"Who Is Azura?": A Request at the Behest of a Lore-Obsessed Quester

MaleAmazon · February 2020

To be fair, at launch, you couldn't quest as anyone but the Vestige, and titles like that are helpful when you can't call the player character by name.

Yeah, but I mean more that they say "vestige" way too much. Like "Vestige, come here" instead of just "come here". They would of course know the name of the player, and simply replacing it with "vestige this, vestige that" is lazy IMO. Now, I guess they can´t synthesize the player name - although Codsworth saying my character´s name out of the blue in Fallout 4 blew me away, to be honest...

It´s kind of funny though, since a few quests in the game, like the Lodorr one, is predicated on the character having no soul... guess someone didn´t think ahead then. But I don´t fault them - to be honest I think the "you have no soul" explanation for why you can use wayshrines, resurrect etc, is a really good in-game explanation for mechanics.

I'll let Finedrin out when he shows that he's learned his lesson.

The only "proper repentance" in the face of Altmer snootiness is a quick dagger / lightning bolt to the face.(I assume Faruin was snooty. Maybe I should inform myself before passing judgement, though.)

Starlock · February 2020

Dialogue options in this game have never been particularly good. It's what makes this a so-so RPG compared to the truer cRPGs that have very extensive dialogue options. I don't ever expect that to change. The amount of time it takes to do branching dialogue is significant, and while I don't doubt the development team could do a great job of it, they probably aren't given the leeway to incorporate that into their designs.

Some if the issues the OP points out can be fixed with better writing, though. There are some pieces of content where protagonist responses are much better written, but these are few and far between. Kudos to whoever was the lead writer on Clockwork City and Murkmire in particular, because there are generally much better dialogue options in those stories. We are still stuck with one-line response options, but they're written in a way that doesn't make our characters sound like idiots.

All that aside, I alway write my own character dialogue when I'm doing questing anyway. I've gotten used to ignoring the writing for my character, because it's typically bad and can't ever be as creative as what I bring to the table even if there were branching dialogue options. It works well enough to add my own character voice to the story.

opaj · February 2020

MaleAmazon wrote: »

Yeah, but I mean more that they say "vestige" way too much. Like "Vestige, come here" instead of just "come here". They would of course know the name of the player, and simply replacing it with "vestige this, vestige that" is lazy IMO. Now, I guess they can´t synthesize the player name - although Codsworth saying my character´s name out of the blue in Fallout 4 blew me away, to be honest...

Oh! That. Yes. There's a bit of classic writing advice about not using names too often in dialogue. If you listen to an actual conversation between two people, they rarely say each others' names as often as characters do in fiction. I've rarely found my own dialogue to be worse after removing names.

MaleAmazon wrote: »

It´s kind of funny though, since a few quests in the game, like the Lodorr one, is predicated on the character having no soul... guess someone didn´t think ahead then. But I don´t fault them - to be honest I think the "you have no soul" explanation for why you can use wayshrines, resurrect etc, is a really good in-game explanation for mechanics.

The whole soul/no soul thing bugs me, but I can't fault ZOS for that. They wrote the story assuming the main campaign would work one way (you play it from beginning to end), had that changed on them just before release (you play your faction from beginning to end, then jump to the next faction, then the faction after that, meaning that you're getting story about not having a soul after you get your soul back), and then had it radically changed again a few years later (One Tamriel, meaning you can have a soul or no soul at any given moment).

Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

MaleAmazon wrote: »

The only "proper repentance" in the face of Altmer snootiness is a quick dagger / lightning bolt to the face.(I assume Faruin was snooty. Maybe I should inform myself before passing judgement, though.)

And after all that the Altmer have done so much for the Bosmer! This kind of attitude is why the Bosmer are still living in trees. Honestly.