That's totally right. Good quests make good rpg's. Combat is just a nice ad-on, not the focus of the game.

Does mining, woodcutting, blacksmithing count? Because that's in.

Huzzah!

But Conan-worship aside; so you want to be able to learn to fight without actually fighting, that's the issue right? Well that basically means that you Study fighting, but never Experience fighting. Do you know what such a thing is called? An infant. And I don't know about you, but I'm not seeking to play some infant. I'm not against peaceful solutions, I actually prefer them, but styudying fighting is not a peaceful solution but a violent one - and when combined with the lack of experience, it's a very bad such.

So give us peaceful solutions. And by all means add in a way for these infants to study their ways as well, just make certain that when they're eventually forced to test their knowledge in live action that they fail before a more experienced opponent! :chaos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PQ6335puOc

There's the problem, it was pretty boring how easy it was.

To some extent, yes. We also want peaceful solutions to quests.

Yes, and (bear with me here, this gets a little hard to understand) after you put 10 points into main skills through training you would level up, allowing you to put another 5 skills in everything again. Sure you can't do more than 5 per level but you will be able to level up after training anyways.

Yes but if you started doing what you just described your character in Oblivion would be very weak.

Well if you think about it, a large portion of Oblivion's quests were not "Go kill this" quests. Many of them were "Please go find this" or "Please collect this" and several of the more fun non combat quests like bringing the apocalypse to a Khajiit village (thus my sig :tongue: ). It just ends up that while you try to do that, you will most likely run into some bandits or wildlife or the occasional wisps and undead, which are easily bypassed with high enough sneak skill or invisibility. It's not like your forced to fight all the time but all the TES games and most RPGs have some premise of you having to fight, thus the combat systems hehe. With crafting you have more non-combat things to do, which I will be doing in great detail but I also enjoy combat which I will also be doing. I will skip a fight or two if I don't want to spend time fighting them (such as melee versus Ogres.....Ogres have annoyingly high amounts of health.)

I was so happy when I read that. You know why?

Because first off, it basically fulfills the want for players to have stores or shops of their own. It also allows a merchant to produce their own goods instead of only selling those goods that they got from stolen goods, pillaged goods, or goods they bought from others. This allows you to actually make a 100% profit entirely on your own (once you pay off the price of the equipment needed to start doing these things).

Hopefully the systems put in place for these things are deep enough to keep someone engrossed for quite some time.

Also, you didn't even mention farming, which was also confirmed to be in.

I don't know how anyone could see that as a good thing.



Well, it's a game about the fantasy equivalent of Norseman. I suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nj%C3%A1ls_saga, Iceland's most famous literary work. It involves vikings, wars in Ireland, duels, blood feuds down the generations, axes in skulls, etc. Its main character, though, is Njal, a lawyer who talks his way through everything and has most of his major victories at the Althing (the oldest parliament in the world). I mean, he gets burned to death at the end, but hey.

The reason speech always loses out in these games, except that some see it as not exciting, is because unlike magic and combat and stealth, which can be systematized, speech needs to be added manually to any quest and script that needs it. You can try to make a system out of speech, and then you get the speechcraft wheel from Oblivion. Fallout 3 and especially Fallout New Vegas (which you can finish either without killing anybody or by killing literally every single person except for one robot) do a pretty good job of having speech be a big boy skill. I have hope.

I would like to see a mercy/ knock-out option and a choice for a finishing kill move. one example for a knock out would be a quest where you are interrogating someone for information. maybe by not killing him he will be useful again later. what about fist fights for money, like maybe in a tavern. It would be nice to get xp points on fights but I know that will prob not happen so knocking ppl out and not killing them would work nicely for that.

But as I said, Bethesda did that because they didn't want people forsaking an entire part of the game. Ignoring combat ignored a quarter of the games content, in both Morrowind and Oblivion. Ignoring combat in say, Arena would be more like 80% of the content lol.



The game isn't about dragons, they are just the antagonists. Just like Morrowind wasn't about Dagoth Ur, it was about Vvardenfell and it's peril against Dagoth Ur's influence. Also this game isn't made after any other story out there, it's completely new set in the TES universe. The comments about Conan were talking about it has a conan atmosphere of combat, meaning it is brutal and bloody, it wasn't meaning it was made in conan's image. Mainly it has a nordic feel to the architecture and savage combat, which I for one am all for.

I would certainly like non-combat solutions to many quests. But of course in ESV's combat guilds, especially a fighter's guild, it doesn't really make sense to advance through it with little fighting.

I would like the thieves faction to have quests in which you do not have to cause any harm directly in the quest, but rather use your speechcraft and stealth skills.

Here's my two cents: don't do quests that require killing. Within the Elder Scrolls game systems, you CAN just be an average nobody, if you role play that way. You obviously aren't going to complete the "last dragon hunter killing dragons" story line if you play that way, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. I one had a Morrowind character with high "non combat" skills, and focused solely on the adventure of trading. I'd by some things in one town, walk to another town, dodging wildlife and bandits, and sells my wares in another town. Just use a little imagination.

Completely agree with that, but surely you're aware that it's not easy to refrain from quests in an RPG in general. Yes, for those that ca do heavy role-play this can be done, but at least a few quests with non-violent solutions are not much to ask. And there is enough hope at least for TG quests and DB/MT quests.

Well that was true in fact for Oblivion. Not one thieves guild quest required you to kill something.



Well like I said, Morrowind and Oblivion both had many quests that you weren't required to kill things but there were things that might attack you in the area you needed to go to finish the quest. If you went out of your way to avoid them, you didn't have to fight. Has a nice RP aspect to it if you want to RP that way and you don't have to fight.

That is true. It would be an even better step up to implement speechcraft into it though.

Of course, Oblivion had dismal speechcraft, and Bethesda has probably learned their lesson this time around.

Yeah, only a few quests in Oblivion required you to make someone happy to give you information to proceed with the quest. I did like the choice between using speechcraft and torturing argonian for information for the Fighter's guild quest though. I liked the system in Oblivion more than I have systems in the past though. It made the speechcraft skill useless but that can be remedied by removing speechcraft skill from the game.

I grow tired of arguing such a moot point but what the hey. All you have to do is train the proper skills. If you want to raise Strength, Intelligence, and Endurance than you just go to the trainers and train two skills under each attribute all 5 times. So you would put 5 points of training each in Blade and Blunt for +5 to Strength, 5 for both Block and Heavy Armor for +5 Endurance, and 5 in both Alchemy and Mysticism for the +5 in Intelligence. It is the same thing as getting those up through normal gameplay, it just cost more money.

With Fallout 3, Bethesda learned the power of words with the Speech skill. With New Vegas, Bethesda learned with Obsidian how to perfect it.

That said, I hope I am right.
I would definately like a pacifist option, it's not like I am going to roleplay like that, but having an option is already good enough.

Bethesda's use of the Speech skill in Fallout 3 was pretty underwhelming, especially given the series that game was based on. Their involvement with New Vegas was minimal, so I doubt they really learned all that much from it (dialogue-heavy games have always been Obsidian's style and main strength). I wouldn't be surprised if Skyrim has a bit more dialogue involvement, but the plot seems to inherently involve violent conflict, the setting isn't exactly friendly, and it's never been the style for TES games to let players play through without violence.

Thinking realistically, the game will be more combat-centric than oblivion in order to appeal to the ever growing first person shooter market, effectively ignoring all those who wish to attempt to play the game passively in favor of completely flushing out the more popular mode of play.
However, optimistically, they will create a game in which the destination is clear, but there are many paths you may take in order to reach it, be it convincing a small band of warriors with your considerable speechcraft to assist you in defeating the dragon, or training up the physical skills yourself, while sacrificing the social advantages, in order to face the dragon alone.
however, the latter option is highly doubtful.

Agreed, but apart from the MQ, we'll have the TG and similar SQ.

They dont have to make every game have a non violent option... and realy go ahead try and hug a dragon .. go on hug it!

We didn't say that. Don't try to turn the discussion to something else just for the thrills.