Skyrim was one of the most successful games of the last decade, to such an extent that Bethesda has a huge challenge living up to the lofty expectations fans of the franchise have for The Elder Scrolls 6.
Many RPGs have morality systems that are simplistic and take away player freedom to roleplay without taking significant mechanical penalties, like the original Mass Effect trilogy’s Paragon/Renegade system. However, The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to implement more moral choices throughout its game for a few key reasons.
Skyrim’s questlines rarely had moral choices in them. What differentiates most Skyrim players’ evil and good characters is that their evil characters do certain evil questlines like the Dark Brotherhood or, to a lesser extent, the Thieves Guild. They may also find themselves joining the vampires in the Dawnguard DLC, but there’s one big problem with the way Skyrim handles morality.
Once the player has committed to any of these questlines the game tells a clear story, but it is rarely one which involves any genuine choices on the part of the player. The Dark Brotherhood questline, for example, sees the arrival of the Night Mother and her creepy clown attendant Cicero, the destruction of the Skyrim chapter, and its rebirth with the assassination of the Emperor Titus Mede II himself. However, the questline branches in no way, and while there are a few choices like whether or not to spare Cicero and unlock him as a follower later, they are few and far between and to little consequence.
It should be possible to join the Companions, become a werewolf, and lead the rest of the Companions down a far darker path. Similarly, it should be possible to join the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood and make morally good choices at key moments that help reshape the organization or get the player kicked out, especially considering the fact that both the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood are hugely waning in power before the arrival of the player, who helps revive them but has no actual say in the nature of that revival.
Skyrim‘s modding community has fixed this with mods like Dark Brotherhood for Good Guys and Thieves Guild for Good Guys. The Dark Brotherhood for Good Guys mod allows the player to find clues that reveal the reasons behind all of the assassinations they are asked to do in the main questline, and then gives the player the option to weigh the moral choice of whether or not to perform the hit. Similarly, the Thieves Guild mod allows players to recreate the organization as more of a Robin Hood-style gang of helpful rogues, more similar to its incarnation in Oblivion.
In short, these mods allow the individual choices of the player to affect the outcome of quests in these main Skyrim questlines far more than they are able to in the base game. The Elder Scrolls 6 needs to expand upon Skyrim’s formula, which prioritized freedom and exploration above all else, and a great way to do that is simply to give players more options at every point of the game.
Players of The Elder Scrolls 6 should be able to do an evil playthrough of any main questline in the game if they want to roleplay as an evil character, without the quests pigeonholing them. The reverse should be true for players who want to join organizations like the Dark Brotherhood in order to find out who their targets are and save their lives. This breadth of roleplaying opportunity would allow more players to experience the entire game without having to make separate good and evil characters to stay in-character, and could help The Elder Scrolls 6 live up to the hype.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is currently in development.
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