I think some members are misconstruing the OP's comments about timed quests. If you read some of the earlier posts you'll see that ResistanceKnight is not suggesting BGS put a timer in the corner after you accept a quest causing you to fail the quest after time is up. Quite the contrary. I believe he wants it to be seamless and invisible to the player.

First off, as suggested in previous posts, we should be referring to these types of quests as evolving quests rather than timed. No quest in TES should be "uncompletable" (not a real word, I know) unless you as a player choose to outright decline it at the start or back out at a later time. I recall several quests in OB where you had the option to complete the quest in different ways, like Fingers of The Mountain. I'm not putting a spoiler on here in the off-chance someone has not played OB yet, but here are the details for those who have played already and want a refresher, http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Chorrol_Recommendation. Needless to say there are a couple different ways to complete this quest and even after completing, there is still a chance for you to do something else to cause a different outcome. In a sense, this quest evolved depending on how you chose to complete it.

This touches on what Res.Knight is trying to suggest, where a quest line changes/adapts as you go along, either due to the passing of time, or choices you've made, conversation paths or possibly other quests you've decided to complete first. Also, not all quests need to behave this way. It would just add some variety to the game if even a few were like this. You accept a quest...it may change over time, it may not. Since the quest shows no indication of whether it is going to evolve or not, you don't feel pressured to pursue it immediately, but you still could complete it right away, that's your choice. Now, say a few weeks or even months of game time pass. You go to get to your quest, and you get to the quest point, and what's this...

"I'm sorry, but the local Thieves Guild had to relocate because the city guard was tipped off about their location. We could have dealt with the guardsman in charge of the investigation but all of our members were out performing other jobs. Wait, were you thinking of joining the Thieves Guild? You were?! Oh, if only you'd have gotten here sooner, you could have helped us lead the guards on a false trail. Well, nothing to be done about it now. Would you like me to mark the new location of the Thieves Guild hideout on your Map? Okay, here you go. Be careful though, there are guards patrolling the entrance waiting to arrest anyone entering our new safehouse. You'll have to figure out a way to sneak past them so you don't get arrested."

So because you found out the initial location of the Thieves Guild, but chose to wait a while before going to that location, something happened; something changed. You haven't failed that quest, it just adapted to something in the city that happened over time. Had you decided to go there sooner, you might have had the same quest given to you, but this time it would be that someone tipped off the guards, and you would be given the option to lead them on a false trail, or you could go do another quest or some exploring and let the guards find the original hideout, and then maybe you'd be involved in finding a suitable relocation spot, if you didn't get arrested in the raid. Maybe you need to ask around to find a side or secret entrance if your sneak skill is not high enough to sneak past the guards to get to the main entrance. You can still complete this quest in some way, it's just that it got a bit more difficult after a long passage of time. Also, you wouldn't have even known that this quest evolved because based on when you came into the picture, it would appear to you as though Bethesda just programmed a static quest with a bit of a twist on finding this town's Thieves Guild. Any options you would have had by taking this quest earlier would never show up for you on the current playthrough so you would never know that you missed out on anything. But, on the next playthrough, you might find that this particular quest is somewhat different than you remembered and you'll think, hey, that's kinda cool.

Regardless of your actions, that raid was going to happen in this town at a specific time whether you were directly involved or not. Just because you're not there when it happens, doesn't mean that you will be unaffected by the outcome of that raid and its effects on the thieves of that town.

Apologies for a long post, but it seems like some people are getting a right bit peeved at this suggestion and I thought that maybe it could use some more clarification.

Cheers!

I'd love it myself, but it would seem to go against the basic tenets of the series.

Yes, kinda. I dont think describing as making the world less open is fair tho. Because that's not what it's about.. It's more or less about adding actual tension to certain quests that SHOULD require you to hurry. And I agree that some should have a time limit, however it shouldn't elimate you from progressing the qiuestline, it sohuld merely set you back, or rob you from some better reward or something..


But never should the mainquest be timed, you do not want to rush people through the main storyline

True that, but they are updating the combat and graphics engines...so change is sometimes good, right?

HAAAA you mean, TIMED MAIN QUEST.
Then i agree with you partially.

Anyway in arena and daggerfall, you had timed randomic quests :
You went to some merchant asked for a job and some times he would give something like:
I need this (insert object) in X place in 2 days.
You would receive the payment only if you delivered it on time.
Now a progress would be something loke being reported as a thief if you don t show your ugly face for an additional amount of time. You could always repay interest with money, but your fame would go downhill and people would be more reluctant to give you quest, so well rewarding quest would close themselves.

Many quest i would abort because i was willing to explore, a more interesting one appeared, etc.
But it was my choice and i didn t felt like crying a river because i failed it.

Again, timed quest for randomic or even a very few hand written, its your choice. Take it or leave it.

As for main quest timed:
I would love the fact that if i don t solve the game after for example sparcely timed random chain of events happens + some more time someone else would save the world (or the world would end). And you would end up as second rate zero.

It would actually give you a reason to complete the main quest. Right now there s absolutely no incentive to do it, you can seat your lazy fat butt forever and sip beer for all eternity and nothing will happen.
I agree it would have to be some very long time and event that clearly scream impending doom and looses for the PC.
But imprinting a sense of urgency then not having ANY sense of TIME COMSTRAINT is an enormous stupid paradox.
Especially in games like skyrim and Oblivion where they press you up to day 1 to move your [censored] after it.

In Morrowind you don t know what or who and why.
In arena you just have to run after a freaking piece of paper... Who cares...
In arena there was no constraint also. (can t remember the main quest)
In Oblivion as i sayd here, a portal open 2 imps a daedroth play poker around a table not to fall of boreddom until you disrupt them
And in Skyrim ? Dragon will loiter around until you pick one for a fight ? Arght that would be dumb and immersion breaking as much as it was Oblivion (at least for me)

There s plain diference between doing it slowly, and doing anything else but what the game has been build for.
Anyway if you re not doing the main quest, why would you cry me a see if someone else do it ? You re not doing it anyway.

Thats what I was trying to say, yes. Probably could have worded it better looking back, but at any rate at least a few people got it after I clarified myself. Evolving quests based on when you get around to them would add to playthroughs, in that odds are things will be different dipending when you get around to things. I'll using the kidnapped Billy quest again.

The first time you do the quest you do it right away, and you save Billy from the bandits and return him home. The second time you may wait an ingame week. Upon going to the cave the bandits call home, you find no Billy. After questioning...or killing the bandits, you end up with a note of sale stating that Billy was sold into slavery at some castle/wealthy household. If you go right there to save him, you could buy his freedom or sneak in and rescue him...or hack your way through and get him out that way. If ya kill a lot of the guards a bounty may pop up on your head though, leading to bounty hunters trying to track you down and bring you in.

If you wait another ingame week however on your third playthrough, you may find Billy has taken a liking to another slave girl, and now hopes you help both escape. Now you have to either buy both their freedom, sneak in and help both escape, or hack your way through and get both people out. After freeing the girl, she may ask you to deliver a note to where she used to live before she was taken, now deciding to live with Billy. Finally, after returning Billy to his family and getting their reward, you go to the girls family and give them the note. They say thank you, maybe give you some gold, and say bye.

The gold could be split, so no matter you gain the same reward for completing the quest. Npc just says they'll pay ya, so if you save the boy right away you get 100 gold. If you wait to the very end and end up saving the girl as well, you end up with 50 from the boys parrents and 50 from the girls. The only difference would be the ammount of fame/infamy that you gain as you go about the tasks. The main reason for that is that players shouldn't be rewarded for being lazy. They can go at their own pace, but the objectives of the quest are time sensitive so that the world looks less staged and seems to flow without you even though it does.

No. Nothing puts a game in my trash can faster than "GAME OVER" or "YOU FAIL" or "TIMED OUT!" because I was supposed to ASSUME I had to rush to do it, not that I was told "hey if you don't do this right now, you're going to fail" but then if the game tells you that, the immersion is already broken.

I'm trying to think of a profit in this, and there just isn't one.

At the end of the day a game is supposed to be fun, not a creative masterpiece that is flawless.

Human beings are flawed, we always will be, I cherish that fact and I enjoy relishing myself in a flawed world that in no way resembles real life.

Did...you read anything past the title?

Yeah, I was replying to the most specific part of your post. It was like a giant tree branching in all kinds of directions. If I were to take the time to reply to each wayward thought you had, it would take all day.

The quest system was designed as it was for convenience. Games should never put their first basis in realism; there's no fun in that.

If you really need to be so nitpicky about "oh golly, that npc waited an extra hour for me! so un-realistic!" make a mod for it. I find it silly.

This to me sounds fantastic. Having the game world change and progress based on how long you take to start or complete a quest is a really neat idea.

I want tesV to have better graphics, a morrowind-like history and quests. But no, this no, The only thing they should never change of these games is their concent and philosophy: It′s all about a big world where the only one who makes the changes is you. You are the hero. And this proposal is bs.

Can't really get/make mods for an xbox.

And the extra hour thing is fine. Its the npc/bad guys waiting ingame months for us to continue is the strange part. I'm okay to some of it, because its an open word, but once parts of quests are tripped specific events happening with or without you could add more openness to the world. Kavatch for instance was always burned to ash. With an open world writing system and timed triggers, Kavatch could have been a visitable town till a specific part of the main quest was tripped, and then an attack would start. If you went right there, you could save some people and the town possibly. If you waited, thinking nothing of it rumors would pick up after a few ingame days about Kavatch being attacked. and when you did finally get around to looking for Martin, Kavatch would have been full of flames and demons like we normally see it.


It would add a lot to replayability. For some quests, namely the main one, there wouldn't be as many of these option. The main quest would need to be writen more open instead, making it sound like its okay to wander around between quest parts if you want to. For side quests it could be used more, because the changes wouldn't be as detramental to the survival of Skyrim.

An example of open writing style, for instance would be when Martin opened the Portal to Paradice for us to go through to get the Amulet. If you didn't want to go in, the story comes off as strange because any hero in that situation would hop right in if the portal was ready...while instead the player may wish to do something else first. The character and the player kinda contradict themselves, so the story comes off a jarring. A better way to handle it may have been Martin saying that it will take some time to finish preparations for the portal, and that we should go off and do what we want for a while. After say 4 ingame days Martin would be ready, but the player wouldn't be told that everything's ready for the main quest to continue.

Once the player goes to check out if everything's ready, Martin would act like he was just about to send someone to find you because he's finally ready. The game world apears to follow its own time, but in reality time is moving in acordance with the player.

If you don't do some quests in time, there should be a quest that get's started because you failed it.

Example:
oh darn it, I forgot to help protect Jenna's farm from the Bandits last night and her farm got sacked and she got abducted. QUEST FAILED.

But wait!
Jenna is being held captive in a nearby Bandit hideout now, so I should go save her! QUEST ACCEPTED

OH NO!
They killed Jenna before i got her out of the hideout QUEST FAILED

Well I might as well bring her unique amulet to her family so they know she's dead QUEST ACCEPTED

I brought it to her family and they thanked me for telling them the bad news, they gave me her dagger (+rise in disposition with family) QUEST COMPLETED

This is a great guideline on how this system of radiant questing could work. I would really like to see something like this implemented, as RK said, the replayability for side questing if the game world worked in such a manner would be massive, and add tonnes of new possibilities/flavour to the side quest aspects of the gameplay.

Laziness pays off again If they do it like this that is fine by me.

NO!!!!!!

The only timed quest that I would like in the game, and very few of them mind you, would be like some of the Theves Guild quest from Oblivion. Or if you're standing by a dwemer bomb that you just lit the wick on and you don't out of they way in time.... then you fail, I'm ok with that!

If a count down clock ever pops up during Skyrim, I will be mad as hell! And will prolly be on this forum spaming all of the OP's future threads, cause I sure won't be playing Skyrim for long...... thanks to time limits!

We could argue for or against this topic forever. My take is that RK has a fantastic idea here. Will it be implemented into the game? Probably not. Why? Because traditionally, the appeal of a TES game has come from an open-world gameplay style and a "go at your own pace" quest and storyline with insane amounts of sidequests ranging from the completely mundane and ludicrous to the extremely difficult and time-consuming. I think this is why people spend hours upon end just exploring. So, due to the fact that BGS does not appear to put any time constraints into their games (or at least very few) realistically, I don't see "the passing of time" influencing the story or quests in any way. That being said, I can see the passing of time affecting the world, i.e. plants grow and die, snow falls, accumulates and melts with changing seasons and temperatures, towns and villages may even grow or shrink in population (or be eradicated by a dragon). I do see quests evolving but rather than time being the trigger, I see this more as your actions, your decisions, your conversations and interactions with the NPCs that will determine whether or not a specific quest comes your way and in what form. I'm pretty sure I read from Game Informer that the radiant AI in Skyrim will in fact adapt to your actions, i.e. assassinate a shopkeeper and his daughter will take over the shop. Depending on her attitude towards the PC, she may or may not give you a quest...so...um, it looks like this type of thing is already going to be in the game. We're starting to see a change in direction now with RPGs that are decision-driven, where the way you play, the things you do and the responses you give change the way NPCs around you behave.

I have a feeling Skyrim is going to be a whole lot more dynamic than TES games we've seen in the past. Even combat is supposed to adapt so that you're not always just mashing the "swing sword" button.

ResistanceKnight, like the hoverboard, your idea is probably too far ahead of its time. We're getting there though. Soon my young padawan...soon!

Thanks for reading the title and nothing else. I'm looking forward to all those other intellegent conversations we share in the future.


Well, if you got that same dagger one way or another the lazyness only would equal more work. But at any rate, the cool thing would be on your first playthrough you may think that it was designed for her to die, and that kinda bums you out. So on your next playthrough, you hope against hope that if you hurry there you can save her or something...to actually find that you can save her.

That's kinda what spawned this idea in the first place. First playthrough of Oblivion I didn't realize Kavatch was a burning pile of ruin, so by the time I got to it I was shocked to say the least. Next playthrough I remembered that so I hurryed to Kavatch...only to find the only difference to me hurrying there was that the monsters were weaker...and that was because my level was much lower.

Kinda annoyed me that they didn't even give me a chance to save anyone. Timed quests, ones that evolve once the time limit is reached, was my solution to that matter. Kavatch could have been a visitable town, with its own quests and such. Then it could be attacked, and being if you hussle or not you could save some of it. Then after the attack, some of the people you saved/escaped on their own because you were not there could have quests that take into account that their home is now gone. Like before Kavatch was a ruin someone wanted you to track down a family air loom for sentamental reasons...but now they want it because they need to sell it to make some gold. Even if the quest doesn't change, the reasons behind the quest could change with time.

Well i imagine the rewards for doing it the different ways would be different, if this kind of thing was implemented at all.



not really... Daggerfall (and i think Arena, but i didn't play that too long), had timed quests, AND sometimes the Main Quest was timed

Daggerfall was pretty great. The timed quests didn;t bother me at all.

I think someone needs to calm down and read some of the previous posts. The OP never said he wanted a countdown clock to popup during a quest. In fact, he hates them like the rest of us. I don't think I saw anyone on this post that likes them. Before bashing the OP, kindly read some of his previous posts. It's tiring and takes too long for the rest of us to re-iterate what he's going for in this post.

Side note: I'm pretty sure BGS is not going to have any clocks in Skyrim except for town clocks maybe...or maybe a cuckoo clock you can purchase for your home.

Daggerfall had timed quests, wich added extra pressure to complete them, because you could fail.

Quests need to be failable, or let me put it another way, it should be possible the kidnapped boy dies, the father is sad and the quest is over. No reward.
Nothing is worse than the let me hold your hand kinda games where it is impossible to even fail anything.
Dead? No worries, youre just unconscious, youll wake up in a bit with an extra scar. Argh.

Quests that need to be completed within a certain timeframe, otherwise there are consequences, is a good idea.
But it should be for side quests and maybe one or two guild quests only. And not all side quests, just where it makes sense story wise.

The extra pressure in the right moments could add to the game. If all we are is relaxed when playing, then the story isn't very gripping. There should be a little fear instilled in our hearts. At any rate, even if the clock runs out, the game should keep going though. If a town gets stacked, then unique quests given by the survivors could add extra content that you might not have seen otherwise. Greatly improves replayability. If its just straight up fail, players will just reload their last save and try again. But if there's a reason for them to check out what happened, and stick out this playthrough they could find some unique questlines and the replayability goes through the roof.

Well, I'll agree with you to a point. I'd like to see the kidnapped child possible to die, but a lot of players would be set off by that. If you could return to the father and tell him that the child died and the fater, though still very sad, gives you a little reward for your troubles. Players may think the story was writen for that to happen and not bother trying again till the next playthrough, where they happen to save the kid this time. Unique little things like that can make the world feel much more alive, and believable.

Of course, it should mainly be only for side quests, and a few parts of the larger quest arks for the main and guild quests. And not all the side quests either, just where it makes sense story wise.

I hate timed quests. Hate them with a passion. They svck. Worst thing you can do to an open ended game.

OK, now that I have told you how I feel, let me tell you why. I can easilly gather dozens of quests in one town (probably) and some I might want to do before I do others. Why should some arbitrary timer determine when I am to get something done? Only give me 2 hours to get a quest done? You can't do the quest yourself Ms NPC. If you were in such a darn hurry, why did you wait for me to slog my way across the map to get to you?

Now, I do like the quests where the elements are on a schedule and you have to do certain things at certain times because of it. That just adds to the quest experience.

I dislike them, to an extent, just like you. For fetch quests, timers would be a pain. But when you're saving the world, a threat of a town taking some extra damage if you take your sweet time would add to the excitement and fear of the world ending.


Pretty much what I was sugesting. Quests that use a schedule should actually use that schedule, instead of saying they are using it but if you miss the time everything's fine later. Even if you miss the meeting, you could find the npc again and explain that you had to miss it and you wish to set up another meeting.

Also, quests that evolve as time moves on could make the world less staged and more open. Saving Kavatch could have been possible with timed quests...and a whole lot of other things I've said a few other times. At any rate, timer for the most part shouldn't be added...but quests should evolve with time.

And what's the worst thing for an open world game? Putting in timed quest events.

Dead Rising anyone? No thanks.