I personally like Skyrim for the open potential for creating your own in-game stories, but there are definitely gaps that your imagination has to actively fill. For example, when traveling, there is no banter with your follower like in Dragon Age, which means that when thinking of my in-game story, I fill in those blanks.

Great article! Thanks foro writing p.

That’s really the core of my complaint though — Radiant Story doesn’t seem to care whether or not the quests it generates are discordant (or even necessarily interesting, as you point out). The fact that it sometimes is possible for them to fit — and that doing so often requires new generic NPCs with no personality — is not enough to make them compelling for me.

That said, I hear what you’re saying, and there’s certainly part of me that is happy to just have more stuff to do. And it’s certainly nice for there to be something at the end of a questline, even if it’s repetitive and not particularly suited to a guildmaster. :-)

For the more clandestine guilds, however, like the Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild, the fact that there’s no reaction to the completion in the overt sense is actually a positive point. It makes sense that no one says anything about a Forged Business ledger, that was the point of forging the number in the ledger. Even in those cases only the nonsensical nature of the quests is solved with the issue of awkward presentation to circumvent the voice actors remaining.

The repetition, however, is something I don’t feel is actually a negative. Yes, it does make the player think of the quests as procedurally generated lists of chores but that’s because they’re supposed to be a never ending list of repeatable chores. The repetition fits perfectly in-universe in almost all cases. An assassin’s guild is going to, in the vast majority of cases, kill low-profile targets without much pomp and circumstance. An honorable fighter’s guild is going to do day to day work like rescuing a citizen or dispatching a wayward animal. A thieves’ guild is going to pickpocket, steal, and forge business ledgers day in and day out. A mage’s guild is going to need to restock enchanting supplies and deliver enchanted items or items to be enchanting to and from the guild. These all sound like boring jobs because they are boring jobs; they’re the everyday grind work the guild does when it’s not embroiled in some epic adventure i.e. the vast majority of the time. The only major negative on this point, in my eyes, is that the jobs are not readily able to be delegated to junior members even after climbing to the top of the respective organizations. It makes no sense that I’m not telling some peon to do this stuff for me.

But it certainly makes me appreciate what had at first seemed like a beautiful game with a simplistic combat system for what it really is: a beautiful game with a fantastic combat system.

Thank you!

That was a little disappointing. Getting promised Gerudo Valley and getting Sun Song. :/

Besides that, I do like your work! (I’m a rookie when it comes to music theory and how good composition works, and something like LoZ music, which interests me, really helps.)