User blog comment:Madman97/You know what really grinds my Wabbajack's? S3E1: I can't kill these guys/@comment-25109952-20131025182427/@comment-13446185-20131106030419

Draevan, first of all if they didn't want the NPCs to be essential, they wouldn't have put that setting in the game. You wouldn't just make a setting for NPCs that you wouldn't use, it is obvious that Bethesda wanted certain NPCs to be unkillable.

Second of all I never said that I believe in some casual gamer conspiracy. The fact that Bethesda set NPCs to essential when they could have had them protected shows that Bethesda didn't trust that all gamers will take the game seriously. The whole essential NPC business was made by Bethesda for players who just want to run around and kill shit, so that they wouldn't ruin there entire game. These players fit into the label "casual gamer".

It's not that I think TES is necessarily dumbing down, it is that essential NPCs was made for the casual gamer.