Yeah, it had a lot of them.
I really felt the characters, their motivations, and their troubles. I think a lot of the characters had very coherent arcs and the story enriched their personalities while their personalities weren't wholly reliant on stories. I really was interested in the character of Ulfric Stormcloak and his character from his past to his death with all the contradictions thereof.
Is there any specifics you want me to comment on?
Seriously, I could talk about my favorite characters and arcs from the game all day. Make a top ten list of favorite skyrim NPCs and stories and places if you want.
You don't have to be specific, at least not for me, I played the game.
And I think most of the NPCs in the game are shallow, boring and replacable. Even the few things you can get with Ulfric and the handfull of other NPCs that actually have more than just 2 or 3 lines of interest, sadly do not show enough expression to really give me some kind of 'emotional' reaction, most of what they say is simply to formulaic, to much of a cliche.
The things that made games like Plansecape interesting for me, was that you could have ACTUALL conversations in the game, about the game-world, the NPCs, their beliefs and discussing a lot of topics that have zero to do with you or the quests, making the characters feel real and believable.
Mr.Btongue talks about this in great detail here, with the question of, "what do they eat?"
This is something that Mass Effect 1 did a lot better for example, it's simply the way how the game allows you to explore, like the lore, the world and the narrative trough the conversations that you can have. Skyrim has almost none of that, and the few times where you get it, are very small, to small. Ulfric and Balgruuf have potential, yes, but that's all they have, just potential. You simply never have a real conversation with them.
"As wide like an ocean as shallow like a puddle", this describes Skyrim, the NPCs and locations best, in my opinion.
I even would argue that Morrowind did a much better job, with its boring wiki-like dialog format when it comes to NPCs, but that doesn't seem to resonate very well with the current lead at Bethesda - and a lot of
casuals, for the lack of better words. Admittedly, the text and its presentation was quite overwhelming in Morrowind, up the point where it becomes yeah, downright boring and the player would not have 'real' dialoges with the characters but enter in monologues. However, it still gave me more of a feeling that I was 'exploring' a narrative here compared to Skyrim, which was the other extreme if you want so, where you don't get enough exposure and chances to ACTUALLY engange in no clue, 'useless' chatter, back story, lore etc. Something that I also enjoyed a lot in the Witcher 1, which gave you a lot of oportunities to engage in lore, informations and NPCs that had not necessarily a purpose or advancing the story/narrative, their role was purely to make the world 'lively'. No character in Skyrim ever gave me the same feeling like Zoltan, Shani or Triss, just to name a few as there are plenty more.
Another issue I had with the NPCs of Skyrim, was consistency, like how we discussed a few pages back, you simply can't fail with any of the NPCs. The world is so sureal when it comes to this, like as it was made of plastic, and the same is true for ALL of the NPCs. And this goes way beyond the immortal NPCs that you can't kill, Skyrim isn't the first game that did this and it's definetly not the worst mechanic in my opinion. What is far worse if you ask me, is that you simply can't anger NPCs, to the point where they downright refuse to do ANY kind of business with you. And no matter how well a character is written or how great he his, if you don't have at least the 'choice' to seriously piss him off, they simply feel like unreal dolls, at least to me.
A big difference to Plansecape for example, or even Baldurs Gate, where characters would leave your party and even attack you, if you provoked them to much, making them feel much more believable and like an actuall part of the world.
