Skyrim - The Elder Scrolls V

[civ_king]

In terms of quest design, this has been my biggest complaint about Skyrim almost from day one. It's true in all ES games to some extent but in Skyrim it was especially noticeable. Role playing is almost impossible unless you happen to be role playing a mercenary who does jobs for money. Since most quests have only one or at best 2 ways of completing them, you can't make meaningful decisions about what your character would do. Let me give an example. Without spoiling where it is or what it's all about since I know at least one person in here hasn't played it yet, there is a certain quest line involving werewolves. Your choice when you find out about them is "help the werewolves" or "walk away and have this quest stuck in your quest log for the rest of the game." This is not good design for a game claiming to be an RPG. What if I'm playing a lawful good type who thinks that werewolves are an abomination that have to be destroyed? Where is my option to join the werewolf hunters to exterminate them? This is just one example. I tried to role play a lawful good paladin type of character in this game and quickly found that if I was sticking to that there were a ton of quests that I could not actually complete in the game, especially in terms of the major quest lines.

Again this has always been a problem with ES games dating back at least to Morrowind, which was the first one I played, but in Skyrim it seemed really egregious. I understand that there is limited budget for games and they can only do so much, but maybe spend less time making the graphics pretty (which modders are going to outdo all of your work within 3 months of release anyway) and focus on making the game itself deeper.

Exterminate the Dark Brotherhood?

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Exterminate the Dark Brotherhood?

True, there's a quest for that, but it only opens up after doing the first part of that quest chain, which means you have to kill the woman in Riften before you can do this, which is not something a lawful good character would do in the first place. Assuming you are playing a good character all along, the option to exterminate them would never even come up since you wouldn't do the prerequisite quest.

 

[civ_king]

True, there's a quest for that, but it only opens up after doing the first part of that quest chain, which means you have to kill the woman in Riften before you can do this, which is not something a lawful good character would do in the first place. Assuming you are playing a good character all along, the option to exterminate them would never even come up since you wouldn't do the prerequisite quest.

Grelod the Kind is actually a horrible cruel woman who psychologically abuses the children, I'm not sure killing her is some extreme act of evil.

 

[Polycrates]

True, there's a quest for that, but it only opens up after doing the first part of that quest chain, which means you have to kill the woman in Riften before you can do this, which is not something a lawful good character would do in the first place. Assuming you are playing a good character all along, the option to exterminate them would never even come up since you wouldn't do the prerequisite quest.

Haha on the topic of the somewhat...flexible moral compass of the game, with Hearthfire (I got the DLC on the Steam sale, don't judge me!) after you do that mission you get a note from a courier basically saying "Hey we hear you're an assassin who likes murdering old ladies! Have you considered adopting children from the orphanage where you murdered an old lady in cold blood? We hear the old lady you murdered in front of a bunch of children was really mean so we think you would be a really good dad"

Likewise Dawnguard is even worse:

Spoiler :

If you want to become a super-vampire, you have to join the vampire hunter's guild first.
And if you just want to be a regular vampire hunter, your first quest as a vampire hunter is "protect a vampire and get her safely back to her super evil death castle so she can give the elder scroll that she is carrying to the vampire leader who wants to destroy the world". There's no option to, you know, kill the vampire lady and just take the elder scroll.
You get back to the vampire hunter castle and they ask you "why the hell did you do that?"
SORRY, GROUCHY DUDE, I JUST DO WHAT THE QUEST MARKERS TELL ME, I AM NOT A VERY GOOD VAMPIRE HUNTER

 

[Symphony D.]

Some current character screenshots. I know there's a separate screenshot thread, but whatever, it's Skyrim. I was shooting for attractive, but not a porn star:

Spoiler :

Lately I just roll around like a female Garrett getting 1500+ damage sneak attack critical shots:

Spoiler :

Sometimes the game is really pretty:

Spoiler :

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Grelod the Kind is actually a horrible cruel woman who psychologically abuses the children, I'm not sure killing her is some extreme act of evil.

I'm aware of that, the key word here in my character's alignment was "lawful". Trying to play a lawful character means you can't just take the law into your own hands. It's something that ES games have always struggled with, you can play a good character, or you can play an evil character, but you can't really ever play a lawful character of any type because a ton of quests in the game are at least borderline vigilantism.

I still think Skyrim is a fun game I just don't think it's a very good "role playing" game, your options for playing your character are simply not deep enough, you end up with a ton of quests cluttering your quest log because there's only one way to complete them and your character wouldn't do it that way.

 

[cybrxkhan]

I'm aware of that, the key word here in my character's alignment was "lawful". Trying to play a lawful character means you can't just take the law into your own hands. It's something that ES games have always struggled with, you can play a good character, or you can play an evil character, but you can't really ever play a lawful character of any type because a ton of quests in the game are at least borderline vigilantism.

I still think Skyrim is a fun game I just don't think it's a very good "role playing" game, your options for playing your character are simply not deep enough, you end up with a ton of quests cluttering your quest log because there's only one way to complete them and your character wouldn't do it that way.

I'll have to agree with this, as much as I think the TES are probably the best RPGs on the market, no competition (at least for me).

Unfortunately, the RPG aspect in TES only works if you really use your imagination hard, essentially work out what happened in your head and sometimes make up justifications. For some like me that's fine and even enjoyable to a degree, thinking of imaginary conversations between my otherwise relatively silent followers, for instance - but for others who like roleplaying it's pretty difficult. A lot of times I just read up on the quests on the TES wikis just in case there's a second or third or hidden option that I can take that suits my character more.

 

[Double A]

I'm aware of that, the key word here in my character's alignment was "lawful". Trying to play a lawful character means you can't just take the law into your own hands. It's something that ES games have always struggled with, you can play a good character, or you can play an evil character, but you can't really ever play a lawful character of any type because a ton of quests in the game are at least borderline vigilantism.

I still think Skyrim is a fun game I just don't think it's a very good "role playing" game, your options for playing your character are simply not deep enough, you end up with a ton of quests cluttering your quest log because there's only one way to complete them and your character wouldn't do it that way.

Samurai Jack was lawful (I guess?) but he didn't follow any of Aku's laws. Just declare a crusade or something.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

D&D alignments like "lawful" or "good" can't really be applied to the world of Skyrim. They hardly work in the D&D system, better think out of the box in that case.

 

[Double A]

I know, but he's the one who wants to use such arbitrary and confining labels.

 

[MkLh]

This is not good design for a game claiming to be an RPG. What if I'm playing a lawful good type who thinks that werewolves are an abomination that have to be destroyed?

How good it is to exterminate people because they have a disease that turns them ugly?

 

[Wolfbeckett]

You people are harping on nitpicky details of the one example I chose to use instead of addressing the overall point of my post. The point is there aren't enough options in terms of character behavior for Skyrim to be considered a great RPG. It's still a great G, it's just the RP part that I am taking umbrage with. If you don't think it's "good" to exterminate werewolves, then pretend I never used that term and instead described the character as a zealot. If you don't like the alignment system in D&D, which I used as an example just because it's well known and most people understand it, then pretend I didn't bring it up. My overall point wasn't specifically that I can't play D&D alignments, the overall point is that it's hard to play ANY kind of character because of the limitations in the quest system of the game. I can't determine ahead of time how my character would react to a variety of situations and then play him out that way, because in most cases I don't get a choice on how to react. That's the point.

 

[Double A]

If I can pretend about you not bringing certain things up, then why can't I pretend the role playing is better?

 

[LDiCesare]

I agree that it's very difficult to roleplay. You choose which quests you do or don't, but there are hardly ever any significant choices or consequences to your acts. The sole exception being Empire/Stormcloak quests, and then the vampire/vampire hunter quests. The other quests are play either like a mercenary or move on to somewhere else.
If you try to do something different, the quests won't let you. For instance, try to kill Ancano in Winterhold: He won't die because it's not yet the time for you to fight him... The only choiceyou have is which quests you do, but if you want to play many quests, you simply have to make do with many things your character wouldn't have any reason of doing.

 

[civvver]

Dude it's skyrim, not a d&d game. Lawful good is a made up thing that exists only in d&d universe.

From an RP perspective, skyrim is more of an rpg than pretty much any other game out there. I can't think of a single game that has the type of desicisions you're talking about at every level. Many have quest/story line altering decisions at one point or another like dragon age origins when you can decide in the mage tower to support the templars or the mages, or like some of the quest decisions in skyrim. But no game has full user action choices everywhere, it's just impossible to program that without severely limiting the scope of the game (ie less quests overall).

 

[LDiCesare]

The Witcher, both 1 and 2, have far more choices with long term consequences than Skyrim has.
Admittedly, the world is smaller, there's so much less exploration, but actions have deep consequences that are not immediately obvious.
An old game like Arcanum let you play many different styles (like the bridge quest to get out of the first town: fight thieves, deal with them, pay them, trick them, or get the local doc to kill them) up to the final boss who you could either fight or (if you were really good at it) convince. Skyrim offers many many more quests, but they are almost all linear or at best with one alternative where Arcanum for instance offered many options.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

The Witcher, both 1 and 2, have far more choices with long term consequences than Skyrim has.
Admittedly, the world is smaller, there's so much less exploration, but actions have deep consequences that are not immediately obvious.
An old game like Arcanum let you play many different styles (like the bridge quest to get out of the first town: fight thieves, deal with them, pay them, trick them, or get the local doc to kill them) up to the final boss who you could either fight or (if you were really good at it) convince. Skyrim offers many many more quests, but they are almost all linear or at best with one alternative where Arcanum for instance offered many options.

Yes thank you. I don't expect a game to provide an RP experience the way a tabletop game would, I get that there are limitations in the programming and that will never change. But there are many games that do a FAR better job than Skyrim and other ES games. The original Fallout did this 10x better than any ES game and it came out 16 years ago. Just gonna come right out and say it: the biggest problem is voice acting. Ever since consumers stupidly decided that everything that isn't 100% voice acted sucks RPG's have not been nearly as good, because writing in a whole slew of ways to complete quests requires more lines of dialogue and spoken lines of dialogue are far more costly than written lines. Too much budget these days is going towards making a game look and sound good leaving not enough money left over for making the game deeper. Aesthetics are great but they can never replace content. Skyrim's content is broad in that there is a lot to do but it isn't deep because there are usually only 1 or at most 2 ways to deal with a situation, meaning that every time you play that quest in the future it will play out exactly the same (Oh you killed the enemies with a mace instead of a sword this time, that is WAY DIFFERENT!). I don't even consider ES games to be RPG's anymore, I consider them Action/Adventure games where you happen to level up.

 

[cybrxkhan]

To be honest, personally, if TES had more variety in choices like Fallout 3 or NV did I'd be happy. It isn't perfect nor as complicated as some of the other RPGs out there, and sometimes the choices are simple, but it really makes a big difference. I don't like Fallout as much as TES, but that I think was one of the former's greatest advantages over the latter.

Come to think of it, for Skyrim, if the civil war was the main quest and it was as complex as they were originally planning to make it (and they even had parts of the code and worldspace prepared for a much more complex civil war), I'd be even more satisfied with that than Skyrim's current main quest. The Civil war was really a lost opportunity, given how much they could've delved into politics and culture a la Morrowind and really emphasized the two different but very much multi-dimensional political factions in Skyrim.

 

[Symphony D.]

Morality systems in video games are uniformly stupid and poorly implemented. In Skyrim you're objectively a less dark shade of grey than Alduin considering you're a powermongering self-interested instrument of the divine that is capable of achieving divinity itself. The game doesn't judge your morality because literally your purpose is power and to be an agent of variously order and chaos.

D&D's alignments are more judgments of behavior of ethics within the confines of ordinary modern-day normative behavior. Good and evil don't exist as objective things in reality, they're judgments. Skyrim acknowledges this. It's also why it's a sandbox game, not a deeply reflective RPG. You, Dovakhiin, are a prospective God, and the world is your toy, just as it was for Tiber Septim and his Dragonbreak. What do ethics and morality and cause and effect mean in the face of that when you can literally rewrite time by reloading games?

It's like you people never actually read the books that are lying around.

 

[Double A]

My favorite one is Kolb and the Dragon.