There are tons of in quest choices.

The only freedom this game gives you really is about how you want to fight. Often enough, you can't even tell someone you don't want to do this or that, it's really annoying. And as was stated, waht you actually do has too little an impact.

Just had some chick tell me I should go and kill an NPC so we could eat him together. No option to say: "You crazy b****, how about you eat yourself?!" I yelled a nice thu'um at her face instead which resulted in her death, eventually, but it only made me fail he quest.

In general, there's way too few choices regarding quests. You either do as was said or have the quest forever unsolved in your journal.

There seems (to me) to be two threads in this thread - the opening post that would like more options, as it were, for dealing with situations and the world to react more to those options:

Basic example - it is cool to have a thieves guild with associated quests but it would also be cool to have the option of a quest to destroy the guild and be recognized for it. Or no quest but if you wipe out a faction the world would respond in some way ("So you killed that skim, here, let me buy you a drink"). This I agree with, and is a good thing.

Of course it being a game created at this point in time there would always have to be some sort of limit, and no matter what was there there would be someone who still would want to do something and be annoyed they couldn't. Creating reactive worlds that change significantly (more than just a line of dialogue here or there) based on something you do can be difficult (If I kill such and such it would be nice if the world reacted in some way!), and depending on the logical consequences of doing something it could knock on and affect other quests which makes it more difficult again.

I went through these feelings in Morrowind where I went through the game looking for the option to really join the Twin Lamps which would lead to far reaching changes as we took on slavery... yeah, it wasn't there and having the option to kill whoever I wanted didn't really change that.

The other thread seems to be "if I want to kill anyone and everyone why can't I?" I don't really see the point, but true I also don't see no point in preventing it (other then to stop the inevitable whining that would come from people that would inevitably kill someone important and then complain Bethesda didn't do enough to help them not wreck their game).

I guess at least if you can kill anyone at all you can imagine you are having an in game affect (and so the thieves guild was destroyed by the Dragonborn and people no longer had to fear... etc.)



I would like that. Until then my Thalmor sympathizer/secret agent character is just really, really deep cover.



Which I think would be very silly, just replacing the original quest giver with someone else if you killed them.

NPC: "Why yes, my uncle did die from an axe to the face accident. Fortunately he left detailed instructions for a quest he was going to give someone. I thought I would give it now, you know, I kind of see it as fulfilling his last wish."



Actually, that sounds about right. If you have a quest and you tell the quest giver to go jump of a cliff it should be classified as a fail, since you are failing the quest. I guess it would be good to to have a few more outcome titles to differentiate between the ones based on what you do - failure if you accept, try and do the quest and, well, fail, completed, refusing a quest (which would kind of fit this situation)...

I agree completely, but it won't change, unfortunately.

I wouldn't be surprised due to some people who post here. You can destroy one of the guilds and even get a reward for it.

new vegas is made by obsidian, not bethesda.

i don't care about not being able to kill every living thing in the game world...that feature does not make a great game. what i do agree with is different methods of handling the major guilds. i should be able to join the silver hands, help mjoll in riften, help some radical nords wanting to get rid of the mage college, etc. (no matter if you are good or evil, completing the main quest is in your best interest). obsidian handled this very well in new vegas, allowing multiple choices and outcomes for nearly every quest.

as far as all these choices then being represented in the game world....that is such a monumental task of programming (you think there's bugs now) i think it is a little shortsighted to criticize bethesda (or obsidian) for not including every detail. would they like to? you bet they would. but it's just not possible given the hardware and time/budget constraints.

obsidian writers + bethesda game world is what i want.

TF kind of copy of New Vegas were YOU playing?

Killing Caesar would prevent you from being able to choose one of the four ending paths, get random shop owners to congratulate and thank you and give you free booze, make a squad of hitmen constantly hunt you down, prevent you from doing any Legion quests, unlock new ways of solving certain quests and the radio would be reporting on his death quite often.


But nevertheless, you're right. The choices in Skyrim are often limited to blindly volunteering to do whatever the NPC wants or awkwardly walking away without even saying "no I won't do it." Hell, for roleplayers you even have to roleplay that your character is some rude [censored] simply because walking away from someone mid-sentence is often the only way to deny their quest.

Just quoting this, but not really replying to just this. Yes, sure, you can "choose" to become one, or all of the mentioned things, BUT, here's my beef, which it looks like not many picked up, you can't really choose NOT to become those things, I mean you either go the mage college for example, and if you do all the quests, you become arch mage, yes. BUT the other option would simply be to walk away and not do anything there at all. This is my main problem. There is the thieves guild like I mentioned. Your only real option in the game is to join them, or simply ignore them. Why can't there also be options to go against them, like I said, for example, the Jarl could employ you to go undercover to find out what the guild is up to, and in the end to take them all out to get a huge reward from the city of Riften for wiping out the Thieves guild once and for all.

See, that would be great. As it is now, if I don't like the thieves guild, the only thing I can do is basically leave town and ignore the quests.

It's not just about "killing all NPC's" I mean it in a more story driven dynamic way.

Pretty much the only thing that happened for one or two guards somewhere mentioned "Did you really kill Caesar" "Caesar is really dead" or something like that. I never intended to do legion quests, I wanted to have the legion be "the enemy" and as in a war, I kill all enemies I see but that was something the game world was not designed to happen, hehe. I was excecting the whole legion to crumble before me.

These forums lack a "Like This!" button.

This design philosophy is not only what plagues TES, but the majority of modern games, role playing games in particular. Hell, it's what's wrong with most forms of entertainment: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViewersAreMorons

Strongly agree. Being baby-sitted is extremely annoying, being unable to have real choices is depressing.


One of two choices ?
Most of the time, the only choice is to accept the quest or not, quests that even include a choice are a small minority...

Exactly. Game producers today seems to think their primary audience have the general intelligence of a chimpancee. And unfortuantely many seems to conform to that idea.
It's the whole X-Factor and Helicoptor Parenting thing going on. Everyone must be lead to think they're absolutely amazing at everything, depsite having no skill what so ever. If someone fails to calculate 2+2 then it's obviously a problem with the math, not the person who couldn't calculate it!
Apparently the general idea of producing (games, television or otherwise) must be to cater to the lowest common interest.
"We might lose most people with an intelligence highter than the African Frog, but most people are below that anyway!"

And I myself would like to destroy the smug little weaklings :D Butchu can't, can ya? Not without everyone in the city trying to murder you. >:|

I think I remember once playing Sim Golf and it gave a tip saying "the key to a successful golf course is to make it look hard, but play easy."
I agreed with that statement and found it appropriate to ALL kinds of entertainment, but I feel like games these days are interpreting that phrase differently than I am. I found that phrase true because overcoming adversity is a rewarding experience. Some people have different levels of "pain tolerance" when it comes to difficulty, and therefore throwing everything and the kitchen sink at your players probably isn't the wisest idea, but decently challenging? Sure. In that sense, I never interpreted the phrase to say "difficulty = bad, avoid difficulty," but rather the phrase as a whole basically says "people feel entertained when they succeed where they thought they would fail."

And yet I think developers these days have forgotten about the "look hard" part and focus entirely on the "play easy" half. They don't see the big picture, only half. The result is they miss the big picture entirely and just make pathetically easy games that don't provide the player with any form of real satisfaction.

If you're on PC.
You can set any NPCs to be killable.

As a Khajiit I want to kill the Thalmor and eat them all!

I must say though, I just came across the Dark Brotherhood in Skyrim, I am very happy how that was handled. It should have been like this also with the Thieves guild. I was quite surprised it was possible to do what I tried to do "just for the hell of it".