Sounds great until a dragon lands on Ulfric's head and your dragon born destiny ends with his life.

No matter how free you feel you are playing a story that someone else wrote.

It may have been a more interesting story, but I'm saying that Obsidian's range of things they could do with it was more limited. They simply had a less full toolbox. Very limited set of recurring characters. The two "boss fights" of the end of the game are completely new characters you never meet before that final segment.

Most potential enemies or victims were resolved within the stage of the quest they were introduced. Or shortly thereafter.

I agree 100% OP.

Beth have most definatly catered for the idiot side of the spectrum rather than ones with a brain. It has taken a toll on the quality of the series too. Dealing with CONSEQUENCES is part of the RPG experience... if some dumb 14 year old in his ninja DB gear wants to kill all of whiterun... then let him, if he wants to blame bethesda for his broken game... let him. Better to alienate the idiots from the franchise than the ones who've supported them for so many years.

Whats up with all the people not even reading the OP anymore? Thats just embarrassing.
Or is your reading comprehension really that bad?

Wait. Compared to the Skyrim MQ? Which has a total of 3 or 4 people in it and a couple ancillary characters and one main bad guy? The NV mainquest is essentially almost the entire game as everything you do somehow effects something else. If you break the main quest just to 3 large factions you still have far more major players, no matter how you accomplish the quest, than Skyrim's MQ. I understand what you mean about the "boss" fights at the end though.

There are essential NPCs because Bethesda thinks we are dumb enough to kill quest-givers and whine about it. And some of us are.

I'm sure there will be a mod for this.

I think people come into the forums to have knee-jerk reactions to the first shiny object to come into sight. Horrible.

On topic with OP:
Over at the Nexus, someone found that there's a "class" for the type of essential you're looking for. (Not essential to the player, just other NPCs.) So there will be a mod for it as soon as the CK comes out. I'm really curious why they didn't do this from the get-go as well though.

Glad to hear that, I hope they release the creation kit soon.

On a couple of the daedric prince quests I would of loved to be able to screw over the prince past just not doing the quest.

Could be made to where unless the death was story related, only you could kill certain NPCs. So that random backwards flying dragon doesn't come down and crush my enemies for me. And I really hate the whole "Whatevs,there will be a mod for it soon.." sh~t. Really? Grats for you, bro you can mod your game but what about those who got it on Console?

NV has lots of characters in its quest lines. That's not my point. It has very few recurring characters. The House questline only had House, for instance. Yes Man only has Yes Man. And nobody interacts with anyone else. Benny could be made to appear a grand total of two times. And then completely vanishes, dead or not.

It would actually be perfect if a Dragon did that, since it would provide the ideal excuse to switch sides if one's character is still undecided. That it would simultaneously break the Stormcloak quest line is just gravy.

You see, the entire point of not having essential NPCs is that it means you have to really think about it when considering whether or not to go on a rampage after one of the locals pisses you off, because you know that wholesale execution of the village or town will wreck multiple quests. What we get instead is the farcical situation of half the town surviving being run through with a Greatsword, because someone at Bethesda though that we would be unable to handle the repercussions if we prematurely terminated so much as a single quest.

:shakehead:

No body should be unkillable.
If I want to get out of Helgen and then start my Necromancers plan for world dominantion and eradicate all life in Skyrim, then I should be free to do.
It should not matter waht quest they give you - if you kill a vital link in the main quest then too bad - that was our choice. Live with it.

If the main quest matters that much give it several key start points so you can go talk to Bob if you killed Jim three stages earlier and kick start the main quest chain again.
For some stages though broke could well mean broke.
You go wipe out the Monks out first thing and tough dodo - you wont get to learn how to shout - live with it!
Actions adn consequences - your decisions for your game.

No need to.
Bethesda broke them for you with patch 1.2

barrom phshhhhhhhh!

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

I actually joined the Theive's guild and right now I don't have any desire to wipe them out. (I hope I didn't just read some spoilers in this thread that will mess that up for me in the future...) But, without giving anything away, last night I embarked on a quest that suddenly became very linear... I was imprisoned and the only way to get out was to join with a group that I didn't want to join. They helped me escape, but at that point, they assumed I was now one of them and that I was supposed to fight on thier side. But, I didn't, and instead I killed them all. At that point, the quest was actually completed, but I hated the fact that I couldn't disengage from the path I was on before that point because I wanted nothing to do with them or thier "cause". (As I'm shooting them with my bow, they're all like, "What are you doing?", "I'm on your side", etc.)

Meh, they could be unkillable by monsters and killable by players.

The real reasons are more probably :
- Catering to the cretins that would cry they broken their quests by randomly killing people.
- It's easier to just make a NPC unkillable than it is to program events in case of his death.

Streamlining. That's why.

I suspect that is right. I have not bumped into it much just because I don't kill random people often. Still I'd like to smash an alter, or break a quest simply by telling someone to go to hell and wrecking my disposition with them to the point they wont give me a quest. And yeah I'd like to be able to kill anyone I want or if you are going to make essential NPCs make it only for the main quest line and not any of the guilds or other side quests.

I thought of this exact thing earlier as I played Skyrim.. One thieves guild member was being rude so I decided to kill her, but I was sure to quicksave before that, because I had a feeling she wouldn't die.

You don't need essential NPC at all.
Morrowind (again) did this perfectly : you could kill ANYONE, and I mean ANYONE. You just had a window popping up and warnning you that you had broken the MQ if you did it to one of the few really essential NPC. But you could still do it and not give a damn about the MQ.

Bethesda has just jumped into design lazyness and casual audience since Oblivion, like, sadly, most companies...
At least they still make great worlds and maps, which is more than we can say about most of their competition...

So because you wanna go on a murderous rampage I have to live wIth broken quests when NPCs die from dragons or environment?


You make it sound so easy, I can almost promise you there would be even more bugs if this were the case

In a similar vein, I'm not happy that in order to complete every possible quest I have to go against my own moral/value system... basically, there is only one solution to many of the quests and that solution is not one I'm willing to do, I wish I could do 'something' to get credit for the quest being complete in one way or another. Like turning someone in who tries to recruit me to the Brotherhood, I don't care if it marks 'fail' on the quest as complete, I'd rather that then open quests I'll never complete. Of even small things like putting out a lighthouse light, I do not want to even simulate criminal activity, give me another choice... like, let me say no and 'fail' the quest. Or the daedra quests, don't even get me started on them, I tried killing off a cult of murders as a last ditch effort to go 'my way' and finish a quest that I didn't want to do, it still looped around to giving me one option, kill and innocent person to complete this quest. NO I don't want to. I don't want to join the imperials or cloaks either, but due to a bug/glitch I felt forced to choose so I could complete the game.

Love love love the game (heading for 100 hours with probably another 60 or so left by my estimates), just don't feel it's role play in the truest sense sometimes.

Totally agree. Why is EVERY Imperial General essential, even AFTER the Stormcloack quests are finished? It's just stupid. I WANT TO KILL ALL OF THE IMPERIAL SCUM.

You know followers in this game? Lydia, Mjoll, Sven etc. etc. They got this "fall to knee and only killable by PC" thing.
So technically there are three forms for mortality in this game:

Killable, knockable then killable and knockable.

With one, you can kill them like any normal NPC, like Sven's mother.
With another, other mobs and hostiles can only knock them down and only you can finish them off.
With the last one, nobody can kill them unless it is scripted so.

So solution: Make all NPCs except for the MQ ones the second type of mortality.

New Vegas got around this by telling you that you failed the quest in question. Morrowind would tell you that the "threads of fate" had been broken.