Quest to Nowhere: The Next Elder Scrolls Game Shouldn’t Have a Main Story
q2n:
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…
No.
The changes to quest lines that you suggest would take away from the absolutely open world aspect of the Elder Scrolls series. You mention yourself how the main quest sometimes feels like “you’re dragged away from what you want to do”. If I have to worry about time constraints on quests, even if it made the world “more organic”, it would take away from the open world aspect and made me feel even more like I was pushed into doing something at a precise time. There are enough games out there that work with that kind of restraints for the player and I am very happy that the Elder Scrolls series are not among those games.
If you don’t want to do the main quest, don’t do it.
I think what it is that I would like to see is there be some consequence for you choosing not to do something. I think this would make the world of the game a lot more interesting, and feel a lot more realistic (in that it feels like a actual working world, not that it is like the real world.) So if I run off to Winterhold to become an Archmage and ignore the civil war, the civil war should continue on it’s own. Maybe towns get sacked, or maybe even Jars overthrown while I’m off doing other things.
This will probably cut off content that I can no longer play on this playthrough, because a character died or something about the world has changed, but if you want to experience that then you can make another character and make the choice to do something involving the war.
What I meant to propose with the dynamic main story thing was basically take this idea of making the not choice a choice, and just applying it to one story aspect of the game. Since applying it to more story thread then just one would likely be both ridiculously hard to do and basically impossible to bug test.
