant quests?

For example, the vertibird pilot has learnt of a newly discovered vault (a new, randomly generated small area) which you can pay to be taken to for fresh pickings. Said vault (or raider base or anything really) may (or may not) contain (say) a diary leading to the co-ords of a cache of gear somewhere in the wasteland (which you could pay the vertibird pilot to take you to, or not). Both areas guarded by the usual local mobs of course for our combat fix.

In a way, the 'base building' idea is an ongoing radiant quest, albeit in the same location, especially with the constant threat of raiders and suchlike. I like it.

So YES to radiant quests like Skyrim, but also yes to more than just goto x, kill y, collect z. (although that's fine as one kind of radiant quest).

I'll defer to you on the usefulness of the Radiant Story system as a modding resource. However, it sure would have been nice if Bethesda had actually used some of those resources to give us something more than the same often broken fetch quest over and over again.

I want the original idea, not Radiant lite that was in Skyrim, that was a bit disappointing.

I honestly won't mind as long as we have plenty of non radiant quests. It was a good way of sending you to previously unexplored places, though sometimes it repeated. That and it invariably adds more content if you're just in the mood for a mindless romp.

Riiiiiight.

Again I call out the Thieves Guild quests in Skyrim - at least half, and probably more, of the questline involves doing a bunch of Radiant quests all over Skyrim, with assignment of the quests being completely random, totally hit and miss as to their actual usefulness in completing the quest chain, but 100% predictable in their progression.

Ironically, the Thieves Guild was probably my favorite guild questline to do in Skyrim, because it was the only one where I kind of felt like I had earned the leadership position once it was finished. How much better could it have been if instead of 20 or 25 totally forgettable, random shake n' bake fetch quests, Bethesda had given us a few longer, involved and actually memorable ones where you still had to do a bunch of work but also deal with a few plot twists and such?

I HATE Radiant quests. Feels like busywork and the rewards were never worth the time and effort. They feel superficial and meaningless.

If they could somehow implement them better, give them more weight, I would be willing to listen.

If Radiant quests could somehow have an impact on the meta game (affect faction standing, price/availability of goods, etc.) then I'd be on board.

Another way to implement them effectively would be to integrate them SPARINGLY into larger quest lines. For instance, one or two EARLY quests to become part of a faction could be Radiant - that would help contribute somewhat to replay value.

That's what Morrowind and Oblivion did basically. Gave you a smaller amount of more fleshed out, better written quests instead of radiant quests. Problem with that though, was that once you reached the highest rank in a guild, you pretty much never did anything with that guild ever again. You couldn't do anything more with that guild. In Oblivion, you completed a handful of quests for the Guild, and became Guildmaster, without really feeling like you earned it.

At least in Daggerfall and Skyrim, once you reached the highest rank, you could still do quests for them if you wanted something to do. In Daggerfall, not only did it take longer to become Guildmaster (at least 20 quests completed and must have the requisite skill), but you still had to occasionally do quests for a guild to keep your rank, even if you were Guildmaster. Each completed quest gave 5 Reputation with that faction. For every month of inactivity with a faction, you lost 1 Reputation. Go 10-11 months without doing a quest for a guild, and you'd lose your Guildmaster rank. Considering how many days would pass fast traveling around, it wasn't hard to lose track of time and neglect a faction. Hell, you could spend up to 30 days in a single fast travel.

I'd like them to be in but not at the cost of normal quests. I'd still like to have them than not having anything to do at the very end. I had finished Oblivion like that and there's nothing to go back to right when my character is completely mastered. Feels like a big waste.

Exactly this. The less time they waste on these, the more than can spend handcrafting actual quests with branching choices, unique characters, and everything else that is absent from the radiant "go. do. return." quests.

If there's one thing we know everybody loves more than escort missions, it's fetch quests.

Radiant Story wasn't just used for those quests. It was used for the random encounters you'd find in the world, and world reactivity like when you Shout in public or drop an item. It even governs scenarios and little quests triggered by your actions, like hired thugs for stealing, letters of inheritance if an NPC that likes you dies, or getting requests to beat someone up after you were spotted assaulting an NPC.

It's a shame that all people see in the Radiant quest system are banol fetch quests (which, especially with the framework Radiant Story creates, are really easy to do in large numbers and don't really hamper Bethesda's ability to handmake content) when they enable so much more than that.

I agree with a handful of this.

I, myself, love having radiant quests. It allows your character to always have something to do, which is a good thing. More repeatable things, the better the game is in my opinion. BUT the game must still have actual normal quests which you can only do once and are all rather nice and grand. Not masterpiece style quests but at least good quests with interesting things to do and characters to enjoy.

For example, radiant quests I would like would be simple ones. Like how in Skyrim you got radiant thieves guild quests about always going to a random location and stealing a random specific item or going to a kill a random dragon priest or dragon... That sort of stuff. Not in a way where A LOT of quests are radiant for no real good reason (which Skyrim honestly did do).

And I really hope certain areas can respawn, maybe not even just respawn with the same enemies but with different ones! Like a clear a cave of Giant Scorpions then come back later to find that it has been turned into a raider nest... And then clear the raiders and later come back to the same place to see ghouls there, having a 'feast'...

It's nice to have the game world being dynamic and continuous... Radiant quests actually helps toward this too as it gives a lot of simple, "respawning", quests to do in the game which keeps developing the world. For example, I can easily see assassination quests being interesting if done correctly. I mean there's always going to be someone who wants someone dead in the world and people will keep entering and leaving the certain area of the Wasteland you are in, giving you an infinity number of assassinations to do. Same thing with quests about clearing out raiders. You can clear out one group of raiders but another group may move in or start attacking with the former dead...

For something like providing continuing things to do after completing a faction quest line, radiant quests would be fine and I wouldn't have a problem with them being in the game. They ended up being used for much more than that in Skyrim, though, and I assume they'll continue to be used to provide cheap, effortless filler material to be substituted for quests with some thought and effort put into them in Fallout 4 as well.

That kind of reinforces my point though, doesn't it? If people sell the radiant quest system short because they don't know its capabilities, then perhaps Bethesda should showcase it better by using it in its most visible role to produce something more than banol fetch quests. It seems that modders have no problems using it to create interesting quests and encounters - why can't Beth?

The best system would be the best of both worlds together.

I mean the actual manually designed quests should have random parameters depending on the current situation.

So for instance the hand written quests can chose the stage place, some of the the quest's NPC roles and target items, and the like, from the random pool of currently available resources, so that each time that you play the quest(-line) it would be a new experience.

The conditions to initialize the quests can also be randomized, so for instance, we can start from a regular random event, that might happen anywhere the conditions are right, then after that depending on player actions, it "MIGHT" trigger one of those semi-randomized hand written quest lines.

So you are never sure where to go to find the quest line that you had completed in a prior game with a diferent character, and that precise quest line might get triggered in a totally different situation, with a totally different setting and role NPCs, and a totally different outcome.

This, will be a new level of replayability, infused into the games.

Why the HELL are people voting yes?

I'm the type of person who would normally vote "yes" for such a thing, as I absolutely froth content, but I didn't like Skyrim's Radiant Quest thing at all. It was way too generic and felt like a chore more than anything else, filling up my quest log with boring instructions. It literally just picked a place you hadn't explored, put a bandit leader in it, and told you to go kill him.

The settlement system kind of demand dynamic quests. Stuff like recruiting traders and other people is best done this way. It also works as other types of quests say to improve or restore reputation with an faction.

Activities relating to hunting, gathering, bounties, deliveries etc would make for suitable radiant quests.

I voted yes after reading this post.

Radiant quests were just pointless busywork with virttually no narrative value whatsoever. I don't want to see them again. The only time I can see them being useful is when your character is grossly underleveled, and needs immediate XP. But that would indicate a pretty unbalanced levelling system anyway.

I'm slightly torn on it but I'll vote yes, game-play wise I hate repeatables... but modding wise the Radiant system was a god send, most Quests in Skyrim were Radiant. Almost every single one used radiance to collect at least some actors and place them into quests, and Story Manager (the core of the radiance system) is one of the best components I think they've added without it we wouldn't have Quest Aliases without Quest Aliases many scripts would have not been possible. Nor would Scenes or Packages have been as easy to create it adds a lot to Skyrim.

It is a very useful system they just didn't do a good job at showing it.. well, that and it works mostly under the hood. Sure it could use some improvements but it was much better then Oblivion or Fallout 3.

I would be happy to see it in FO4 as well.

You win the Internet for the day lol.

We need the radiant quest system. It's so flexible and powerful and when used in the right way opens up a lot of opportunities.

Sure the little boring ones aren't great but there's more to the radiant system than just fetch quests...

Radiant Quests ruined Skyrim I believe. On the smallest of scales like a wanted poster quest on a billboard is fine, but when pretty much every quest thrown at the character is radiant, it becomes so overwhelming and tedious. Bethesda wasted so much time implementing this failure of a system to garner more playability but instead alienated people from continuing play just by shoving so much content down their throats as well as alienating a base that wants better quests. The best quests are written ones that have good c&c and an understandable plot. These things are not provided by radiant quests and radiant questing has really no place in fallout 4 except taking from the game as a whole.

I think a distinction needs to be made between simple quests, and world reactivity. Radiant Story does both. I can understand the disdain for fetch quests; they don't offer any real narrative depth, and they're only there to give you something to do. But the reactivity? http://uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:World_Interactions. Generally speaking in Skyrim, if the same scenario can happen with different NPCs or locations, it's governed by Radiant Story. For non-quests, that means every farmer you can sell crops to, every mill owner/innkeeper you can sell chopped wood to, every mine foreman you can sell ore to, every tavern wench that takes your order when you sit down, every letter of inheritance, etc. I get the disdain for fetch quests, but I have a harder time understanding people who don't dig that.

As for the amount of radiant quests we saw in Skyrim, they only need to design the quest once. After that, it's ridiculously easy to fill in the blanks with NPCs, locations, and objects. So of course they're going to take advantage of that, and fill out the world. Doesn't mean there was a lack of fleshed out quest content in Skyrim, though; the ratio of written to radiant quests is different, but that's only because simple objectives become easier to create en masse.

For Fallout 4, I see Radiant Story playing a huge factor in how the world can change based on your actions. It's already confirmed to play a part in the settlements we build ourselves, which is only appropriate. But any dynamic content like random encounters or NPC reactions can shift a little based on what we do in the real quests, and if there's enough Radiant Story in the game then it will really feel like we're having an effect on the wasteland.