Voted for the third option. But I think "essential" NPCs could be handled better, to prevent the great majority of deaths occurring in the first place - give them roles, defenses, or personal power (as appropriate) which will make them less vulnerable.

Emperors and kings should surround themselves with guards and not grant audiences to powerful strangers with ambiguous motives; prophesied heroes and legendary mages should be able to defend themselves against all but the highest-level player characters, while their locations and defenses shouldn't remain fixed or knowable; vulnerable unknowns who have a significant role to play in the storyline should perhaps not be present at all, until their roles require them to be. Storylines themselves could do more to prevent plot devices relying on conversations with inherently vulnerable NPCs, and -- though this is getting off-topic -- to prevent the fate of the world relying on a few individuals' survival.

Of course, a large part of the issue is solely a game mechanic (developers can't be expected to account for every major NPC dying when writing/coding alternative quest paths), in which case, yeah, option 3 - I'd much rather a simple message inform me that I've severed the quest path, than have certain NPCs be, as far as the new player knows, arbitrarily invincible.

Yes. 95% of the people who claim they want to kill them are going to kill them once, see that it worked, and then reload because they don't want to continue playing in a game where half the quests are now broken and uncompletable. People are in love with the idea of a game where they are "allowed" to kill all the quest givers and break the quests, more than actually wanting to play a game where they have killed the quest givers and broken half of the quests.




Fallout NV's main characters are all unkillable. And I think this reinforces my point above... you're apparently in love with the feature in NV because you think it's there, but you've clearly never actually tried to kill off all the main characters, and probably have no intention of ever actually doing it. Maybe you will try it now just to prove me wrong, but that's really beside the point.

Yes Man is the only unkillable character in the game world....

They should prevent you as a player to be able to kill essential NPCs, somehow, but not by making them unkillable. At least, until you pass their quests.

They should prevent quest essential NPCs from being killed by monsters or other enemies without input from the player... I'm thinking of the "M'aiq the Liar is unconscious" messages I often see in the corner of my screen when walking around Cyrodiil. But if the player attacks a character, they should be killable. I usually skip the main quest in Oblivion, and take particular joy in eliminating the last member of the Septim dynasty. I use the "setrefessential" command added by OBSE to toggle Martin's essential status to off.

The Mythic Dawn laid seige to Kvatch in an attempt to kill the guy. It turns out all you have to do is ask him to follow you, take him out into the wilderness, and then whack him over the head with a big sword.

No character in NV is unkillable. Even Yes Man can be killed, he just respawns.

So "respawning" somehow makes more sense than being unkillable? Also, most of the major NPC's can't be killed unless it's directly through the main quest and only at the point that they are supposed to be killed. I don't want to go too much into it as it's all spoilers and this isn't the right forum. But trust me, Obsidian made sure their required main quest characters couldn't be taken out and ensured the main quest can't be too easily broken by a stray bullet.

Ummm? Are you trying to be a complete [censored]?
Anywho, I actually killed Caesar the first time I met him, then I later kill Mr. House. That was all over a month ago. Now I just tried to kill the General of the NCR, and voila, hes a lying in a puddle of his own blood in his office. The only unkillable character is Yes Man.
Again, stop being a [censored] bag

As I said I was trying to avoid spoilers, but what I'm saying is you can only kill Caesar and Mr. House when the game lets you. You literally can't touch Mr. House until you get to the point in the main quest where you are supposed to kill him. You can't kill Caesar until you get to that point in the quest. Several other NPC's don't spawn until you're at the right point, and a lot of the time the game does a few tricks to make sure you can't kill NPC's at specific times. For example, talking at your through an intercom where you can't reach them, etc.

NO.

Flag 'em ala Morrowind, but nothing more. I dispised immortal NPC's. Ever tried to raze a town? It's impossile with that little level 1 Bosmer punching infinitly.

Yup.

I didn't have any problems with them being kllable. So yes.

I'd prefer the freedom to be able to kill whatever character I wanted however a notification relating to how significant that character is might be helpful.

They are still killable, you just have to find your way to reach them, just like in real life, your not just going be able to walk up to the President of the United States while fully armed. I'd rather the developers use crafty ways to keep you away from essential NPC's than you putting a bullet through their head only for them to get back up a minute later. and even out of those bethesda only used that trick on a few characters. So I would like Skyrim to also handle their essential NPCs like this.

And all the children.

That's more reasonable and I can agree with that. Doing their best to hide it rather than making it obvious would help. But I don't think they should go out of their way to create dialogue and quest scripts to handle people who kill off all the main characters for no apparent reason, since almost no one actually does that. Obviously villains who are designed to be killed (which lots of the NV cast are) can be killed at the right times, but I think people who are demanding that the game handle them killing the Emperor before he talks in the Oblivion intro or people who want to kill Martin "just for fun" but still be able to beat the main quest are asking for too much.

Yikes! You're right

I forgot all about the children.

Nah, I would rather not ruin my game experience or others. For example, I haven't played a Fable game since I hit the Lady Gray glitch in the LOST EPISODES...

Think it's better if they let you kill whomsoever you want. A message could pop up saying something like "You just [censored] up seriously. Tamriel is doomed."

Mmmm, but maybe it would be convenient if essential characters were impossible to kill for anyone but you -- it'd be really annoying if [Martin's equivalent] fell off a cliff or charged into a pack of daedroth and you didn't save your game the last 20 minutes. He she could be knocked unconscious or whatever.

edit:

And this:

Povuholo

Not being able to kill essentials made me personally feel extremely powerless in Oblivion. They should make it like Morrowind's was.

As much as I hate games that break, the realistic thing to do would to make everyone killable. Even children (if they add them)

I want them to be killable but I don't want them go dying on me by themselves. I mean imagine if an npc important to the story would decide to go pick mushrooms or something and get killed by a mudcrab. Keep important npcs out of harms way (in towns and if they go out they should have a bad-ass escort with them).

EDIT: Maybe they could be replaced if killed. Like if some leader of the Blades or something similar gets killed the second in command would take his/her place and you would get to do all the quests anyway.

Agreed. If your stupid enough to go after every single plot-essential character and have no previous save then you completely deserve a broken story. And then if they get on the forums asking why they can't finish the story, then all hope is lost.

TBH, if there are more NPC's that are not important, we won't have to worry about the important. Right?

Yes. I do not like babysitting people.

I think it might help if someone explains why developers make their important quest characters invincible. It's not because they want to annoy you, or because they can't bear to see them hurt. It's because quests in video games are a pre-written series of events that require a lot of work (and content, and processing, and disk space) to create. Let's take Oblivion as an example. Martin's an important part of the main quest. They record a bunch of dialogue with people talking about Martin, and a bunch of dialogue from Martin himself. They write a bunch of scripts where Martin does things. They write a bunch of quests that all center around you looking for Martin and then doing things for him. All of that takes a lot of time. Then they're finally done and they have one main path to complete the game and do the main quest. Now, they focus on a few other paths through the main quest that people might take. Let's say you sneak into A rather than going to B. They record some new dialogue referencing you doing A instead of B, and tweak some quests and scripts to account for that. They probably do that for a few different parts of the quest. Now, you want them to deal with you killing Martin (for no apparent reason other than your character being a psychopath who wants the world to end). In order for the game to continue to make sense, they'd have to record a bunch of new dialogue so that all the people who would usually talk about Martin now talk about how he's dead, because otherwise it looks stupid when you're parading his severed head around and they all keep talking as if he's standing right next to them. They have to change all the main quest points to include code and content to deal with the now-dead Martin. Any places where he normally would have spawned in now have to be redone. Any places where NPC's would usually reference him need to be changed. They have to think about the game's story a bit... in the actual game story, you killing Martin is supposed to mean the Daedra invade and destroy everything and the world is doomed. Do they actually write all the code and art and dialogue to handle that?

A lot of people say things like "I think it's fine if they just put up a message saying you broke the game but let you keep playing" but I seriously doubt anyone would stick to that promise. They would still come onto the forum complaining that the game crashes when they get to one part because Martin's dead, or complain that a bunch of people keep giving you quests related to Martin, or that Martin spawned at one point even though he's supposed to be dead, or that the game doesn't give them any cool quests to do when they've broken most of the quests. Plus, developers don't WANT to ship a game that you can easily break and see all sorts of bugs with; it makes them look really bad, and the vast majority of gamers would hold them accountable for each and every bug regardless of whether a pop-up appeared saying "From now on all the bugs are your fault". Gamers aren't exactly forgiving, understanding types.