The Elder Scrolls XIII: Born Under a Certain Sign

[factotum]

I think that would get pretty tedious after a while. Yeah, its a bit more immersive, but "find this specific townsperson in city full of nothing but townspeople" is not my idea of high entertainment.

Yeah, this. Realism is all very nice, but this is first and foremost a *game* (you know, something played for entertainment purposes), so there are some things that are done because they make the game more fun and realism can go hang. If you have some other method of showing the important NPCs other than naming them then that's fine.

[Landis963]

Maybe CHIM gives you the name of the person on the other end of the quest marker? Along with the quest marker?

[Triaxx]

Or you know the magic spell that leads you to your goal, which ends up useless in Skyrim, but would have saved an awful lot of hassle in Morrowind.

[Caelestion]

They actually had that feature (characters not being named until you'd spoken to them once) in the Temple of Elemental Evil PC game from the early Noughties. It was basically a gimmick, I found.

[Triaxx]

I've forgotten just how much I love Temple of Elemental Evil.

[InvisibleBison]

I think that would get pretty tedious after a while. Yeah, its a bit more immersive, but "find this specific townsperson in city full of nothing but townspeople" is not my idea of high entertainment.

I guess I didn't explain my idea well enough, because I don't see this sort of problem showing up. Basically anyone you've talked to, or who's been mentioned by someone you've talked to, would be labelled by their name, not generically. You'd only be looking for "a specific townsperson in a city full of nothing but townspeople" if you're somewhere you've never been before.

[Temotei]

I'm pretty sure we're just at ESV, got confused what's the ESXIII is about..

This is the thirteenth thread on GitP discussing the entire series of Elder Scrolls games.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

You'd only be looking for "a specific townsperson in a city full of nothing but townspeople" if you're somewhere you've never been before.

I dunno, I have that problem even WITH the names.* And then you run into a different problem. Unless you go really in-depth with it, revealing names of people you'd heard of would only be viably realistic in small settlements - "Justinius? Yeah, he's a really good blacksmith." If there's only one blacksmith in town, obviously he's it - but for example Whiterun has two. And that's for a relatively specific job. 'Bethany is a beggar in the Imperial City' - there can easily be dozens of those. If you're just magically knowing WHICH beggar is Bethany - well then you basically have the situation now, with all the names revealed to you in advance, except with more coding. If not, unless this person is giving very specific directions to Bethany, you'd have to go around questioning every beggar, which might be realistic, but tedious.

*This is one of the frustrating points of it being a game - if it were real life, I could usually ask, 'Hi, do you know where I could find so-and-so?' And they could tell me, 'Yes, go down that street, they run the third shop on the left.' Maybe they'd even give me a description of what the person looks like, if it's someone I've never met before. For those of you who haven't played ESO, it's extremely guilty of giving me a list of names to hunt down and nothing else. Most of the time I don't even get the race of the person I'm looking for, never mind distinguishing features like hair color or a description of the clothes they were wearing when they were last seen. I know they want to keep these things short and to the point, but it's like the NPCs are expecting quest arrows to point to the relevant people!

[InvisibleBison]

I dunno, I have that problem even WITH the names.* And then you run into a different problem. Unless you go really in-depth with it, revealing names of people you'd heard of would only be viably realistic in small settlements - "Justinius? Yeah, he's a really good blacksmith." If there's only one blacksmith in town, obviously he's it - but for example Whiterun has two. And that's for a relatively specific job. 'Bethany is a beggar in the Imperial City' - there can easily be dozens of those. If you're just magically knowing WHICH beggar is Bethany - well then you basically have the situation now, with all the names revealed to you in advance, except with more coding. If not, unless this person is giving very specific directions to Bethany, you'd have to go around questioning every beggar, which might be realistic, but tedious.

I agree, but I don't think the settlements in Elder Scrolls games are large enough to cause problems. You say Whiterun has two blacksmiths, but you're hardly going to think that the Imperial woman is Eorlund Gray-Mane. Gender, race, profession, and location are enough (more than enough, in most cases) to uniquely identify pretty much every NPC in Skyrim.

[veti]

Random speculation topic time: Morrowind was full of dungeons where all the enemy people were named, and rarely if ever did you run across a foe whose name was 'Bandit' or 'Necromancer' unless it was an animal like a Shalk. Is that something you'd like to see in ES6? Randomly generated foes with names? It would be harder, I think, to tell which people were important, either as quest-givers or quest-objectives...but I don't know if that's really a bad thing; it could be a big boon to immersion too. What do you think?

The thing about Morrowind - none of those NPCs were "randomly generated", they were all individually placed. (And named.)

Quite frequently, I found, I could go into a cave, kill half a dozen bandits (all named), and only discover weeks later that one of them was a quest objective of some sort.

I really, really liked that. Also the fact that you could lose/sell quest items. It made the whole world feel much more... as if it were arranged around something more than just "my personal convenience" - as if I were, in fact, just one person in the world. Not, as in Oblivion/Skyrim, the only person in the world.

[factotum]

Gender, race, profession, and location are enough (more than enough, in most cases) to uniquely identify pretty much every NPC in Skyrim.

Now go and play Morrowind and try the same trick in Vivec.

[LibraryOgre]

I agree, and I think it should apply to non-hostile NPCs as well. Everyone should be labelled "Townsperson" or "Citizen of <wherever>" until you've spoken with them and they've introduced themselves to you, or until someone else has told you who they are.

This is somewhat what happened in Arena... while they didn't have floating identifiers, pretty much every random person you ran into on the street had a name, a job, and a bit of gossip.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Unrelated topic: I was trying to figure out if non-player-character people use Magicka for their Shouts, so I could continue an argument elsewhere on the internet, and in the process I found this: it amused me, so I'm sharing.

(Slight NSFW warning: just Lydia's naked corpse, and not any more naked than normal bodies in Skyrim, but still probably awkward if your boss/non-Elderscrolls-fan significant other is in the vicinity.)

[factotum]

Unrelated topic: I was trying to figure out if non-player-character people use Magicka for their Shouts

Um, why would they? The player doesn't.

[Temotei]

Um, why would they? The player doesn't.

Dragons use magicka to shout. If you completely drain a dragon's magicka, it won't shout until it has enough magicka to shout again.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Thank you Temotei!

Um, why would they? The player doesn't.

Short answer: gameplay and story segregation.

Slightly longer answer: because I dimly recalled something about using Magicka draining poisons to shut down enemy Shouts, and from a gameplay perspective why would the devs bother to give the NPCs yet another resource to keep track of and acquire bugs when they can use an existing one?

[Caelestion]

A dragon doesn't need to wait for its shout bar to replenish.

[Spore]

Unrelated topic: I was trying to figure out if non-player-character people use Magicka for their Shouts, so I could continue an argument elsewhere on the internet, and in the process I found this: it amused me, so I'm sharing.

That reminds me to continue my journey with Cicero. Does he really attack people randomly? Or is that just a rumor?

[factotum]

Dragons use magicka to shout. If you completely drain a dragon's magicka, it won't shout until it has enough magicka to shout again.

Oh! I didn't realise that. I would rather they'd had NPC shouts limited by time in the same way the player's are--IMHO it's just lazy on behalf of the developers to say "Oh, we've got this otherwise useless magicka bar for these non-spellcasting NPCs, let's re-use that for their Shout limits.", unless they also do the same for the player character.

[Triaxx]

Nope, player has a separate shout timer.

[Keltest]

Dragons use magicka to shout. If you completely drain a dragon's magicka, it won't shout until it has enough magicka to shout again.

Dragons don't actually shout either, they use spells that look similar to some of the shouts.

[factotum]

Nope, player has a separate shout timer.

Um, yes, I know that, which is why I said it's unfair that NPC shouts work via a different mechanism.

[LibraryOgre]

Um, yes, I know that, which is why I said it's unfair that NPC shouts work via a different mechanism.

I agree with it, though.

Consider someone making Orcface McSmashalot. He NEVER puts points into Magicka. He knows 2 spells. If Shouts work on magicka, he's not going to be able to use most of them. Elfy McMagerson, though, can shout for HOURS. He can shout himself across Skyrim without running out of Magicka.

But why not use the timer for NPCs? Because lots of NPCs are gonna die, quick, especially if they can't draw on shouts at need. There are relatively few of the shouty NPCs, and their limitations/scripts seem to prevent them from shouting everyone into nothingness... harder to do for PCs without some sort of cooldown.

[Triaxx]

Ugh, Firefox had an aneurysm the other day and has been screwing up. What I meant to say was: Players have a separate Shout Timer, Dragons and NPC's use magicka. Which is why Draugr shout so infrequently, they have to stop and wait for the timer to recharge, and why they all seem limited to one shout.

Using PSB and trying a non-player variant of a shout shows they have magicka cost but not Regen time.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

I wonder if any of the Skyrim NPCs will get cameos in the next ES game. I doubt the Greybeards or any of the Jarls could show up unless for some bizarre reason it takes place in Skyrim again, but I remain disappointed that we never get to do something lethal to Elenwen. And Malborn could conceivably appear again. Maybe surviving members of the Dark Brotherhood could show up to found a new Sanctuary...

[factotum]

I wonder if any of the Skyrim NPCs will get cameos in the next ES game. I doubt the Greybeards or any of the Jarls could show up unless for some bizarre reason it takes place in Skyrim again

It's not happened much before. M'aiq the Liar shows up in Skyrim, but I can't recall any other characters from older games who also appear.

[veti]

I wonder if any of the Skyrim NPCs will get cameos in the next ES game.

Is there any history of ES characters doing that? Apart from gods (and daedric princes) the only examples I can think of are Master Neloth and, possibly, Ma'iq the Liar, though come to think of it he probably is some kind of daedric prince...

It would be nice to think that Delphine from Skyrim is the same as the clueless shopkeeper from Oblivion, but it seems - implausible.

I doubt we'll see Elenwen again - too much backstory there, it would be like a whole block of content that was only available to people who'd played Skyrim, which would be the opposite of the direction Bethesda has been going. If anyone does get a cameo, it'll be someone we have no very strong feelings about. Maybe someone like Karliah, or one of the faculty of the College.

[Divayth Fyr]

It's not happened much before. M'aiq the Liar shows up in Skyrim, but I can't recall any other characters from older games who also appear.

Neloth? Lucien Lachance? Shadowmere?

Depending on your interpretation, Sheogorath in Skyrim might also count.

There are also a few cases where npcs in different games share the name, but there is nothing to prove they're related, much less that they're the same person.

Edit: We also had Big Head in TES III and Shivering Isles.

[Kareeah_Indaga]

Is there any history of ES characters doing that? Apart from gods (and daedric princes) the only examples I can think of are Master Neloth and, possibly, Ma'iq the Liar, though come to think of it he probably is some kind of daedric prince...

Sinderion (or what's left of him) shows up again. What's left of Captain Carius also shows up in Dragonborn, IIRC.

[Triaxx]

Not to mention Jiub in Dawnguard.