First World Skyrim Problems or "Why can't i kill everybody?"

[Bells]

i've been dancing around in Skyrim for a while now with my Argonian Mage Archer, recently i decided to marry Lydia (only companion i had with me all game and she is with me in all missions) and it's been fun to both Roleplay and experiment with the game.

There are a few nagging issues that bother me though... one of them being that quite a few quest lines i come across aren't really open. At least they don't seem to, for me.

Just recently i walked across the map to reach Markarth (Fast Travel is just for Fetch quests or when i get stuck), my character is a good guy, a former thief turned hero and has no problem taking down bad guys by any means necessary... it's been fun roleplaying it like that.

I do draw several comparisosn with Fallout New Vegas though, that's the previous open ended Sandbox RPG i played and it just feels like i had a ton more freedom in that game than in this...

For instance, i just stumbled on the Cannibal quest line from Markarth... my character's rational was simple. "I'll pretend to be curious about them, follow them to their lair and take down as many of these sons of bitches as possible..." simple, right?

Well... i can't. Not without failing the quest and loosing access to a few shops and turning a handful of people aggro on me! I wanted a bit more background on the quest to see if i should give it priority or not, so i checked the Wiki... and it seems, as soon as i started my only option is to kill a innocent priest and become a Cannibal myself, or fail the quest by attacking the cannibals which will turn a bunch of people on me, make me loose access to a few shops and give little to no reward for it!

I remember the Cannibal quest in New Vegas, and man, that was fun! In that game i was playing a "Dexter Like" Lady Gunslinger and i was able to string along and deceit all the cannibals until the very minute where i turned on them when they were the most vulnerable and took them all out. All the while i had the option to join them if i wanted!

a couple of similar things happened in Markarth where 80% of the city wanted to kill me, but i couldn't burn this wretched twisted, corrupt place to the ground... and when i went to talk to the Jarl everybody attacked me because for my surprise there was a Thalmor group next to him! The same bastards that have been hunting me down for weeks... and god knows why, cause i don't!!

And the whole Stormcloaks Vs Imperial? What you mean i HAVE to pick one of the two?

Man, the Imperials are asses who do nothing for Skyrim! And the Stormcloaks are a bunch of bandits playing revolution! Thanks to the Stormcloaks i was almost killed unfairly in the beginning of the game, hell if i want to be associated with these bastards!..i want to take them both out and make Skyrim free... but i can't.

And the Thieves guild quest line? Again, an entire city... corrupt to the bone, and i can't cleanse this place with my Lighting and Arrows... i had to turn my back on the city entirely, cause the game keeps thinking i want to join the Guild, when what i really wanted to do is to take the entire organization down...

Skyrim is great fun, but New Vegas gave me more freedom to progress on my own terms...

[Ryong]

The answer clearly is mods. Mods fix everything.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

See this didn't bother me, my first character was a totally evil corrupt power hungry archmage with designs on global domination, and my alt is a sneaky thief who only cares about money and somehow manages to steal even metaphorical principles such as the plot and future hope for the world.

The only good guy I made was an atypical Nord 2 handed heavy armour warrior and he was boring to play.

[Bells]

The answer clearly is mods. Mods fix everything.

I have 50 Mods installed in my game! Sure, quite a few are cosmetic... But i have goddamn dinosaurs running around skyrim and from time to time i'll walk into an open field to witness a battle between 10 Stormcloaks, 10 Imperials, 5 Vampires Mages, a small band of Forsworn and a Bear while i try to sneak the shit out of their line of sight just to see my Wife rushing towards the battlefield screaming "Skyrim Belongs to the Nords!!" , which prompts me running after her before she gets killed yelling to her myself "You DO realize your Husband, The Dragonborn, is AN ARGONIAN right?!"

...Oh Lydia, my beautifully racist wife...


And i do play a good Guy, and even so i STILL want to turn the whole of Markarth and half of Riften into a pile of ashes... and i would do it if it didn't turned me into a wanted criminal, broke 7000 quests and blocked me with a dozen unkillable NPC's...

[mauve]

Man, I STILL haven't finished Skyrim. I think I'm stuck on some random puzzle in a dwarf-ruin somewhere. I haven't really run into many of those problems you're describing yet; Even though I'm a Thane of, and own a home in, the Thief Guild city, I've been ignoring the Thief Guild quest because I'm trying to play a "good guy" character. Even when I went to go find the Blades dude in the ratway I basically just strolled in the front door and slaughtered everyone who walked by rather than befriending the thief guild leader. And, funnily enough, said leader STILL asks me if I'm ready to join his guild. Oh, you mean the guild who I mowed down with arrows and Marcurio's overpowered lightning spells a few hours ago? I'm glad they're over that little mishap.

And my Imperial archer ended up marrying the Imperial mage Marcurio, so you can imagine how much Stormcloak cities love us. Also I joined the Imperial army earlier in the game but STILL haven't done any of their missions because I don't know if it'll make Stormcloak-held cities hate me even more.

And for the record, Marcurio is the greatest character to marry. His "I love you" dialogue is so hilariously out of character from the rest of his lines, so he'll be singing your praises in terribly overacted adoration one second and then grouchily tell you he's not carrying thirty pounds of dragon-scales for you and that you're DAMN LUCKY he sees fit to even give you the time of day in the next.

[Bells]

Mauve you can use the "Fix the Game Spell" also known as the Illusion spell Pacify.

That's the only thing that made me not flee Markarth... i was just finishing One of the main quests in the city that made me go tempering with the Silver Bloods that control all the corrupt guards and at some point the guards ambush me in a temple inside the city, where they just killed the whistle blower that had tipped me off to the quest and they try to arrest me. Knowing better, i fight them off and easily kill them all...

What i didn't knew was that the game WANTED me to go to jail, where i would begin ANOTHER quest that would win me the guards favor... so as soon as i leave the Temple the WHOLE DAMN CITY turns aggro on me... i Pacify my way into a glitch where a Guard tries to arrest me again, and go to Jail, where i pretend to befriend the main enemy of the Silver Bloods Madanach, and then proceed to quietly kill him in his cell (By virtue of a megaton of fireballs that would, in any reasonable universe, collapse the whole damn cave).

I Escape the prison, and now not only does the Silver Bloods don't thank me for ending the Revolution Madanach was leading against them, all the Silver Blood NPC's want me dead AND the guards too... so i flee to the Jarl, thinking i could trigger a dialogue that would make me Thane so people would stop to try murder my face and that scene goes LITERALY like this.

*rushes into the Jarl Temple, with 12 Aggro NPC's on my tail* (that i counted)
"Ah! THERE!! There he is hey Mr Jarl would you Ple---_AAAAAAAAAAAAH THALMOR!! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!"

I ran headfirst into a group of Thalmor that hang by right NEXT to the Jarl and now the Jarl is aggro at me, and the Thalmor, and the Silver Bloods, and the Guards and everybody has their own Mercenaries ALSO on me... no amount of reloading fixes this. And if i Kill ANYBODY i get 1000 Bounty all over this area... each time.

So, y'know what? Thanks to the PC Gods, i Console command God mode, and start spamming Pacify all over the room and one by one the NPC's come at in and finished their quests, give me treasure for helping them and FINALLY i get protection from the guards who stop attacking me. Even the god damn Thalmor who hate my guts stopped attacking me on sight.

Pacify. It fixes the game.

[Aldurin]

You're doing it wrong, Bells, all you need to do is relentlessly slaughter anyone that isn't essential to the main questline. Become the Slasher of Skyrim, burning people alive as you stab them with a hammer.

[Krylo]

I've said many times that Skyrim is great fun, but it'd be a million times better if it was by Obsidian.

[PyrosNine]

I believe any quests that cannot be satisfactorily resolved with an inventive "take a third option" solution are best treated as "dead", in morte de author fashion, and HAX or pseudoquests are the best method of leaving events in a way that pleases.

So, Tenpenny tower, right? Fallout 3, no matter what you do, someone gets screwed over. Peaceful resolution gets all the humans killed. The other option gets a bunch of sentient ghouls killed.

My solution? Climb the tower and assassinate Tenpenny, steal all his crap, (and his nice outfit) and leave. The racist, evil, pointlessly wealthy ass is dead, and in time, and only in time, can the situation be resolved. The quest goes unfinished, and I can even delete it off my quest list just so it's not nagging me.

Someone needs to die that I don't like? Resurrect.

In a game that espouses the idea of freedom and multiple solutions, sometimes they always forget to cater to multiple ideologies of problem solving with each quest!

Also, letting a dragon kill people you don't like is an acceptable means of dealing with mean people in Skyrim. As Baleman said in Begins, "I won't kill you. But that doesn't mean I have to save you from dragons."

And if people are getting upset that you're killing someone in Skyrim, clearly you're doing something wrong, because they shouldn't even know that you happened to be within a mile of the deceased on the day in question.

[Bells]

No, on that regard the game is pretty broken... someone sees me stealing something in one town, and all the guards already know me in the town across the map that i've never been to before... or in Markarth, i kill a couple of corrupt guards inside a temple, and as soon as i step out, the entire town is aggro at me...

Sloppy coding i would suggest...

[Magus]

Tenpenny Tower annoyed me at the time, too, although in retrospect the fact there is no "good" solution IS kind of appealing. Although apparently there is a glitch on that one that lets you basically get the "good" solution--kill Tenpenny after you get everyone to agree to let in the ghouls and after telling him everyone is all for it, but before telling Roy. Supposedly this will break the part where Roy murders all the humans after you leave. Of course, they may have fixed this in Game of the Year edition...I don't know if I'm going to play the game again with high Charisma/speech to check it out personally.

But then I played Into the Pitt and that did the same thing again with the totally morally gray outcomes and I was annoyed again.

Which is odd, really. Because morally gray outcomes are better than the stark white/black choices the game offered most of the time. Maybe I had gotten so used to the game only offering such contrasting choices/outcomes that that was why it annoyed me there was no completely, totally good outcome to these two quests.

Like an example of just pointlessly white/black quest outcomes: in Broken Steel you can turn the satellite missiles on the Citadel instead of the Enclave mobile platform. Turning it on the Citadel is just pointlessly evil, even more so than destroying Megaton (which has clear rewards in that you get 1000 caps, get to live in Tenpenny Tower, and so on), whereas destroying the Citadel is pointless, since if you are that evil you wouldn't have helped the Brotherhood in the first place or got inducted in (seriously, if you are still inducted into the Brotherhood at the end of the super evil path I'm taking in my second play through, the game is really poorly thought out), unless you can't get into the armory any other way. I haven't tried, so maybe that is the "reward" for annihilating the Citadel? There were also other choices to fire on which the game handwaves away as "wrong flight path coordinates". What if I thought that pesky purifier was the cause of all the problems in the world? And the thing had four payloads, too, the perfect amount. Why give the illusion of freedom? It was worse than their deus ex machina "you got kidnapped/knocked out" unavoidable plot points.

Oh, and something else annoying about Fallout 3: you can't kill children. And no, I don't really oppose that sort of self-censorship normally, but they built Little Lamplight totally around the concept of a society of children, and being unable to talk my way in (one of the few times speech failed in my whole play through--I even got President Eden to blow up the base), my super blindingly white Paladin character thought for a few moments about just shooting their way in...but you simply cannot draw your gun in the cave until after you get the gate open by doing the sheriff's quest. After that the normal "can't kill kids" physics are there, of course. But still. They should have avoided setting it up that way with their "can't kill kids" rules. At least put that sheriff behind some bullet-proof glass he can mock you from behind or something.

At least they fixed the ending so you can ask Fawkes to go into the irradiated room and he does, although it acted like this was some kind of moral failing on my part instead of just the intelligent thing to do since he is totally impervious to radiation. I'm presuming you can ask any of the other companions to do the same, though, so I guess they coded it in as "ask Paladin Cross to go into the radioactive room" which would indeed be cowardly, I guess.

I hear New Vegas fixed most of these problems with Fallout 3, though, so I'm looking forward to that.

[Pip Boy]

I felt that a lot of the options available with the satellite missile thing were there for the narrative, not for the player to actually use. The important thing isn't that the player wants to throw a bunch of missiles at the Citadel, but to demonstrate that the Enclave could and would do so. If there is anything Fallout was good at, it was bombarding the player with VOLUMES of useless side infromation to help build a deep narrative, and I felt that this was one of the game's greatest strengths.

[Magus]

But you could bomb the Citadel, though. And narratively it is never justified that anyone would ever bother to do that, as you can never join the Enclave or what have you (something I hear they fixed in New Vegas, where all three of the main factions are joinable). So why not allow you to go psychotic on the other three non-choices? Anyway, it's not that important, Fallout 3 has plenty of good qualities to recommend it. But if people want to pick on the lack of choices they can, because it's a problem the creators created for themselves in the first place by designing the scenario that way.

[greed]

I agree with Krylo, Obsidian did a way better job than Bethesda. NV blows Skyrim out of the park. And I like Skyrim, it was just crushingly disappointing to have so much less choice. Not just all the invincible people but the lack of choice in quests. The example that really pissed me off during the game was the conclusion to the Thieves Guild. You really shouldhave had the option to tell Nocturnal to fuck herself find a new slave and then either allow you to go it alone, side with Mercer or maybe talk Nocturnal and her supporters on side but without selling your soul. Maybe an alternate quest where you do something for Nocturnal something of similar value, or just explain that you've already sold your soul to one of the other daedra or something. Also I know this isn't asking for too much as New Vegas had every major questline give this much choice or more.

Also the lack of reactivity just makes the stuff you do feel so meaningless. Like spoilers for the Civil War and the Dark Brotherhood if you complete the Civil War for the Stormcloaks then the country is under their control. But if you then do the end of the DB quests the Emperor rocks up like he owns the place and his guards are all over the place, what the fuck?

Basically I like some of the stuff Beth did, but god damn they really should have cribbed a lot more from Obsidian's New Vegas. Also level scaling still sucks balls.

[Bells]

well, it is quite telling that a new player in Skyrim can actually become a Werewolf "by accident" simply by committing himself to a certain questline, because, like every questline in Skyrim around the midpoint the game simply goes "well if you came this far OF COURSE it means you want to commit 100% all the way" even though there is always a crazy twist in the end you could easily miss and not know about like turning into a cannibal or a god damn werewolf.