The first Bethesda game I bought was Fallout 3. I also bought Oblivion and Fallout: New Vegas. I'm about to buy Skyrim and go all fus ro dah on this gorgeous looking game world.

Here's my problem: I've never finished a Bethesda game. I love the early stages, then after a while the story just seems to fall apart for me, and I can't figure out why my character is doing what he's doing any more. Is that a problem that anybody else has experienced, and if so, how do you overcome it? To avoid it happening in Skyrim I'm thinking of just sticking exclusively to the main quest, but it sounds like I'll be robbing myself of much of the content that way. Can anybody give me some advice?

Play the game how you want to play it for as long as you want to play it. If you enjoy it to a certain point then you fizzle off, who cares if you finish if you had fun?

Never play a Bethesda game (Mainly TES games and Fallout) by ONLY doing the main story line. There are hundreds of quests and guilds to join, and optional stuff you can do when you are bored in a huge open world. The main quest line isn't that large either. I wouldn't dare write this, but the main story is as long as the singleplayer campaign in CoD or any other shooting game in that magnitude.

I think the side quests are kind of the problem. Like, once a character has risen to the top of the thieves guild (which is presumably a full time gig), why ever go adventuring? I just kind of lose a sense of who the character is and then I lose interest in the game.

Walk in a random direction. You'll find tons of stuff to do

You may be losing your character because your taking on way too much.

This can be a problem for me also. As of right now I have about 10 quests I'm workin on, it was 40ish. That was too many and I started to lose a sense of what I was doing. I started to think about it and I decided that I would role play more than I was and actually decline quests if I though he wouldn't want to do them. This is working great for me. If you got lost in oblivion and fallout then Skyrim will be a huge challenge for you to overcome. Just do what I'm doing and don't take on every side quest. Also do not miss out on this gamer because you think it'll be to complicated. Complicated or not it's amazing and you should have plenty hours of fun and adventure. So stop reading the forums and grab it from steam or go out and get it lol. You will NOT regret it. I promise. Now let me go play some more of Skyrim.

Thanks Snake. Puppets is a great album.