Skyrim - Struggling one year later @ Joystiq

I never had to struggle with Skyrim. I quitted long before i reach that level.

yea, i was saying too, TES are for open world rpg and i can't ask for my perfect rpg. Then i played fallout NV....... now i'm still hoping.

I think there is a basic, fundamental difference between people who like TES and those that don't. Those that like it want to explore, succeed and engage the story on their terms. Those that dislike TES want structure, such as hub/spoke/chapter progression model that gives them a sense of freedom but within the confines of the story arc. I like both depending on the day.

ChienAboyeur said:

Examples of scrapped features:


Food should have been produced and consumed by the various entities in the game world (Rorikstead was probably intended to provide a farm to the player so the player can participe in)

In this context, food was a totally different thing as the PC might have been left without food to eat. The possiblity of introducing hunger/sleep was tested and tested long enough for the irrelevant food system to be kept.

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Personally I love hunger, thirst, survival needs mods and I know others like this sort of thing as well, but you are quite mistaken if you imagine Bethesda ever had plans to incorporate this kind of gameplay in the vanilla game. This is not a survival game and there have never been needs meters in any previous Elder Scrolls games.

Hunger meters were never tested in early builds of the game. There is no irrelevant food system, food provides stamina and health. There are plenty of excellent mods that greatly expand on this, for example Imp's More Complex Needs tracks the protein, nutrients, water and fat content of every food item, and you suffer penalties or increased stats based on your dietary habits.

Re-Evolution of Quest/Mission design

Its really a pleasure discussing topics on here, especially with Ghan, such a thoughtful conversationalist.
Now, it would be much easier for Bethesda to implement quests with multiple solution paths then Iron Tower. Iron Tower has three people total working on their project, One Designer, One artist, and one programmer. Bethesda has about 100, at least. If Bethesda diverted just 3% of their resources, 3 people at the most, to work on higher quality quest/mission content, the game would be way more interesting. Take 3% effort from making generic dull design and modelling of dungeons, caves, and items, and use ot make just 10-15 sidequests, 10 hrs. or so of really interesting variable path/solution missions. And, you can even add about 5 hours of variable path solutions to the main quest. There, thats basucally what they need to make the quests trully memorable, and not just a passive experience easily forgotten on a few years.
A person can easily remember most of Fallout 1,2,NV, KOTOR, Planescape, and Arcanum's quest even a decade later. Thats the one component that would make the Elder Scrolls much much better.
In fact, give me two other people and I can do this. It is this reason such mods as Nehrim for Oblivion are vast imprvements.

GhanBuriGhan said:

I agree that quest design could and should always move forward. Although I would say there is a number of quests in each recent TES that certainly go beyond the kill the foozle trope. However, one should also be aware that designing branched, multi-solution-multi-resolution quests is hard. I see this very well in the development of my favorite indie RPG project, Age of Decadence: That game is basically nothing but branched narrative (and a TB combat system) - and they learned the hard way how much work that is. And in a fully open large world with very open character development, like TES it must be even worse. Ultimately I think games like TES should rather keep developing the simulation aspect and focus on emergent gameplay and emergent narrative.
That said, FO-NV shows what is feasible, and it certainly would be nice if TES designers work even harder to develop their writing for future titles.

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