Been playing Skyrim for a lot of hours now and just finished Dragonborn for the PC, and it was well enjoyable. I've now reached 326 hours played, which is around 15 days. Heh.

But... without spoiling too much, I feel I must say that Skyrim's storytelling isn't that good, and it's beginning to bother me rather a lot.

A lot of the stories really lack build-up. You get to meet the characters and that's fine, you get an introduction to the problem and that's fine, you run a few meaningless errands as the poster boy and that's fine... and then there's supposed to be this story arc where you're building up reputation and growing your character and getting into a position with enough responsibility to take on the problem.

But this doesn't happen. Instead the problem always becomes suddenly immediately urgent and you have to solve it right away and the story ends.

Only the main story line, the Companions story line and some of the side quests, especially on Solstheim, don't have this problem. The rest of them do. Some of them are outright bizarre, such as being the apprentice at the college, random betrayal, OMFG ARCHMAGE. What happened to the Mage's Guild from Morrowind and, to a lesser extent, Oblivion where I travelled between the great cities and performed tasks for the guild, building up my rank and eventually earning my title? Why was there never more lessons in the great hall? Anything?

It feels like half the story is just missing, plain and simple. There's absolutely no build-up of any kind and it's really disappointing; especially if you start your character with a specific activity in mind for which the game can present you maybe 5 hours of gameplay for, such as the case with mages. And don't even get me started on how nobody but the occasional guard seems to notice anything about who I am. It's just disappointing man.

Dragonborn does it again. The interaction with the Skaal are truly kept to a bare minimum, aren't they? And even more absurdly, the main quest never takes me to almost half of the island and I never get to interact with Rieklings, Werebears, or anything else we all remember so vividly from Soltheim. What the hell?

That's all I wanted off my chest.

Bethesda is great at creating the worlds we play in, not so much the stories that we play through.

Well I don't believe that's the entire truth. They were much better at it in the past.

I dunno. Daggerfall wasn't exactly the most clear and concise story ever. And lets not get started on Fallout 3's plot holes.

Personally, I've liked all the main quests since Morrowind ( I neve played the first three games). The College of Winterhold was the only quest like I had problem with, and my gripes were the same as the OP's. I did not earn the title of Arch Mage, and I feel some of the members of the CoW don't think I did either. I did not expect the quest line to end where it did - I thought that was just the beginning!