It's dumb game design to set up a system where your NPCs randomly die without player input, unless you're explicitly going for a whole-world simulation and not a story game at all, or unless protecting the NPCs is the intended result.
That is the point of Skyrim; to emulate a world where things can happen without player input. Like say, your favorite blacksmith who lives by the city gates can get killed by a random vampire attack. Or that priest that prays to Talos in the center square can get killed by a dragon. Part of the appeal is that some of these NPCs have sidequests, so even though they don't have essential story missions and are therefore non-essential, saving their asses could be involving and beneficial to the player. I remember saving Windhelm from a dragon attack while I was doing a job for the Thieves' Guild, because these NPCs could be useful to me in the future and I don't want them snuffed out. It basically led to me creating my own story of how I saved a city I really didn't like because I saw potential for something there in the future.
To use BG3 for an example for a moment, because I've been playing it a lot recently and the examples are fresh to mind: There is an attack on your "hub" area during the second act. Important NPCs with future dialog and quest content can die here, if you don't protect them. However, none of them break the game if they die, and the attack doesn't happen randomly. It's not going to happen when you're off killing monsters in another part of the world, or something and a monster is never going to just wander through the hub world and randomly kill an NPC while you're selling loot to the blacksmith, either. It's a specific event where important NPCs are put at risk, and how the player responds is part of the point.
The fact that attacks can happen randomly in Skyrim IS part of the appeal of the game; the fact is, one day, the game can just choose to send vampires or dragons to attack the city, and you'll have to defend it. I can't count how many times I saved Adrianne Avenicci from vampires raiding Whiterun, but hey, that actually got me feeling involved in saving her life, because she was useful to me whenever I show up in Whiterun with a pile of dragon bones and I need to sell them.
And, again. Because I know you're going to miss it: I'm not saying you have to do any of this. I don't have a fundamental problem with essential NPCs, usually.
Essential NPCs are only a problem for console peasants, as someone here has already said. On PC, you can either use the console commands or mods to kill them.
As for me, being able to kill NPCs outside of combat is a gimmick, nothing more. It's a cute thing that I can react to Nazeem's back talk with the Mace of Molag Bal smacking his face in, but if the game didn't give me that option, I wouldn't lose sleep over it. I mean, with Mass Effect, I was more than OK with just being able to punch Khalisah Bint Sinan Al-Jilani, I wasn't screaming at the game for not giving me the option of unloading explosive rounds into her face for daring to question my methods.
And even when I did kill Nazeem for back-talking me, I usually just reloaded the game because the mojo of the Whiterun streets would just feel wrong without him.
Okay, look, I know this might seem obvious to point out, but Elder Scrolls isn't D&D. It's D&D inspired, perhaps, but it's not D&D. The series has always been about solo characters since Arena... Although originally Arena was conceived as a party game, that was scrapped early on in development, and it's never returned save for companion NPCs in later games.
Yet it still bolts on a DnD leveling system to a game that isn't DnD. Which is stupid. Skyrim making it easier to level up every skill makes perfect sense since you're alone, you might as well be a jack of all trades.
If you're going to bolt on a DnD system onto something, you might as well go full-throttle and make it a full DnD game with companions that can make up for a player's lack of skill in other areas. That way, a character can be free to go level up to be a pure mage, without having to worry about warrior/thief skills because he has someone to do the warrior/thief shit for him.
That, or just throw the DnD shit out the window and let the player have an easier time leveling everything up.
For example, from the very earliest days, character concepts like Nightblades, Spellswords, and Battlemages has been core character concepts in the game - literally saying "Yes, you can build a character to do a bit of everything". It's always been possible, from the earliest games, it just requires a bit more work. And if you didn't want to do that, the game supported that, too.
Which again, it's all a waste of time because you need to be good at everything. So Skyrim just did the right thing by junking the class system and making it easy to level up every skill. The fact that you need ''a bit more work'' to make a broken system workable goes to show that it's a sub-par game, compared to a game that uses the system to its fullest potential, like KOTOR, or a system that makes it easy to work on leveling up, like Skyrim.
And if you want to hit better in Morrowind, you put points in Agility + weapon skill + luck. The to-hit formula is a little more complicated if you look behind the scenes (It also takes into account how fatigued you are, for example), but fundamentally the only difference is that KOTOR is turn based and Morrowind is quasi-real time.
KOTOR actually makes sense with the RNG hit/miss thing. You're not aiming at the enemy yourself. You're just selecting them for your character to attack. The character's aim is determined by their dexterity rate. In Morrowind, you have to aim and hit the bad guy dead-center with your cursor, and even then, it could still register as a miss, even if you yourself didn't miss, which is bad game design, since the only thing that should determine a hit or miss in such a system is whether or not the enemy is dead-center on my cursor when I hit the attack button.
A real-time first person system implies that hit chance should be dictated by your skill as a human with a controller/keyboard & mouse. With this system, you are the character, and your aim is what determines whether or not you should hit the target.
A stats and dice-roll based combat system is designed primarily to compensate for limited control and a total lack of visual cues. It's a layer of abstraction between you and the player character. Your character is the one who aims, and it's his stats that determine whether or not he hits the target.
Mixing them both is what makes the design of the Morrowind combat system objectively bad, as they are two diametrically opposing systems. So yes, objectively, Morrowind IS a bad game combat-wise. You're combining two, contradictory systems together. You have to hit the enemy dead-center AND pray that your stats are enough to actually register a hit. Which is stupid.
I mean, I'd counter Rakghouls, but no creature is as annoying as cliff racers, no.
By that time, you'd leveled up enough that Rakghouls are not much of a problem. Just pack enough health packs and antidote packs, which are cheap to buy at the merchant stores all over the place.
The tougher enemies like Dark Jedi do not show up until you're at your third planet, and by that time, you have 2-3 Jedi and several experienced party members.
Morrowind isn't trying to be either of those things, though. I mean, a power fantasy to some extent, sure, pretty much any RPG is to some extent, but not in the same was as Skyrim, or hell even Oblivion.
If it's not a good DnD RPG, and it's not a good power fantasy, then what is it?
Dragons are not comparable to Cliff Racers, except that they fly and you never get rid of them. Cliff racers are deliberately designed to be a nuisance, not a profitable mini boss encounter. They're more akin to bandits or something in Skyrim.
Bandits are not an annoyance in Skyrim. Cliff Racers are just not fun game design, whereas dragons are more fun to fight.
Except that breaks the game. You can't just remove essential status in a game not designed for it, then it turns into option 4 on my list - let players do it, but it breaks the game. which is the worst of all four options.
You're breaking the game regardless. Like what happens in Morrowind, when you kill an essential NPC, the game basically warns you that you fucked the world and you'll have to reload.
This is exactly the problem. "Radiant AI" sounded cool on paper, but what it meant in practice was that someone you needed to talk to might just randomly be found dead in a field one day because the game randomly decided to make them go pick flowers there, and there just happened to be a fucking minotaur that OHKed them because you leveled up too much.
Which means that for radiant AI to work, you need essential characters. So that your questgiver won't just end up dead on the floor because a random cliff racer, dragon, minotaur, or vampire came upon them one day.
Sort of a side/sperg rant. Tons of computer RPGs copy the core conceits of D&D without understanding why they exist in the first place. D&D's game structure is based on a party delving further into an increasingly dangerous dungeon.
My point exactly. Morrowind bolted on a DnD leveling system to a game that isn't DnD. They just borrowed the mechanics of a game without understanding what that game was. That's why, in my view, Bethesda didn't get anywhere near good until Oblivion, FO3, and Skyrim. Morrowind was like Sonic 06, a game that has the potential to be good, buried under an avalanche of jank and bad game design. Mostly because they bolted on a system for a cooperative board game onto a single-player video game where the player character is usually alone. It's the equivalent of me giving a fur coat to a guy in the Bahamas.
Maybe you weren't around for PC gaming in the 90s. But even the most polished and higher budget titles often had awful user interfaces and presentation. Fallout 1 is a classic example of a game made by nerds who didn't need a tutorial for the convoluted mess that was the interface. They understood everything and so because it made sense for them it didn't need to be overhauled so non RPG fans would understand what they were seeing. But for the average gamer it was beyond tedious and exhausting to get into the game. Fallout 1 is one of those games where the writing, story, and music are timeless. But the gameplay and interface were heavily dated within a few years.
I remember Spoony saying that, after playing Fallout 3, he had a problem getting back to FO1 and 2, because the UI was such shit and the music was so depressing that he couldn't get back into it. He descirbed his own feelings as ''blasphemy'' because he loved those old games, but FO3 just gave him an experience that made him no longer able to put up with the BS of FO1 and FO2.
Which probably explains why he got his candy ass whooped when he went into FO2 again, made a build that's not suited for combat, and got his face punched in by random enemies. This was a guy who made his living talking about RPGs, by the way.
