Quest to Nowhere

The Next Elder Scrolls Game Shouldn’t Have a Main Story

It’s been a few weeks since Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim got released, and since then I’ve wanted to write a blog post about it. But every time I tried to come up with something to write about, I couldn’t really come up with anything to write about. I think this might be because all of its flaws, and everything it does right are fairly obvious, so trying to talk about anything often seems like I would just be retreading ground someone has already covered before.

Now the thing I’ve noticed, from not only my own life but also from listening to podcasts where they’ve talked about Skyrim, is that when you get two or more people together who have been playing the game what they end up talking about are their experiences playing the game. The really interesting weapon they got after doing this mission, or the Dwarven ruin they stumbled upon when they got lost whilst looking for something else, or how they took down a dragon with the help of their horse.

The game has been made so that everyone will have a completely different experience playing the game, and because there is so much stuff different players will often encounter things that other player might not have seen or would have never seen. Which is really one of the things that make the game feel great, when you discover something it feels like you are actually discovering something. Which often times leads you to wander around looking for stuff rather than doing quests, and especially just completely ignoring the main story quest line.

Now this finally gets us to the crux of this whole post, which is that this game doesn’t really need a main story line of quests. They might be cool quests to do, but it more often than not feels like I’m being pulled away from what I want to do in order to do something that I have to do.

So what I’d like to see in the next Elder Scrolls game is no main story line of quests, but still have a main story line of quests. What I mean is that the main story line quests shouldn’t be like they are in Skyrim, or were in Oblivion, rather the player should be free to do whatever they want to do and the story adapts to fit that. Don’t make the player go to the main story, have the main story come to the player.

For instance instead of looking into why dragons are coming back to Skyrim I decide to go join the Mage’s College in Winterhold. While doing missions there perhaps I start to get information related to why the dragons might be returning, and that might cause me to seek out people who might know more about it. Or to take an example mission from the game, perhaps I don’t meet up with the informant person who would have taken me to a dragon burial site to see the dragon get revived, perhaps instead while running a mission for the Mage’s College they send me to, or near, one of these sites and I see this happen as if it were a random event occurring in the world.

This more organic way of telling the story would allow all the players of the game to experience the game’s “main story,” but much like the rest of the game how it occurred would be different for each player. Additionally it would make the whole world feel more realistic, as if things were happening all around you even though you aren’t there. This is sort of not how things aren’t really now, since if I stop doing a quest line nothing happens to progress that quest line’s story without me the player doing it. This is nice as the player since I can do whatever mission I want at any time and know that I can always stop and go back to it if I’d rather go do something else, but it does from time to time break the immersion of the game. It is especially so when it’s an apparently critical and time sensitive moment.

I think also this more organic way of storytelling is more in line with how people play these games anyway, and that way of playing is definitely something the developers designed for with Skyrim. Since they made the quest system flexible enough to know where you had been and what places you had cleared out, and to send you hadn’t already been to or move the item you need to get to a different location (I’m not entirely sure how it works but this is my general understanding of what it can do.)

So it seems to me that with Skyrim they are already moving in this direction of making the game more about supporting player exploration, and players doing whatever they want to do at a given time, and I think that having the main story adapt to what the player is doing is the next logical step for the Elder Scrolls games.