I don't know who worked on the Winterhold quest line... if it was the same person who worked on the Mage's Guild quest line from Oblivion (which also svcked)... it's about time he/she was fired (while in no case should any harm befall him/her).

While I could design a better video game narrative in my sleep, I will provide some constructive criticism here.

There are many many problems with the quest-line...
1. Hand-holding, linear, and scripted - the quest line is completely linear, completely hand-holding, and overly scripted - there is no room for player involvement or auto-motivation, everything is obvious and apparent - ONE WORD: BORING

- How to Fix: Give the player general directives or simply nudge him in the right (or wrong) direction: provide opportunities for player initiative; allow him to provide his own character motivations and to piece together the pieces of narrative puzzle on his own, fracture the narrative into pieces among time, locations, and people.

2. Tries too hard to be "epic": ONE WORD: TRITE

- How to Fix: There is a place for "epic" in role playing games... but it is not right at the start, and it is not continuous: the word you are looking for is PACING - when it comes to narratives, intrigue and human drama trump "epic" every time. This industry-wide love affair with "epic" will end soon (hopefully), and you'll all look back on how idiotic it made many of your games. Epicness is earned from player interaction, not dumped on him.

3. Dungeons are too long/big: ONE WORD: DRAGGING: narrative density is too light, there is too much padding: when you go in a dungeon level 10, you should not be coming out level 15 after two hours of repetitive fighting with no narrative or setting development

- How to Fix: Option 1: make the dungeon shorter
Option 2: create a denser narrative (or include many "mini-narratives" that unfold throughout dungeon or throughout course of main arc.

4. Character development centralized, disconnected from quest-line: Buying books from a person is a really boring way to develop a character

- How to Fix: Tie character development (spell acquisition, etc.) to quests and world design. That awesome reanimate dragon spell you have? Would be a lot cooler (and "epic"), if instead of buying it from some guy, you had to hunt down and kill a lich for it. etc.


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Here's a quest line I might design (right off the top of my head)...

1. You arrive at Winterhold to discover that it's completely abandoned except for an old groundskeeper. You talk to the groundskeeper, and convince him to let you in. He tells you what happened (mage's conflict and destruction of Winterhold resulted in the wholesale abandonment of the college by all the members, who went their separate ways). Then you have free reign to explore certain parts of the college. It's essentially empty and cobwebbed, etc. The library is empty, etc. In one of the rooms you come across a journal that mentions where one of the mages might have gone.

2. Following the journal, you arrive at some other location, and ask around for the mage, following a trail of weird happenings, etc. till you finally find him.

3. He, of course, wants nothing to do with you, so you must find some way to convince him to teach you. Eventually, you convince him to attempt to reform the college.

4. He gives you a few leads you could follow on how to find the other previous members of the college, as well as some new leads.

5. Then you are free to go out and try to convince these wizards etc. to come back to the college, going all over Skyrim, and dealing with plenty of interesting situations that either the mages put you in or that the mages themselves got into. Meanwhile you have to figure out what originally led to the dissolution of the college, and how to reconcile the previous members. As you convince each mage they teach you spells and provide training, etc.

6. Once you have gathered enough members, you can re-open the college, and begin to help clean it out (from all of the nasty things infesting it), and help to rebuild it... find students, re-stock the library, etc. Meanwhile, you get a new trailing quests from the various members you have brought together.

7. Everything seems to be going fine until conflict breaks out again and a giant mage battle takes place within the college, and you must help protect the students and figure out how to deal with it.

8. Having dealt with the final conflict, you can become Archmage or pass the position on to someone else.

9. Getting to archmage is only half the quest line however, once archmage, your presence is desired at the kings palace... where you are called on to deal with and solve several magical threats to the kingdom... and you can either deal with them personally, or assign members of the college to do so (with varying success).

etc. etc.

In any case.

QED.

I loved that questline. I got awesome rewards for completing it and I had no bugs with it. It was also very fun and challenging!

Still disagree with you. I didn't feel like it was trying to be epic, I feel like it was epic. And I think the main dungeon you go through for that quest should be long. There are plenty of short little side dungeons in the game, but for the guild quest lines a nice long crawl is good sometimes. I don't think I would enjoy your alternate proposal as much. It mostly sounds like a lot of running around to the far reaches of Skyrim. They've done quests like that in previous TES games, and they weren't fun in practice because they felt like they were artificially lengthened via travel time. I'd much rather go through a long dungeon delve than run all over the world map just to talk to a bunch of mage trainers. As for development through spell tomes... that's not really anything to do with the quest line, it's more an issue you seem to have with the game's magic system in general.

I think the quests need to be more mage like, not just warrior like with some evil wizards in the dungeons, i wanted to actually learn and test magic since it is a college and i think they should do something more creative for mage quests, also the dungeons were WAY too long.

This. I thought it was great; a massive improvement on Oblivion.

I thought it was way too abrupt for a roleplaying game. I suppose it works if your character is already a well-travelled mage, but for a level 3 character who is actually go there to learn... well, lets just say becoming Arch-Mage within two weeks of joining while most of the College can burp better magic than I can cast didn't exactly feel like a winning questline. It didn't help that the test to get in, the practicing a ward with other students, and first bit of going tot he ruins started so promisingly. After that the game assumes you are Merlin or something. I'm just hoping the other Faction quests arn't so abrupt. Its really worried me.

Dude, you have to kill a Dragon Priest to finish it. If you manage that, you are merlin. They're the hardest enemies in the game. At least before 30.

It's an improvement on Oblivion, but it's still not great. I'm inclined to agree with you on one aspect: pacing. You're simply thrown into an epic adventure, with very little build up. It feels like, as a low level character, the game expects you to be some sort of well-traveled, high leveled Mage with numerous years of experience. It was the same problem as Oblivion, where you rose above the rank of your fellow Apprentices in less than an in-game day.

Like I said, it's better than the Mages Guild in Oblivion, but it still leaves a lot to be desired.

True enough, but the point is from a story POV you have to complete the quest when its given, because a certain Thalmor isn't going to sit around his glowing orb waiting for six months while you you train to 'eye of the tiger'. The entire point is the pacing svcks, and it is made too 'urgent'.



Y'know... i'm horrified but this questline makes me actually have to defend the Oblivion questline. At least in Oblivion you ahd to get reccomendations from each and every Guildhall, while learning more magic as you went. Then, you started off killing lowly Necromancers. For all its faults the pacing was a bit better.

The guy is right..

There are what? 12-15 members in the college. Including the young students.
Second quest of the line you get sent to find some books..

The dungeon turns out to be some kind of a training ground for rogue mages..
When you finally appear on the other side your body count has gone up by 25!!
That's double the members of your college..

In ONE DUNGEON!!

Talk about forced..

The funny thing is that the College of Winterhold has the best questline out of all the guilds

I completely agree with you Rindill and Alixen, and as Morrowind player I would like to add that I was even also extremely disappointed with the Dwemer ruin (I won't give names to avoid spoilers).

It's a ruin that we know from a quest in the Mage's guild in Morrowind, we also had to discover the reason of the disappearance of the dwemer then, so I had a lot of expectations about that part of the quest.
From the outside it looked like it would be as awesome as I though but in fact it's the worst ruin I saw in the whole game so far.
I expected some new interesting lore about the dwemer, or some items or books to hint at some quest where I could learn more about them and I got none of it.

It's too long, doesn't have anything interesting in it, no background, badly designed, it's supposed to be a city not a very long corridor with one or two rooms.
Part of it isn't even dwemer and no explanation about how it came to be.
Honestly half through it I just wanted it done and was dying of boredom.

I know that when I'll do a new game in the future I just will skip that guild just to avoid having to go through it again.

? Am I the only one that experienced a completely different (but still poorly done and very short) quest line?

1. Arrive at College of Winterhold, person asks you to demonstrate a spell to be allowed entry.
2. Get tour of the College and attend a class about Ward spells.
3. Professor asks the class to meet at Saarthinal (?) Ruins.
4. You find a powerful ancient artifact there. (Eye of Magnus)
5. Bring it back to the College, Archmage asks you to find out more about the Eye.
6. You find some weird magical being underneath the college who warns you the artifact is very dangerous and you need to find the Staff of Magnus before something goes wrong.
7. Some research leads you to Dwemer ruins somewhere, you find a dude there who tells you that the Staff is at Labyrynthian.
8. Retrieve Staff from Labyrnythian after killing a Dragon Priest.
9. Bring it back to College, use it to defeat evil dude within the College whos trying to use the Eye to blow up the world or some [censored].
10. Become Arch Mage

I just became Arch Mage, are there any perks for it? In Oblivion you had the chest that would multiply alchemy ingredients, and you could have a fellow mage go along with you. I haven't really found anything like that

It does not svck. i actually liked it.

You get a bed, the great robes and a room/garden with respawnable alchemy reagents. It's better than what you get from the companions which was a pat on the back.


My only problem with the questline was that it was just too short.

Didn't think the quest series was that great, but tbh your version sounded worse and very cliche, I do agree they tried to over epic it and that it could have done with a continuation after becoming archmage.

I think the only things needed to make this quest line awesome are:
A.) At the beginning, force the player to do some radiant story quests for each of the teachers at the College, giving you a "training" feel. (Preferably before going to Saarthal)
B.) Actually give you information about [censored] like the Eye of Magnus and the Staff of Magnus and maybe even Magnus himself.

What it lacks is a build up and a feeling of accomplishment, but I never really felt the accomplishment since outside of evil dude tapping in to the eye, I never knew what exactly it would do. Everyone else seems to know, but I don't. Also, the Thalmor robes straight up svck but no way in Hell I want to wear any other robes since they're way more suave looking than the ragged archmage robes. Who knows, though, maybe I'll find an unenchanted set of Thalmor robes.

The story was awful, just terrible.

You had no motivation and no clue what was going on.
Arrive at college.
Join college.
Get sent on some fetch quests and through a miracle survive.
Become head of order even though youve barely been there a week and there are more senior members, and have no clue what is going on

No idea what the eye did, no idea why everyone wanted it.
No idea what the staff was for.

Very unstatisfying, you cant pull a narrative like that on any tv show so why should it be ok in a game?

To be fair, playing the questline itself was fun.
The dungeon crawls were awesome.

But I dont see why we cant have both excellent dungeon crawls and a story without giant deus ex machina's everywhere and with some decent character motivation and explanations on why on Nirn everyone wanted that eye, or what it even was.

It was pretty awesome I think. The only annoying part (and even then it was just annoying because I svcked at it) was GOD. DAMN. MOROKEI. Loving his helmet though.

Just to be clear, the two 'Enthralled Mages' were Savos' friends that he trapped there to stop Morokei right?

Yeah, that's what I'm assuming them enthralled mages were. Took me like 5 tries to bring down Morokei, and I only managed it due to Equilibrium + Healing hijinks to restore my mana as I fired lightning bolts wildly from behind cover.

2 of those tries ended due to me not watching my healthbar while casting Equilibrium. It's officially my favorite spell ever.

Until you find out that magicka regeneration bonuses do not work when in combat, the helm and robes do indeed seem nifty.

Im hoping its a bug and not by design.
Try it out, it gets really noticable on higher magicka pools and with a decent bonus, such as of the mages questline.

Try to empty your bar on your last kill to make it really noticable.
As soon as he is dead, refill rate more than doubles.
But when in combat, magicka regeneration bonus does not work.

I thing the pacing of the questline definitely does leave a bit to be desired. You go from a rather Harry Potter-esque "let's learn how to cast a basic ward, children" class to the discovery of an artifact that can eat the world, without much build-up in between.

What really annoys me is how little flavor and ceremony there is to being Archmage once you win... you'd think someone might occasionally mention it in conversation. Hell, the court wizard in Whiterun keeps saying things like "I thought I had you pegged for a mage" and "you should consider joining the College in Winterhold!" And in-game I've been his boss for WEEKS.

The story was okay, the main issue is that it's ridiculously short. I mean, seriously, 8 quests and you're Archmage? I barely arrived there and they think I should be Archmage? It made no sense to me. Oblivion's Mages' Guild had 19 quests in its main line. What's with the reduction?

I havent done the mages guild quest yet but I totally agree that quests are boring and linear. Done thieves guild and companion quests so far and they have bored me half to death. They dont make me even remotely motivated to find out what is happening or even to care the slightest about the characters in them. Its always the same dungeon crawler with the same enemies and no reward at the end, not counting a few weapons. I am a hardcoe rpg fan and I always complete everything even if I don't find it amusing. But so far im thinking Skyrim might be the exception.