i'm not too keen on this idea of being roped into an alternative questline (i.e. college of winterhold), even if it's a short departure, just to advance the dawnguard questline. also, i recognize that the dawnguard questline isn't the first quest in the game to employ quest-crossing, there were many others which had you starting other questlines in order to finish a previous one. i don't know what the devs were thinking by having us criss-cross questlines, canvassing alternating storylines. personally, i find it distracting. perhaps they wanted to indulge a particular theme or character, but the end result comes across as a poorly designed... strike that, a poorly engineered narrative, with small, interchangeable story beats-which usually results in a character vomiting more exposition into my lap. thanks. the last thing a game like this needs are new ways to incorporate more tedium into the mix.

i feel the same, i always feel out of place as a nord warrior having to cast a spell to prove i have what it takes to be allowed into the college

Dovetailing quests are mainly there so that you don't have to search too hard to find new quests for your journal. I agree though that they can be unhelpful for role-playing, and in the specific case of Dawnguard there is an annoyingly time-consuming example.

it's because their design philosophy has moved into the assumption that you want to do everything in the game on a single playthrough and be a jack of all trades. And that if they don't push you into questlines you're too stupid to discover them for yourself. They axed classes and assumed that therefore nobody would want to roleplay a class. You are now playing a linear action adventure game set in an open world where you choose the order of quests, not an RPG.

y r u going there in the first place i just go to the carriage outside of windhelm and ask him if he has seen the moth priest

you have to go there to start serching for

no you don't just go to the northern ice fields and speak to the old man

how did you find him if not threw the college?

you tube

i thought that too, and was quickly relieved when i discovered i didn't have to "engage" the mage's questline to get around that objective. doesn't matter, you're thrust into it regardless.

The irony here is... you don't have to pick up the college questline... but when devs see that people follow linear paths that don't even exist, they figure why bother with putting in the alternative paths?

You're complaining about a forced path that you made for yourself.
There's always another path, Bethesda reward players who are thorough.

You didn't give the game enough credit, you made an assumption and this is the reason why games will continue to lose depth, because people don't bother to search for the alternative path.

Bioware (I think) once made the observation that 80% of players never see everything a game has to offer... so why bother putting all that stuff in if the majority of your audience are too impatient or uninterested to find it?

So either cut content nobody will see or spoonfeed it to them... either way games suffer.

OP thinks he is complaining about a problem but he is in fact contributing to the cause of games becoming more simplistic...
Considering the amount of posts complaining about this exact topic, Beth could be forgiven for thinking "why did we even bother to put in the sidestep around the college quest? The vast majority didn't manage to find it."

So in the next game... they don't bother.

i'm hardly "contributing to the cause of games becoming more simplistic." you give me far too much credit if you think i could spearhead that operation by virtue of this topic alone. and speaking of credit, am i not giving the game enough credit, or are you just giving the game far too much? at this point, i'd much rather be labeled the cynic given people's tendency to wear the blindfold. and videogames have never been that complex, so don't even start that reductionistic b.s., accusing the criticism.

and furthermore, i'm all for exploration and discovery (undermined by many of the in-game mechanics and nav markers), but not as a result of misinformation and sloppy plotting. and it's not for any lack of trying that i haven't made it that far in the dawnguard questline, i'm simply not eager to pursue this particular quest given the fact i already know what a royal pain in the ass it will be to complete. i have four characters with well over five hundred hours between them. there is very little in this game i have not already seen, a few dozen times over, so there isn't much nuance in this game that escapes me. just poor design choices i tend to overlook. which i do, not just for my own benefit, but for the benefit of the series. i guess i am a bit of a martyr in that regard.

also, your comment about "cutting content," i'm not sure what the implication was behind that. if you're assuming that the creators would withhold in-game "content," or at least severely limit the potential to put out an overwhelming amount of content that it would be too dizzying for some people to handle, i would say that's a good instinct to possess as a developer. it's mindless nonsense until it's been hewed through a thought process, which is the "design" part in producing a game. i tend to think that's more important than just spraying out more content for content's sake, but hey, what do i know...

regardless, on a more practical side, please indulge me this "alternate" path to obtain the elder scroll (dragon) in the dawnguard questline. maybe i haven't been thorough enough, but everyone i have spoken with have all indicated the next step lies at the college of winterhold, to which i need to admit myself, thus starting the mage's questline. EDIT: the deadric path is more direct, granted, but it's still a pretty lazy way to go about adding new content, especially since the dawnguard storyline insists on borrowing from old content.


"Considering the amount of posts complaining about this exact topic, Beth could be forgiven for thinking "why did we even bother to put in the sidestep around the college quest? The vast majority didn't manage to find it."So in the next game... they don't bother."

i wish they hadn't bothered! it was a cheap move to extend the dawnguard storyline, "sidesteps" or not.

Is it possible to have this discussion without revealing the plot/missions/spoilers?

Because I think it's an interesting point to raise, but some of you need to watch the information you're posting in the General Discussion forum...

well... i'm not sure how much of a spoiler it is to say that one questline crosses paths with another. i'm not being sarcastic, i really have no sense of these things. i figure as long as i don't go into much detail concerning the plot and characters, i'm relatively safe.

I agree, we following the quest marker is usually easier, it's definitely not always the only way to go, but people don't always seem to acknowledge that. And to the OP, just go strait to septimus signus at his outpost. No college entry needed.

i know what you're saying, but how does that change my original point, whether it be the mage's questline or a daedric questline? they both are blatant in their intended function. they're both interchangeable fetch quests, tacked on to add-on content in order to extend the storyline. lazy either way.

You don't have to go to the College. Don't know where everyone gets this idea from.

Investigating a near by cave, after breaking out of jail in Winterhold. The Chill's farther out than Septimus' cave. The first time I found him, & went after the Elder Scroll, I didn't even know it was part of the main story.

A few too many spoilers here imo

If you are going to mention


It'd be nice if it were spoiler tagged.

Past that, I do agree with OP. The number of times in the game where they try to nudge you into doing everything is very annoying.


The issue is made worse by the fact we don't really have a true journal anymore. Our quest objectives point us exactly where we need to be and don't give us any clue about any alternatives. In Morrowind, you had clues over the choices you had through dialogue and journal entries. If you want to


You either have to get lucky through exploration or google yourself some spoilers, there isn't any journal entry saying "But perhaps I won't need to join the guild, I may be able to find another way in". Its just bad design, plain and simple. Hopefully its one they do not stick with in the future.

So...bypass it.

There's talk of a crazy man out on the ice flows that knows more than the silly college about the scrolls.

I bypassed it.

You're such a downer...

I see your point, however.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LTsvOHq3xc

I agree, I roleplay my characters to only do certain quest lines. ie Mage > College of Winterhold, Thief > Thieve's Guild, Evil Morality > Dark Brotherhood, etc.

However, you don't have to go to the college, luckily. You can go straight to...


and get the quest from him. You can do this at level 1, I'm pretty sure, without ever even finding out that you're the Dragonborn.

There are (almost) always different ways about going through quests that you won't be told through the quest log. For example, during the Blood on the Ice quest:


The one thing that really bothers me, though are two quest in particular where this is unavoidable. The Jewels of Barenziah quests and the Dragon Priest masks. Both of these require you to dabble into every single faction, which breaks RP for me.

Also, this needs to be moved to the spoiler section, I will go get a mod.

No you don't the college could be deleted from the gamefiles and you could still find the elderscroll, and its not like your even required to do a single solitary quest for the Mage Guild inorder to talk to the librarian.

An OCD where if an unfinished quest is in their journal they suffer horrible headaches.

Hmm, seems like no mods are currently on.