ummm, are you actually playing this game? This game is about nothing but role playing. The only dull dialogue is the ambient dialogue they give to the city folks. … The actual interactive dialogue with real NPCs is usually fascinating.
Examples, please. It's usually very dry. And hard to call it "dialogue". You rarely ever speak "back" to NPCs. They are information dumps who will tell you anything you ask. It's immensely good that they god rid of the ridiculous mini-game in Oblivion and went for a more natural feeling interface for dialogue but at this stage, it's like a stripped down version of Morrowind Wikilogue except with voice and animations.
But you say "No choices" - are you kidding me? I'm playing a good guy in Skyrim and there are all kinds of side quests that deal with where i have to pick whether to take an innocent life in order to get some great weapon gain fame or leave the quest be.
Be goody-two-shoes philantropist or a "muhauhauha I'm EVIL!(tm)". Yeah, great choices. Those of us who have become accustomed to classics like Ultima or Fallout will have a problem with this binary world view and quest "choices", I'm afraid.
Example: one quest is given to me by a runaway orphan who wants me to kill the evil housemother. The evil housemother is certainly mean, but she has not killed anyone. So do I kill the evil housemother; Both the kid and the kids remaining in the orphanage would be happy - but . . .
How about Derp Brohood never actually turning up despite the kid doing the summoning ritual day and night, waiting for your involvement indefinitely? And only really turning up once you do it yourself and then the "U STOLE OUR KONTRAKT KILL A RANDOM STRANGER OR DIE LOLOLOL" attitude that you get? Weaksauce. This is not role-playing.
In another quest I have to help a girl decide between going for a new suitor who will finally take her out of town. Or the old suitor she still has feeling for but he wants to stay in town and keep the town strong. One choice make the mother happy and one choice make the father happy.
Meaningless. If you are sentimental and care about polygons' feelings, then perhaps it is touchy. But the characters are empty. They exist in a vacuum. There's no personal involvement or attachment. Neither option means anything for the game world or you as a character. Why should you as a player care unless you want to LARP emotions? But that's not the worst of it. Why should the NPCs care what you have to say? Total stranger walking into their lives and telling them what to do on matters this trivial. Are they stupid?
And in another quest this daedric god will only give me this mighty hammer if I lure and then kill this priest two times. I could go on and on but to say Skyrim is a game without choice tells me you probably have not played the game that much
I have played the game for 100+ hours and solved 100+ quests. I'm pretty sure I know a good deal about the game.
But here's the biggest problem with the "choices" in Skyrim. They are elemental and often absolutely nonsensical. Take the Whispering Door for instance. Jarl himself tells you that he has problems with his kiddo and asks you to find out what's been going on and
come back to him to report. You know what follows next if you do it and then the quest kind of self-resolves, without even giving you the option to tell the Jarl anything. That doesn't make any sense at all. You either do that final step of the quest or you just simply ignore it. I mean, wow, Jarl must be thinking "what a jerk, I asked him to report me back and he ain't got anything to say to me. What the hell is going on? Is he brainwashing my son or something?". And I don't even want to remember the immensely pretentious and juvenile script (and voice acting, which you can't skip for some reason -they must have thought it a pinnacle of literature in games perhaps?) of.. well, the "door". Uhh...
Or take the quest about Alik'r warriors and the redguard woman. What she asks you to do makes absolutely no sense because, well, it's common sense really. If your men go missing, won't you get suspicious and send even
more men to exactly where they went missing? It's like she is asking for it. There is no nuance, subtlety or any intelligence at all to the quest. It feels very base and aimed-at-children. I was only happy that I could rat her redguard ass out (as a redguard myself
) so that the game world would end up a less derpier place.
Or how about the "lessons" at the College of Winterhold, where you go happy-adventuring with your "class mates". The entire thing is a huge face-palm. It's almost as good as playing Call of Duty; entire thing is on rails and doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of in-game believability.
Or here is a more random, obscure quest: you meet some guy by a dungeon (somewhere on the outskirts of Throat of the World). He asks you for assistance. If you agree, one of the quest objectives you get is "to keep him alive". Well, the joke's on you because he's invincible. He won't die no matter what. Is the game trolling us now? You literally can not fail that quest. You can only leave it undone and the game doesn't even bother to give you the oh-so-diverse "EVIL" option this time around.
Or how about Imperial vs. Stormcloak quests? You don't ever get at any point a choice to double-cross anyone when it would make perfect sense to do so. Or how about, you go into Windhelm, hear Ulfric's idle speech with his dumb thane about a certain other hold and its Jarl but it never actually materialises as an event where you could warn that other Jarl beforehand. Not to mention that the entire civil war thing is a stalemate farce with the exception of the occasional set-piece fights between roaming Imperials and Stormcloaks.
And then again, most of the choices come down to kill/save, this meaningless choice/that meaningless choice. There are very few quests in the entirety of the game that have more nuance than simply settling for a GOOD/EVIL or DO/DON'T option. And some of them are actually good but they are the exceptions and they make the rest of the game look even worse.
In short, the game is very, very juvenile and offensively unintelligent. There's hardly any NPC with any personality. Their treatment of Daedric Lords (and Ladies) is equally juvenile. They've stripped them of any nuances in character and gone once again for cheapening stereotypes. Quality of dialogues and the depth (and sometimes inanity) of quests are clearly aimed at lowest common denominators. Which brings us to a comparison below:
I can see where you are coming from Villain. There is some degree of c&c if you play the game the way dajjer does (which I don't - I take all quests and always go the route that will net me the best loot), but the game doesn't provide any drastically world altering decisions within itself. Still, different strokes for different folks, I think it would be incredibly difficult to put those moments into a game as big and open as Skyrim (though New Vegas did a pretty good job with it)
That's the point. FNV did so many things right, it is easily a "How To Build A Meaningful Open World RPG for Dummies" guide. Obsidian showed us that you can build a game that holds up to the original games in RP department using Bethesda's (almost) trademark sandbox framework. It's a game that should be taught as a design landmark at Bethesda offices.
And look at Skyrim. So much they could have taken from FNV and almost none that they have. Existence of FNV as a good RPG voids whatever RP qualities Skyrim has. No reason why Skyrim couldn't be more like FNV but Bethesda settled for a children's RPLite action game. And maybe 10 millions sales isn't a coincidence when you think about it in that light.
Yeah, it's baby-steps really. But when are we going to have mounted combat? Feels very silly having to dismount for three wolves every time .
Indeed. In our year of 2011. 6 years after Oblivion (where horses first appeared). What's funny is that you and a few free-roaming hunters seem to be the only people in the entirety of Skyrim that ever ride horses. I haven't seen anybody else on horseback. And I think this was a particular design decision to avoid that sore thumb feel that Oblivion had when you couldn't fight back from horseback or when mounted NPCs looked like they were having a psychotic episode when they chased you, dismounted to attack you and mounted back to chase you again because you were getting away etc.
One thing I don't get with the horse is what's with the rise-on-back-feet thing with the horse that you can do when you press jump while not riding the horse. Does it serve any purpose other than pulling a "FCK YEAH!" LARP move?
I tried it against creatures and NPCs and it doesn't seem to do anything.
