I hate the fact that quest related items exist all around the world, and you can accidentally take them and not get rid of them.

A good example is the Panthea's flute I accidentally took when I looted the entire contents of a chest, while doing another quest. When I got back to my house to off-load some of the crap I had accumulated, I noticed the flute and tried to put it in storage. "quest items cannot be removed from your inventory". [censored].

So I went to the wiki to find out who would want the flute. Consequently I ended up joining the Bards College. Now that I have the quest to actually find the damn flute, the NPC won't take it from me.

In conclusion I now have: 1. a damn flute that's 2 points of dead weight in my inventory, 2. a sidequest I can't finish, and 3. joined the fricking Bards College.

I've said it before and I say it again: quest items should be storable and weigh nothing.

In order for me to complete a quest totally and completely unrelated to the Mage's Guild...I have to join the Mage's Guild.

That is the problem.

Regardless of the reason, I don't like being coerced into joining a guild. Period.

It's not such a problem.

I know that there are many factions and I know that I must join them in order to work in undercover mode

'Know your enemy' and of course the old favourite of using your enemy's weapons against him or quite possibly her

Bit like infiltrating the Gestapo to further the ends of the French Resistance. We're not fully joined-up members we are Outsiders. As usual

Now I may wear the Iron Cross yes, but only because it furthers my own ends

My agenda is to seek power to promote my faction... sacrifices must be made in that interest. I'm pretty short-sighted, it's roleplay

Strictly speaking of game mechanics I'd agree. As it pertains to RP'ability it svcks pretty bad.

I can accept that some content is restricted to guild members. I like that. It encourages replays in order to experience the different aspects of the game.

The issue I'm talking about is intertwining a free quest with a guild quest. To some extent even that's OK but not when joining the guild becomes a requirement to finish the free quest.

If guild membership is a pre-requisite to completing the quest don't let me start the quest in the first place or at least let me know so I can decide.

It just seems like a bait-and-switch.

To me it would be just like applying for a job (receiving a quest from a NPC). Being hired (being strong enough to complete the quest). Going through the process of filling out all the HR paperwork (clearing the dungeon) and then being told you have to pay a fee to start work (finding out you have to join a guild to finish the quest).

I wouldn't have used up those arrows and potions if I knew I was going to have to join a guild.

Maybe it's to fit in with the, what seems to be, Skyrim is a miserable place theme. EVERYONE, including the PC, gets shafted in Skyrim.


I have absolutely no problem with this. Honestly.

In a different playthrough.

The issue is not having the option to finish a side-quest without joinnig a guild.

If I was playing as a (battle)mage this wouldn't be an issue because I probably would already be a member of the College, but I'm not.

I should, IMO, be able to play through the game as a member of each guild and get a distinct experience. Freelance also. No matter how many times I play, maybe because of the Radiant Story, I'll never be able to have a clean freelance, warrior, thief or mage playthrough.

I don't really see how allowing a clean style of play hinders any other form. It just doesn't seem like it was designed into the game.

It's not actually a "free" quest. You have been sent on a Radiant Quest by the Greybeard faction. Radiant Quests are something that all factions have that are random and can send you anywhere.

If you really want to be pedantic about the RP, this is not the dungeon to be arguing about since Saarthal has been locked up tight (and hidden) for thousands of years and the Mage's College has exclusive access to it.

Pedantic? Really?

All I'm asking is why send me to a dungeon I can't access unless I join a guild? I don't mind the randomness of quest locations. I just don't think joining a guild should be the price for finishing the quest.

From an rp perspective, factions are an ingrained, ramified structure directly embeded into the world.
It would be hard to have no involvement with them the same way it would be hard for us now to live our entire lives without ever being effected by the presence of government or other embedded social structures.
From a more practical perspective though ('cause I do feel ur pain) some of these faction-linked quests only require that you interact with them, not that you join.

Never enter a dungeon unless you have a quest related to it. Seriously. If you do, you will break something later on.

If youve got a guide its worth using. Thats one of my big problems too the guilds have lost alot of character and you cant help but be introduced on your 1st playthrough, it takes away from the immersion and adds linearity.

Dam , i hope this anit true coz the way i play is when leaving helgen i dont do the main story line straight away , I head for anise's shack near riverwood kill her, thats my home from now on. then explore the whole map and every tomb dungeon i can get in. I dont like being lead by the nose in games like these. Yes i pick up quest items some say where to drop em off some dont, But am really hoping this anit gonna break the game. Dungeons dont come with a " if u enter and kill certain bosses your gonna ruin ya game". Seems a bit daft if this is the case. Its like saying when starting a new game u have to go to every npc u can find/see and make sure u have all of the quests for skyrim. Then u can go and explore, thats seems pointless.

I did not read every reply to this post but I assume that if u can't gain access to a dungeon it is because it is part of a guild's storyline, and if you decided to join that guild later the entire quest lineup would be thrown off since you completed a portion early...just a guess

Here is a map of every place in Skyrim http://www.gamebanshee.com/skyrim/mapofskyrim.php#null
To make it even larger click on the map image and a resizable popup window comes up

Most people know that Fantasy games usually involve quest chains and dungeons and while they have some freedom, if you do something completely way out you may break your character or the game.
Why people do completely way out things I do not understand WE ALL KNOW THE FORMULA.
I have 4 characters a barbarian type, pure destruction mage assassin thief and a dual wielding archer who is more like a agile skirmisher than a rogue
Each of them has started off the storyline in a different way AND

in the first 25 hours Ive never seen a bug or broken anything.

A game with a free open style of play does NOT mean OK lets go kill Ulfric for my first task....etc

I "freelance". I don't start the "main faction" quests. I talk to Alvor in Riverwood, go to Whiterun, talk to Balgruuf, deal with the dragon at the western watchtower, go to High Hrothgar.... and bag the rest of it. If miscellaneous quest breadcrumbs get added to my log, I ignore them unless they're not involved with the main factions, the thieves' guild, the dark brotherhood, or any daedra but Azura and Meridia.

This series of games is PRIMO for allowing you to do exactly what you WANT to do and nothing else. At the moment, due to Beth's backassward porting of the game, some things that would have been totally transparent in Oblivion are very much occluded in Skyrim. Give it time. Either Beth (under protest no doubt) or modders will eventually fix the stuff that's not properly working at this point.

I've "freelanced" every TES game since Daggerfall. I'm expecting to be able to continue that without issue in Skyrim.

[ETA: oh, forgot to address the "strategy guide" part... Never used one, don't expect to ever need one. If the wiki doesn't have enough tips for you, I don't know what to tell you.]

You're just crying over nothing, join the College of Winterhold, loot the dungeons they send you to as you normally would, finish their main quests, and nothing will have changed.

I do not see a problem with one item linking you to the start of another quest. They could have done it better by placing all quest items under a different tab. However forcing you to join a guild in order to progress with a main quest feels extremely forced to me.

"What you can't let me into this place even when the fate of the world depends on it because I'm not a guild member?"

I await the day the construction set comes so I can remove all quest tags from items and essential tags from all NPC.

The ability to remove a quest item would be a much larger issue. Nobody wants to lose an important item for quest that they "may" do later

But I agree with you completely. I find the fact that I have to join mages guild to enter Saarthal VERY annoying. I'm a warrior, have nothing to do with magics, and here the quest shoehorns me into it to be able to complete it?

I'm pretty sure you can play through the entire college main quest line without using a single spell, even the defense spell you have to cast to join can just be a shout, they'll let you in anyway.


EDIT: Just remembered you have to use a scroll to get in the college, but as far as RP goes, this seems mildly acceptable, considering there is plenty of great loot (and daedra hearts) in the college).

Hi There

To go back to the thread title- you only need a strategy guide for this or any other game (since the Myst series at any rate) if you have the mental capacity of a brick. That has been crushed, fed into a mincer, turned into puree, fed through the guts of a Brontosaurus infant, excreeted, blasted into space and colonised by an alien life form called 'the brick thick thick brick recycled as Brontosaurus poo thicky thick wit' species.

It is unfortunate that a game which has had so much thought put into it, captures (almost) the coherent atmosphere of a nordic civilisation (gay marriage and other 21st century political correctness stuff aside), has graphics and npc interaction that are believable and natural, works on my 8 year old computer as good as new and has depth, breadth, incidental detail and everything a 44 year-old lifelong RPGer could wish for has a central questline that can be finished without hiccup or much thought very, very easily.

I would love to still be playing the central questline instead of, as with the others in the series, hopefully colouring in the skipped side quests in the hope that something interesting turned up. I played the empire- I will now play the stormcloaks to see if that is better (and play it as an Argonian to test the racism (speciesism) of that faction.

As for avoiding joining a faction? I was asked to be a werewolf far too early and what followed making that decision quickly became mundane. Similarly with the endless search often for the same books from the mages and ditto thieves (well, cooking books).

It is still a world you can get lost in- I spent my first evening in the game trying to catch up to a headless horseman who was chasing after his spectral steed after apparently falling off it.

Nevertheless, these games have suffered from inattention to complex detail of the 'main' quest and, in the case of Skyrim in particular as this was not true of the previous games in the series, sub quests.

I do like the daedric quests- genuinely evil for once instead of merely mildly dastardly. I actually turned them down because I felt sick at the thought of carrying them out. Of course, in Nordic tradition, the difference between murder and justified killing was very small and largely depended on how powerful the killer was- usually as a result of it. Nevertheless, they were nasty and compelled role-playing to continue as opposed to simply playing myself with my own morality as the hero.

They seem pretty Lawful Evil to me. Sure they talk about chaos, but people also claim to be Napoleon Bonaparte.

Scrolls are good stuff. They're more or less meant for people who can't just wave their fingers for it.

the way I see it, quest items should at LEAST be storable in a safe container (quick safety check!).

at most, a quest item from a quest you don't have should be sellable to a merchant, BUT the merchant will never get rid of it. that way if you pick up an item and sell it, you can buy it back later if you grab the quest.

I agree, I have a bunch of quest sutff in my inventory I can't get rid of.

Weirdest is probably this hip bone I pickpocketed. Why in gods name can't I drop this?

The hip bone is a key to one of the Daedra prince questlines.... Sheogorath maybe?

Yup.