they should make a twisted story as in game of thrones!

I'd rather not end up throwing my computer through the window

It's going Oldboy.

I think we all knew the story will svck elephant nuts . Which is why I don't understand why the limied us so mush

But they made Morrowind though. That was a game with excellent writing, roleplaying options, on top of one of their best handmade world creation with unique landscapes combined and tied with atmosphere and culture though.
Fonv isn't perfect but imho overall it had great writing in it. I guess when comparing fo3, skyrim (who imho had GREAT lore writing but the ingame writing that've interacted with was atrocious), and fonv, fonv is considered to have the most "amount" of great writing in it. But then again that's my personal opinion and when trying to define what's good or bad is subjective and I'll leave it at that

To play devils advocate, a lot of times it's easier to write a good story that's on the rails than it is to write for a sandbox that could go any direction.
In a way Bethesda currently can write a great sandbox game as they are great in making locations "personal" or interesting while having nothing to do with ingame content. Their current writing of giving us the "base" of an idea what's going on and leaving us with room to interprete what we think is happening behind the scenes, if they would focus more on that and master it, they would have a very nice style that leaves room for us to interprete different outcomes and be considered "good" writing at the same time.

What I'm getting from that interview is:

"It's hard to write a story that can be used for a sandbox game."

You've cited a game that's exactly what AiTenshi1 is saying. Morrowind is excellent world-building based on the drama of the gods. In the end, you're still fighting the big bad guy at the end of the main quest. Morrowind, however, is a unique product from even Bethesda's current products with such a strong emphasis on world-building. I've never really seen Bethesda emulate that level at all after Morrowind.

Although I'm unsure if you can classify it as a sandbox, we will see September 1st how true their statements are. From what I have seen and what people who played the game have said, Kojima's MGS: Phantom Pains is going to be a masterpiece in both narrative and open-world stealth gameplay.

Same here but Morrowind is also considered a game by Bethesda that had great world building on top of having great writing. A lot of people who have played Morrowind even the ones who complain about the mechanics will agree it's got the best main storyline of the tes series. From the way the quests are written to the ingame books such as the sermons, Morrowind is a perfect example that Bethesda doesn't have to or "can't" have great world building with great writing as well.
You don't have to sacrifice world building for good writing is the point I was trying to make. You can have both, a handcrafted world to explore and get lost in but also have great writing as well at the same time.

The thing that MGSV has that makes it easier, as do some other sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption, is you're playing as a specific character that is very much predefined. Fallout traditionally gave you a base to build from, but the bulk of the character's development and personality were up to you.

That's why I'm worried about Fallout 4's voiced protagonist. It seems to be trying to go both ways in terms of letting a predefined voiced character but still trying to let you define them. I think it's going to end up coming up short on both sides.

Oh definitely: Afterall we have Bethesda who, let's face it, are awful in terms of narrative and dialogue trying to have it both ways (ain't gonna happen).

Not to mention that Emil is still lead writer, that has me concerned since he's hit and miss with a lot of stuff. We'll see though, I hope to be wrong and that Fallout 4 will have amazing dialoge. I don't see that happening but I can hope.

Just wondering how many quest mods have you authored and released? If you have then you should already know the incredible difficulty in trying to account for every conceivable scenario a player character might find themselves in and trying to write in things in your quest accordingly.

If you haven't built a quest mod, and I say this respectfully, you cannot comprehend the amount of work that goes into building a DLC sized quest and story. There may be others contributing to this thread who I don't recognize and have, but the only other person I recognize who has built one is B1gBadDaddy.

I spent nearly TWO YEARS building Helgen Reborn for Skyrim and one of the most challenging things to work around is the open world concept. Let's say in your story you have the PC meet your main Antagonist 3/4 of the way through the quest for a chat. Where do you "hide" the Antagonist all that time before the meeting? If the place you meet him is accessible throughout the entire quest line you have to have some sort of story as to why he's not there is the player happens to discover that location before it's time to meet him. That's just one tiny example, but the consequences are that if you don't "hide" him, usually by having him disabled until you need him, you could miss the first 3/4ths of the quest if you meet him early. Again, that's a simplified example but for every action the player can possibly take you have to account for it.

To have your quest still playable you can either spend a ton more time writing, recording voice lines and programming your quest, or simply set it up in a more linear path because it solves so many more problems.

So just so you understand, it's not like Beth can just snap their fingers and this stuff gets done. As Todd Howard said once, "We can do anything, we just can't do everything". After building Helgen Reborn, I know exactly how he feels.

Best post in the thread!

There was never a dichotomy between great world building and great writing for Bethesda. Development priorities have changed since Morrowind, however. The type of world Morrowind depicted was one where the world told the story of the dog and the farmer before they told what hero's story was about, and life and faith was all interconnected. However, that's not a writing style I saw Bethesda revisited, especially in Oblivion or especially Fallout 3, which I think was very guilty of poor world building. The Capital Wasteland, if I recall, was a terrible world overall. The individual stories just didn't coalesce to any meaningful singular world narrative.

Fallout 4 should have a main quest skip, since that's tradition in all the previous Fallout games, 3 and New Vegas included.

The Civil war is identical. Even the writing is almost identical. Regardless of what side you pick, the way it plays out is identical. It's a pseudo-decision.

Dawnguard is slightly better and exhibits what we'd like to see more of, the problems being that Dawnguard is such a low percent of the game's overall content and that even Dawnguard's content has this issue where the plot makes far more sense if you side with the Dawnguard rather than the Vampires. If you side with the Vampires there are some gaps in the story that don't fill out so great, making it awkward. The RPG aspects of Dawnguard check out, the story aspects of it don't really accomplish that. Dawnguard is another case of "you can blow up the Enclave or blow up the Brotherhood, but why you or your character would want to blow up the Brotherhood is beyond me" because the vampire side of Dawnguard has several moments that make you go "lolwait why" or they have to shoehorn an opinion on you to make it align with the Dawnguard side of the quest.

And they didn't "clearly say" anything. You just got PR'ed. Look through this thread at the sheer amount of people voicing confusion about what Todd was saying, with people interpreting it both as a sign they stressed storyline and that they choose to ignore it as a major factor. It's not the "negative nancies" being bias, it's everyone filling in the gaps in their own way because it's a PR statement. That's because Todd literally said nothing at all. It was a long-winded statement that amount to nothing at all except "we tried to make a story that fit the game style," which is the most worthless statement you can come up with. And btw, even if Todd said "this is the greatest story told since Don Quixote, trust me," the issue is we cannot trust him cause the man is infamous for lying and stretching the truth leading up to game releases, whether it be purposeful as a marketing tactic or whether he is too gung-ho with announcing features that haven't even been included yet.

You are blindly supporting Bethesda. You're blindly supporting Bethesda because your reaction to encountering dissenting opinions that you don't agree with is to demonize everyone who disagrees with you by writing them off as liars and idiots who just want to blindly hate Bethesda. Maybe when you're older you'll learn that demonizing your opposition isn't a good way to...yknow, bridge the gap and understand what they're actually trying to say.

Morrowind had TERRIBLE writing, great lore though, but the NPC and quest writing was beyond god-awful because it was all copy-pasted encyclopedia entires.

And the roleplay options in Morrowind were just as bad because of how broken and non-functional everything in Morrowind was.

That's because they rebooted the lore in Morrowind, so they had to introduce basically every single concept in the universe in a new way in one game. Oblivion and skyrim just added a bit more onto it, since they aren't reboots.

Sounds like NV.

When Morrowind came out, people were complaining that it was dumbed down from Daggerfall, that it had no choices and consequences, and that it was completely made for Xbox FPS players instead of a true RPG demographic.

Literally nothing has changed since 2002. I just enjoy all of the Bethesda games for their open world and great roleplaying opprotunities. Some may be more to my tastes than others, but that dumbing down white noise has existed for as long as there has been a internet and videogames.

That being said though, Morrowind has my favourite world out of all of them, and if there's one thing that I want for Fallout 4 it's a focus on being as weird, out there, and imaginative as possible. I really missed the strangeness in Oblivion, and the return to that in Fallout 3 is one of the main reasons why I am so in love with that game especially. If Bethesda started to take after Mororwind more, I can't say i'd be unhappy.

(For some reason I got an extreme deja-vu right now)

Thank you for your insight, it's a very appreciated post.

I've never worked on a quest mod myself or any mod for that matter.

However I can't imagine settlement building for example being an easy task. Of course the development of a highly organic and dynamic story is a task that will be extremely difficult to successfully pin down to a system even, not to mention execute well. For me the solution doesn't lie in the classical storytelling systems. You know the whole sidequest/mainquest stuff.

There's a great presentation about 'Narrative Legos' by Ken Levine (@GDC 2014) that you're maybe interested in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58FWUkA8y2Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58FWUkA8y2Q#t=39m35s may be especially interesting given your quote.

To quote him: "Physics wasn't built in a day"

Morrowind is my 1.1st favorite Bethesda game, behind Skyrim.

Skyrim for me was a return to the more weird lore from Morrowind, but without all the broken mechanics, or, at least nowhere near as broken mechanics.

Dragonborn could possibly be a positive in the fact that it had some decent written characters although the main plot is terrible and rushed. Neloth in particular stands out for me as a well written NPC who was funny but informative.

i think in any movie etc, if the hero had to follow the already killed nemesis to the realm of the dead to finish him off, it wouldn't exactly be considered easy dead - and that it's mainly the fact that, on the way to that realm of the dead, you deliver strawberries, strangle a few bandits, go to the market to sell some pottery and take a nap at the next best inn, which just makes the dragon thing appear somewhat minor

Skyrim's probably my favourite video game, atleast until Fallout 4 comes along, and its tied with Fallout 3. I would most want to see a second take on Morrowinds world but not so much on Morrowinds game, if you get what I mean. Morrowind was broken, you are right, and ultimately I would love a game set in Vvardenfel and/or the rest of the Morrowind landmass that provides a gameplay different to Skyrim or Morrowind. Something to do with the poltiics of House Telvanni in a strategy context would be a dream come true. I'd love all sorts of different games to arise out of Morrowind's fiction, aswell as Fallout since I think both of them have the best fictional worlds around.

Ive talked before about how I want Fallout's fiction set in vastly different kinds of games, mostly strategy, and yeah its the same with Vvardenfel. Im kinda rambling a bit but Morrowind to me feels like the best setting to use as a springboard to other types of wonderful games, whereas Skyrim feels like the best game whereas its not 100% there with the setting. But yes, it is much better than Oblivion with its setting, and Fallout in general is always weirder and more imaginative so I am really hopefull for Fallout 4.