Some of the comments here about not doing guild quests that don't fit your character are just ridiculous, you people are telling others hey it's fine skip great big chunks of the game, it's fine there's no problem with them forcing you against your RP. You are actually telling people not to play the game!!

Take this character a goodie two shoes warrior - no Dark brotherhood (obvious), no Thieves guild (same), no Mages guild (don't cast spells), I can do Companions (Oh wait I have to become a Werewolf so no to this one too), no Vampires (obvious), Dawnguard (maybe the only one, but wait I have to help out Serana when I should kill her), so whats that make it 0/6.

You might aswell forget all dialouge toggle god mode and play it like a first person shooter.

If thats how someone wants to play, its none of your buisness.

There is no RP reason for a "goody two shoes" warrior to change. Infact becoming a vampire accidentally from infection during combat can easily RP'ed in to an alignment shift towards evil acts. The DG makes perfect sense either in you wanting to become a lord or getting "revenge" for the infection. Seriously if you are crap at RP'ing its not the games fault.

I would have to agree with the rating...Dawnguard added a niche component to the overall game, and as extensive as it was in that it certainly didn't add a lot to the rest of the game environment, with the downside that once you installed it, you had to act on it or pay the price via town attacks etc.

That said, the issue of bugs, questline conflicts and marginalised options really is unforgiveable in what was essentially a flag dlc for the game. In view of the pre-dlc hype from Beth, that there would be "...less dlc, but with more content...", I would rate this as a fail on Beth's part, both in actual fact (Dawnguard does not compare with any of the F3 or FNV dlc's content or storyline wise), or as a public relations exercise (do you trust them or are they bs'ing us again for sales?).

With Hearthfire, I think it would be safe to say that Beth is moving into an era of marginalised/specialised dlc's, rather than broad based additions to their games, not so much expanding the base games, but simply adding optional niche bits to them...that may not be a good thing for us, and it certainly may not be worth the price of such dlc.

What you are doing is not role-playing. You are playing a character that 'magically' changes it's entire drive in life (fake that it is) to fit the situation they are in. Your characters are in fact delusional. That's not good role-playing. Sorry.

Differences of opinion I guess. If you are having fun with it then you win.

But if your character is that against lycanthropy, why would you even want to look at her again, let alone talk to her, have her teach you, or follow you around? Why would your character want to continue associating with those mongrels once you learned what they are and what they require of you? In all honesty, your character should be thankful they let you out of the Underforge at all once they made the offer.

Not every character has to do everything, especially if you're role-playing. If you really can't come up with a good reason for your character to go through the guild quesline, there's plenty to do outside of them until you make another character that's less focused on role-play or is less against what happens in the guild.

That's up to how good you can role-play. A role-play needn't be a static adventure, "this is my character and he's going to do this and this and this, and nothing that happens in the game will make me deviate". You can of course play that way if you want, but I find I get much more out of role-playing and the game in general if I just let my character's story tell itself.

I make the character, define their personality, wants, and needs, then start the game. Nothing's set in stone, what happens in the game drives what my character decides to do next. A good guy works through the Companions and finds out their secret? Maybe this changes his perception of that secret, thinking it not as bad as it first seemed, or maybe this steels him and causes him to leave, vowing to attack them if he ever sees them alone and strengthening his vow against "evil", or maybe he feels entrapped and begrudgingly goes through with it as it lowers his opinion of those involved (and then may or may not change him in any number of ways as he experiences it first-hand).

That character is glad to leave the Companions. Never said he wasn't. I was only listing what 'I' am now missing from the game. What I would like to do with this character is join the Silver-Hand and purify the Companions. Too bad I can't.

Indeed. On the PC there is a mod being made for that, though.

You have obviously never done any real RP'ing then if thats your view. In any AD&D game merely mentioning an act outwith your alignment can give the GM licence to change your characters alignment right there and then with potentially disasterous repocussions that you the player have to deal with and suffer through. For instance a "lawful good" cleric who refuses to heal a "chaotic evil" character (even for a good reason) can instantly lose all his spells and lose favour of his god right there and then because its an aligment shift away from the core "good" to "neutral". Same cleric bitten by a vampire or accidently infected during combat can have his aligment shifted instantly to chaotic neutral/evil, again losing favour of his god and spell casting resulting in a journey either towards the dark gods favour or in a quest for redemption in the eyes of their original god. Hell go read a Dragonlance novel for god sake, the main protaganist (tanis) changes alignment several times in the novels going against his better nature. THATS roleplaying.

You are not RP'ing, you are using the premis of Rp'in as a crutch to complain about non-issues. RP'ing is not a straight jacket that stakes a character to one path and one path only. GOOD Rp'ing is about adapting to challenges the character faces within his/her world, this means a character develops and evolves a story of his or her own that is unique to that playthrough. BAD Rp'ing is using the premis yet failing to actually bother to grow the characters personality or reason for even being, and then complaining that your forced down a single path when you have multiple path options at hand.

A goody two shoes character would go and get cured straight away - that's good roleplaying. What you are doing is deluding yourself into believing that by making excuses up for Bethesda's poor restrictive quest lines and molding your character around that is somehow good at roleplaying. No you are the one who needs to find out what good roleplaying is and what the word apologist means.


Thats it leave it upto the modding community to fix it up again.


And you are apologizing for Bethesda's restrictive quests and trying to hide it by putting down anyone who begs to differ with you on the subject by making attacks on them. If the quests weren't so restrictive you could leave Aela in the chamber and the moment you walked out the door a quest failed pops up and the essential flag comes off the whole of the Companions.
Even in the radiant Vampire quests you are the new lord but you can't tell quest givers no I don't want to do that. No you are forced to take it and do it, if you ever want another radiant quest instead. Yikes that might have even given people an easyway to get around the Vingalmo bug.

Better to have modders implement new quests than new gameplay systems. It took Oblivion close to 4 or 5 years to get playable lycanthropy modded in a usable way, and even now it's still not near the quality of Bloodmoon or Skyrim. On the flip side, Oblivion has plenty of quest mods that meet or exceed the quality of the vanilla quests.

played dg on pc,havent had bugs to speak of.
the vamps attacking towns things not been a problem,just killed 'em all.not lost a usefull npc yet.

i think the quests are a bit restrictive in the 'you must do' department and the price is a tad steep but the extra content is worth it.
im thankful they've at least released expansions (for most of us).

especially after the pc modders get their hands on it and turn it into something brilliant! cheers

You may as well say that your COD character could be a pacifist but then he joins the army because he has no money and re-evaluates his pacifism when people start shooting at him. Therefore, COD is a roleplaying game.

All you're doing is concocting rationalisations for being railroaded by the game. You are attempting to roleplay, but in the context of a game that doesn't care about roleplaying and isn't motivated to facilitate it. Skyrim is horribly linear - the choice is do quest/don't do quest. In other words, if you wish to roleplay, either engage in mental gymnastics to rationalise out of character actions or neglect content - content that is nevertheless waved in your face by the game because Bethesda assume you want to be a mage/assassin/thief/warrior who is sometimes good and sometimes evil depending on the linear questline. Because Bethesda no longer understand roleplaying and have not made a roleplaying game - they have made an open world action game, with some of the worst writing they have ever produced because storytelling is no longer a priority.

Dawnguard deserves criticism for it's copy/paste fake dual questlines. It's a lazy implementation of a non choice. Why can you still be a vampire lord after joining the Dawnguard? Because Bethesda are operating on the notion of OMG I got super vampire powers that is so awesome as what their game is selling and what it's about. Story is something tagged on to give a reason for stuff to be happening and roleplaying is not what they're bothered with. And as long as people think that's fine, they'll keep moving further in that direction.

Exactly, lack of choice hurts Dawnguard. The questline is better then the main quest but that's not saying much because the main questline was horrible.

honestly skyrim isn't much of a role playing game at all.

To me, a role playing game is not linear. But the ENTIRE game is linear, it can simply be put off and you can customize your character.

It is more like an action adventure to me.

Still kills time but to me what makes a game fun to replay is all the different possible outcomes.

Someone (and I won't say who, I might PM you though) on these forums said that choices are IMMERSHUN-BREAKING.

Now who the hell would think choices are immersion breaking?

You can choose to do a quest or not! Or, even better, you can imagine more choices! ... (sarcasm).

But seriously, I have to agree. The branching, choice and consequence is really what makes quests interesting. If Skyrim had a much lesser amount of boring, monotonous, radiant, fetch quests and replaced them with a smaller amount of really great, thought-provoking quests that have a great amount of choice and consequence, it would be amazing.

Or I can just uninstall Skyrim and settle for pure imagination. That would give me all the choices I could ever want!

They don't even need to provide us with multiple choices, two or three are enough. But for Talos sake, give us these two! And not "do it or leave it" attitude everyone has... Molag Bal's quest was particularly painful. My character was a Champion of Boethiah and she refused to serve Bal, but she didn't even have an option to free the priest. All I could do was to leave him tied and imprisoned for the rest of his life. What kind of writing is this? Would it be so difficult to add a line "Here, let me untie you, you're free to go" and then a pop-up Quest failed?

I won't say due to respect but I'll PM you if you want to.

Its pretty sad as to what constitues a "review" these days. This was nothing but an article expressing this guys opionion as opposed to a critical review. He didn't even mention the werewolf perk tree and abilities, or the vampire perk tree and abilities for that matter. He failed to mention the new weapons and armor added, including dragon bone weapons; failed to mention the new higher level enemies it added; faild to mention the new boat transportation it added.

All he did was [censored] and moan about bugs, which for me, I had no clue what he was talking about most of the time as I experience next to nothing for bugs on either of my playthroughs of Dawnguard. I am not saying dawnguard was exceptional or anything, I'm just commenting on the garbage that passes for "reviews" these days. To be critical you need to discuss all aspects of that you are reviewing, not just the ones that align with the arguements you are making.

I assume you are equally upset about the perfect scores Skyrim was getting despite the many issues it had at release? Heck, the ps3 version was getting great scores even though for many it ran at about 5 to 10 FPS.

I do agree that perhaps the score was a bit low for Dawnguard. However, I think reviewers may be a bit more critical of Bethesda for awhile after they took some heat for ignoring glaring issues with the vanilla game at release.

Agree, as much as I hate to say it, I wish the TES was more like Fallout in this catagory. We need more Choices and Consequences, don't give me the same reward for both sides such as Serana.

I agree. While Fallout 3 didn't have a good a story as NV IMO, it still was pretty decent. Some of the side quests like the fire ant one with the demented scientist was somewhat entertaining. You also had several choices about how to handle that situation. The same is true for some of the other quests as well.

While I enjoyed having the extra levels and enemies, I do think raising the max to 30 was a mistake. You had so many points by later levels that most characters start becoming good at everything. Although I realize some people like that in a game.

Get rid of most of the filler boring Radiant Quests, and provide more gripping factions and side quest stories. Make them have multiple ways of doing things so each game can feel different.

Yeah, i agree with you, I was just being sarcastic. edited now.

Totally agree, with the possible exception of the score being a bit low. If you consider that DG was across three platforms, and one of them still doesn't have it, then really the DLC can only be scored at a top level of 66/100, if we are being fair...okay, that's contentious, and will draw the crabs, but when is a 'release' a 'release' if it isn't actually released due to technical or other problems? I'm a pc'er by the way, but I fully support the console folk in their expectation of what they were told they were getting, and all of us in relation to getting a decent product.

The issue of pre-release hype and marketting is an industry wide curse...a plague on us consumers. Companies want to make money, critics/reviewers etc trust in what they are told by the companies...if they and us are bs'd to, without explanation, then of course there will be a reaction...and more of it is what I say, as it might bring a bit more credibility back to the industry.