If you had a choice of x or y in every quest, then they would have to halve the number of quests to fit that in. Bethesda could have put a few more quests in like the Markarth one or even made the whole game that way, but they made a philosophical decision to leave them open to interpretation.

I like it that way because it lets my imagination run riot and allows me to be creative. The choices are what quests you think the character you created would accept - not the way they go about them.

This, partially because of


this.

Bethesda just doesn't do choices and consequences. Or good gameplay mechanics. Or gripping storylines. Or good balance. That pony only has one trick left, but it is a quite amazing trick indeed


And it would be a better game for it. Skyrim is an ocean that is inch deep. Can't we have a lake with some depth instead?

Yeah, it has definitely fallen short in the story dept. It's a strange mix of the sublime and the ridiculous - with some of the most beautiful locations I've ever seen in gaming with some of the worst writing I've ever read in gaming. Pity. I think if they had concentrated on quality over quantity it would have been a superb game. Less really dumb quests and less followers but each with more of a background and frankly having a personality never hurt anyone.

I totally agree.

They should have taken notice of all the good things Fallout New Vegas did.
That has consequences, people, places you care about. The main quest is big, important, the mojave wastelands future depends on your choices, you have to get it right.
If you do something, you get the consquences.
Everything in it is convincing and it lives.
Caesers Legion are the exception, they are horrible and very, very stupid. But they exist as a completely free option, albeit unsideable.
In comparision to the pathetic, very unnessesery vileness wrapped up in sickeningly sentimental writing, thieves guild, and for doing the trophies, CL are actually better done. You can destroy them completely for one thing.
You can do the trophies at the barest minium level possible and with the barest minimum effort. You hate them, just get it over with, then forget about it. So not true about the hideous tg trophies.
It has true freedom and choice.

Skyrim has a big open world, but little effort put into the quests themselves.
The main quest is seriously lame. There is nothing to show you did it, not even cutscenes.
The system itself is broken.
Bethesda made a openworld game but then put essential tags on people who never needed them, won't let you destroy the people you want, fail what you want and the whole system treats you like a stupid child.
They try to force you to join the tg to the point they deliberately hid the none tg options for finding Esburn ingame. Things that have absolutely zero connect to the tg, are forced into the tg.

Fallout 3 has more choices than skyrim. And that game forces your town exploding, dj killing, fev in the water, slaver, kill happy scourge of the wasteland into being a soppy daddys girl/boy for the soppy main quest and won't let you side with the enclave properly.
That is 99% free everywere else.
Dragon Age Origins, a linear and traditonal rpg, has more choice than skyrim. That lets you do whatever you want, within the options of the quests.

You cannot make a big enough impact on skyrims world, by wiping out whole factions and people you hate, because bethesda were so stupid, they force you to do some linear, twisted, lacking in good options, idea of what they think you should do.
It's like they thought making it openworld would be enough, you don't need true choice, the ability to do whatever you want, and then made some quests with work in, and a load of fetch and kill quests.

What skyrim needed was more rigidity, structure, beter writing, a main quest that was good, epic and impactful, and to let you kill, do, destroy whoever and whatever you wanted throughout the entire game, without being able to destroy the chance to do the main questline and finish it.
In short, it needed FONVs system.
Even ending the game with the main quest would have made more impact. Then at least, what you did would have to be carefully thought out, planned, done in advance, to get the ending you wanted.
I can see why Obsidian did that on FONV now. At least it leads somewere and gives results.
I would much prefer a ending then continue, but I can see why they did it.

But to use a more rigid, proper consequences, properly written system would mean they actually had to do some proper writing, put actual effort into the quests all the way through, and make cutscenes.
And instead they made a openworld and wasted it with a broken system, completely unnessery essential tags, and just slapped fetch and kill quests into places that did not have good quests.

Skyrim has made me even more wary of Fallout 4 now.

After playing FONV, and seeing how awesome Obsidian made it, I don't want bethesda to do fallout 4.
Obsidian should do it. their writing is far better.

Seeing the stupidity in skyrim, I suspect bethesda will ruin FO4. They will have the same, lazy attitude and do a skyrim on on it.
And that would be a crying shame.

There are many choices. Two characters I have never even started the main story line. One is being hunted out in the wild for crimes. The other is a merchant who makes his living bringing whatever he can scavenge to towns on his route. Both eventually will reach for loftier goals, but they've been too busy trying to settle affairs to do so right now.

Does the world change much as a consequence? No. It never has in TES games. Unless you do the main quest. For a game world to alter based on the various responses of millions of players, it would require more coding and resources than is practical for a game.

If what you're aiming at is more like three alternate ways to complete the main quest that alter the world in different ways, well that's not how the game was made. The main quest in TES games always had common end results with very little room for changing the actual story.

Your choices are as various as your imagination in this game. I've even seen a you tube vid of a guy playing a pacifist monk.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Morrowind

This is one of Skyrim's biggest flaws imo. pretty flora and fauna does not make this world feel alive. Nor does the huge amount of dungeons or what is left of character customization.
A world feels alive when it responds to your character, when it reflects on your actions and how it reacts to your choices.

...it is....

I agree with you that there can be choices, but these choices stem from purely player-made limitations. Certainly there is always room for imagination, but what I am saying is that developer-created boundaries and limits/consequences go so much farther into making a RP experience. No matter how differently you play your characters there is very little difference between the characters with respect to how the game world responds to you. The difference you see is the one you have created with your imagination, which is perfectly fine but does not work for me like it used to. The reason I stopped playing with toys when I was a kid was because my imagination became boring. There is just so much more a game can do for a RP experience than to give us a pretty world and tell us to let our imagination fill it. Sure I can imagine that my Dark Brotherhood character is feared by everyone or that my Archmage would never join the Companions. But the fact is that there is nothing in the game world itself that limits or enhances that feeling.

Its pretty sad how few choices there really are. That's the kind of stuff that can be planned before the game is really even in production right? For example they can be writing the story and quests for Fallout 4. Even without a set story they can create ideas for side quests, with positive and negative endings on a smaller scale based on your decision.

Personally i think they relied to much on the radiant story system

I just spent 5 hours in the lu!
That was after i stuffed my face with your fishy stick!

Where are the choices and consequences in Morrowind? There's the Fighter's/Thieve's guild conflict, and you can only pick one Great House, but 99% of the quests are just as linear as in Skyrim. The only changes that come about from completing the main quest (which you MUST complete by killing Dagoth Ur, even if you'd prefer to join him) is the Ghost Fence goes down and NPCs have some new comments. No new quests open up, and no old quests are changed. For that matter, you can kill Vivec and depopulate all of Vvardenfell, and no one bats an eye.

In a game that allows as much freedom as a TES game, players are always going to be able to conceive of hundreds of possibilities that the game simply doesn't allow. Of course I wish there was more reaction to what the player did, but it would be incredibly complicated to implement in way that was truly believable. A game like New Vegas essentially follows a linear, branching quest structure, which is very different from the TES approach. It allows for deeper storytelling and characters, but it also requires a lot of railroading with regards to what the player can and can't do, and when they can or can't do it.

Ideally, in a perfect TES game, every single quest you undertake would have an impact on the next one. Become head of the Companions? When you go to join the Stormcloaks, Ulfric should acknowledge this and give you specific, head of the Companions related quests. Help the Forsworn in Markarth? You should be able to join them then and help them take over the Reach. There are an almost infinite number of things you should be able to do, of ways the game should react. It would be impossible to implement them all without massively shrinking the scale of the game.

OP says nothing he does matters- says fallout NV was better. So, predictably, someone says Elder Scrolls have never been about consequences-what??? And then someonelse that Fallout NV was never immersive- do you see a pattern here?

First, minimize- well, nothing is really new. Then, I never liked the game you liked anyway- minimize comparison.

Minimize criticism in regards to Skyrim. Repeat as neccesary.

I hope no one told the OP to put in more hours- because that doesn't help.

When Bethesda took choices away from the character build, they went past a subtle line, and now the game is broken. It is a good action adventure game. It does get boring. Now, someone will say Oblivion is boring- and the minimization will begin anew.


Skyrim has real intrinsic problems that cannot be addressed with a DLC however great that DLC is. The character build is no longer enough to keep you playing. They have harmed the character build- and the NPC interaction which allowed you to feel you affected the world around you.

They took a road 'experts' said they had to in order to be imersive and engaging. They thought if they removed pesky things like a character build you, the future buyer,would be happier. They got rid of much of the NPC interaction probably because it's hard to do- and was criticised in Oblivion for being silly.

We now have the game many of you said you wanted- no more 'math' having to level up, no silly dialogues with NPCs- just great looking pictures, and oh yes, you can choose the clothes you wear. Roam around, enoy it. It's a large empy world. But it's open- if you can get past the slow pace now allowed you for realism's sake. That high speed and jumping around broke imersion, right?

These comparisons to Morrowind- that it was linear, that NPC's didnt' react either- that's true enough. But Morrowind was the first with the large audience- and you can't go back to that. Just being there was enough, and the comparison forgets the Character build was deep in Morrowind as opposed to the shallow build of Skyrim. Oblivion was the advance forward- the NPC interaction and the character build was intact. Now we have no character build compared to ether previous games, and the quests are linear with little or no consequences and reaction- like Morrowind. But that was then- we are here now- and you can't repeat Morrowind, Especialy without the character build!

The character build was idiotic...it gave you all these fancy choices on creation and then made all those choices pointless by saying "now go out and swim so you′ll be superfast"...Morrowind can be defended and forgiven as an rpg for its' atmosphere, unique storytelling elements, variety of equipment, but the character build and mechanics is one of the worst crimes ever commited against computer roleplaying.

papercut_ninga If I accepted your premise the character build was awful in morrowind- what possible connection to Skyrim does that have now? But I don't- regardless what you think, there were choices to be made in Morrowind regarding your build and your character grew over time- more choices than Skyrim.

Skyrim removed character build choices Morrowind and Oblivion both had more of- regardless of your personal feelings about Morrowind's build. Without a character build of depth in Skyrim, and consequences for actions reflected in NPC interaction, Skyrim is empty as the OP suggested. The construction of Skyrim made it so. Your bashing Morrwind does not change this.

At any rate, what worked for Morrowind cannot neccesarily work for a game today.

I played New Vegas and liked the first playthrough (subsequent ones felt like being stuck in the movie 'Groundhog Day' because the entire setting is tied up in the inescapable 'big story' so you can't ignore it and create your own story). But, all paths lead to the same place, a big battle at the dam and a slideshow. I don't consider that any more consequential than what I get in Skyrim. So far in Skyrim none of my three playthroughs have looked much like the others aside from the opening sequence.

skyrim is fun to play, but, the game is shallow, simple and becomes boring fast. this is due to the fact that there is no meaningful choice or consequence and the "character build" has been inexcusably reduced to skills/perks, of which, most have been rendered meaningless.

yes, you can "do whatever you want." however, i don't want a blank canvas to play on. i want a complex, meaningful game that builds around me as i play.

i want the mechanics of the game to enhance the gameplay. i don't want unlimited "freedom" without much needed boundaries.

like i've said before (for some good though mostly worse) this game is roleplaying sim: i am forced to rp my characters and create my own limitations for gameplay or else the repetativeness and meaninglessness, simplemindedness and shallowness become detrimental.

There might not have been as many *choices* in Morrowind, but there was more consequence. You could ruin entire questlines if you wanted. The Fighter's Guild could interrupt the Thieves. Committing to one Great House banned you from the others. One Mages' Guild quest had you kill all the Telvanni leaders, which would wreck that Great House line. And of course, every quest giver could be killed if the player chose to do so, even if you didn't know he/she was a quest giver. That freedom was awesome.

Why can't that work in a game today?

I did. In fact I think the paradox is that what made some people think NV was stale was the way the devs had paid attention to structuring the world in a more realistic way. So the roads are relatively safe and the areas around civilisation are pretty clear. The wildlife is in the wilder areas and concentrated in specific zones. Deathclaws are in packs in certain places, not spawning randomly alongside robots from the mysterious killer robot factory all over the place with no sense of why they're there. IMO NV was more of a living breathing world than Bethesda can pull off (Gamebryo limitiations notwithstanding). Though I have to say Skyrim is a big step in the right direction in terms of the world feeling real. Now what they need are the decisions with consequences.
In Dead Money, whether you had to kill Dean Domino depended on what you said to him when you first met him. Dialogue near the start of the game determined an outcome near the end. Bethesda would really benefit from picking up on that sort of writing.

This made me smile.

If Farengar tells me to join the Mages College (that I have already joined) once more I swear I'll swing for him...

The game isn't perfect by any stretch, there are some choices to be made, and consequences from them. However, I do find that I don't need to listen to what people say and simply need to click on all the responses in conversation, in no particular order, and I eventually get to where the game wants me to get. That is wrong to me. I am a relative newb to this game and can live with it all short term. Whether the game will have longevity though is another question. If, as I suspect, it doesn't, then more choices and consequences is the answer. As it is I am still on my first character, approaching level 50, and currently nothing has happened that makes me feel like starting again.

Lets stop looking at previous titles for a moment, because all you're gonna see is regression as time advances on the series up to this point, instead lets make it a point that things need to be different/improved upon. the TES formula has grown and leveled off to become, an Open World, Action Adventure, Dungeon Crawler all ment to be read as one sentence where applicable.

it had elements of C&C like in Daggerfall when dealing with the Spriggan and the Wood Cutter (HA to that guy who said Daggafallz had no C&C beyond the End), Oblivion had C&C.....with Mods. Skyrim....eh it has a CRAPLOAD of crevices that can have C&C but just doesnt utilize them....

Lets switch up that Formula eh? many from end of 2010 to Nov 2011 went on about how they're trimming the fat and all that jazz. well now we have a barebones TES, at this point. hope your happy...no not really, I couldnt care about your happiness tbh, What I do care about are Options C&C being an outlet for Options.

can we have them back now?

If you can convince everyone to buy 3 copies to make up for what will now be perceived as lost sales, considering the minimalistic Skyrim's success... sure, you can have them back.