Yep.


BUT, please, stop saying that people dont have imagination when the real problem is that NPCs dont react properly to the player actions.

A lot of complains on this forum are invalid, but some of them are REAL. Theres problems with the NPCs. The Jarl that helped you in the end of the MQ dont even ask what happened when you come back...this kind of thing could be implemented and would be really great.

I use my imagination to identify with my character. I become the player in the game - his actions are my actions. I do not kill needlessly or with malice, only when provoked or attacked. I craft because I love the exploration and gathering, I smith because I am creative and like to make things. I love my horse, and will protect him from danger. I am suspicious of other people in Skyrim, until their motives are clear to me. I am my character. Fortunately, though, I never have to bathe or shave.

For myself, immersion is everything. I find it far easier to immerse myself during combat than when interacting with NPCs, because no matter how good a game's writing / quests are, they will almost always clash with my character's RP, unless it's a game like the Witcher 2 which has a single PC. Skyrim's less detailed quests sidestep that problem.

As for the combat, I have yet to find a game which is so immersive. Skulking around in some gloomy dungeon, shadows dancing on the walls, hearing the crunching sound of my boots on the earth reverberating through the stone halls, chancing upon a Draugr, pulling back my bow string and delighting in the sound of the wood protesting, releasing and hearing that satisfying *thud*, before ripping the arrow off the corpse and moving on for the next kill is a simple, yet incredibly immersive experience for me. Many gamers just run through dungeons and spam click everything that moves, and their sole source of joy are the items they loot off the corpses and skill increases. It is no wonder so many players miss attributes and other statistics; they can't imagine their characters so they want the game to quantify them. Of course these players rely on quests / story to immerse them, but that's not what TES is about. It can't be, because of its sandbox nature.

But things are happening. Specific to this instance, the original author of the article stated he was upset because he killed NPC's in front of a particular NPC and she didn't react to it. My (and many others) reaction to that is, role play it. You're saying that's wrong, that we don't understand what roleplay is.

YOU are the one not getting it. We're not changing anything by role playing it, and we're not expecting anything to change. We are utilizing role play as a tool to explain the behavior within the game world. Specifically, in this instance, someone wrote a beautiful explanation on how she had seen so many things in her lifetime, that she was the caretaker and that was all that mattered to her.

How is that so hard to understand? It boggles the mind. It's such a simple concept but it keeps getting missed by every rebuttal given for 'how' myself and others roleplay in this game.

I have to head off to school soon, so apologies if I miss a response.

You don't role-play other characters. You role-play your character. You're simply explaining away things overlooked by the designers. It's fine that a lack of reactivity and choice is okay with you, the problem is when you start acting like it's only a problem because others have inferior imaginations. Seriously, I'd like some answers: How is greater reactivity and interactivity not a valid goal for an RPG? How is it that the reactivity and interactivity of games made ten years ago is still the baseline? Why do you feel compelled to attack those advocating the improvement and expansion of these features?

Lot of people need their 'cinema' to be scripted.

The people playing demo during events are good at it. Have you noticed how they play? They want to make everything look and feel more epic .. It's a sense of 'cinema' I guess. I`m like that.
Hell just by how you're moving the camera can make all the difference. Some have it and some don't

Some will jump during 'important' conversation and other will find the right angle to make thing look epic.
For exemple when I entered the temple of Nocturnal .. There was something waiting for me .. I walked to him while checking the ceiling and be like .. Impressive!! .. You can make your own CInema .. Some folk are just lazy. They just want cutscene.

I suppose this must be the dormant dungeon master in me. I appreciate that in Skyrim not only do I get to develop my own storylines in my head for my character, but in a different way for the NPCs as well.

I agree. I use my imagination ALOT in these games.

I imagine my companions reaction to seeing me slay a mighty dragon. In my head they stare in awe as i stand before the dragon and absorb its soul. Even with the old lady in the fort- i imagined her reaction to what i had just done. Her talking was icing on the cake for me.

Even for sneaking exploits, i imagine that its just the games way of translating more advanced strategies i would've used had the gameplay been advanced enough to allow for it. Yes, its ridiculous that they go back to their business after taking an arrow to the waist, but maybe in real life i wouldve head shotted him while having my companion set their camp on fire. The end result is that i cleared a bandit camp. Seeing an enemy get stuck on the environment doesn't ruin my immersion either, i just think of my character as nimble and outsmarting a real bandit.


Its not that im giving Beth a pass and saying that im completely okay with having to use my imagination- its that i understand that its a game made by people with limits.

Your concerns, while valid, have nothing to do with the response you quoted. My response was in reply to those who are saying "you're doing it wrong" when people like me choose to smooth out the immersion with role play.

Now I'll address your concerns: yes, I would LOVE to have more complex interaction and consequences with NPC's. Who wouldn't? Who is saying otherwise? No one. But some people, like myself, have played the previous TES games and are used to this and have found work-arounds. Also, some people, like myself, don't over-generalize and have had a LOT of interaction and consequential relationships with NPC's.

In a game with literally hundreds of NPC's, the reality (today, right now in gaming) is that there's no way in a world as in depth and complex as Skyrim that it's possible without huge sacrifices in the detail of the game world, or waiting years for development. What you expect is unrealistic. People keep holding up New Vegas as an example, but really, there weren't nearly as many choices for the player. The world wasn't as big, the questlines were pretty narrow, etc. There is an example of the tradeoff involved. You're getting two different experiences. How many hours of replay can you get in New Vegas, with different playstyles and outcomes, as opposed to Skyrim?

I agree. You can create your own immersion but there's also plenty of immersion breaker moment. During boss fight I always make thing look more dramatic lol. But I do stuff like drinking and sleeping before going to another dungeons if I`M in a village. It's make sense no? Or following the road and not just 'jumping' down the mountain if my objective is down here. Plenty of little detail like that. Ive seen some debut playthrough of some guy jumping and looting the room while the NPC tell him about his lost wife .. I mean who would do that?

Dragonborn : Hey look IM JUMPING OH OH UG UG FIREBALL!!!
Villager : My Wife died and I want her body back sniff...
Dragonborn : WOOOHOOOOOO LIGHTNING ATTACK

DB player .. geez this game immersion svck!

I don't know why morgueanna's understanding of the limitations of current tech and business escape so many people. It makes absolute sense to me. So much sense, in fact, that it might be called 'common' sense.

Thousands, if not more. Of course, if you start pretending and imagining things, then you can easily bloat numbers endlessly for both games.

So true! In fact, I've started to imagine you have a sense of decency and respect for other posters. It's the only way I can get through the constant condescension in your posts.

:celebration:

i just realized the difference between users on this forum. Some people like me play this game for the role playing story experience first. Any shortcomings we come across, we acknowledge it, but our imaginations can easily fill in the blanks. Its almost like playing with highly advanced action figures ( remember how their arms didnt bend, but you had to imagine that it did)

Others,they play it for the numbers and action. Every little flaw gets in the way of their number crunching and grinding. For them its not like getting lost in a book, its a what you see is what you get affair. If they dont see it, they dont get it. To them, having to imagine anything in this game would be like having to imagine a grid when playing tic tac toe.

Last time I let my imagination run wild was when my character became an Agent of Dibella, and spent two nights in Her Temple wearing a certain http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/613844736906270882/E65AC6AA1B2B58F95A5E55CCAE1D3FB45F313C84/. I'll let you guess what happened in that ceremony....

Like others, imagination is absolutely critical for me as well, and it starts on the wagon ride for my next character! What do I mean? Well, I did this in Oblivion and this particular character turned out to be the one out of nearly a dozen that I felt most connected to. I actually have a back story in mind for this character as to why he was about to be put to death. (I don’t know is you guys have actually thought about that or not, but you probably at least gave it a little bit of thought.) But obviously, he/she was either innocent, falsely accused/framed, or guilty of something pretty bad. If you’re a Stormcloak that’s pretty easy to say you were sentenced for treason. But I didn’t want to be pigeon-holed into that.

So, like my guy in Oblivion, my next Breton will be an orphan whose parents and siblings were murdered when he was just a teenager. After witnessing this brutal slaying, he had to fend for himself and scavenge for everything. By necessity he learned to steal simply to sustain himself and got real good sneaking through the many ruins of Skyrim just hunting for food or a safe place to sleep for a night. But he remained a loner, never really getting very close to anyone. He wasn’t a brutal murderer (yet) but would defend himself if necessary.

Eventually and partly out of boredom and partly out of the need for companionship he made his way to Riften where he found the only group of people who had ever really accepted him, - The Thieves Guild. After working his way through some of their ranks he was contacted by the Dark Brotherhood and truly let himself go to the “dark” side after that. (He was a confused and troubled man at this point.) So his sins would eventually return to visit him, and he was incarcerated and convicted of murder and sentenced to death. (Que the wagon ride…)

So I plan on starting from a save I made as soon as I left the cave out of Helgen. I’m going to RP a little just to get “in character” and eventually make my way to Riften. (But I’m playing like all of this is happening BEFORE he was sentenced to death. Sort of like the time before that all happened in his earlier years. I plan on doing at least some of the TG quests and side assignments, and eventually join the DB and proceed from there. At a point that “feels” right, I will divert from the DB or either complete all their quests, I’m not sure because I haven’t done any of them yet. Then I will fast forward in my mind and pretend he just escaped Helgen and start the other parts of the story from there. So half of his life (the dark side) took place before Helgen And after he slayed his first dragon and absorbed its soul he becomes forever changed. Something in his heart made him realize that he had done a lot of bad things and while he cannot change the past, he swears on his life he will change the future. He does not yet realize it, but his destiny as Dragonborn has just begun!

So not only do I have to roleplay my characters motivations, because he/she is controlled by me and me alone. but I also have to roleplay the intent/desires of other NPC's ingame, not under my control, not my mechinations, and not my concern k


so I save an NPC from certain doom, he doesn't say thank you and offers me skooma, so I have to "think" he said thank you. and yet destroying a Dragon gets everyone all in Aww and how much they can't believe it, requiring 0 mental facilitation from me.


yeah please stop trying to say Imagination needs to be a crutch to lack of game response.

You quoted my post which never said you were doing it wrong. It said Bethesda was doing it wrong and pretending things are different doesn't change that.

Skyrim offers no more reactivity and choice than Oblivion which offered no more reactivity and choice than Morrowind (some of this is arguable, but generally, yes, the TES series is consistently non-responsive to the player). And that's my point. Why are we satisfied with decade old accomplishments? Why hasn't Bethesda made significant attempts at expanding on their games? I mean, occassionally we get a handful of new features, but then we lose a handful of features at the same time. The world is bigger, but factions are fewer and questlines are shorter. Combat has new fighting styles, but there's fewer weapons to choose from. Etcetera, etcetera. This is all a net gain of nothing. The team for Skyrim is roughly three times that of Morrowind, they presumably have a signicantly larger budget and greater control due to their success with Oblivion and Fallout 3, and the industry as a whole is simply a lot more profitable in general. Where is the contribution from the extra hands? What is the money being used for?

For all the derisive comments made about how "complainers" are looking back at older titles with rose-tinted glasses, those satisfied with the product they've been given sure don't seem to like the suggestion that Bethesda might try a little harder. I've been a supporter of this series for a long time, but I'm not seeing any sort of progression. The mistakes and oversights were things I could overlook on something released ten years ago. But today? For me at least, good enough ain't good enough.

OP is the best. <3

TES is an experience as much as it is a game. And an experience must be.. well, experienced. I can't just hop from quest to quest like an errand boy, going 36 days without sleeping and scaling mountains when my character's wearing steel plate armor. You need to immerse yourself, and immersion is exactly where this game (and all the Elder Scrolls games, for that matter) succeeds.

Yes you can use your imagination with a MUD too, or a Pen and Paper rpg. You don't complain that they don't have... stuff for you to see or hear, you just use your imagination and have a nice time.
Actually it's easier to use your imagination in these. In Skyrim, when an NPC gives you a line of dialog which does not make any sense, they mess with your RP.

But pc rpgs are a different matter from PnP etc. I can understand though, if you are new to rpgs, that you don't know what they could have offered us and what we got. It's natural to defend Skyrim if you haven't played the fallout series for example as that writer did. Easy to have an opinion and look at this matter from 1 side.

yes. It really is that simple.Of course it would be cool if they did react to everything. until we get that game, i ENJOY my experience by filling in the blanks. I feel sorry if you arent able to do the same. Its worse than not having access to mods. Maybe i have it easy because im an artist, we are able to see things for what they can be.

Once again, I'm totally not saying your opinions aren't valid. I just think your expectations are a little too high.

The team is bigger- it sure is! And if you listened to podcasts or read the blogs, you'd see what they were working on- making the game world as detailed as possible. They spent hours detailing the smallest things, making each piece of meat 3d renderable. Combing the countryside with microphones for ambient sound. Months writing a completely new language (both spoken and written) for the dragons.

Bethesda's focus was on the world first, and the NPC's later. That's kind of how they've always been.

You ask why they've trimmed down on quests/faction choices/etc? I honestly don't know for sure. I can give you my assumption- graphics/coding/complexity of coding. I don't know the first thing about coding, but I did live with an extraordinarily talented programmer for a few years. I know how many hours one simple line of program can take, and how one interaction mistake can mean hours and hours of workarounds and fixes. The more complex the program gets, the harder it is to work with. We're seeing that now, with patches that are supposed to fix things but are instead breaking new things! These people are professionals, experts in their field and even they are having a hard time working with the size and scope of the game as it is now. Think about that.

One of the reasons (something I posted in the other thread on this topic) they don't have a ton of reactive/consequential NPC's is because this detailed world is so open ended. You can join any faction. You can kill (almost) anyone. You can steal (almost) anything. With very few exceptions, the world is completey interactive. Every small consequence that could change that limits the future choices, and Bethesda/TES has always been about giving as much choice as possible.

And once again I'll point out that several questlines DO end with reactions from the NPC's. Not all of them. Probably not even half. But my experience so far has been overwhelmingly better in this regard than Oblivion. Maybe that's not the same for you, and I'm sorry if it isn't.

I have to go to school, maybe we can discuss it more later!

I use my imagination when people that complain about skyrim ^^ i imagine they write something good instead of that.

:foodndrink:

I pretty much have to use my imagination that conversations with NPCs about where their quest takes place actually happens. I have my compass and all markers turned off, so I can at least use the 'show on map' feature to get a general idea of where I imagined I was told to look.