If you hated College of Winterhold quests, you'll hate the Companions even more.
If you haven't, start the Dark Brotherhood quests instead.
What I hated about them really wasn't the actual quests themselves, they were standard 'go to dungeon Y, find X', but were interesting dungeons at least, it was more the complete lack of explanations behind the entire thing.
I mean the entire quest line could be summed up as
- Lookit! We found this big magic orb!
Hello, I am a mysterious mage from a mysterious order, goodbye.
Here, go find out where we can get a magic item to uncover the secrets of this magic orb.
I am the blatantly evil character and I have seized control of the magic orb.
Go get the magic item to control the magic orb!
Use the magic item to defeat the evil character and retake the magic orb!
Hello, we are mysterious mages from a mysterious order, we are taking the orb, goodbye.
And there, that's pretty much it, you get absolutely no more explanation behind what the Eye was, and what the Psiijics wanted with it. As bad as Oblivion's Mages' Guild questline was, at least you knew who Mannimarco was, what he wanted and had lots of ingame books about him no less as opposed to just being told 'ah, Elves and Men fought over this during the sacking of the city' and nothing more.
The Dark Brotherhood quests I've done, they were good, but the actual side-assassinations themselves were underwhelming. I guess I'll probably just take a break from Skyrim, come back when there's some more mods to play.
Comeon, the Thalmor had one universal trait of indignant occupying Nazis. The Nords clearly had more personality than them.
And bullshit I have not once heard a villager in Morrowind go "Dang there sure are some smuggler problems, better hire some dude from the Fighters Guild to deal with it." or "Man, the Telvanni are fucking crazy". I do share the feeling that each faction and area is too isolated from one another, but I can't really say the factions themselves were much better in that respect in previous games.
I get the feeling that the factions in Morrowind worked was because there were skill limits. You could not advance in rank unless you had a certain level of some relevant skill. Some skills were pretty slow in leveling too, so 90% of the time you completed a quest you would have to piss off somewhere and do something else before you could get another quest. It was frustrating and inconvenient and made the pacing really good because you did feel like some newbie joining some snobish ranks. It also meant you couldn't power through all the quests in the faction quest line. That pacing feels more like the cause of the problems here.
And the inherent problems with trying to make the plot more dynamic involving moving and speaking actors interacting with eachother and more extensive speech options, but that seems secondary to my main theory.
I'm just a sucker for compliments and that Thalmor guy in Markarth is full of them, 'There are so few pleasures in life as fine as your company'
. To be fair to the Thalmor, there's only like 4 of them ingame that you actually interact with, apart from random soldiers, but yeah I was over-exaggerating with that point, but really the point still stands, 3/4s of the Nords are just 'I like mead and fights, I hate milk and magic' and that's pretty much the basic personality template for most Nords, whereas I really think Bethesda could have fleshed out the Nords as a much more varied race as opposed to just 'Vikings'.
The factions in Morrowind (and also Oblivion) did actually feel like they were part of the world as a whole though, as opposed to Skyrim's factions. I mean, you leave Whiterun and you'll never hear the Companions' mentioned again apart from if a guard randomly mumbles a reference, same thing with the College when you leave Winterhold. I mean, in Morrowind whole sections of the island were under control of the various factions, you found temples in most big cities, shrines in the wilderness, mages' and fighters guilds in the cities, and even when you left, for example, the Telvanni lands, the faction was still mentioned by people here and there, and you still met people from the faction in various places.
And yeah, the skill limits in factions were definitely something that really worked in Morrowind and that they should have kept. It made becoming archmage/grandmaster/grandpoobah/etc actually take time and skills as opposed to 'hi, I don't know any spells except the ones I was taught just now, but in three days I'll be archmage.'
So yeah, I'm not saying Skyrim is a bad game or that it's a classic case of 'MORROWIND IS SOOOO MUCH BETTERRRR', it's just the factions are really...underwhelming and the setting, while visually nice, could really have had more work put into its actual content and backstory.
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Topic: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Read 1600633 times)