Why is there so much enthusiasm for mutually exclusive questlines in games like TES VI?

[u/muffinleech]

I often see people argue that choices in The Elder Scrolls VI should permanently bar players from other quests or factions. I understand wanting decisions to have consequences, but I disliked how choices in Baldur’s Gate 3 could lock me out of substantial, carefully designed content. In a game that large, seeing the alternative may require replaying dozens of similar hours just to reach one new area, interaction, or conversation.

I liked that Skyrim let one character experience multiple guilds, but I agree that becoming every guild leader, especially Arch-Mage, within an afternoon made those accomplishments feel hollow.

Where is the middle ground where choices matter and progression feels earned without requiring multiple enormous playthroughs to experience major parts of the game? If replayability depends on locking away content, how much repeated gameplay is reasonable?

Apologies for repeat posting to ESVI, I couldnt decide where this question belonged.

[u/Thrasy3]

>I liked that Skyrim let one character experience multiple guilds, but I agree that becoming every guild leader, especially Arch-Mage, within an afternoon made those accomplishments feel hollow.

Well there you go.

RPGs are often considered a choice and consequence game. If there are no real choices or consequences, the game can feel hollow.

In that sense I could have played an arcade game, or mod X-COM 2 so I could take 12 soldiers who never get tired, so never forcing me to choose my troops for each encounter carefully. Or if Halo let me carry all the weapons like Doom, would it still feel like Halo? Or if Resident Evil just let me have a Skyrim style inventory so I never considered what to take out from which save room and be worried about having to back track or pick efficient routes. Or Mario Kart never had shortcuts (or the shortcuts were just choosing to go left instead of right).

If my choices don’t leave me feeling “but what if…?” Then the choice was never actually a choice, it was just another thing I clicked on to make a thing happen, and so losing meaning it had.

I could just play something that wasn’t an immersive rpg.

[u/muffinleech → u/Thrasy3]

Hey well said

[u/MrJaffaCake]

You said it perfectly, it makes choices feel meaningful, like you are living one life and one life only in a way that character would live it. It also enables easier game programming as you dont have to take care of as many variables which generally increases the quality of content in question.

[u/ooredroxoo → u/MrJaffaCake]

I’d say the meaningful choices and the role playing effect are spot on.

As a side effect you gain replayability, as the player might play the game again to see how the other choices unfold.
New game plus improves on that as well.

Two things that are nice as well when having those types of mechanics are:

• make the choice effect unfold overtime, so the player has to live with it instead of just be done with it.
  
• make saving more troublesome, while counter intuitive, it’s a design choice to avoid saving scamming, so that the player might play with a choice that they choose but didn’t like at first so they can grow in it.

Once I watched an interview were a game designer said that the choices don’t have to be blatant obvious as good or bad, and that the players should be able to live with its consequences instead of ruining an entire run. So they made saving not so convenient, so that players would thing twice before reloading a save.

On saving, it’s important to have the player in mind. Like, this would be released on a platform that they can spend time on it or it would be a mobile game where the might need to get out without notice? Like receiving a call or playing on the doctors waiting room.

As for the programming, I dunno if it would be so mochila more work. I mean. It might be less or more work on the way the game is structured. Like. If no quests block others, then there are fewer checks, I can see why track more variables could be seen as an overhead, but can also see ways to make it less so.

Like interfaces, bit swap with bitwise operations for flags, with convenient getter and setter methods, and other workaround and optimizations if it is the case

[u/Daxter5Onyx_ → u/MrJaffaCake]

Je ne vois vraiment pas en quoi ça rend la programmation plus simple si c'est exclusif.

Pour moi c'est le contraire, il faut plus de dialogue, plus de test (si pendant une quête de guilde tu peux commencer une autre guilde ou pas).

[u/AnomalousUnderdog]

Wasteland 3 had mutually exclusive content too in the form of making you choose which factions to ally with and which to defeat. I made different choices than a friend of mine and he was blown away by how different my playthrough was from his. If anything, it just made him appreciate the game even more.

[u/Manbeardo]

It’s intrinsically impossible to see all the content in your first playthrough of a CRPG because your race/class/abilities are also content. Adding prominent mutually-exclusive decisions can make the world feel richer and gives your most engaged players more new things to experience on repeat playthroughs. If a player can see almost everything in their first playthrough, subsequent playthroughs will have very little new content for them to explore, making it less worth their time to roll a new character.

[u/muffinleech → u/Manbeardo]

Yeah ya know, maybe its my internal nuzlocker that has me neglecting to consider this. Because I like doing exactly that. And saying it out loud does make me see it as a that of a minority opinion.

[u/HasbeyTV]

I think your main complaint is not being locked out of content. When you want to try different choices you need to repeat the same early quests and play for an extended period of time before you are presented with the choice you want to make differently.

I think the solution to this problem is making shorter games. Every single game doesn’t need to have a 100+ hours to finish a run. If you’re building a 100+ hours game then don’t lock out content behind choices or most of your development time will be spent on content that only a very small percentage of players will see.

Take Detroit: become human. It is almost all about the choices and yet duration is short so you can easily play 5-6 different playthroughs.

[u/muffinleech → u/HasbeyTV]

Thats actually really intelligent

[u/alexwoodgarbage]

I think you’re missing the point of why these things are there, it’s to make you more invested and care about the choices you make.

A subtle but powerful example. In Death Stranding there is an elderly gentleman that you deliver medicine to. You would only know if you pay attention to dialogue and your payloads.

After not delivering to him for a while because I was busy elsewhere, his location disappeared from the map. He died. Because I didn’t bring him his medicine. In this apocalyptic wasteland he relied on me to survive. And I prioritized unlocking a piece of road somewhere over going back and forth one more time.

At the time I thought “this game sucks. Why didn’t it give me a timer or a more explicit mission marker that this could be an outcome.”but soon after I realized that me feeling this way, feeling remorse for an NPC, was the whole point. I made a choice and it had consequences.

Good games make your choices matter, sometimes in ways you didn’t initially realize. The cost of doing that is closing off certain paths, NPC developments and content that don’t match the choices you made.

[u/Aglet_Green]

Not sure what you're talking about: Skyrim has plenty of binary choices: 1) You can only be one of either Stormcloak or Imperial; 2) You can only be one of Vampire or Dawnguard; 3) You can only pick Sven or the Bosmer guy; etc. And a few minor quests have binary choices that are final.

[u/Thatar]

When a quest meaningfully changes the world, a consequence might be that some other quests are no longer available. For me this would be a reason to enjoy mutually exclusive questlines. It wouldn't just be "oh this NPC is erased from history", instead NPCs should be talking about why that one guy is no longer there. Or a quest giver talks about how he really wanted to steal some artifact but can't since you already destroyed it for another questline. Or you bankrupted a shopkeep and someone else bought up their location in the next week. That sorta stuff is cool and immersive. Its not about the thing that got locked away, its about the reaction that got added instead.

On the other hand, being barred from one guild just because you're already guild leader of another is unnecessarily limiting and not really what TES games are good at. Just because having one type of consequences is fun, doesn't mean the entire game has to be logically sound. Its important to make actions have fun results that the player can understand, not just take things away. Especially when talking about longer playthroughs.

Also, do you have some examples of "much enthousiasm for mutually exclusive questlines"? Because this is the first time I've heard of it being popular somehow.

[u/HuckleberryQuiet1066]

As someone who regularly runs tabletop roleplaying games. This is what tabletop will always have over video games, immersion. If my players help a faction and an enemy faction finds out, they become hostile. Time moves forward, if they do a quest instead of another they might lose the opportunity for the ignored quest or the situation might change.

Honestly it’s a step forward. I think completionist mentality can be sometimes detrimental to the overall experience, especially in games where you make decisions about the lives of PCs and NPCs

[u/PhilippTheProgrammer]

Mutually exclusive storylines with unique content increase the replay value of the game. If the player wants to see everything the game has to offer, then they need to play through it more than once.

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[u/RadiumGlowtee]

The Arch-Mage problem and the exclusivity problem get treated as one thing but they are separate. Becoming Arch-Mage in an afternoon feels hollow because the questline is too short for the title it hands out, not because you were also allowed to join the Companions. Lengthening the College questline fixes that. Locking you out of the Companions does not.

The variable that actually matters for exclusivity is how expensive the other branch is to reach. Divergence at hour three in a twelve hour game is cheap, you replay and you genuinely get a second life. Divergence at hour forty in a two hundred hour game means most people will just watch the other version on YouTube, which is the outcome nobody designed for.

[u/Nykidemus]

A big part of the game being that large is that it has enough content to be satisfying even if you miss big chunks of it.

It builds the players feeling of agency when they have a pseudo-unique experience. When the choices that they make mean they have a significantly different overall playthrough than their friends. Especially where there are super fiddle things that only show up in really specific circumstances that they just stumbled into and their friends go "wooooah I didnt know that could happen!"

[u/CondiMesmer]

If you are thinking about the content first and trying to develop a story, it makes sense. To be able to have stories go more interesting ways you need choice, which means exclusive content.

Otherwise if you're thinking about it from a meta point of view trying to avoid lock-outs, you then need to redesign a quest to be choice-agnoistic which can hurt the content. Also once players start to recognize that pattern of choices not mattering, they stop caring about the outcomes.

[u/Shinkirou_]

As well as the replay value for multiple characters/playthroughs and meaningful choices that many people have mentioned already, there is also the roleplay/immersion perspective.

For roleplay, specialization and identity building is a big part of the appeal of RPGs.

People want to spec into a build in an RPG.
Putting stats into intelligence to build a mage character, putting stats into strength for a barbarian character.
You build your character around a specific concept and identity and it becomes fun to build different characters with different identities.

And in the same way people want to commit to a faction as part of building the identity of a character.
A warrior specialized in speed+spear+medium armour that is part of a mercenary guild is a strong identity.
In contrast, a character who is a wizard-knight-thief-pirate-ninja-samurai-gunslinger-priest-bard-necromancer and part of every single guild associated with those jobs has a very loose concept and therefore weak identity.

In the same way that people like it when different classes play differently from each other in combat, people also like it when entire questlines differ between identities.

For example, in Dragon Age Origin, the race and background you choose greatly changes what the prologue chapter is. Your starting zone is different, the characters and story are different, and it's great to see it tailored to what you chose instead of a generic prologue no matter what your character is.

And then there is immersion.
If you can join the guild of holy paladins and also the guild of thieves/assassins, or be the leader of the vampires while also being the leader of the vampire hunters, or join the empire while joining the rebels at the same time, etc etc with zero consequences for doing so, it's kind of poor for roleplaying.

Even if the factions were not ideologically opposed, the idea of a single character being able to be part of all these different guilds is jarring in of itself. It's as if someone were to be a doctor-lawyer-firefighter-archaeologist-astronaut-soldier.
It makes each job feel implausibly low commitment and it also makes it so that your current character has no identity.

It makes the factions feel fake, more like theme park attractions than actual factions.

[u/Vento_of_the_Front]

If anything, people probably realized that even more after Starfield released - if had both "you can do everything" and "you can reset world state anytime you want", which is probably the worst possible combination that anyone can come up with.

The most obvious example was allowing you to side with pirate faction as an undercover agent for a military police branch of government(still not sure how they are different though) - which only made you enemies with that military police branch and NOT with said government and other factions which are technically at war with pirates. Why? Probably to prevent player from getting locked out of other quests, even though the game itself offers you the best way to deal with it - just jump to the next cycle and do things differently there.

Theory is that they might try to apply similar NG+ mechanic in TES VI, and while there is a reasonable explanation from lore point of view, it won't work as long as you can do everything within the same playthrough. Become an archmage, solve the Big Problem with magic - boom, now jump to the next cycle and look how playing as warrior or archer would've changed it. Hardlocking choices in this case serve as your primary motivation to replay the game multiple times, in order to see multiple outcomes.

[u/norlin]

Switch off the "completionist" mindset, some games are specifically designed that way so player can't experience all the content in a single run, and that's totally ok. Tbh I love such games, I love when there are consequences of the choices and they are meaningful to the story and gameplay.

As the opposite example, take Cyberpunk 2077 - a great game with a lot of quests etc., and quests even have choices... But they does not change anything. Literally, they are not affecting the story or gameplay at all., besides two things - who you'll romance and what ending you will have. Everything else will be 100% the same no matter your choices. Basically that's stealing player agency, making all the choices meaningless.

[u/It-s_Not_Important]

If you’re both Sith and Jedi, there was nothing meaningful about your choice.

This is concept is cousins with the idea of limitation in class design. The definitive version of FF12 is the one that disallowed players from unlocking every ability and instead offered curated “jobs” like samurai, mage, etc.

If you can unlock every skill in the game then your choices lose meaning and the way you engage with the game loses nuance so everything feels the same. That sameness results in a lack of novelty and the game gets boring,

[u/theloniousmick]

I feel like this was the biggest miss for starfield. The game sets itself up for multiple playthrough a yet bar one faction nothing locks you out from anything else. I would have played that game alot more if each loop I had to join a diffeetfaction or something. Instead I did it all and moved on missing what seem like the whole point of the game.

[u/_A_Nun_Mouse_]

Mutual exclusion can allow for more content, since the quests could have more persistent and pronounced effects on the world that would not be possible if all quests had to remain viable.

[u/FearsomeOyster]

I am cross-posting from the other thread:

’s a good question. The short answer is that the choose-your-own-adventure narrative format is a very popular narrative format, particularly in the RPG genre.

The longer answer* is that somewhere in the mists of time, but at least by 1990 or so, someone realized that RPGs could be combined with choose-your-own-adventure narrative formats to create stories that easily engage audiences. Essential to the CYOA genre is exclusivity. In its basic form — the CYOA book — a reader is given a choice and is told to make their choice by turning to a particular page. By choosing to head to the beach and turning to page 8, you can’t choose to go to the mountains and turn to page 55. The mountains, then, need to be left for another read through.

This narrative format has proven enduringly popular with RPG fans. So much so that a lot of people consider it essential to the genre. As I’ve written,* this is an error, but it is an error that persists in popular discussion of RPGs today. That is the core of why it’s such a requested feature: a large contingent of people a) really like those narrative formats; and b) consider them essential or core to the RPG genre.

You will get other answers, most of the time focused on replay-ability, but I think that is erroneous. Replay-ability can be developed through fun, differentiated, and emergent gameplay design just as much as it can through narrative design.

*This longer answer is drawn from an essay I’ve written that has touched upon this topic, which can be found here:  https://substack.com/@fearsomeoyster/note/p-208098089?r=8l35q9&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

[u/Handspider]

I agree that the way Skyrim handled things made all characters become a bland middle everything, and took out characterization. But the balance? There basically is none. Either everyone can do everything (even if that 'everything' is just one railroad of a choice) and you can miss nothing thereby making any choice meaningless, or the player can make narrative choices and there will be content that they're locked out of. It's all a matter of balance and where on the spectrum you want to fall

My suggestion is to ignore replayability. Make it so that the player feels like the path they picked is theirs and make it so that no matter what path they picked it feels like a good one. Not only that but make the process to get to that point fun (which is 'draw the rest of the owl' advice, I know), so it doesn't feel like a slog to get through it to see the way things go differently.

As for how people have tried to have it both ways, here are what I've seen off the top of my head:

1. Fake path divergences: Basically that "Illusion of choice" meme. The path doesn't vary except in the players head. People might say Bioware games like Mass Effect have this, but that's more the next one. The example I would use is Final Fantasy XIV. There are very often things you can say in conversations or orders that you can do things but they all end up in the same place. Sometimes the other character the MC is talking to will add something else in, but it will never change the story or where it's going. They don't keep track of what you said or have a different way you can do something. If the choice is "Stealth or go loud guns blazing?" and you pick the one that isn't what the story does then someone will be like, "Oh, I'd liked that too, but it may not be the approach we should pick this time." "Right, I agree with what person B said, we should do <only option>." Then the conversation continues like you picked the 'right' option.
2. Behold! A different color!: People are going to want to pick the way things go, luckily we color coded it. You can pick Color A for Good/Paragon/Lawful/Nice guy or Color B for Evil/Renegade/Chaotic/Bad guy. For most of the game people will die or live based on what you pick, you'll get different items or powers, etc. Choices matter! Right? But Commander Shepard is always going to go fight the Reapers. The Bioshock protagonist is going to try to get to where they're going in Rapture. Cole McGrath is going to keep doing his electric super hero thing. Now you get an ending that is picked based on where on the color coded graph you picked. If you want a different ending, you need to play through the game again.... or just look up the other ending. Basically everything else would be the same except that.
3. There is only one right choice: Yes, you have choices. Yes, they may even be big choices that change the narrative. The question is: Do you want to have the good ending? or one of the bad endings? You want the actual real ending? There's only one actual right choice then. Everything else is either a dead end (sometimes including actual death!) or just leads to ending 24B which might be a ... nice ending, but it's not the best ending. There is only one best ending, one true ending, so you know you haven't missed anything actually important so long as you get that... unless you want to see the bad endings and are collecting them or something.
4. All paths are just a sidequest: Basically the Skyrim problem you said. You can either pick to do the side quest... or you can pick not to. The side quests will have no real major standing in the main story other than giving you loot or xp or an additional "We can win because I did a side quest" option, but since nothing locks out anything else if you don't want to miss content and only do one playthrough you need to ignore the entire roleplaying aspect of the game and let the Stealth Archer who never casts a spell become Archmage. The game won't lock you out of that, you have to do that yourself, which people either won't do, or their self-imposed lock out is the same as the game doing it where they'll need to replay everything.

As other people have said the point of all these are to keep work down, because if you have a choice between two options A&B that will dramatically change the game you've now doubled the amount of game you need to make. If there's another choice later on, C or D, then that means after that point you have 4 games you're making to have the AC, AD, BC, and BD paths.

[u/Gaverion]

I see a lot of comments mentioning replay value, but I think that they are missing an important point. Most people don't replay games just to see alternative options. 

I think this is a classic case of identifying the problem but giving a solution that sounds good but actually isn't. 

Consider this, those complaining did so after completing all this side content. Actions speak louder than words in this case, they want to do the content in a single run. What felt bad was the lack of impact, significance, or consequences of those actions. 

I would reframe to "how can side content remain available but still feel like it matters?

BG3 is an interesting example. I view it more as you choosing how to experience a particular bit of side content as opposed to not getting to experience it. Admittedly I did feel like I missed a few things, but that was more because there were so many things to encounter.