What I mean is, Skyrim actually does a good job of making the game feel alive. People have their own stories, daily routines, and conversations but it just seems there is very little room in this living town for the player. You can only really genuinely affect the their lives when the game want you to. I walk past a bum and they are all "I'm so hungry..." and I look in my inventory and I have enough food to open a small restaurant but can I go "Here, have his roasted goat leg some ale and some nice warm apple pie?" Nope. All I can do is say here is ONE gold coin out of the thousands upon thousands of gold I have in my inventory." Heck not even bums maybe if I though a blacksmith npc was cool and I had spare ore I could give it to them to better my relationship with them and who knows maybe even get it to the point where I become a friend/favor customer and get discounted prices.

Be nice if you could just give gifts but thats just one aspect of town life. Cutting wood is fine, and cooking though mainly pointless is fun as well (and being able to give people their favorite food would make it more useful), but I just think it would be cool if you could actually go through the game just as easily as a merchant or a bard as you could a warrior. It would be awesome if you quests could be completed without setting foot out of town. Where the same quests has more options of completing them rather than go to x cave and kill y bandit with either a sword, a spell, or a bow. To have more political or merchantile options... if you have enough coin and reputation, rather than being the errand boy you can pay mercenaries to do the quest for you. Or have the option to set up assassinations or find out secrets to use against other characters to potentially blackmail them.

I dunno, just would seem fun to be able to make a character who's weapon of choice was the power of words and a deep wallet. But I just feel the towns while need are more like a fish bowl. They all have their lives in the bowl and I'm stuck on the outside looking in. I mean a lot of people complain about not being able to do anything about the corruption in Riften. Heck it would be cool if you could take over a the role of a Jarl... either by doing enough quests or just rolling up in their and killing guards until you've killed enough to make them retreat and then you approach the Jarl and take their position by way of force either by killing them in fatal combat or intimidating them into giving up. I just feel a lot more could have been done to make the player an actual part of a town rather than just a visitor. I don't feel any real desire to stay in town outside of picking up quests, dropping off items in my storage or selling them off, and maybe idling about to 'watch the fish'.

No ofense but If they implemented every little thing everyone think that would be cool in the game it would take 50 years to develop.

To be fair, that is kind of a problem with real life too: Sometimes people just have a life and don't need you in it.

Although, I do agree on certain points. Particularly I miss having some type of fame rating, where as you do things you become more known in the world and people actually talk about you. One particular pet peeve is this:

Guard: "Did you hear about the college? I heard there's a new Arch-Mage."

Me: "Yeah, it's me. They made me Arch-Mage despite not knowing magic and only doing a couple of chores."

Guard: "If you have an aptitude for magic, you should try them out."

Me: "..."

I agree there isn't enough choice/dynamics to what you can "do" to effect the world or change up your gameplay. my original reply was going to be


"Que! what do you mean not livable! I found a shack lakeside with a garden, its original occupent left, I harvest, I hunt I visit a nearby mill to chop wood for gold since the char I'm playing really isn't suited for heavy combat or magicks, I invest with the nearby towns with another fellow who hunts and just bought me a horse the other day. my whole life was ruined when a Dragon appeared and torched the place. I considered my home burned down, and I tracked the reptile to his lair. I knew I couldnt fight him so I bought the help of a mage, in the end it was a total failiure, the mage died and I fled. I came back reclaimed his body and gave me a water burial. I have no Idea what I'm going to do now."

If everyone reasoned like you, we would still be in the Stone Age, carrying stones and hunting boar.

Look at 1995 and look at now. Look how technology has advanced. If you were living in 1995 and you saw Skyrim's trailer, you'd say it's either a :

A ) Lie
B ) Animated Movie.
C ) Dream.

If someone told you, right now, in 2011 that a game is coming out that RENDERS planet Earth in it's ENTIRETY, you wouldn't believe him, because we're not there yet. We might be able to do this in 10-20 years, but it's going to take much more than that "If they implemented every little thing that has been requested, it would take 50 years to develop" reasoning.

Just one question:

Have you ever written one line of code in your life?

Haha. So true. There's also this one constantly:

Guard: Joined the Comapnions, huh? What do they let you carry the mead?

Me: No, I'm the Harb- Forget it.

I bet he hasn't. But that doesn't change that his point is quite fair others who have and do write code are however not quite up to the task as it is I'd say to meet the requests of the opening post. Too much work. But in 20 - 40 years ? Who knows. All I know is that next year it will be 40 years since Pong was considered a huge success.

Not really... Think about games like the Sims (ahem, I've watched the wife play) and all the possible interactions they can do with each other.

Nope. Skyrim feels alive, plays alive, was alive, is alive and will be alive.

Fable tried it, and it didn't ended well...

10-20-30-50 years... that's not my point.

My point is that a lot of people who doesn't have a clue about how the software development process work come and say "hey, why didn't you put this in your software? It's looks really easy to be done". Guess what? It's not, I've been working in this area for 10 years now and I get that a lot. Software development is really time consuming and requires a lot of testing and even then things will go wrong 99% of the time. I can't even fathom the ammount of complexity behind such a monster as is the case with this game.






Really? The Sims is a game focused on that kind of relation between characters. The developers focused on this aspect of the game only, they didn't have to worry about dungeons, skill tree balancing, combat, spell system, quest writing, etc etc etc.

Skyrim is a beast of a game compared to tiny The Sims.

PEBCAK


Look this one up

The towns do seem alive.... The first couple times you visit them. Then it starts to feel more like a living wax museum.

I'd SO love to enter Whiterun and be like...
Holly crap there's some sort of festival going on! What a surprise! There's women dancing with flowers in their hair, and playing tambourines! And new stalls selling festive clothing and items! And some guy is just giving out free mead! And the Jarl, he's strolling about tossing gold coins to children! Oh my god! Skyrim is a real place!

Yes I have written a few lines of code in the past not a lot or enough to consider myself competent but I have given it the good old college try. And the physics of movement and a combat engine is one thing. Simple conversational effects are another just plain "If/then" checks with the dialogue and programmed actions. Of course something on the scale of what I suggestion would be very massive and much like coding an entirely new game. You have to double triple check a lot of stuff and you get one part wrong and it could pull everything else apart at the seams.

Heck, look at the simple go-fetch quests. Even with the way things are now you can glitch your quest and come across some random bug. Making actions matter on that scale is a big bone to chew on. You have to make sure the actions of one path of code does not step on another and if you have separate paths for every single character in a town and every single town has their own separate paths and so on and so on that is A LOT of paths that cross over top and up under each other and without some strong coding to keep them from getting tangled or stepping on each other's toes, its a recipe for utter buggy glitched chaos. So in a lot of ways its just as hard as the physics and the combat to keep all that stuff straight and organized, but as a few have pointed out before... if the fact that something was hard was reason enough not to do it, the word we live in would be a very different place.

My only concern is while I LOVE Skyrim... my sister LOVES games like the sims and character interaction. She'll derp around town for hours on end. And it seems games are all about combat engines and new skill trees and building the next big installment of character badassery. Just saying combat is fun and all but it would be nice if the same focus was given to town life. Where I can give things to people and feel like I'm effecting their life rather than getting some cheese '8 hour buff of charity' for giving away a single coin when I know I am capable of giving more. Heck, why not have an exterior housing upgrade that installs a garden so we can grow our own supplies for alchemy or cooking, or put in a training dummy that actually levels your skills when you hit it. Or I dunno, flesh out that skeletal carcass that is in game marriage. Give me something that when I want to take a break from dungeon crawling and killing stuff, that makes me WANT to hang out in town and actually feel like I'm doing something productive rather than just watching people have the same scripted conversations over and over again. Let me challenge other archers to an archery contest, fishing is a good classic staple of rpg games, maybe introduce gambling of some kind, or maybe the ability to open your own shop, really the sky is the limit.

Not saying they have to impliment everything, but its not wrong to dream is it... but really give me something... Skyrim is suppose to be the game that I put into my PS3 and not feel the need to take it out for a few days to a few weeks. As it is now, as much as I love Skyrim, I get bored of it after a day of playing and need to put in another game to take a break from it and do something else. Maybe its a fact that one of the games I've use as a 'pallet cleanser' is Harvest Moon. But still Skyrim just doesn't have that much variety in things to do... yes there is a variety in HOW you choose to do things but that is not the same thing. But eh, I enjoy Skyrim for what it is. And honestly don't see any of my 'recommendations' making it into this game but could always plant the seeds for possibilities in the next.