They don't go underground. They go into the church. And there are at least two guys you talk to, plus a woman (plus some other NPCs). The first one, sort of obviously, is the shopkeeper to whom Dar-ma was making the delivery. She says she hasn't seen her, but if you look around, you'll find Dar-ma's horse behind the store. If you go back in, the shopkeeper claims that that's her horse. You can talk to the innkeeper, but he doesn't give you much information, though the way he clams up is significant itself. Then there's a guy wandering around town who will tell you that he can't talk in public, but that if you come to his house after dark, he'll tell you what's going on. If you wait and go to his house, he'll explain where Dar-ma is, why she's there and what they plan on doing, tell you the whole history of the town and the Deep Ones and the Brethren, if you're interested, and he'll give you a key to the trapdoors and suggest that you use the one in the inn, since it's closest to where Dar-ma's being kept.

Also, if you stay the night at the inn, you'll see that the other guest room upstairs is torn up - there's obviously been a fight there.

See - all these little details are there in the game, just waiting for you to discover. Or you can just go, "Look! A trapdoor! I'm supposed to go down there sometime, so I'm going right now!" And you miss all the rest of it.

Again - I see your point. You're essentially asking that Beth do more to force, or at least guide, people into following the path that reveals all those little details, rather than allowing you to just rush through it and miss them all. And I'm just saying that those details are already there and rushing through it and missing them is your choice. I don't believe that Beth should limit the choices available in order to compensate for people who take shortcuts and miss details.

Couldn't agree more.

Timed quests!

Yes. If I gotta save the girl by midnight or she dies...she probably should die at midnight, even if I'm there or not. Quests should be ready for success or failure, and have branches so its ready to handle either. And quests shouldn't end there.

First playthrough you save the girl who got kidnapped. Everyone lives happily ever after and you get your cut of the gold.

Second playthrough you wait a while, and then go the cave to save the girl...only to find the cave empty except for some animals. But wait! There's a sign of a camp recently being set up in the cave, and there's a note hidden in the ashes of the fire. The note, which must have been placed their after the fire was put out, writen in the girls blood, saying that the bandits home base is a camp located at location x along road y, and they plan to sell her into slavery.

You could run right their, save her, and get the cut of the gold like that second part had never happened.

On the third playthrough, you wait after getting the note, go attack the bandit camp, kill em all but find no girl. In a chest of gold you find a bill of sale stating she was sold into slavery at manner z, and now you either have to go buy her freedom, or free her through sneeky/head on attacking means. Either way, the guards at the manner are stronger than the bandits, so you gotta be more careful.

It's possible to get that fealing of time passing like it does in a linear game, yet it still is an open world and the character is never forced to do anything.

I wouldn't mind "linear" quests if done properly and with enough freedom within it's constructs.

For example, let's say there was a quest where you had to jump into a carriage with a few other NPCs to some location, perform an action at that location, and successfully return. Maybe it's a Mages Guild quest where you are transporting a relic to a location with other mages and you need to protect it along the way. Once there, you and the other mages need to perform a magic-based ritual with said relic to continue in the quest, and then return successfully. This is a linear quest, but you have options on how to defend the carriage and options once at the location. If done right, I can see this being quite enjoyable.

Or for another example I've greatly wanted to see, a quest where you are a passenger on a ship. The ship is going from point A to B. Along the way, you are attacked by sea creatures or maybe another ship, and it's up to you and the other NPC's to defend the ship and make sure it doesn't get overtaken. Again, a very linear quest in that no matter how you play it, you have to remain on the ship and it's always going to take place from point A to B. However, how you defend the ship is up to you and perhaps, if there was a conspiracy afoot, you could even decide to sabetage the whole adventure and work for the force you are facing (in the case of another ship trying to overtake you).

The point is, while you may or may not think either of those options sound fun, it's no great leap of the imagination to envision a linear quest in a game like that that has enough variety and freedom within it's structure to truly stand out and be a memorable experience, while not taking away from the freedom that is the hallmark of the TES franchise.

While I would prefer this be kept to the utmost minimum, I for one am in favor of some linear quests.

The best times I had in Morrowind was due to stumbling on something, or finding the Great Welkyn stone by accident in OB.

Keep the world as open as possible, especially if quests can be entered and completed in different ways.

This would be perfect. Daggerfall style, but with more variety. So then you can "complete" each quest, successfully or not. The ultimate experience, and a lot of incentive for more playthroughs. If TES has been always an open game, we can't say the same for its quests, mostly linear. With the exception of DF, of course.

I think the original post should have been titled "should quests be more in depth?" That seems to be the point you are trying to make. I would imagine your poll results would have been entirely different. I think your wording killed this poll.

I chose other. The version you gave is just limiting the game to a more linear fashion. However, maybe we can get some quests that have a time limit and if you don't accomplish them in that time limit then the hostage is killed and you have failed the quest and must either reload to a save point to try to finish it in time again or just go on with the game and try it on another character you make.

Also, I'm not advocating it has to be a really short time limit, I mean like you have to save this lady because if the ransom isn't delivered by the next morning then they will kill her.

Edit: Damn, just read through the rest of the posts and someone already suggested this, oh well.

More in depth questing, like they made you sit down and finish it right after you accept it? I don't really care, teh thing i like about tes is that if you get bored you can just wanderer around till you feel like helping joe nobody fetch his lunch or whatever

Although i do like the idea of timed quests, like you have 12 hours to go kill the cultists before they kill farmer joe's daughter

I think TES would greatly benefit if it was a level-based game, rather than an open world game. They could tell the story better.

The OP isn't specific enough

But...the philosophy and popularity of TES is about being open world, and multiple paths. Also the moddability. Plus, there are going to be dungeons are going to be low, medium, and high level places.

The best part about being open is that it's up to you to decide whether u want to play a quest with a linear approach or a diverse try something out of the box style approach.
Everyones a winner that way.

def' no

That is one of the reasons I like the game. The restricted access was one of the reasons I didn't like Fall out 3 as much. I like the freedom to go wherever you please.

Umm what? The main quest is already a linear fashion if you decide to go that route, why would you want leveled gaming? This comment made me die a little inside.

Agreed.

I just want deeper quests that aren't based solely around killing....not all fetch quests for meaningless items.

Now it makes sense to me.

But forcing is bad, a better idea I came up for this is to make the direct path more hidden/obscure so you'll stumble on the fun/intended details before finding out where the next part of the quest is.

In the case of the trapdoor, put a rock over it or hide under some bushes/carpet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, games with linear levels, like Metro 2033, are capable of telling great stories. I feel like TES stories are never fully realized, and I think one way to remedy that would be to make the game level-based.

However, I wouldn't object to something like http://tinyurl.com/cka2ze, where levels can branch off into what you might call "sidequests" before merging back into the story, and can be revisited in such a map.

Additionally, see http://tinyurl.com/3ulbwop

I think it would work great too. I call it, the evolving quest. Made a thread about it a while back, it got flamed to kingdom come. Not many people liked the idea of being timed, even if they don't beat the time the quest would just branch off instead of getting a you fail pop up and the quest just ending.

But most people just read the title and responded on that though, so its hard to say. I'd like to see Evolving quests though.

Poll: Is TES a little too open at times?

Just, no.

;tes:

Well, it's a lot of work to do, you must admit it. In DF the method was simple, and they can't simply copy that in Skyrim. And there will be definitely a lot of people complaining if there were timed quests. Probably this is only a dream.

However I like the Evolving quest idea too. But I think as I said it's a lot of work. :shakehead:

anything linear is evil as far as this series is concerned

You mean like the fighter's guild quest "A Rat Problem" where you couldn't just walk out and kill the mountain lions but you had to linearly progress through the quest to complete it and do detective work (kind of)? Bethesda is ahead of you on this one.

Never said it would be easy. It would be awesome, and really add to the replayability though. And its not like every quest would have to make use of this, just like not every quest is going to make use of the radiant story tool. It would be pretty hard to implement, but it would definitly would put the quest system above other rpgs.

Probably not something we'll see in Skyrim. Maybe the next TES game, or Fallout 4. We'll have to wait and hope. Radiant story all ready sounds like a step in the right direction for quests, so I'm content. For now at least.