@alyx
How am I supposed to believe, I am Leader of 2 personal armies (assassins and thiefs), Grand magician and I still get beaten by a troll?

@LukeAlmighty
It's obvious that the reasons they made it so you can join every faction in one playthrough is that they don't want people to miss out just because they're not willing to start up multiple characters.
But this only highlights the true flaw of modern TES: the games aren't sooo good that they make players want to start up a new character as soon as they finish the first.

@alyx
I seriously do get a worldbuilding whiplash while playing Skyrim, because I cannot tell, if I'm supposed to be a relatively strong person, or a GOD among men.

@LukeAlmighty
You're more like a god incarnate. A sort of Jesus. Sure you can do the equivalent of miracles, but you're not exactly immune to being killed by unbelievers.

@LukeAlmighty @alyx this is why my best skyrim experience was doing an alternate start mod where i wasn't a dragonborn and the main story didn't exist, i just went around doing quests for people and doing the civil war stuff.

that combined with a mod to let me kill anyone meant i started doing the thieves guild quest begrudgingly to get a gem appraised but once i found out there were like 100 others i had to collect to make it worth it, i stealthily wiped out everyone in the thieves guild except a kid they had who i adopted.

@beardalaxy @alyx
Yes, that's how I play it too.
Plus Requiem of course :D

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty
I envy people who can go on killing spree's in their roleplays. I can never commit to something like that, cause I'm always concerned about missing out on quests or some dialogue down the line or something. Even when I know Bethesda is Bethesda, and important NPCs are immortal and would ultimately kill you if you as much as look the wrong way at them.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty I get into it haha, I role play the character as best as I can.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty most of the time, I don't even get through the game's story with a character and make a new one instead. If I only knew how many Skyrim characters never made it to the greybeards

@beardalaxy @LukeAlmighty
With whatever character I make, I'm obsessed with completing everything I can with them. Only times a character remains unfinished is if I get bored with the game, and by the time I come back to it, I completely forget what I was doing, what I was roleplaying, what build I was making, so I just start over.

As for roleplaying, thinking back, I think I manage to get most immersed in Fallout. There's something about the pseudo-realistic partly sci-fi setting that appeals more to me than full-on fantasy. I also prefer shooters as a genre, so works well for me for the rest of the gameplay too.

@alyx @beardalaxy
I have this sissue with Witcher 3.
I am way too deep to deep into the story to begin again, but I seriously don't feel like playing with full quest log, 300 potions and more systems then I can wrap my head around.

And even, after I switched it to easy, it just wasn't the same.

@LukeAlmighty @beardalaxy
I know the feeling. Over-complicated systems and too much content thrown at you at once is one of the reasons why I'm slow to pick up and really enjoy a RPG. It took me YEARS, and multiple attempts at playing Mass Effect, before I finally managed to fall in love with the series. I tried playing Mass Effect 1 back when it released, but didn't actually finish it until after Mass Effect 3 came out.

@alyx @beardalaxy
I tried playing fallout tactics 2 times. Get bored after 1 mission.

Try it 3rd time, complete in one sitting.

Try 4th time, bored... WTF???

@LukeAlmighty @beardalaxy
Usually after I manage to get past that hurdle of finishing it the first time (and if the game's good obviously) I've got no problem of playing it another few times.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty I wouldn’t mind if the beginning wasn’t so long and drawn out not red dead 2 bad but still

@freddie_the_fed @LukeAlmighty
Skyrim? It kinda depends what you'd count as beginning. Just Helgen, I'm fine with it. Doesn't bother me. But if you include the few immediate quests until you get to Graybeards and unlock dragon shouts, so you can be free to explore the world with all the gameplay elements unlocked, it's a hell of a chore.

@alyx @freddie_the_fed
KOTOR...
The game is linear the first HALF... or at least it feels like it.

@applejack @alyx yeah i have to force myself to roleplay and just take the roads there and assume that, since my character is a denizen of this world, they would know it better than i would and that's why the marker is there.

i guess the problem with bethesda games is that the PC isn't from the world you play in, unless you specifically choose a nord in skyrim.

i think breath of the wild did a pretty good job balancing quest markers and just natural discovery.

the thing that holds morrowind back for me so much is how clunky it all feels. i could get used to it over time probably but when there are so many other games (that don't have random chances of hitting an enemy right in front of my face) there's just no real reason for me to play it. listening to lore videos or whatever is good enough for me.

@applejack
I understand and appreciate the journal experience. My issue with that approach is strictly with how I usually end up playing a game.

I often will have periods when I get bored of a game, and do something else for even months on end, and then randomly want to go back to the original game I was playing. At that point, no journal will be able to get me to remember where I was, where I was going, what NPCs and from where gave me quests and so on. I'm basically at risk at being completely lost and abandoning the playthrough or the game entirely.

For better or worse, map markers help mitigate this for me. I've got a Fallout 3 playthrough I modded a year and a half ago, and played less than two weeks before pausing. This week I randomly decided to play again, and was able to pick it right up immediately.

@applejack
Map markers, especially how Bethesda does them, have plenty of flaws too. A lot of times a combination between map markers to show a general area or zone, and a journal description to describe something specific would work sooooo much better.
But if I have to choose, my balance does tip in favor of map markers, for the assurance that I won't get lost in a game just because I don't play it daily.