depth of character

Excerpt from a post by Tyrion1 to the Bethesda TES:V suggestion thread, and responses.

If the next game is to be in Skyrim, Bethesda has a great opportunity to use the existing lore to create a fantastic dark political atmosphere (check Shades’ thread “The story you would like to see” for an example.) As well as create some wonderfully unique creatures e.g Were-Bears and the Volikar vampire clan that could make TES V really stand out from other generic CRPGS (e.g NWN 2 Original Campaign and Oblivion.)

2. Choices and Consequences- Choices and Consequences are one of THE defining aspects of a CRPG. Yet both Oblivion and Morrowind almost left these out completely. Instead of multi-branching quests with several way to solve them, we were left with simple “Yes” and “No” choices. Gee Whiz. However, in Oblivion choosing No didn’t even matter anymore, since the quest NPC would still request you do it even after you decline. The biggest failure in both game were the main quests. Both had only one ending, and both both were utterly linear. The plots weren’t particularly good either, just simple “Save the World” nonsense. What Bethesda should do is take some inspiration from Planescape:Torment. That game had a great plot (a personal one, no save the world rubbish), memorable characters and a ton of choices and consequences. PS:T had as many as 8 ways to solve a Quest! Compare that with OB and MW and that puts them to shame. Despite its crappy combat and graphics, I will still go back to P:ST in five years for those reasons, whilst Oblivion with its shallow plot, lack of CnC and generic setting will be long forgotten.

I agree with most of what you said but I especially agree with point #1. Lets see some politics! Some war! Some strategic concerns!

Yeah, the black and white good/evil system always got me a little mad. I’d like to see a better storyline, kind of like a “religion VS. politics”, in which no matter what the player decides to to do, their choice might be party evil or partly good; they just have to weigh out the concequences themselves.

3.) Good vs Evil.
I like a good vs evil plot myself, but OB was way over the top on this score. The defining line between the two shouldn’t be so clear cut, and please don’t forget that even good decisions can still lead to bad consequences.

4.) Politics, or motivation.
I didn’t really feel that there was any motivation when going from one place to another in Oblivion. Things seemed to simply happen, from one point to the next. This just doesn’t cut it in my opinion, and indeed many others in this thread.