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[Flying Dice]

I'm complaining more about the motherfu-ARGLEBLARGLE-sential NPCs". Markers on my compass and map don't break immersion. Wanting to murder the whole Thieves' Guild as bloodily and noisily as possible for being pricks, and for not being real thieves, and not being able to because Bethesda wanted to idiotproof the game instead of fixing the actual problems that have been in pretty much all their recent games not only breaks immersion but pisses me off.

 Unrealistic things don't break immersion for me; shitty mechanics, poor VAs, and idiotic, straightforward quests do. At least I can sneak past most of the Draugr (or however they're spelled) instead of fighting them in the neverending series of 'invade Nordic tomb for Artifact of Great Power #753', but you can't sneak past not being able to murder someone because the devs wanted to make money off of the mouthbreathers who never save and don't think before killing NPCs that are central to major questlines.

[Microcline]

I happen to enjoy the game, mostly because I don't break immersion just by having a marker on the compass. I mean, it's impossible for Adventurer to have a compass, right? Or mark something on his map?

And while the dungeons backtracking is sort of strange, it's a hell of a lot better than getting stuck in a hole and having to reload. If we were going for 100% realism, there would have to be a entire minigame based around shoving a full suit of Elven armor into your backpack. Not to mention your hundreds of dwarven arrows that should be impossible to carry. Oh, and swimming in heavy armor? They should take that out, because it's totes unrealistic. Most of the light armor too.

There is nothing wrong with the player having a compass.  The problem is that it does far more than a compass should, usurping the player's ability to solve problems on his own.  I see nothing wrong with allowing the player to use the compass to find NPCs or landmarks that they know (this is especially useful given that NPCs can move around).
The problem comes when you can see everything (lost ancient ruins, forbidden treasure, fugitives, level bosses, evidence of a crime), regardless of whether you have good reason to know where it is.  These things should require the player to explore, investigate, and think.  Combined with the linear dungeons, there is no reason for the player to do anything beyond walk in the specified direction and kill the draugr/bandits in his way.

Furthermore, the limited dungeon design gets old fast.  There is no reason to search for hidden passages or loot while plowing through corridors of identical draugr, because the only area of interest is the final chamber containing the boss, word wall, and big, unmissable chest of generic leveled loot.  There's no mystery about what might be hidden behind the next door.  The need for ubiquitous convenient back doors would be removed if players were again allowed access to intervention scrolls and mark/recall spells, or even more interesting modes of transportation such as jump, levitate, and speed enhancement.  This makes dungeons into challenges that are overcome by player versatility and foresight instead of repetitive slogs.

As for trainers, who gets more skilled in armor within an hour/week? Crazy. They need to go. For that matter, the HP system should be replaced by a DF like system that requires hours of pouring over your old anatomy texts to find the most optimal place to stab the next bandit.

Also elves and dwarves and dragons never existed and shouldn't be in the game. Why are there so many caves? What about the polytheism that shouldn't be so prevalent during that time period?

TES VI: History Class.

I never heard anyone complain about this.  Most of the complaints are about the removal of interesting features that existed in previous games.

I was complaining before they announced Skyrim. I knew TES series were ruined when Oblivion came out. It's just less skills, armors, weapons, magic, etc, etc and more graphics, combat and "streamlining" for casual players (they actually mean dumb players I think) from now on.

Meh, it's not perfect but it's still fun if you don't play it like the way you played Morrowind.

You mean spamming the jump button while you move around?

Is this really any different from spamming spells while walking in Oblivion or forging a thousand iron daggers in Skyrim?

[Rhodan]

I'm complaining more about the motherfu-ARGLEBLARGLE-sential NPCs".

Actually, I think the immortal NPC is not just protection against the player, it's protection against themselves. It's incredibly easy for NPCs to get into a fight even when you didn't do anything wrong. They walk around all over the place, too, straight into the morning breath of some dragon that landed on the local Inn to loudly ask for directions. It's also rather easy to accidentally kill the wrong NPC when you're yelling directions at the poor lost dragon, so immortality against other NPCs only wouldn't work. Even accidentally dropping a dagger can spark a fight.

NPCs in Morrowind hardly moved about or faced random monster attacks, if anything happened it was the player's fault.

Skyrim's solution is a bit crude, but it gets the job done. It's a bit like how the first 3D games looked horrible compared to 2D sprites. (And sometimes still do) Once the technology is perfected, we'll have quests that adapt to replace missing actors.

[scriver]

What about the polytheism that shouldn't be so prevalent during that time period?

...what? This just doesn't make any sense. On any level.

Once the technology is perfected, we'll have quests that adapt to replace missing actors.

This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with writing. Beth just don't want to create non-linear games.

[alway]

They already have code preventing NPCs from killing other NPCs while allowing the player to kill them. See also: Companion characters.

[scriver]

Like has been said many times before, there is nothing directly preventing companions from getting killed. The low-health mode just causes enemies to re-prioritize companions as extremely low threat, so they focus on others instead. A companion in low-health mode might still die if he gets hit by an area-of-effect spell, has an drain-health-over-time effect on them, or if they get hit so hard by an enemy they bypass that mode completely (or if, say, an enemy begins an attack before the companion goes into low-health-mode but it only makes contact when he's in it).

The same mechanics seem to be relevant for common NPCs and certain creatures as well.

[Rhodan]

Once the technology is perfected, we'll have quests that adapt to replace missing actors.

This has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with writing. Beth just don't want to create non-linear games.

Whether they want to or not is irrelevant.  If you create NPCs that respond in dynamic ways to situations, no amount of monkeys in typewriters can write text for all the possible outcomes. No amount of monkeys could do the required voice-acting for all that, either.
If anything, making NPCs immortal allows for much greater control over non-linear questlines. An opportunity which they sadly didn't take.  They immortalized their NPCs so the linear quests cannot be broken, they would have to do the same to keep non-linear quests from breaking.

If this "Radiant AI" system keeps improving and becomes more Radiant Intelligence and less Artificial, the non-linearity will appear out of the dynamic interactions between the NPCs, the player and the world, and questlines will be largely unscripted save for the dramatic points, setting goals for the NPCs and letting them do their thing and make their own decisions on how to oppose the player or cope with the loss of another NPC. They're "pioneering" with a "new" technology, and everyone knows that if you pioneer, you'll often die of dysentery. (Quotation marks because there is most likely some other game out there that has already done this and did it better)

[penguinofhonor]

I was watching a friend of mine play this the other day, and after watching him go go through two dungeons and asking him about it I realized something funny. Every dungeon in the game has a convenient back door leading you out by a shortcut after you've accomplished what you went in to do. He went in one dungeon and had to jump down a pit to get in, but didn't even slow down to think of a way back out before jumping because he knew there would be a convenient back door leading out after he made it to the quest marker.

Even the mysterious ancient ruins that require special keys to get in have a back door that requires no key. The ancient dwarven tunnels are littered with convenient lifts that put you right back on the surface where you can fast travel. The entire game is built in such a way that the player never has to retrace more than a handful of steps.

For a sandbox game, it's so linear and simplified. Quest markers for every single quest pointing where to go is one thing, but convenient back doors and exit passages in every dungeon? I mean, really? Am I the only one that finds that odd?

Backdoors are good game design. There are tons of easy backtrack routes in Skyward Sword, and that made the game significantly better in my opinion, as it does this one. Tediously running all the way back through a dungeon has never, ever been fun for me, and I consider the increasing frequency of backtrack routes to be an advancement in game design. There are some things that are just more important than immersion.

[Tarran]

I also like quick escapes. It's not realistic, but by god does it get rid of a potentially extremely boring part of the game.

I mean, can anyone honestly get enjoyment out of walking through an empty dungeon and enjoy it? I can't.

[forsaken1111]

It kinda is realistic actually. Do you really think the people who once used these places wanted to run through a mile of trap-filled hallway to get to the throne room?

[Tarran]

Well, back then they had levitation.

The Nords decided levitation was unmanly and banned it throughout Skyrim.

The population dropped by 50% in the first year.

 



But, even if it's somewhat realistic in that respect, 99% (?) of the time the secret exit is in a spot nobody could ever get to by foot.

[Sordid]

I also like quick escapes. It's not realistic, but by god does it get rid of a potentially extremely boring part of the game.

I mean, can anyone honestly get enjoyment out of walking through an empty dungeon and enjoy it? I can't.

When the dungeon is just a corridor with a couple of side rooms, no. I still fondly remember the mazes in Daggerfall, though. It was entirely possible to actually get lost in them, and while that was partly due to the primitive graphics that made every corridor look exactly like every other corridor and the utterly unusable map, I do find Skyrim's dungeons somewhat lacking in complexity.

[Microcline]

If this "Radiant AI" system keeps improving and becomes more Radiant Intelligence and less Artificial, the non-linearity will appear out of the dynamic interactions between the NPCs, the player and the world, and questlines will be largely unscripted save for the dramatic points, setting goals for the NPCs and letting them do their thing and make their own decisions on how to oppose the player or cope with the loss of another NPC. They're "pioneering" with a "new" technology, and everyone knows that if you pioneer, you'll often die of dysentery. (Quotation marks because there is most likely some other game out there that has already done this and did it better)

Radiant AI was a gimmick, and it hasn't been improved since its inception in Oblivion.  It would probably be better described as a list of character schedules than a form of AI.  Unfortunately for Bethesda's "Radiant [fetch] Quest" system, the point where procedural generation can mimic the work of a competent human writer is also likely the point where computer programs start passing the Turing test, and I don't see Bethesda as producing that level of innovation.

I also like quick escapes. It's not realistic, but by god does it get rid of a potentially extremely boring part of the game.

I mean, can anyone honestly get enjoyment out of walking through an empty dungeon and enjoy it? I can't.

I don't think anyone is arguing against the principle of backdoors.  The problem is that the linear dungeons are more like a movie or a rollercoaster than a structure to be explored by the player.  If dungeons were non-linear, alternate entrances/exits would seem more like natural features than developer cop-outs.  Also, previous installments had things like intervention scrolls and mark and recall that provided an instantaneous escape and were well-integrated with the lore.

[Urist Mcinternetuser]

The dungeons got old really fast. They are very repetitive, and I feel the need to open EVERY single urn. I stopped checking the urns, which made dungeons go by quicker, but still not very fun.

[scriver]

If you create NPCs that respond in dynamic ways to situations, no amount of monkeys in typewriters can write text for all the possible outcomes.

You don't have to write something different for every outcome. Plot important NPC killed? Put some documents in a drawer that can point the PC ahead.

No amount of monkeys could do the required voice-acting for all that, either.

"Writing" doesn't just mean dialogue. And yeah, I'm one of those types who thinks 100% voice acting is completely unnecessary anyway.

If anything, making NPCs immortal allows for much greater control over non-linear questlines.

Please elaborate on how you mean? I only see a cop-out to avoid having to take people's possible deaths in account. A very lazily and badly implemented cop-out as well.

If this "Radiant AI" system keeps improving and becomes more Radiant Intelligence and less Artificial, the non-linearity will appear out of the dynamic interactions between the NPCs, the player and the world, and questlines will be largely unscripted save for the dramatic points, setting goals for the NPCs and letting them do their thing and make their own decisions on how to oppose the player or cope with the loss of another NPC. They're "pioneering" with a "new" technology, and everyone knows that if you pioneer, you'll often die of dysentery. (Quotation marks because there is most likely some other game out there that has already done this and did it better)

There is nothing new about Radiant AI, and nothing new about Radiant quests. I doubt there's much difference at all from OBs RAI, except a few more AI packages (most which would've been added for F3 and F:NV). I don't think there's much emergent about them either, not even the so called Radiant Quests, but I won't say that for certain until the CS is out.