BlackCompany Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 To be fair to the designers, Radiant Story was a "clever" design that tripped up in the implementation phase. It's one thing to have a great idea (which Radiant is). It's another thing altogether to match it up with the reality of game production. I have no doubt Radiant story looked good on paper. Probably seemed like a tool which would save Bethesda hours in development time. And it likely did so, too. Unfortunately, it saved them time in all the wrong ways. Taking the 'human touch' out of quest design resulted in streamlined, efficient quest creation - of hundred of soulless, shallow fetch quests with little to no consequence or impact on the world, your character or anything else. Radiant would have been a good thing to use a lot less often. But used as frequently as it is in Skyrim? That's a bad thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gsmanners Posted March 8, 2012 Share Posted March 8, 2012 That's just the thing. A "soulless, shallow fetch" quest is all any game amounts to. Heck, that's all any adventure story amounts to. Take object A, deliver it to B. This is a rough summary of Lord of the Rings. :biggrin: It's what you do to achieve that result that makes the game interesting. This is where the true genius of the game lies: the map design, the time scaling, the exact placement of rewards and traps. The way all these things interact with the world and other quests is what is problematic. I don't think they really gave enough thought to a good, robust approach to all this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CalibanX Posted March 9, 2012 Share Posted March 9, 2012 I've played for hundreds of hours so far with multiple characters and I'm actually starting to prefer the radiant quests to the written ones. Of course, I did the written quests first, but for replay-ability I've been enjoying the randomness of the radiant quests which have me running all across the map to "fetch" things. Once I've done a written quest, I don't usually go out of my way to redo it again with another character, whereas with the radiant quests I enjoy cleaning out dungeons to acquire books for the Winterhold College etc. Maybe it's just me, but all I need is an excuse to go somewhere, explore, kill stuff and I'm having a good time. I don't really care about quests, I just like being in Skyrim having fun with my characters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts