Please tell me you're joking...

There are many different criteria that can be apparent to any degree, and based on that sometimes a special name is given, and sometimes it's not. Severe Autism is one of those names (Probably what you're thinking of as "Autism").

But they're all Autistic disorders.

Edit: posted before I saw your edit, but I'll leave this for the knowledge of others.

I have no problem picking up complex plotlines whatsoever, so the main quest was a sail for me.

Morrowind was actually more difficult to comprehend at times, because a lot of the plot involved discussions with people through text that you have to search for on your own time. Oblivion was simplistic by comparison.

Yes, I also meant to write 5, not 3, just pressed the wrong keyboard button. Anyway, I also forgot about Autistic Savants, so that's my bad there.

Wut.

Yes! It was completely black and white. I haven't played Morrowind in ages (since I was about 13 I think), but I remember parts of the story really had me thinking. I hope Skyrim leaves you with a moral dilemma at the end which never gets resolved. After you kill/banish/whatever Alduin, depending on his relationship with Akatosh you may be considered a saviour by some people (like the Nords) and a God-killer by others (Imperials and others that follow the 9 Divines). I hope we actually get to speak or properly interact with Alduin besides combat.

The "books" in-game are actually rather short anyway, and not needed to enjoy the story at all (they serve pretty well to tear apart any and all claims made by Jauffre, Martin and Mankar Camoran as being ignorant and uninformed, though). If you want a "deep" experience though then, yes, you should be prepared to have to dig deep, do your own research and draw your own conclusions.



Ignoring the ad hominem attacks, a deep story has its roots in history - and you can't "live" the history anyway, you'll have to learn about it. Books are just the most condensed, quick (well, relatively quick - but then, I'm used to read 1000+ pages real-world history books ...) way available to do it.

Quite right. to clarify my previous post, aspergers is usually not geniuses. But some of the flavors of the autism spectrum can cause a person to be a savant.

I get that it's part of the experience, and yes some knowledge should require you to go out of your way. But what I'm saying is that Oblivion's story really had no drive behind it, and people don't usually play RPGs just for the gameplay. I love the TES universe, but I wish the game could present the more important lore in other ways than books. For example, in Skyrim there should be large parts of the story that aren't directly necessary to learn to still feel part of the story, and are more rewarding than just finding the right books. It should be on ancient walls at the end of dungeons, instead of just a book you found sitting in Cloudruler Temple. Think of it like the terminals in Halo 3. You could run straight past them and still enjoy the story and get involved in what's immediately going on. But if you take the time to find the terminals, and then decipher them you not only learn a lot about WHY things happened the way they did, but you also feel rewarded for reaching the terminals. It would have been different if it was just written on a plain old data pad that you found sitting around.

I'd just like to interject that when playing Oblivion I found the side quests (Mages guild, fighters guild, theives guild, Count/Countess quests, ect) to be very informative of the game world.

More important lore was explained in conversation. I don't get what you mean by "ancient cave walls" -- written there? How is that really different? Depicted in stone? That seems even more obtuse than having it written down in-game in a book. If the story had no drive, that's kind of a different issue than "will we know what's going on", which you may recall the original post being about. You were given enough information for the plot to make sense, or so I felt. Further information requires exploration, because most of the time, TES lore does not provide a "right" answer. How do you express complex and subjective ideas in a complex and subjective manner without having needless exposition dumps?

Me too. It's because the main quest dealt with a much larger issue, but was still kind of treated the same as each of the guilds. Each guild's story was perfect in scale and fitted in nicely, but the MQ was just too ambitious to be constrained in the same way as the guild quests, so it wasn't fleshed out as much as it should have been.

Oblivion is probably my favourite game of all time, but i admit the story fell short quite a lot. It's funny because even in the making of Oblivion video Todd Howards says "we always try to make our bad guys morally grey and not just evil" (something like that). Yet that's exactly how it appeared to the average person who would play it, and that isn't good.
About the pacing, if it starts off too fast people will moan, if it's not fast enough people will still moan.

So you complain about not understanding the main story and then admit to not even trying to understand it because it's a videogame? Sweet story bro.

Sorry, I sorta didn't explain it well enough in the initial post. But you can't really make the story subjective when it's written in a book, by an author who has already interpreted it them self. You need to venture into dungeons and uncover ancient first-hand accounts and tablets that bring a sense of history to the lore. I just really didn't like that most of the really interesting stuff was written in books. It deserved entire ruins that serve as archives of information, otherwise people just find all the information they need on the UESP and end up completely disconnected from the story.

That's why you don't ever read just one book, but several, possibly by people who don't use the same primary sources. Then you go and try to find the primary sources yourself (which is significantly harder).

Didn't you ever do real-world history research? That's pretty basic stuff.

Subjective, not objective. Subjective means "open to interpretation". As in, each author has interpreted the material, books sometimes contradict and the exact, objective truth may never be known. This lack of absolutes grants Tamriel a complexity rarely seen in fantasy worlds, and is the exact reason I actually care about TES lore. Because it's not about memorising pointless facts, it's about interpreting them. Again, I don't understand how you could attempt to convey that level of richness and subjectivity outside of in-game books.

I would like the villian to be introduced near the start/middle of the game so that we can identify him/her/it.

In Oblivion and Morrowind I had no idea what was behind all these problems and it came as a suprise that there were big bad bosses at the end, even though I had a PhD in the Tribunal, Neverine, Morrowind Tribes and the Septim Dynasty, the Blades, the Dragon Fires, the planes of Oblivion, etc.

I hope we actually get a choice in quest instead of just one option.

I know this is wishful thinking, but I wish the game wouldn't place the player in the center of the universe until very late in the game. Yes, I know - everyone who is playing is aware that they are, in fact, the center of the universe - but the game world should treat you like a total stranger until you prove yourself.

I'm also actually hoping that you don't get an absurd amount of initial "instruction", and instead the game just drops you off at a remote fort with a change of clothes, a few coins, and a swift kick in the butt. Daggerfall started that way, Morrowind (more or less) started that way - and it was awesome. You weren't squat for the longest.

Moreover, I really regret that Bethesda told us were were dragon born before the game even comes out. That would have been an awesome surprise to drop on the player. I know, everyone playing knows you are the hero, but still...

I do, however, like the idea that you can complete the game by just skimming the surface, but that there is great depth under the surface. It lets the casual gamer enjoy the game, while letting the hardcoe players enjoy it as well.

Something more like FO3, you know who you are and you made a decision to follow your father, from that point you're free to do whatever you want and thats awesome.

nah i like the fact that you actually have to become part of the game world to get the full experience out of the main quest. or any quest for that matter.

I think the problem with Oblivion was less that the story, and the accompanying lore, was bad - it was far from awful. The big problem was rather the way it was presented to you in the quests. Especially in the beginning - the opening acts of the MQ were extremely poorly motivated. The Emperor sees you in a dream? He gives you the Amulet of Kings, and then Baurus lets you keep it? Big WTF moments. By that stage, the MQ has already lost a lot of credibility, and so that really reduces your motivation to read the books, and so on.

I think what Oblivion was going for was to start the game off with a dramatic event, which gets you excited, and then you gradually fill in the blanks later. The problem was that your role in that dramatic event, and the things the game asked you to do as a result of taking on that role, were extremely implausible. It just killed immersion, and made it feel like a cliched and generic "hero saves the world" story - so the game didn't really give you a good hint that there was an interesting story behind the MQ, if you were to read the books. What Oblivion needed was a more credible role for the player, or at least better motivation for the role they chose - why would you be the guy to look for the heir? And they needed to do this in such a way that it made sense for you to know about the history/culture/mythology.

Reading the books was far more enticing in Morrowind, because of the role you were given. Your role (at least initially) was to fake being the Nerevarine - but how do you convincingly do that? Well, you'd better read up on the history/culture. It made sense.

I don't understand how you the player would fail to know what the Dragonfires are, as well as the more basic motivations for Dagon's attacks and other relevant background information, by the time you trek off to Kvatch. Jauffre has virtually everything the budding player needs to know, in summary form. And everything is piled upon (arguably to an extreme, as in please quit over-emphasizing this, NPCs) from there.

If you're looking for the short and sweet "most common interpretation" of the larger and more grand things, then
1) You're robbing yourself of intricate understanding, as you will likely fail to pick up on the nuances of why that interpretation is as it is,
2) You're robbing yourself of unbiased view, as you'll likely accept that first given interpretation more readily over other interpretations,
3) You're robbing yourself of the ability to derive your own interpretation, namely robbing yourself of the experience of uncovering and piecing things together by yourself. Which, as should be noted, is actually rewarding.

The bolded text, which is the summary of the Aldudagga, we didn't even have until relatively recently. And while it was a joy to read, it would have had far less impact in reading it if the reader had no familiarity with the nuances, and had no cultured ability to make their own interpretations, as mentioned in the points above.

And how is something like the Aldudagga, or something like a steadily derived interpretation of events, supposed to be displayed in a short-and-sweet form anyway? A cinematic would do something like those absolutely no justice, as would any medium that would condense them down into effortless sound-bytes. Never mind that for the grandiose stuff, laying it all out in a short-and-sweet manner would essentially be canonizing a particular viewpoint, which is generally a bad move.

If the player wishes to understand the plot more than just the bare-bones sometimes-nonsensical basics, then they have to work for it. That's a trend that's been there for each and every game. And I doubt we're gonna see it removed for this one.

Well, in Oblivion's defense, that particular bit of lore wasn't created until after Oblivion had come out; and it's a Nordic myth, and thus of questionable relevance to a game set in Cyrodiil. And all this is ignoring the debate over just how canon MK's independent writings can be considered.

I never finished the main quest.
Got to sidetracked with other quests.
The mainquest writing was so *****y, i really didn't care to finish it.

Giant demon wants to take over the earth/nirn? Tell me something I haven't heard.

Beth better have better writers. Hell I think they could hire some free talent in the Fan Fiction section.