It was disappointing. Alduin had no character to him. At least we got to speak with the antagonists in Morrowind and Oblivion...here it's nope...he has nothing to say to us. Also, as usual...the final fight was completely lame. He was probably easier than any of the wild dragons wandering around or the dragon priests....I mean come on!

Either his power and level of threat were greatly exaggerated.....or the team that designed the game completely dropped the ball on designing the battles with him. They couldn't even bother injecting even a little bit of creativity in his combat/encounter design. They just took a standard dragon, scaled its health a little without increasing its damage, gave it a meteor attack that does 0 damage, and called it Alduin.

This just proves once again, that we could have had a better game if Obisidan did the writing/balancing/mechanics, and Beth did the engine/world building.

I totally agree, and what about Esbern. I thought he was supposed to guide you throught the whole main quest?

I completely agree. Very poor ending even for being a bethesda game. Still what to expect, they obviously dont wirte good stories and never have. They make great open worlds to explore and I guess you cant have both.

Well, the topic about roleplay was locked because reached more than 200 posts (weird policy for a forum). So,Ill just paste here my last post over there.

Yesterday I played more two hours with my mage after finishing the main quests. Do you know how many NPCs knew what I have done? Just 2! The old dragon on the top of the mountain (its the epilogue) and the greybeard. Thats it.

No one else, even the Jarl who helped trapping a dragon, even the leaders of factions who sited with me to discuss a truce for me deal with the dragons knew that I saved the world and defeated alduin, the world-eater.

The dialogue option to talk about dragons simple disapear. Cmon. It would not be that hard that at least five-ten NPCs gave me some love after what I did.

Yes, theres a million quests to do.
Yes, theres a million places to explore.
Yes, theres dozens of ways to play your char.

But no, theres no concern about roleplay in this game.

I just finished the main quest as well. So, so disappointed.

Like you guys I was expecting to be received back in Skyrim like a true Nord hero, praised for my valour by the main npcs, showered in awesome loot, and have my name sung aloud on the streets.

So much for this 'living, breathing world' when no one even knows that I saved it.

Extremely disappointed, and can't figure out how the heck Bethesda could drop the ball like that. They seemed so very sure on their epic story ever since day one of the teaser trailer, and all the interviews. And we get this? REALLY?



Bring on the epic DLCs!

The Thalmor want to destroy Man to which they can finally go into godhood again, the dragons being back would easily help that.
Hell, the whole Civil War was probably so more Men would die.

And about how easy it was to kill Alduin at the end:

I decided to experiment a little bit and see what would happen if I lured Alduin closer to the bridge -- specifically, I wanted to see if that would get Tsun involved in the fight. Sure enough, Tsun got pissed off and proceeded to beat the crap out of Alduin until he killed him.

So yeah, they really didn't even need me after all. I'm sure they could've found someone else to shout Clear Skies with them.

I hope this gets Bethesda's attention and they read this thread. The main quest was very disappointing and short, no rewards for beating Alduin, and people don't even acknowledge you for saving the world.

Geez, after reading all of these comments, I would be better off going back and playing my saved games with FO3, FNV, and DAO. Besides, all of my characters are much better looking and so is the armor. I don't know if any of you have noticed, but the cut scenes at the end of a fight are graphically out of sync and don’t even look realistic. No blood splatter or anything. Seriously, I am starting to lose interest in playing PC (or console) games if the developers are going to continue to put out crap.

It seems Bethesda strikes again with absolutely atrocious lore and story that seems like it was written by a third grader.I mean Bethesda owns at making a wide open world with plenty of entertainment, but I feel like my IQ dropped a few points when I saw the ending to the MQ. Still love the game lol

Oblivion had excellent main quest.

the questlines in general are really, REALLY disappointing... i mean, i was expecting AT LEAST oblivion quality writing (which is a low standard) but somehow bethesda has gotten even worse than "evil cult wants to summon satan". the main quest and companions; in the time it took to complete these questlines, i had barely got the 2nd mythic dawn commentaries book, barely defended rats from moutain lions, barely gone to the urshilaku camp, and barely achieved my 2nd promotion in the balmora fighters guild. the conflict was over before it started, and the hyped up mystery of the dragons return ended up just presenting and then never answering itself, assuming that "kill the big bad black dragon" would distract you from it.

you beat alduin, only to find that you cant kill him. so, you go to sovngarde, beat alduin, and... he explodes. what the hell did i do differently? why did we just completely remove all feeling of danger and threat from our main villian right before the final fight? why is any random dragon stronger than their supposed leader? if apparently alduin explodes if he is beaten in sovngarde, why didnt ysmir, olaf one-eye and tsun not just kick his ass a long, long time ago when he apparently ruled skyrim and frequently devoured the souls of the dead from sovngarde?

why did the nords carefully preserve the bones of every dragon they killed? how can alduin resurrect them? what the hell do the blades have to do with anything other than pissing off the greybeards? why is the dog outside falkreath the most developed and likeable character in the entire game?

i wasnt expecting shakespeare, but good god, the swedish guy who voices 80% of the nord population could have written a better main quest. in fact, in the 2 minutes ive been writing this ive come up with a better ending:

when you fight alduin at the throat of the world, he is a super-powered monster with outrageous amounts of health who breathes white-hot death that burns like the sun... needless to say, he will wtfpwn you, dragonrend or otherwise. after the supposed-to-lose fight results in the depletion of your health, paarthunax becomes a big damn hero and svcker punches alduin, then airlifts you to the courtyard at high hrothgar. alduin angrily pursues and kills paarthunax, resulting in a tear-filled crash landing, but alduin is injured and has to retreat. then you go and do the whole "catch dragon, cessation of hostilities" thing, but instead of going to sovngarde right away you fly (and actually get to see the beautiful landscape as you fly over it, thought that would be obvious) to high hrothgar to check in with the greybeards, only to find that alduin and his dragons have attacked it and killed them all, with burning and frozen and fus ro dah'd rubble displaying the epic battle that took place. THEN you go to sovengarde, where instead of 3 random dorks all the dead greybeards are waiting for you, and together you have an epic debate (aka shout battle) with alduin, with everyone breathing fire and frost and calling storms and whirlwind sprinting around... then when you beat him, he doesnt magically explode but motherf***ing SHOR comes out from his hall and deems alduin unworthy to be amongst the great warriors of sovngarde due to his loss against the dragonborn, and then banhammers him to aetherius for his repeated failure to eat the world.

you get a sense of victory, while alduin is still a god and only beaten because YOU proved to the GODS THEMSELVES that he was unfit for duty. oh, and the blades are maybe killed killed at high hrothgar too, seeing as they serve no real purpose. again, not shakepeare, but SOME sense of accomplishment and that alduin is actually dangerous.

I LOVED the first fight with Alduin. Not only did you fight on the throat of the world, but you had no backup what so ever. It was a lot more challenging and epic than the last fight. I just ignored the last one and acted like the first fight was the REAL fight. Kinda like killing that one guy in paradise in Oblivion (forgot his name). It wasn't the end, but it felt like it.

Because you know, I like to feel special

Seriously. It really feels like the MQ was the end result of a schoolboy's in-class fantasy essay, doesn't it? It's so full of cliches, poor plot devices and zero character development. We basically learn nothing about anything. We apparently saved the world from a huge threat, but we get nothing in return for it besides cursory remarks from a handful of NPCs. Did anyone actually feel threatened at all by the return of the dragons? I sure as hell didn't - and it seems like neither did 99% of the NPCs in Skyrim.

Sadly, this is how all of Skyrim's main questlines feel to me: poorly thought out, inconsequential garbage - even when compared to Oblivion's, which were already pretty bad.

I have a feeling that the DLC is gonna make up for this main quest. Maybe they did it on purpose so more people would get the DLC when it came out...

I really love this game and all, but I have to agree with everyone here. The Alduin fight was literally a normal random dragon encounter fight. He flys around, lands, you swing at him for awhile, dead. I was a little surprised when he died because I didn't do anything special, it felt abrupt. Also dragons aren't the most threatening creature in the game, giants are. At the beginning dragons are tough, but once I got to lvl 20 I knew I wouldn't die in a 1-1 fight with a dragon. Giants on the other hand, I still can't face and I'm lvl 41. I think the dragons look cool and act cool, but when I see one I'm like "Okay lets get this over with so I can continue what I was doing"

Well I have never played a Bethesda game where the main story was any good, simply because they totally lack characters. I have never met a character in fallout 3 oblivion or fallout new vegas

It really is sad that both encounters against Alduin did not feel all that special, or harrowing. He was weak, pure and simple....and clearly like much of the main quest and writing in general, an afterthought with little testing done. I mean his super special meteor shout does 0 damage and can't even hit a barn! How could they not catch that?

It doesn't help that when we encounter him in the wild, he turns tail and flees the moment we hit him, instead of wtf owning us for daring to interfere with him. Heck, I'm sure almost anyone here on the forums could make him more challenging with the vanilla construction set alone. Here, let me try:

Alduin
1. Increase all movement speed parameters (ground/flying/physical attack speed and range)
2. Greatly reduce all incoming damage from non players, and greatly increase outgoing damage against non players
3. Increase damage resistance, health, and all outgoing damage
4. Reduce dragonrend effectiveness against him, forcing us to use level 3 dragonrend for maximum effectiveness
5. Increase player as target priority.
6. Change his meteor shout to rain a lot more meteors, each meteor does huge area of effect damage with stagger, fire damage over time, and throw back.
7. Make his shouts recover four times faster than normal, and have unlinked timers
8. Give him max level shouts: kill, whirlwind sprint, slow time, storm call, elemental fury, clear skies, unrelenting force, fire breath, ice breath, ice form, create a lightning breath effect just for him.
9. Set his AI to never land unless he is hit with dragon rend.
10. Make him immune to stagger.

There, now I know nobody has the construction set, but I am sure the changes I have listed can all be easily done without much in the way of scripting. It's clear to me that they did not even try to make the fight memorable or difficult.

I thought Morrowind's was fairly good. It wasn't amazing, but it was still fun and pretty interesting. Dagoth Ur and the Tribunal were intriguing characters.

Daggerfall's was good too, and had some memorable (if one-dimensional) characters.

I agree totally with this, what Bethesda really really needs to do is take a step back from their game, and take a long study year on the basics of what makes a game good

Alduin's motive is that he is a destructive jerk that likes to blow things up.

So far, I've enjoyed the main quest. I've enjoyed this game quite a bit. However, I have run across the first point of true annoyance in the entire game....

I wasn't horribly disappointed with the ending, but I was expecting some sort of movie or slideshow, at the very least.

Of course, I'm not expecting a New Vegas-quality ending. There just weren't that many choices to made in Skyrim. Most of them boiled down to "yay, you killed that thing" or "yay, you got that other thing". It was pretty rare for me to make an actual choice that had consequences, but that's not exactly Bethesda's strong suit with their games.

The main quest didn't feel that short to me, I'd say it took maybe 10-15 hours. Blackreach was probably 25% of that time though.

The first fight with Alduin actually felt epic, and when I struck him down there I felt accomplished. The second fight was just dumb. The fight with the gatekeeper guy at the Hall of Valor was more difficult than Alduin. Hell, the dragon priest outside Sovngarde was probably the most challenging enemy in the game.

We get into the Hall of Valor, where pretty much every awesome hero ever resides, including Shor, but instead of being able to talk to them, we join up with the three apparently "important" heroes who sent Alduin forward in time and immediately run back outside to fight Alduin. The entire scenario felt backwards. It would have been way cooler if Alduin had stopped us before we reached the Hall of Valor, and after an epic one on one fight, we fatally wound Alduin. Alduin would start to give some sort of speech about how a mortal couldn't defeat him, but Shor and an army of other heroes would approach from out of the mist, and Shor would banish Alduin or something like that. Then we would be led to the Hall of Valor, and we'd be able to actually talk to some of the most important characters in ES lore. After some epic Sovngarde celebrations, Shor would gift us with some awesome weapons and apparel to suit our character's skills, and we'd be sent back to Skyrim.

Honestly, the first thing I did after I killed Alduin was to run back to the Hall of Valor. I felt cheated when I found out it was locked. Really, I'm not saying the Main Quest was terrible, but there was so much wasted potential in Sovngarde.

bethsda games are built around a dynamic world, lots of combat, random encounters etc...the story is fine but the game itself blows away any other game that came out this year i think, easily.

Haha.

Typical Bethesda.

There story's have allways been a big [censored] you in the end. Oblivion was allright.