Wednesday, July 22, 2009

The perils of railroading

I reached a point in Tribunal's main questline in which Almalexia has sent me off to find two things (well, one is a collection of things):

Spoiler: Click to display/hide

This spoiler involves the Temple side of the main quest in Tribunal.

As an aside, this museum is pitiful. It contains one artifact! A two-story building full of display tables and pedestals and guards, and only one item to display. It's not even in the middle of the museum, where you might expect a museum's prize possession to be, but on a table off against one of the side walls by the stairs. No plaque or information card either, nor any glass case or even a velvet rope barrier. Honestly, it looks like some warrior just accidentally left his hammer on a bench in an empty room. Ridiculous. No museum, no matter how optimistic, would open to the public with two floors of nothing (plus one). A "collection" like this would make more sense on display in a temple or throne room, not in a dedicated building.

So I'm required to donate at least two items to this "museum", I suppose so that it can properly be called a "collection", and in so doing I must thin out my own private museum, which is much worthier of the title.

Spoiler: Click to display/hide

This spoiler involves the Imperial side of the main quest in Tribunal.

The thing is, this needn't have been a problem at all, if they had just written Almalexia's dialogue to say "Go talk to this person" instead of saying "look to someone who guided you in the past", since it's quite possible that no such thing ever occurred.

4 comments:

  1. My discipline goes to hell in this game. I'm getting "off the tracks" all the damn time. Probably some connection with the fact I just can't do that in WoW? Anyway, my character is still very young, so what happens to me is that I happen to find too many caves and dungeon-alike places. What I do, is to get the place's name, tab out of game and check the Wiki. If there is a quest associated, I just don't blow up the place.

    Sometimes I wonder if I should have gotten a Morrowind game guide, to avoid those kinds of conflict, but then, I guess it wouldn't be as fun.

    On mods: I searched and found something to relieve the pain from my fingers: a sneak toggle mod! Works perfectly, BUT I had to download and install, and use... MGE. Since I am affraid of that damn tool, I just have it on default, and everything is fine. I might try to actually make it have my graphics all prettier if you can tell me if that reset button actually works fine. Does it?

    This is the link on the toggle sneak mod, if you are insterested: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22969

    I like sneak because it makes it easier for me to tell when an enemy spotted me and I didn't! Also, for crit dmg on my bow, and then, when I do gain points on it, I will gain Agility bonuses on lvl up, which helps my bows too =)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, I didn't mean to imply that it's a bad thing for a player to get off the tracks. I prefer to play non-linearly, myself, and I just think the linear main quest in Tribunal was too easily broken, accidentally.

    Yes, I like that sneak toggle mod -- it was one of the first ones I installed. There's also a nice zoom/telescope mod you might try for MGE, or the ownership detection mod that turns the crosshair red like in Oblivion. Which reset buttom are you talking about for MGE?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hmm I'll be careful once I go into that quest line then.

    A reset button like "oh damn I screw everything up *presses button and all is back to original settings*"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, I haven't needed a reset button like that, but I'm reasonably confident that if everything goes wrong you can uninstall MGE and everything should go back to normal. :)

    Oh, and don't worry too much about the quest. When I say it was "broken" I just mean that it assumed that I already knew where I should go next, and I just had to look up the quest on UESP to find the answer.

    ReplyDelete