What Are You Playing, Part 3: The Assassination of my Wallet by the Cowardly Sale

[Cespenar]

I really couldn't figure out what I was supposed to see in it back in 2011. So many of the game systems were unimproved from Oblivion, and it's not like those were outstanding, timeless mechanics in the first place. In a world that had plenty of time to learn from the righteousness of Dark Messiah, the animatronics flailing at each other with pool noodles of Skyrim was just a nonstarter for me.

As much as I like to bash on Bethesda myself, there are not many open-world RPGs that can do what BethRPGs do. Now, can you write an encyclopedia worth of stuff that can be improved? Yes, starting with a simple lack of fun melee mechanics like Dark Messiah. But can other games do all that Skyrim does? Not really.

I actually don't like games like Torment where you know that dialogue is the solution to every problem. Once you know that diplomacy always works, it stops feeling like a dynamic decision to try to talk things out vs using violence when needed and starts feeling like I just need to keep my numbers on the character spreadsheet high enough to keep the dialogue running. It loses a lot of the interactivity and immersion. You're not making decisions based on what you think is right, you're just going along with your highest stat distribution and watching the show.

I don't like that kind of feeling myself, but with Planescape (and other games that do it right), it doesn't really turn that way because while "diplomacy" may always work, the type of diplomacy needed for the occasion might elude your character's stats/skills, or might not fit your preferred methods of solution. Though if you somehow become an all around powerhouse with 20s in Wis, Int and Cha, and not care about good & evil, that might become an issue, I guess.

The strongest instance of what you described, for me, was in Sunless Skies, where the game quickly devolved into a spreadsheet-fest in which you sometimes not skip a well-written but mostly irrelevant snippet.

Having got a fair way into the second Trails in the Sky, still enjoying it, but there is one really irritating thing about it--and that is, how it does sidequests. I mean, it at least gives more of a reason for sidequests than most RPGs do--you're playing a "bracer", a person whose entire job is doing random stuff for people--but it puts arbitrary time limits on them, generally with no way to tell what the limit is, so you'll go and do the next main quest and find that several of the jobs you had on hand are now "failed" because of that. Also, it tends to put some extra sidequests in *after you've finished a chapter*, so you walk out of the Bracer Guild house ready to start the next chapter, but you have to run back in and check if any new sidequests have been added, which disrupts the flow somewhat.

The first game did a bit of that as well, but it was definitely not as bad as SC in that regard.

The safest method is to just check the quests in the journal and see if they are short, medium or long term, and just rush the short ones before doing any main quest stuff.