Everyone knows that TES game manuals are good reading material for that special time we men spend in the bathroom doing our business.
*ahem*
Don't try to deny it; you know it's true, and you've done it before.
Well, while reading the Morrowind game manual whilst on the royal crown tonight, I stumbled across something that really caught my eye, and made me think. Let me read for you what Todd Howard himself says in the "Introduction to Morrowind" section, on page 2 of the Morrowind GOTY edition game manual (I assume it's also in the original version as well):

"The essence of any Elder Scrolls role-playing game has always been simple: let you do what you want, and make sure you have fun doing it. Huge, detailed, and open-ended are words that frequently come up when talking about Arena, Daggerfall, and now Morrowind. We don't believe a good role-playing game should restrict you from making choices, even if they're bad ones. Go ahead and play a Wizard that wears heavy armor. You can do it, but remember that it's another skill to learn and might take time away from your magical studies.

One of the first questions people usually ask is, "What do i do in this game?" The answer we give is inevitably "Well, what do you want to do?" Do you want to be a noble knight or a treacherous swine? Do you want people to like you? Do you want people to loathe and fear yo? Do you prefer casting spells, wielding swords, or both? Want to plunder dungeons and tombs? Rise to head of a guild? Gather information from everyone and everything? Whatever your interest, there's plenty for you to do.

One minute you may be gazing up at the moons and stars over the plains or out for a swim in the Sea of Ghost, and running for your life from a cliff racer or slaughterfish the next. Any place in Morrowind can quickly turn deadly. Vvardenfell, the setting for Morrowind, is a culturally geographically diverse place, dominated by the volcanic Red Mountain and surrounding wastelands. You'll find the island's population in a variety of different settlements, including small fishing villages with stick huts, strange towns where houses that look like large bug shells are used for housing, dwellings made of giant mushrooms grown by mages, and the majestic ancient city of Vivec.

Everywhere you go you will find an assortment of do-gooders, scoundrels, eccentrics, and ordinary people just trying to make their way in the world. How you choose to interact with them is entirely up to you, and as a result you will find your gameplay experience may be completely different from anyone else's. Trust whom you will, dispatch whomever you want, but be prepared for the consequences.

Morrowind is filled with things for you to do...hundreds and hundreds of things. During your efforts to complete the main quest or rise to power in a faction, don't forget to leave the beaten path now and then to see what's over the next ridge. Or, talk to people you meet to see what problems or assistance they may reveal to you. It is in these moments, and thousands of others like them, that you will forget the real world--sometimes for much longer than you intended--and lose yourself in ours. Perhaps it'll be spent searching for a lost artifact that is rumored to be hidden in a tomb. maybe you'll choose a side in a war between rival guilds.

No matter what your preference, there's no right or wrong way to play Morrowind."

A few particular sentences and comments in there that particularly stick out to me that prove my point.
"We don't believe a good role-playing game should restirct you from making choices, even if they're bad ones."
"Trust whom you will, dispatch whomever you want, but be prepared for the consequences."
"No matter what your preferences, there's no right or wrong way to play Mororwind."

I think that's all that needs to be said, but I'll elaborate for the people who don't get it.
TES games are ALL ABOUT PLAYER CHOICE. That's why I absolutely love these games. That's why I absolutely loved Morrowind. When I don't have the option to make WHATEVER choice I want to, it stops becoming TES for me. Let me kill who I want. Don't make certain NPC's invincible. Give me the CHOICE Bethesda, to mess things up, because it's my world once I start up that game. Let me play it how I want to, and LIKE YOU SAID YOURSELF, good role-playing games shouldn't restrict you from making certain choices.

I agree but i should still know that im not killing someone important while on my killing frenzies

I completely agree. I see no reason to make any character unkillable, besides children of course. If TES wants to improve on an open world experience we need to see this. If I kill an important character to the main quest, I should suffer the consequences to that. You can't stop someone from just reloading the game if they make a mistake like that, but at least some people would live with the consequences.

I'm expecting all the characters besides the ones for the main quest will be killable since there is a system that will replace quest givers. Possibly quest-line characters would be unkillable but who knows. I would prefer to suffer the consequences at least when I'm playing through for roleplay purposes. Theres really no excuse to have an open world game where you can do whatever you want if your unable to permanently kill important members of the game. If I shoot an important member of society, odds are they will not be knocked unconscious. They will probably die.

I wouldnt mind anyone being killable, so long as the important ones are damn well guaranteed to not die from abnormal game play interactions, like, "suddenly, Dreamora hoard!". I don't want to be playing and randomly get a message saying an important NPC has died, or worse, find out someone important has died when i actually need them.

There are plenty mechanics that could be implemented that prevent NPC's from dying randomly that are essential to certain quest/main quest, such as making them only vulnerable to you, or making it so that anything can "knock them out", ala Oblivion, but if YOU should so decide to take their life, you can, ala Morrowind.

I really don't know how to handle this, possibly making them unkillable when they are not in the same cell as you are if thats possible.

Kinda ninja'd :ph34r:

there's more to playing the way you want than just killing who you want. Id prefer if OB had more choices that actually mattered like which guild you join, who you support, actual consequences to accepting or rejecting quests.

But of course, being able to kill anyone is fun

Indeed, I think we can all agree that there was a lot more wrong with Oblivion than simply this.
But this thread is simply about this subject. Being able to kill anyone.

(To future posters: I don't want this thread to escalate into an Oblivion bashing thread, nor a Oblivion vs Morrowind thread, so please don't make it like that)

Murder is a pretty big choice. If you chose to kill someone in the real world you suffer severely for it, so why can't it be the same in a video game? Killing someone is a choice that could change the game in a completely different direction if done right.

I agree. I loved how in Morrowind, encounters with important people felt very tense, like, knowing if I slipped up or messed up, bad things would happen. And you know what?
I absolutely thrived on that tension. It was so fun. I remember the first time meeting Dagoth Fyr. I don't know why, I just almost crapped my pants being in the same room as him. Knowing, one wrong slip of that trigger, and BAM. Dead. LOL. God it was great.
That feeling never happened in Oblivion. Not once. You know why? Because I couldn't kill whoever I want. Well, also, because enemies were all leveled and nothing was EVER a challenge whatsoever but, that's a different point. :glare:

I agree(Wow, a thread where everyone agrees), which relates to how I felt towards certain characters in oblivion compared to Morrowind. I actually liked characters in Morrowind because of how I felt during that tension you described and they just have an overall better feel than characters in Oblivion. In Oblivion, I just though "who gives a crap, die, give me your money" or if I was playing a good character, "Get out of my way before I decide to kill you because I feel like it and the consequences aren't sever enough anyway.

Sorry, I'm in no way trying to make this Morrowind vs. Oblivion. But Morrowind did handle this aspect better than Oblivion in my opinion.

For sure, I 100% agree with that. Morrowind definitely handled this better than Oblivion. And that's fine to say, I just don't want people to start flaming because of personal opinions. But enough about that.

Being able to make those types of choices is what makes TES for me. Being able to do WHATEVER I want sets this RPG series apart from EVERY other RPG I've ever played.
Absolute freedom of choice. That's what The Elder Scrolls means to me. Please don't take that away.

anyone speculated if radiantstory could kick in on importand NPCs too? say you kill NPC X who knows this and that importand information about whatever.. and RS finds someone else for you who might know the same stuff? surely wouldnt be impossible..

The problem with this really is I can see it causing a lot of programming bugs with all sorts of weird behaviour from questlines and AI.

Not Kids, I dont think the ESRB would allow it. but everyone else is game.

The children should go run and hide when I'm on my killing sprees. When I'm on my frenzies, I don't even want to see kids or I'd wish i could kill them (wow that sounds bad.)

The problem here is that there's no possible way any video game can ever allow you to truly do whatever you want. At some point, there MUST be some limitation, simply because the developers can't POSSIBLY include every option you could ever POSSIBLY want to do. Morrowind, and no Elder Scrolls game before or after it, has been an exception. You couldn't choose to join Dagoth Ur in Morrowind, you couldn't swim to the mainland, you couldn't even do simpler things like play those loots and drums you occassionally find or even ask one of those pesky NPCs standing in the middle of a doorway to move, you can't even sit in a chair or lie down on a bed. This is because Bethesda did not include the option to do these things, even though they're all things you could logically expect to be able to do. In short, the game limits what the player can do because it must, all video games must limit what the player can do to an extent, the only way you cabn truly hope for complete freedom in an RPG is if you play it with pen and paper, and even then, you're still limited by the rules, it's just that since these rules are enforced by people rather than strict limitations in a piece of software which can only be broken by modifying said software, it is possible to bend them, depending on what the person in charge of the game is willing to allow. When it comes to a computer RPG, you have to limit what players can do somehow, whether due to technical, gameplay or story reasons, every additional choice the story can make demands additional work and resources, and at some point, you have to just decide that this is what you can do and this is what you can't, and work with that, the hard question is where to put those limitations. And no matter how broad you make those limitations, I'm sure someone will find something they want to do that the game doesn't let us do. I know I've thought that way about Morrowind before, and Oblivion as well, and every other RPG I played, but as long as the limitations don't ruin the game experience for me (Which so far no limitations I've encountered in any Bethesda game have done.) I'll just play on having fun doing what the game DOES let me do, and for those limitations I don't really like, well, maybe I'll hope some like-minded fan gets the idea of modding them out. Obviously, I'd prefer having the option to do everything I could possibly want to from the start, but that's just not possible, so I'll just have to settle for the next best thing and download a mod, if one is made.

Myself, I don't really care if I can kill every NPC I want in the game, because even if I can completely depopulate the world, I wouldn't want to do it. Lack of an option only really bothers me when I'd have a reason to want to choose it, I've never complained about not being able to leave the borders of the map because I know the developers didn't put anything interesting there, now being able to join Dagoth Ur might be nice, but I don't go into a game expecting it to let me join the main villain if I want to, I've never felt that I needed to be able to dance in Morrowind to be satisfied, I've certainly never felt that my RPG experience was ruind by not being able to smoke a skooma pipe, in the same logic, why should I want to kill every NPC in the game? A world with no NPCs living in it would be extremely boring. And I've played many RPGs that don't let me kill every NPC I could ever want to, really, games that actually even attempt to offer this freedom that Bethesda so hypocritically says an RPG should aim to offer are quite a small minority in computer RPGs, and those that try still don't succeed at truly offering freedom to do whatever you want. On othe other hand, if I can kill whoever I want, that's fine too, having an option to do something I don't want to do doesn't bother me, and if I decide to go killing random people and break a quest as a result, then that's my fault, as long as the game doesn't go killing these people for reasons completely outside of my control when I have no way to be around to stop it, which could never happen in Morrowind, but was a very real possibility in Oblivion, many times I've seen NPCs who wander outside the city walls getting killed by monsters, or NPCs who stay in the city getting killed by the guards for stealing, all as a result of Radiant AI, and this is the toned down version we got in the finished game, I've also seen many situations where "NPC Name is unconscious." comes up on the screen, which happens due to something I have absolutely no control over, and when that happens, I'm actually grateful for essential NPCs, because without them, a quest would have become broken. Concequences for choices are nice, but I don't want to have my game ruined because of something completely outside of my control.



Maybe not impossible, I think, but highly unlikely, I'd imagine the whole questgivers get replaced by their family thing is only for Radiant Story quests, I don't see it applying to NPCs involved in major questlines, certainly not very important characters like Esbern, these, I'm guessing, will just be essential. And in any case, from what I've heard, I don't think Radiant Story will produce infinite replacements for dead NPCs, so it's not really a substitute for essential NPCs, just a way to possibly give the player a second chance if a quest giver does get killed.

I prefer not to have my game file ruined because some important NPC has died. If they allow an option of toggling it off with a warning to the player I would support it, but I prefer there to be essential NPCs by default.

Well it would tell you, like it did in morrowind, that you killed someone important right after you do so. when that happens you just load your game, or continue on in your doomed world

There was a backdoor in Morrowind too, so even if you killed all the essential NPCs but one specific one, you could finish the quest.

That only works when the player is the only one that can go after important NPCs. With Radiant AI, someone else can decide to kill an important NPC, or an important NPC can go get themself killed without your involvement. It would svck if you're just playing normally, reach level 2, then receive a "the threads of prophecy have been broken" because an important NPC half the world away went and got killed.

I get the OPs argument as to why you should be able to kill anyone, I just don't understand why anyone would want to.
Does anyone really honestly feel that let down while playing the game, is killing quest essential npcs that important. Or is this just an intellectual exercise in pointing out a flaw in a game that doesn't actually affect anyone's gameplay and enjoyment?
Personally, I am grateful for the opportunity to kill any npcs, try killing town residents in a lot of other games, see how far you get

simple problem. only you can kill essentials. problem solved

Killing anyone I want, so no essential NPCs? I don't know, what if they wander off and die due to a bug? I'd rather see a more flexible way of dealing with essential NPCs.

unscripted dragon attacks town quest characters gets killed story is ruined

That still exposes their immortality, and prevents clever ways of killing them (eg, push them off a bridge, drop something heavy on them, lure them into a cave of baddies where they "unexpectedly" get killed by inhabitants).

It is a difficult problem to solve, no doubt. You don't want them to get killed because the AI glitched out, but you don't want to make them immortal because it messes with the player's suspension of disbelief. I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer.