Skyrim's disastrous writing: Quest and Story Mods to make up for Emil Pagliarulo's "paper airplanes" writing

[gabrielrock19]

I have to say, I almost didn't install Skyrim SE and considered other, much better games instead. Why? Because whenever I thought of my memories with the game, a thought would often come up along with a grey, depressing feeling: "What is there to do there? And why play it?". I had no immediate answer to that.

"If I'm going to end up feeling hollow after I finish all the questlines and reach maximum level like last time, I better not even try.", I thought.

I decided to return for the mods. I heard so many new mods came out that made the game so much better than it was that I got excited to reinstall the game. This is, I decided, "The Modding Playthough". I'll play the game one last time because of the genius modding community behind it, capable of transforming that sandbox into a game worth every second of my time.

As I progressed through the first main quests and a few necessary side ones to obtain a some key items that were important for leveling, I realized I wasn't going to pretend those paper airplanes were real ones taking me to wonderful unexplored lands and vast riches of adventure. I'd simply throw them away like they're supposed to be thrown.

If I have to complete a Bethesda quest for whatever reason, I'll set the difficulty to novice, close my eyes, hit everything, skip every dialogue and get the item I want or the condition I need. In a few lines, here's what I thought were the critical arguments that better represented my views on the major quest chains. The bad outweighs the good in every quest, so I'll be focusing only on that instead of trying to balance their mistakes for the sake of sounding impartial. These mistakes make up for 70 or 80% of the overall experience.

Main Quest: A serviceable quest where you're the chosen one and now the Lore has dragons for popular convenience. Definitely because Game of Thrones was famous at the time the game came out. And the battle with Alduin at the end, a "Dragon that can Eat the World", is just one more dragon fight? The implementation of the lore contradicts the lore itself, and what you see isn't what you get.
College of Winterhold: A lackluster Harry Potter ripoff. Existed because Harry Potter's last movie was out at the time. Savos Aren is Dumbledore, Ancano is a mixture of Voldemort and Severus Snape. Every teacher in the college has a unique questline, and so does every teacher in Harry Potter. And in the end, you battle Ancano with the Staff of Magnus and not with the game's magic. Reminds you of a certain battle scene between Harry and Voldemort? Wait, there's more. Savos Aren's past is revealed in Labyrinthian and you're able to peek into it just like Harry. And the students who disappeared in the Midden due to a summoning going wrong? The College of Winterhold has been ripped off from the Harry Potter series top to bottom, side to side. And it's a grotesque one. If only it did something better or something different...
Companions: It's even worse than the Fighters Guild in Oblivion. Zero out of Ten, as if the student - Bethesda- left their test blank and the teacher - us - gave them a zero. I won't comment on the werewolf gimmick twice because it existed for the same reason as in the Dawnguard DLC (see below). Twilight has both Vampires and Werewolves.
Thieves Guild: The beggining tricks you into thinking this is an intelligent quest. But the first thoughts of intelligence come to your mind as soon as Mercer tries to kill you in Snow Veil Sanctum. Why did he do that? There is no explanation. Trying to explain his motives away is doing the writing for the writers. Why didn't Gallus stop him if he suspected him to be taking the treasure from the vault? Why didn't Brynjolf or Delvin check the vault periodically to verify everything is there - or even to use the riches and the gold? So Mercer is morally blamed in the end for being the better theif and stealing what he wants so he can enjoy the pleasures of life. Hmmm... right.
Dark Brotherhood: A ripoff from Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood. The same story of betrayal but just slightly different. Also, why is Astrid onto you for no reason... again? Is it because the Night Mother chose you to be the Listener and not her? If so, I think I side with her here. Her reasoning is better than Mercer's, but it's essentialy rooted in the same problems. Once upon a time there were RPGs where everything you achieve is through your efforts and choices alone, or through a small talent and much effort (See Pillars of Eternity I). Why can't you just opt out of this stupid fanservice framework of being the special chosen messiah by God? And the quest at the end to murder the Emperor of Tamriel, politically one of the most important people in the game, besides being extremely anticlimatic and easy has no effect in the Civil War or elsewhere in the game.
Dawnguard DLC: Twilight came out at the time and it was popular. So Emil thought: "Look! They're making money!". And then he just wrote an outline based on "what he knew". Damn, his vampire Lords looked ugly and goofy when transformed. Speaking of overall design direction, every human or monster in the game is ugly when it should be beautiful and ridiculous when it should be cool and impressive. Ugly people have to exist for the sake of diversity - and diversity is beautiful. So how about making them contrast with very fine looking people and also give every named NPC an unique face touched by design? Vanilla Serana could use that.
Dragonborn DLC: Fine, but once again you have no choice. It's essential that RPGs give you a choice, as it's an aspect of the genre. You had to kill Miraak and become Hermaeous Mora's champion in his place. By the 20th time they pull this chosen one crap you start to feel depressed.
Side Quests: I can't recall ANY of them. I have no idea I even played them. I think most were dungeon fetch quests with some lore behind it, but I can't remember what I did in them or their names and goals. I can't even remember their enemies.

Civil War: Ulfric is or was a Thalmor Agent, as per Emil's rule of shocking twists for the sake of shock. The questline is very short when it should be long. The battles aren't epic fantasy combats for territory and cities as we see in LoTR. They're gang wars. A radiant quest takes care of assigning which soldiers you'll fight in each city and that's about it. The NPCs, due to oversight or bug, will sometimes say the war is still going on after you kill Tullius or Ulfric - talk about immersion breaking. Also why do the hold guards scale to level 50 and the imperal/stormcloack soldiers remain in level 10? Once again the implementation of the lore is destroying the lore itself. The guards were only made to scale to you this far so Bethesda could keep the game with a generic "crime/challenge" framework that after a while has nobody giving a damn because they played all of this filler content and left to another game to TRY an recover the pleasure and the time they were robbed of.

I condensed the criticism. This isn't 5% of it.

If I have to play these for any useful power or (very rarely) because I actually choose to, I'll grab a scissors and cut the blank paper. "Novice>Kill everything>skip every dialogue>fast travel>complete". I have zero respect for people who despise writing and yet are in a position where they call themselves writers or are in charge of writing a story. Anyway...

Skyrim's vanilla quest chains are a mass of depression and grey. I played it once a long time ago and at the time the hype and the taste of something new masked this disastrous mess of a "plot" they shoved down our throats.

SO, with that out of the way I intend to be much more generous with modders. Can you people recommend quest mods you thought were amazing? I may even play a few not that great mods here and there if there's at least some merit in it.

Edited October 11 by gabrielrock19

[DirebearCoat]

Hmmmm...  You make some good points about the Civil War.  My character beheaded Ulfric, but the war is still on, and the Yarl of Whiterun still talks about Ulfric as though he's still alive.  There should be Stormcloaks dropping their weapons and turning themselves in to Tulius for clemency.  Or Imperials marching South through Helgen, to return to Cyradil, with Helgen rebuilt and under Imperial and Stormcloak joint control.  So that the Stormcloaks could observe the Imperials' orderly withdrawal from Skyrim.

I haven't watched any of the movies or shows that you talked about, so I didn't know they were comparable.

For everyone else who didn't want to read the (not badly written) essay, the main point is in the last paragraph.

[scorrp10]

That might all be so...  and yet, here you are, expending all this mental energy ranting about a game that, despite all of its shortcomings, has stayed relevant for 13 years...

Sure, a lot of it is down to the mods, but maybe it is this bad writing/graphics/etc that has inspired a ton of people to improve it?   

[gabrielrock19]

9 hours ago, DirebearCoat said:

Hmmmm...  You make some good points about the Civil War.  My character beheaded Ulfric, but the war is still on, and the Yarl of Whiterun still talks about Ulfric as though he's still alive.  There should be Stormcloaks dropping their weapons and turning themselves in to Tulius for clemency.  Or Imperials marching South through Helgen, to return to Cyradil, with Helgen rebuilt and under Imperial and Stormcloak joint control.  So that the Stormcloaks could observe the Imperials' orderly withdrawal from Skyrim.

I haven't watched any of the movies or shows that you talked about, so I didn't know they were comparable.

For everyone else who didn't want to read the (not badly written) essay, the main point is in the last paragraph.

That's my point. Maybe the ideas of the quests themselves have some potential, but you always complete them knowing a big piece of the puzzle is missing.

Dialogue recognition is easy for a company to patch. They have the voice actors and the programmers. They just had to go through every quest condition and add or remove new dialogue, testing to make sure everything was in line with what was expected from the story. It's the bare minimum. What you said would require additional effort to do.

I always thought the developers could have created a new empty Skyrim map to serve as the background for large civil war battles. The map would be an almost empty copy of the regular world so the game could run a large group of soldiers fighting each other; you would be teleported to it whenever the quests demanded a significant battle. Someone made a fan game of Elder Scrolls Wars like an RTS, but I forgot its name. It had new maps suited for a battle, vast and with no creatures or NPCs other than soldiers. Also, a reduced number of trees. I based my idea off of that.

Edited October 12 by gabrielrock19

[gabrielrock19]

2 hours ago, scorrp10 said:

That might all be so...  and yet, here you are, expending all this mental energy ranting about a game that, despite all of its shortcomings, has stayed relevant for 13 years...

Sure, a lot of it is down to the mods, but maybe it is this bad writing/graphics/etc that has inspired a ton of people to improve it?   

Yes, here I am. But not without a motive. The game stayed relevant for 13 years because it aimed to be a jack of all trades and succeeded at that up to a certain point. The potential of skyrim is amazing, but the execution isn't. And it's built upon 20 years worth of Lore that was created in the 90's largely by (Julian Le Fay?). The ES mythology is spectacular. You can see it's based on real mythology yet it has its own touch of creativity. The Daedric Princes and their realms, their visual designs, the indifferent Aedra and the many types of afterlifes for each people in Nirn. Immortality, The Heart of Lorkhan, The Dwemer... the original creators of the lore cared about writing and story. I also do. This is the factor that drove me to the Elder Scrolls series, mainly to its older entries. When Skyrim came out I expected something equally extraordinary or even better than what I saw, and in many cases I got that. Except for the writing and the gradual destruction and mocking of the original game literature (lore).

[Gunslinger808]

I thoroughly enjoy the game despite some of the issues you bring up, but one glaring issue I’ve had with not just TES but also the Fallout series is the fact you can become the head of various clans and factions but in reality have no supervisory discretion.

Yeah, now I’m the head of the Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood,  College of Winterhold, killed Alduin, saved everyone from Mirrak, but I’m still everyone’s gopher.

Hey, let’s add some content where I get to tell others to go get their own darn gear/underwear, whatever.

 

It’d be nice if after taking control you could sit back and oversee the action of those under your command similar to some military campaign games.

 

[DirebearCoat]

I'm a bit bugged by Eorlan (Sky Forge black smith in Whiterun).  You get his two sons out of that Thalmor prison, and he doesn't even acknowledge that you saved his sons.  His wife does, though.  She's grateful to know that her sons are safe.

I got the letter from Tulius, to release the brother.  The two brothers took off into hiding, presumably to rejoin the Stormcloaks.  But I already executed Ulfric!

This thing's a mess!

[gabrielrock19]

You know, I've been thinking something. With 150 mods installed, Skyrim Special Edition has everything a next-gen game does - or at least what old, famous games from the past that were brimming with quality and care had. With mods, it can have intelligent and difficult combat. Professional animations. Good soundtrack. Beautiful or unique NPCs. Well written character dialogue (the sole courtesy of Interesting 3DNPCs mod). Amazing cities with trees and a cheerful design. Monsters and creatures that look respectable or fearsome. Challenging enemy-boss encounters. Incredible homes and castles for you to live in.

With this many mods, the game has everything it lacks. Everything but a plot and quest missions that can be exciting to play.

If the base game came out with these massive overhauls to begin with, the community would focus on whatever features it lacked. Nexus would practically only have new quest mods or mods that rewrite the guilds and main dragonborn quest from scratch, even if it's something difficult to do.

I believe there are many amazing quest mods out there, as I played Darkend a few years ago. I'm saying if the game already had this much effort put in by Bethesda, modders would naturally focus on the only feature it lacked - a good fantasy story.

Edited October 13 by gabrielrock19

[Gunslinger808]

Had someone sort of antagonistic with me on another forum calling TES “Stone Age” game.

Really strange since TES pretty much pioneered the VR and AI integration.

What other games out there have followers that can not just respond in normal fashion, but will actually carry on an in depth conversation?

Not too shabby for a 12 year old game.