Fallout 4! In like 4 1/2 months, its real.

[Sacremas]

That is just so freaky. They speak of it like they expect multiple atomic bombs to go off at any time, and then they can get back on their bikes after.

 

Also catchy tune.

 

[afa]

 

All that stuff about "Morrowind" does "right" could easily be consider a limitation to the player. Joining one guild prevent joining of another, skill requirements, and house faction could very well be seen as blockade. It prevents the player from doing everything that he/she wants.

 

No limits to what the player can do renders any challenge or sense of accomplishment non existent; where there is no punishment for failure, there can be no reward for success. Replayability is also much lesser when everything is doable with a single character that can be both a murderer and a paladin, a mage and a fighter etc. Besides it makes no sense.

 

Such is the way of things, you can't have it both ways. At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

[Coopervane]

Such is the way of things, you can't have it both ways. At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

 

Why not? It seems to me that if if they were to add a simple difficulty menu, then limitations like this would be exactly the sort of thing players could be allowed to toggle on or off. That would be a nice way of doing it.

[Buddy Christ]

 

*snip*

 

Totally off topic, but if I were an Android, I probably would dream of you

 

[ElectricSheep]

 

At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

No restriction = no weight to your actions = no fun.

 

Nobody forces you to replay a game in order to check alternate paths/factions/guilds. Yet people do that since the beginning of additional content, which is the very reason why it started to exist - to increase replayability value. Back in the 90's people would play the shit out of games like, say, Resident Evil 2 just to check every variation of the scenario and unlock every item there was to unlock. This is still the case today with e.g. Mass Effect; people replay these games just to experience different outcomes and responses, no matter how minor they tend to be, because it's cool to have a choice. Even cooler when a game embraces the fact you're playing a certain character and a thief is treated like a thief rather than a law officer because you can be both at the same time and without requirements. A world without consequences is a world of shallowness.

[Guest endgameaddiction]

I had this argument months ago about Skyrim.

 

It makes no sense being a dishonorable thief and an honorable companion at the same time without no restrictions, limitation and one or the other faction turning you down for it.

 

Bethesda needs to start looking into alternate starts and stop this whole one way street roleplay with their huge open world if they are going to allow you to have many roles to take. It just makes no sense being a heroic person with a good reputation across the land and some cold killer assassin at the other end. -smh

 

The purpose of roleplaying is to roleplay as one and go with that type of player with those types of actions and consequences. Here I am an Archmage and Harbinger of the Companions. Soon enough I'll be heading to Riften to do the quests there and become a bad ass thief who will them be a nightgale later on and then I'll end up joining the Darl Brotherhood eventually and slaughter bitches left and right while I'm some ferocious dragon in human form. Not to mention a super hero of some silly war between bloods and crips.

[anthonyb]

I just wonder what the console mods will even be. I assume just basic tweaks like different colour sky or a different colour dog.

[Buddy Christ]

I had this argument months ago about Skyrim.

 

It makes no sense being a dishonorable thief and an honorable companion at the same time without no restrictions, limitation and one or the other faction turning you down for it.

 

Bethesda needs to start looking into alternate starts and stop this whole one way street roleplay with their huge open world if they are going to allow you to have many roles to take. It just makes no sense being a heroic person with a good reputation across the land and some cold killer assassin at the other end. -smh

 

The purpose of roleplaying is to roleplay as one and go with that type of player with those types of actions and consequences. Here I am an Archmage and Harbinger of the Companions. Soon enough I'll be heading to Riften to do the quests there and become a bad ass thief who will them be a nightgale later on and then I'll end up joining the Darl Brotherhood eventually and slaughter bitches left and right while I'm some ferocious dragon in human form. Not to mention a super hero of some silly war between bloods and crips.

 

That is a thing I totally agree on.

It really should be the way that you have to decide your path by accepting the initial quest, which bars you from others ("honorable" quests bar you from thief and assassin quests and vice versa)

I believe this would actually make it more of an incentive for another playthrough. You would actually *have* to play another character to get the different path and/or ending.

 

And please no more forced quest lines like the one with the thieves guild! That sucks!

[Coopervane]

I just wonder what the console mods will even be. I assume just basic tweaks like different colour sky or a different colour dog.

 

It depends greatly on wether or not the Console versions will be able to use plugin frameworks (things like FOSE/SKSE, FNIS, Jcontainers, all those workarounds the modding community has to employ to add anything actually new to the game). If that won't be allowed, then huhhhh... it's all going to be pretty damned basic (followers, reskins, player-homes, the ushe).

I see no reason to belive that the toolkit they give us this time will be any more inclusive than what we got before, so dollars to doughnuts it will need a FOSE and a Fo4Edit, and something similar to FNIS and SkyUI and so on.

 

And one thing you will never see on the Consoles are thouse "make the game way better looking" mods, because it's static hardware, it's got the guts that it does and there's no way to insert a better vid-card or more RAM. The level of graphics the game ships with will probably be the most the game engine can push on that hardware, so don't expect much if any improvement to be found there.

 

 

And finally there's the purely political side of it, IE, don't expect Bethesda to allow porn mods on their service or anything else fun. Because America.

[Gameplayer]

Mmm Donuts

 

 

I think it'll be certainly possible to do

 

Outfits, Locations, Quests, Weapons, Re-balance game mechanics...

There are still so many more things that a modder can do with just the base tools that just means getting even more creative withen a set of perameters, as someone that has done some work in the Arts I'm telling you that its certainly possible to make something worth getting excited about.

 

Hmm, you really gotta realize this too,

 

As modders on the cutting edge driving forward what is considered the absolute best in new gaming visuals, applications, and etc.............Its incredibly easy to lose sight of what the common man in the world thinks of as "awesome"....

 

Because we are so many leagues beyond what those people even realize is possible.

 

For example,

What I have on my computer right now in modding...There are relatively fewer Mod-User's that have the means, skills, knowledge, and discipline to make that happen for themselves.

 

The world really isn't ready for where Skyrim is capable of being at right now, today...It'd just be too much amazing on too many levels and for legitimate reasons pointed out before my post.

 

There are however a good deal of people out there that are screaming for what we have done for our games every single day, yet in the scope of whats offered and what they know about being possible....

Well too them it seems like an impossibility that will take years if not decades to happen.

 

-------------------------------

 

Go out there into the REAL World find a hard core gamer.

Try to explain the concept of modding,

He wont think your sane.

 

Actually sometimes I have huge difficulty explaining how a combination of mods effects a grand outcome to our own mod user base ><

[Coopervane]

Awesome would be a sunroof for the husky gentleman.

 

Perhabs a more interesting question is: How many people are actually chomping at the bit to make mods for the Consoles?

[Gameplayer]

I'll make up my mind on that when we know more.

[ElectricSheep]

Who gives a fuck? Unless the toolkit is made more restrictive and dumbed down in order to make it easier to develop mods for teh consoles, I couldn't care less about modding on said platforms. Also, I get the feeling that mods on the consoles can work as a PC advertisement; "You know, there are even cooler modifications with better graphics and boobs, but since you own a shitty console you can go fuck yourself, duh!".

 

The end of console gaming can't come soon enough. Will I ever get to see a good UI in a triple A game again in my life?

[Sacremas]

Unfortunatey it's a lot more likely that we'll see the end of PC gaming (acutally we may see the end of PCs as you know it now, 20 years from now the only "PC" available may be a glorified netboard) than to ever see the end of console gaming, it's here to stay. We may see consoles become more like PCs, but don't expect UIs to work better, since these things are meant for a livingroom TV rather than a computer screen (fucking hell, I use UI overhauls on my computer games which I play on my livingroom TV! Get bigger TVs you cheapskates!).

 

Don't disparge it too much, if it wasn't for console gaming and other sources of gaming like on facebook, mobile phones and such, gaming wouldn't be as big and recognized as it is today, we probably wouldn't have E3 on the level we do if consoles had never showed up, and a lot of game companies may have been dead due to not being able to be echonomically sustainable without the huge console marked. Console marked stands for something like 80 % of games sold today, that's a lot of revenue lost. If you also count Android and IOS games under normal games, PC gaming is a tiny fraction of the revenues, with the biggest cash cows being successful MMOs... meaning pretty much WoW alone overall and some asian ones, since so many others like SWTOR, LOTR Online, Elder Scrolls Onlone and so on have flopped BADLY. I'm pretty certain a "free to play" game with micro-installments like the MOBAs (DOTA etc) and games like Marvel Heroes earn more than most MMOs, hence why you see so few MMOs being developed these days compared to a few years ago, and more and more MOBA style games showing up.

[Guest]

My opinions:

* Games that have an ability to be modded sells more.

* Games that are more easy to be developed just once for both PC and console have the priority

 

So probably Beth will continue with its policy (console version and PC version pretty much the same, DevKit provided pretty much right away.)

 

Skyrim paid its development, and it is still giving back money to Beth. FO3 not. FONV yes.

Witcher 3? Not yet paid the development.

 

Some other examples: Mass Effect 3, paid the development because it was pretty much a UPK game. But has pretty much zero now sales, and the sales are due to the amazing work "Warranty Void" did.

 

[Coopervane]

Unfortunatey it's a lot more likely that we'll see the end of PC gaming (acutally we may see the end of PCs as you know it now, 20 years from now the only "PC" available may be a glorified netboard) than to ever see the end of console gaming, it's here to stay. We may see consoles become more like PCs, but don't expect UIs to work better, since these things are meant for a livingroom TV rather than a computer screen (fucking hell, I use UI overhauls on my computer games which I play on my livingroom TV! Get bigger TVs you cheapskates!).

 

Don't disparge it too much, if it wasn't for console gaming and other sources of gaming like on facebook, mobile phones and such, gaming wouldn't be as big and recognized as it is today, we probably wouldn't have E3 on the level we do if consoles had never showed up, and a lot of game companies may have been dead due to not being able to be echonomically sustainable without the huge console marked. Console marked stands for something like 80 % of games sold today, that's a lot of revenue lost. If you also count Android and IOS games under normal games, PC gaming is a tiny fraction of the revenues, with the biggest cash cows being successful MMOs... meaning pretty much WoW alone overall and some asian ones, since so many others like SWTOR, LOTR Online, Elder Scrolls Onlone and so on have flopped BADLY. I'm pretty certain a "free to play" game with micro-installments like the MOBAs (DOTA etc) and games like Marvel Heroes earn more than most MMOs, hence why you see so few MMOs being developed these days compared to a few years ago, and more and more MOBA style games showing up.

 

The truth could easilly be the opposite actually..

 

 

With this generation of Consoles, both Sony and Microsoft have released machines that are nothing more than crap PC's locked by DRM, and both companies have expressed concearns about the viabillity of Consoles as a platform.

 

Smartphones and tablets are eating their lunch, and due to the demands of the gaming industry, they can nolonger provide plug-&-play machines, which used to be the whole selling point of a Console, that it was the easy plug-&-play alternative to PC Gaming. Now they are just really crap PC's where the end user still has to deal with system maintenance and game patches, and people are wising up to it and starting to wonder why they should even need a Console then.

 

PC's on the other hand are getting easier to deal with, and has gown significantly as a market since the Xbone and PS4 came out. A lot of people decided to skip those machines and just get a PC instead. Why do you think Sony is foaming at the mouth to push Cloud-gaming all of a sudden, and Microsoft are experimenting with Windows on the Xbone? It's because they can see the Console bubble starting to burst.

 

 

Smartphones and tablets just plain make more sense for casual gaming than Consoles do, and when i look at the kids in my family, it's what they are gaming on and growing up with, not Consoles. And for the enthusiast market, as Consoles have had to become more and more like PC's to meet the demands of the market, they are also starting to make less and less sense there aswell.

 

 

Console-gaming is too ingrained in a whole generation of gamers, especially in the USA and Japan, that they won't go away overnight. This stuff will, and has been happening slowly and gradually, but as things stand, Consoles stopped making sense a good while back and people are starting to catch on to that fact. I don't see them having much of a future unless they can somehow create a new niche for themselves, and by the looks of it, Microsoft and Sony would agree with that sentiment.

[Sacremas]

Nice post, but it's all speculation by now (both viewpoints) and it could go either way. I think the general reception of Windows 10 may play into it, if that's viewed as working better for gaming overall and more user friendly, it may open some doors.

 

However a big part of it is the price point. Consoles are starting to become more like PCs, but they're PCs built quick and easy and a streamlined process. For the same price you pay for a PS4 1TB, you won't really get a PC capable of running the same games, not if you buy it from the store (scouting prices and building it yourself doesn't play into this, these are casual gamers). As such you'll still see people who can't afford a gaming PC from the store or know what a gaming PC really means and how good it must be will still default to consoles. If the price of PC games continue to go down however, the long-term costs may balance themselves out better however, but not if cheap downloadable games are available on the consoles as well.

[Coopervane]

You're still thinking of it in a PC versus Console mindset though, but that's not where things are going.

 

For the casual gamer, i don't think it is a question of PC or Console for much longer, it's a question of SmartDevice versus Console, and Tablets are poised to win that fight hands down. I don't think it will take very long before you can buy Tablets that can play Cowadoody style games (they might not run at amazing graphics at first, but the lifespan of the Xbox360 and PS3 prooved that graphics aren't everything). Now give that thing some basic on-device game controls, and a docking station that connects it to your TV's HDMI alongside a wireless controller, and BAM, it has replaced both stationary and handheld Consoles for the casual market in one fell swoop, AND it can do useful stuff like surf the net and check your email to boot.

 

 

I'll bet you that this is where it's going, and it probably won't take that long before it's here. I also belive that it's the grim spectre of this future that had Microsoft try to market the Xbone as an all-in-one home multimedia solution rather than a games Console, and why Sony has stated they might get out of the Console market after the PS4 and are pushing hard for cloud-gaming.

 

For the casual market, i think it's a done deal, it will be SmartDevices and not Consoles in the not too distant future. We're not quite there yet, but it's comming.

 

 

What i am far less sure of is where this leaves the enthusiast market, and what's going to happen there. There will still be a market that wants high-end gaming, but on what? I would have to assume PC's will win that, because that's the high-end of the high-end, and what enthusiasts would thus gravitate to.

[afa]

 

Such is the way of things, you can't have it both ways. At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

 

Why not? It seems to me that if if they were to add a simple difficulty menu, then limitations like this would be exactly the sort of thing players could be allowed to toggle on or off. That would be a nice way of doing it.

 

 

Well yes, you can have a toggle, but is it really worth it? Again the player always have the choice to not do something. You are giving that up when you flip that switch.

 

 

At the very least for the no requirement route the player can pick to do or not do a particular quest line without restriction. Replayability is also hamper when player has to do the same thing over and over again for the non selective parts.

No restriction = no weight to your actions = no fun.

 

Nobody forces you to replay a game in order to check alternate paths/factions/guilds. Yet people do that since the beginning of additional content, which is the very reason why it started to exist - to increase replayability value. Back in the 90's people would play the shit out of games like, say, Resident Evil 2 just to check every variation of the scenario and unlock every item there was to unlock. This is still the case today with e.g. Mass Effect; people replay these games just to experience different outcomes and responses, no matter how minor they tend to be, because it's cool to have a choice. Even cooler when a game embraces the fact you're playing a certain character and a thief is treated like a thief rather than a law officer because you can be both at the same time and without requirements. A world without consequences is a world of shallowness.

 

No body forces you to have to play through all the guild quest in one character either.

You are asking for the game to impose restriction to somehow satisfy the player's own narrative, you are trading in freedom of the player for an artificial sense of satisfaction. It might work if the game is tighter when it comes to narrative/story/characters, but I don't think the TES/FO series are that kind of games. This is especially troubling when you consider that you actually want to see all the content, but need to reroll a new character to do so.

Also Skyrim already has a few of those Civil war, Dawnguard, join/kill dark brotherhood...which for some reason people seems to hate.

 

Replayability is...well games are different now, how they are play, access to information has changed also. Funny you bring up Mass Effect, that is actually the game that got me thinking about choices in games and if they matter or should they matter. First of all I love Mass Effect I would say I like it more than most even for all the flak it had about the ending.

I think it also has a tighter narrative, story, and characters than TES/FO, not necessarily means a better game (although I do like it more), but I think it earns and in fact it should let mutually exclusive decisions play out accordingly since it has the story telling chops to go after that.

 

But if you consider choices...what exactly are you doing when you make that choice? What exactly are you doing when you make one choice but at the same time want to see what happens in the other choice? What do you do to rectify that? Replay the game? sure but how many times? How many choices are there in a game? How many inter linked decisions are there because we have graduated from A or B decisions. Plus how does the game "reward" you for making that decisions? "I saved this guy from the first game, now he sent me an email in the second" Is that really a choice? is that really of importance? If you didn't save that guy and not gotten his email would you have noticed? How did you know you missed his email?

Which brings us to access of information in 2015. The "easy" thing to do is to google mass effect wiki and have a full list of choices, conditions, and outcome that you can view at a glance, now you know exactly what to do to see everything. Are you using this info to make the "correct" choices and get the outcome you want? or do you use it to plan your playthroughs to see everything? But is that really what choices in a game is? Following a guide that tells you exactly what to do? Are you really the one making the choices anymore? Also if all you want is to see a scene/dialog plays out there's Youtube. Now are we even playing a game? Is there a reason to play it anymore?

 

If all the player really wants is to see everything then why not make it so the player can see everything without jumping through a bunch of hoops? What are these choices all about? a gimmick? What exactly about "knowing there is another path, but I didn't take it but still want to see it" makes it satisfying? Mass Effect has a gimmick with a lot of the mutually exclusive choices where you can "get" the best of both worlds, but you need to meet some requirements, but is that really a choice or is it just another layer of gameplay where it rewards the player with the "best" choice for doing well or in its case you played (bought) the first two games and did something in those game correctly also.

[afa]

Don't usually double post, but I feel like the PC vs console discussion have gone on for too long...as society not as in LL alone

 

The console's low cost, simple, and static model has always been attractive for consumer and developer. But ever since the PS1 era there were stories of what exactly is the end game of console? Hardware improves year after year and PC is always at the forefront. The theoretical answer was they have to eventually match one another. It is less about one kills off the other because by then the difference between the two should be slight. We are already seeing console using "very PC like hardware", and PC standardizing as oppose to the impenetrable wild west it once was.

 

It is interesting to see how the path is being walked however. Phones and mobile is also an eventual process everyone is working to get their hardware faster, at worst you will see a stagnate of improvement, you can't see what you have never seen, but can't unseen what you have saw.

Look at things like steam box, nvidia shield, Alienware Alpha...as unattractive and questionable they are at its current state it isn't difficult to see these concept takes off in a few years.

Intel hard push in iGPU and current roadblock with CPU is also interesting development for better or worse.

VR is another thing that could push things one way or another.

 

Oh wait this is a thread about FO4...

Man I wonder if it will have DX12 support, some bits and pieces of info shows AMD cards are performing quite well with DX12.

[Sacremas]

Maybe a patch for DX12, but since as far as I know that's Win 10 only it's not going to (not just "highly unlikely" it's just not) ship with it, unless they can do support without a dependency.

[Coopervane]

Well yes, you can have a toggle, but is it really worth it? Again the player always have the choice to not do something. You are giving that up when you flip that switch.

 

-snip-

 

No body forces you to have to play through all the guild quest in one character either.

 

 

 

You are asking for the game to impose restriction to somehow satisfy the player's own narrative, you are trading in freedom of the player for an artificial sense of satisfaction. It might work if the game is tighter when it comes to narrative/story/characters, but I don't think the TES/FO series are that kind of games. This is especially troubling when you consider that you actually want to see all the content, but need to reroll a new character to do so.

Also Skyrim already has a few of those Civil war, Dawnguard, join/kill dark brotherhood...which for some reason people seems to hate.

 

Replayability is...well games are different now, how they are play, access to information has changed also. Funny you bring up Mass Effect, that is actually the game that got me thinking about choices in games and if they matter or should they matter. First of all I love Mass Effect I would say I like it more than most even for all the flak it had about the ending.

I think it also has a tighter narrative, story, and characters than TES/FO, not necessarily means a better game (although I do like it more), but I think it earns and in fact it should let mutually exclusive decisions play out accordingly since it has the story telling chops to go after that.

 

But if you consider choices...what exactly are you doing when you make that choice? What exactly are you doing when you make one choice but at the same time want to see what happens in the other choice? What do you do to rectify that? Replay the game? sure but how many times? How many choices are there in a game? How many inter linked decisions are there because we have graduated from A or B decisions. Plus how does the game "reward" you for making that decisions? "I saved this guy from the first game, now he sent me an email in the second" Is that really a choice? is that really of importance? If you didn't save that guy and not gotten his email would you have noticed? How did you know you missed his email?

Which brings us to access of information in 2015. The "easy" thing to do is to google mass effect wiki and have a full list of choices, conditions, and outcome that you can view at a glance, now you know exactly what to do to see everything. Are you using this info to make the "correct" choices and get the outcome you want? or do you use it to plan your playthroughs to see everything? But is that really what choices in a game is? Following a guide that tells you exactly what to do? Are you really the one making the choices anymore? Also if all you want is to see a scene/dialog plays out there's Youtube. Now are we even playing a game? Is there a reason to play it anymore?

 

If all the player really wants is to see everything then why not make it so the player can see everything without jumping through a bunch of hoops? What are these choices all about? a gimmick? What exactly about "knowing there is another path, but I didn't take it but still want to see it" makes it satisfying? Mass Effect has a gimmick with a lot of the mutually exclusive choices where you can "get" the best of both worlds, but you need to meet some requirements, but is that really a choice or is it just another layer of gameplay where it rewards the player with the "best" choice for doing well or in its case you played (bought) the first two games and did something in those game correctly also.

 

Skyrim forces you to do all the guild quests, it was not only designed to allow you to do it, you pretty much have to, or your char will be gimped and several features of the game won't activate.

 

 

How you might ask? I'll spoiler it since this is going to drag on a bit..

 

 

 

Well first up two of the guilds are forced on you durring the main quest (to find Esbern you are directed to speak with Brynjolf, who won't help you unless you join the Thievesguild, and to get the scroll you must speak with Urag at the Collage, but Feralda won't let you pass without force-enducting you into the College). So that's not giving the player much choice there, now is it?

 

Second, you are the Dragonborn, learning shouts is a pretty big deal in the game, but you can never learn them all unless you join and beat every guild's questline, because each of them involves quest-locked dungeons that have wordwalls in them. There is no good reason for this, none of these dungeons HAD to involve a wordwall, they could have put those anywhere else, but no, they made it nessesary to join all the guilds to learn these shouts.

 

And then there's the other unlockables tied to guilds, NPC's not doing their routines untill you join up, Werewolves not spawning in the world unless you become a Companion, and so forth.

 

 

 

Now here's why this is a problem: 

 

Problem 1: They made no effort to justify this. It makes absolutely, positively, no sense what so ever within the games own established narrative and rules that this is possible. The Companions especially, always banging on about honour, how magic is for pussies, and that warrior pride demands they face problems head on, yadda yadda.. why would these people allow a mage/thief/assassin into their guild? It makes no sense at all.

If they were going to make us do all these questlines, then they should have made the effort to tie them togeather, and have it make some semblence of logical sense.

 

Problem 2: Beeing forced to do all these quests also forces the player to play as a jack-of-all-trades non-class, so they can survive these things, or the quests themselves have to be completely gutted to ensure that any class-build can get through them. In Skyrim we got a mix of both. Try getting through the Companions questline som day with a char that has all their perks in stealth and magic... it sucks! Hard! If you set out to play a stealth-mage, then you don't have enough health, most of your perks are rendered worthless by the quest design, and your forced followers will give you crap for trying to use the weapons you've put stats into, the whole thing is just broken (which is why an Arcane-Rogue shoulden't be expected to join the warriors guild in the first place!). But on the flipside, we also have the College-questline, where you can not only join, but become the Archmage whilst having only cast two novice-level spells your entire life, and beating the entire questline relying only on heavy-armor and a war-hammer. This questline is completely and utterly gutted of any meaning, narrative or purpose so that warrior classes can play through it without having to spend their points on magica.

 

 

Bad storries told badly, that's where this leads us.

 

Hey let's have a Thieves guild in the game! But uhh.. we can't really have it's quest involve any theft, because we can't be sure that players joining the guild spend any points in sneak, pickpocket or lockpicking, so uhmm.. let's just have it be a revenge story where the player stabs things a lot.

 

And a mages guild! Except we can't really expect every player to invest into magic, so let's just not have magic play any part in the questline. We'll just have the player fight some more Draugr, that'll do!

 

Assassins are cool, so we need those! Except that might require sneak skills... nah we'll just ensure there's no real failure states for getting caught or anything, aslong as the player stabs things dead that'll do.

 

We gotta have a bards college too! Except speech skills.. and it would require effort.. pile on more Draugr!

 

And a warriors guild, of course! Only that would require... ohh sod it, more draugr, more bandits, lets just cram them in there.

 

 

Guild questing! It all boils down to stabbing things, since we can't expect anything more from the player. Enjoy!

 

 

[Sacremas]

If you are sent by Delphine you can tell Brynjolf to sod off and tell you where Esbern is. It requires passing a speech check, but if you do, you can enter the Ratway, including into the Cistern, all trainers in the guild will train you still (it's perfectly viable to do it like that and go down and add 5 ranks to your pickpocket skill before attempting Brynjolf's quest), and you don't have to join. When you are sent to the College you can tell Faralda you're the dragonborn and demonstrate a shout instead of a spell and she'll let you in... and she'll still put you in the guild and do all that, but you can ignore it. Both of these just fill up your quest journal at this point (more on that later).

 

However as the Dragonborn you should be able to access all the Shouts, so if you want to that you have to do the following;

Join the Companions, do one radiant quest, then do Dustman's Cairn, you don't have to become a werewolf. There's a Animal Allegiance shout on top of Ysgramor's tomb, but get a horse and gallop up the mountain side and you don't have to go through the tomb.

Join the thieves guild, do the quests up to Gulum-Ei in Solitude, then go to the ruin, pick up the shout, fuck the rest of it because that questline is goddawful and you'll sell your soul to a Daedra for a crappy armor and a crappier power if you stay with it.

Finish the entire Mages Guild. Yeah no way around this, there's a shout in the first dungeon as well as the last. If you also want to unlock Konarikh mask you also need to go through here to get Morokei. As you point out you only have to cast three apprentice level spells (lesser ward, flames, frostbite), rest of it can be finished with the dumbest fighter or assassinate all of the draugrs. I highly recommend Immersive College of Winterhold for just the ability to make Tolfdir the archmage instead of your fighter/assassin.

Join or wipe out the Dark Brotherhood, either way Grelod has to die, but you have to do one of these to access the Sanctuary and get a Shout that's inside it somehow.

 

Then there's Stones of Barenziah, I haven't bothered collecting those fuckers ever, but there's one in the sanctuary and one in the second College quest, I'm fairly certain the others are up for grabs. You do have to join the thieves guild, because only Vex in all of Skyrim (after some crazy fuckers spread these little bastards around and merrily placed them in all sorts of silly places despite them having no value) has any idea what they are or can start the quest for you and change them from Unusal Gem, and she won't talk to you unless you join up.

 

THe bigger problem however is the crappy-ass journal you got in Skyrim. You should be able to go into it, pick "look up Aventus Arentino" or whatever and simply remove the quest so you fail it. Or better yet, have it be more optional and less forced that you get these bastards, not register the Stormcloak/Imperial until you actually talk to Ulfric or Tulius, not register Aventus unless you enter his house, etc. But the console players needed hand-holding and quest arrows to find their sweetroll so there ya go, at least they could have then done the first thing and let us delete quests.

[rahrahrah]

If you are sent by Delphine you can tell Brynjolf to sod off and tell you where Esbern is. It requires passing a speech check, but if you do, you can enter the Ratway, including into the Cistern, all trainers in the guild will train you still (it's perfectly viable to do it like that and go down and add 5 ranks to your pickpocket skill before attempting Brynjolf's quest), and you don't have to join. When you are sent to the College you can tell Faralda you're the dragonborn and demonstrate a shout instead of a spell and she'll let you in... and she'll still put you in the guild and do all that, but you can ignore it. Both of these just fill up your quest journal at this point (more on that later).

 

However as the Dragonborn you should be able to access all the Shouts, so if you want to that you have to do the following;

Join the Companions, do one radiant quest, then do Dustman's Cairn, you don't have to become a werewolf. There's a Animal Allegiance shout on top of Ysgramor's tomb, but get a horse and gallop up the mountain side and you don't have to go through the tomb.

Join the thieves guild, do the quests up to Gulum-Ei in Solitude, then go to the ruin, pick up the shout, fuck the rest of it because that questline is goddawful and you'll sell your soul to a Daedra for a crappy armor and a crappier power if you stay with it.

Finish the entire Mages Guild. Yeah no way around this, there's a shout in the first dungeon as well as the last. If you also want to unlock Konarikh mask you also need to go through here to get Morokei. As you point out you only have to cast three apprentice level spells (lesser ward, flames, frostbite), rest of it can be finished with the dumbest fighter or assassinate all of the draugrs. I highly recommend Immersive College of Winterhold for just the ability to make Tolfdir the archmage instead of your fighter/assassin.

Join or wipe out the Dark Brotherhood, either way Grelod has to die, but you have to do one of these to access the Sanctuary and get a Shout that's inside it somehow.

 

Then there's Stones of Barenziah, I haven't bothered collecting those fuckers ever, but there's one in the sanctuary and one in the second College quest, I'm fairly certain the others are up for grabs. You do have to join the thieves guild, because only Vex in all of Skyrim (after some crazy fuckers spread these little bastards around and merrily placed them in all sorts of silly places despite them having no value) has any idea what they are or can start the quest for you and change them from Unusal Gem, and she won't talk to you unless you join up.

 

THe bigger problem however is the crappy-ass journal you got in Skyrim. You should be able to go into it, pick "look up Aventus Arentino" or whatever and simply remove the quest so you fail it. Or better yet, have it be more optional and less forced that you get these bastards, not register the Stormcloak/Imperial until you actually talk to Ulfric or Tulius, not register Aventus unless you enter his house, etc. But the console players needed hand-holding and quest arrows to find their sweetroll so there ya go, at least they could have then done the first thing and let us delete quests.

 

Good write up on how to do it in a minimalist way there

Personally though, I have no problem with them locking off a few shouts or items - it's not remotely unrealistic.  In my native country for instance if I ever want to legally fire a handgun I will have to join the police or armed forces, no buts.  Same comparisons can be drawn to items.

 

Where I do take one of my few issue's with Beth's decisions is tying just too much of this stuff with guild membership - werewolves/companions.  There really should have been an option to acquire lycanthropy in the wild.

 

Nocturnal/thieves guild.  The Thieves guild importance really needed to be notched down a lot  - to about the same level as the Dark Brotherhood.

It would have been a lot cooler if you could have gotten involved in the key/nocturnal quest regardless of thieves guild affiliation - it would have made for more interesting interaction.

 

Back on topic :

 

All I need from FO4 is a good sandbox, fun quests and character options and lashings of gloomy, post - apocalyptic atmosphere.  Anything on top is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

[GrimReaper]

The thing is just that many people do not play a game more than one time, hell a good portion of the players won't even finish the game. So it makes sense for them to include everything in one playthrough. After all it's pretty much your choice if you do the guilds or not. Sure, you get forced into the introduction, but after that it's your choice. The only complaint that I agree with is that it makes a mess out of your journal.

 

And being locked out of content is what mutually exclusive guilds and quests are about. So it doesn't really make sense to complain about all guilds being available and on the other hand complaining about the fact that you don't get everything what the game has to offer if you don't do all of them. If being a mage would lock you out of the companions guild, you'd miss on much more than a word wall, though they should have made it so that you're locked out of a shout that actually complements they playstyle associated with said guild, not just some random word of a random shout.