Dhruin
SasqWatch
Forbes.com has a piece titled Why Puzzles and Exploration Should Drive Story-Telling In Role-Playing Video Games, Not Just Quests. I think the auhor has a valid point, though clumsily explained in the actual article. About the "useless" books in Skyrim:
More information.What if instead of these thousands of useless books, each volume you encountered contained something actually vital to the progression of the game? Keep the spell, skill, recipe and quest books, but ditch the rest. No more useless books at all.
Obviously we’d need quite a lot fewer books, but since books in Skyrim are just irritating props at the moment this would hardly detract from anything.
And what if inside these books were pieces of larger puzzles? Maybe you’d find one clue in a book you find early on in your travels, and then four hours later you find a second clue (or the beginning to a separate puzzle) in a dungeon somewhere else.