Let me just say if you think 12 main quests, 4 radiant quests (one of which you need to collect 24 rare stones scattered across all of skyrim. Once you doa dungeon crawl behind. Then another where you find 7 larceny targets also scattered across the worlds), 7 repeatable additional jobs (they all take place in different cities you must complete 5 in Markarth, Solitde, Whiterun, Windhelm. So 20 jobs but they can repeat cities past five plus throw in Riften (not needed) so who knows how long that could take.) Once you've finished finished the 5 per city you now have 4 city influence quests to get the guilds name out , and then you have one last leadership quest. You are now leader of the Thieves Guild and have fully completed the quest line. Plus some of those main quest take an hour our more.
I realize the other guilds (guild esque) are quite short but when I heard multiple people complaining about the shortness of Thieves Guild I wanted to punch them in the neck. Just wonderng what you guys think.

It's not the fact that they are short, or have too little content, it's that the action picks up far too early and ends up feeling like another story rather than an actual faction, at least that's how i seen it.

I honestly liked the guilds much more in Oblivion. Got a lot more playtime out of those.

I think the Thieves' Guild questline suffers from really poor pacing and a criminal lack of thievery, which is part of the reason I think it is too short. You can blaze through it in an afternoon and the Radiant quests take all of 30 seconds to complete, offer no story, and are just go to x and do y repeated over and over.

The Thieves' Guild questline is indeed much longer than the Companions or College of Winterhold, but those suffer from even worse pacing problems so it's like saying someone is a better fighter than Nazeem. Sure that's true, but it's not saying much.

Personally, I think that the only faction that has any pacing whatsoever is the Dark Brotherhood's, and that goes a long way into making it my favorite of the factions in Skyrim.

Your character joining the faction should not be the inciting incident for ever major event each faction sees. You should have to do a couple of crap jobs before even dealing with the higher ups and have missions only tangentially related to their main plot available at regular intervals (and not just the same ones you had before, quests that actually expand on the characters you're dealing with).

Not everyone wants to be thief, murderer or werewolf either...

I was somewhat disappointed that I was FORCED to be a werewolf, especially because I believe if I get rid of lycanthropy I can never get it again. This is rather disappointing because I had planned on becoming a vampire, but did not want to just throw lycanthropy away.

Most of those are radiant quests which are boring, repetitive and irrelevant to the guild story, what the problem is, is that as soon as you start a guild in about 1 in-game day your already the leader while other members have been there for decades and don't seem to care about it plus there's almost know benefits to it.

I think

Thats the same I feel about it. The guilds are supposed to be suited for those people who want to roleplay a certain style. Instead, it feels like your "destined" to save them. Its almost as you are the only persone in the world who can save the guild. No mattter what guild you join, you just jump the ranks and almost immediadly become guild-leader. I dont mind being the master of a guild, I actually like the idead, but I just think that it happens too fast, and too easy, considering that you are actually just a newbe. Other members has been in the guild for years, yet none of them even tried to become a guild leader, but the player just walks in and take the leader position.

So I find the guilds to be disappointing.

1) You cited the exception. Thieves guild has the most content, then Dark Brotherhood, then College of Winterhold, then the Companions.

2) Those are BORING. Those quests are repetitive as hell. No one want to do those all day every day.

3) Think of it from a storyline perspective. The story is incredibly short and brief and horriawful. Why? Because the radiant quests are just filler.

For bonus points, the Thieves' Guild questline actually seems like an attempt to set the Guiness World Record for "Most Massive Plotholes in a Single Storyline."

This for one, and then there is that the actual story makes zero sense.

Sorry but there's a reason so many people coming from Morrowind and Oblivion are complaining about the guilds, and they are the saddest part of Skyrim and one of the reasons I miss Oblivion. I'm pretty sure the Mage's Guild Recommendations quests took longer than the entirety of College of Winterhold...that is quite a joke.

Every faction questline in Skyrim is plagued by another huge problem, and that's the pacing, as above posters have described. The Companions, you basically join, go do a radiant quest that usually involves beating up a woman in a brawl in town, and then you're immediately thrown into the big picture of the guild and are let in on their secrets on pretty much your very first mission. In Oblivion you had to drudge your way up through the ranks as a whelp very very slowly, however in Skyrim you're pretty much expected to save the entire world or something ridiculous on your first or second quest into the questlines.

I really hope Dawnguard factions don't have the same feel, Bethesda really dropped the ball on the factions in this game because they relied too heavily on the radiant quests which turned out to be a very bad idea and it feels very unimmersive. I wouldn't have minded if graphics were a bit worse in Skyrim if they had questlines as interesting and fleshed out as Oblivion's.

Me too. I hope that no matter which route you go down, you have to do a few quests before even meeting the rival faction. For Dawnguard you go around hunting normal vampires and whatnot, while the vampires go out and feed and learn how to control their powers and whatnot.

Also, I have to note that I really miss the Arena. Another thing that got me very disappointed was the Dark Brotherhood. The DB quests in Oblivion were pretty epic and iirc (it's been a long time since I played them) there was even a quest were you live in a mansion with a few NPCs for a few days and have to one by one kill them and it felt like you were on some kind of game show or movie, that quest was awesome! I was hoping for awesome quests like that in Skyrim's DB and I ended up just getting vastly disappointed.

Oh, and has anybody noticed how in every questline the guilds always tell you how they've fell into disarry in the past two hundred years....like the College explains the great collapse and how Skyrim isn't fond of magic, or how Astrid explains how the Dark Brotherhood is in shambles and that they're one of the last of the DB left in Tamriel, or the Thieve's Guild complain that they were once great and now they're nothing but lowlives in a sewer, etc etc? It's like Beth threw all of that pity into the factions as an excuse for them not being as epic as previous iterations lol.

I agree, and it's somewhat ridiculous that you sort of just waltz in the mages college for example, do a couple simple tasks and bam. You're the new archmage. Same for the others... I mean really, it doesn't make sense. These guilds are full of masters and they can't handle simple tasks of their own profession.

I enjoyed the Dark Brotherhood too, for example, but it would have made more sense if they sent the more senior members to handle, you know, the stuff I can't say because it would be a spoiler.

Just saying, it seems like there could have been more potential

The reason why the guild quest's feel short is because, Time fly's when your having fun

Thieves guilds length is fine, but I was very disappointed in the length and pacing of the College of Winterhold and the Companions. 7 quests and you are arch mage. 2 quests until you are brought in to the companions super secret club.

This may be solved in Dawnguard

So far, I've been doing one or two faction questlines with each playthrough (on Master difficulty).

• First character was a Dunmer thief, completed about 70% of Thieves' Guild, collected some shouts and a couple of Daedric weapons - that took well over 200 hours, then started to become too powerful at level 40, so I started over.
  
• Second character was Nord 2-handed barbarian, collected some shouts and completed Companions, Stormcloaks and MQ in around 150 hours. At that point I was level 27, and it felt a little anticlimactic to continue playing after finishing MQ and CW, so I started a new character.
  
• Third character was Breton destruction mage and for the first time I installed some survival mods, like Frostfall and IMCN. After about 170 hours, I completed about 50% of the College of Winterhold quest and collected a few shouts, but decided to start over to try some new mods.
  
• My current character is an Argonian shaman, focusing on illusion and conjuration and I've added to the survival mods some that greatly enhance the difficulty at higher levels. I plan to complete the College of Winterhold questline with this character and perhaps some Daedric artifact quests.

I've played well over 600 hours at this point and I still have a lot of the faction content saved for future playthroughs that I haven't even touched yet, like Dark Brotherhood, Bard's College, Imperial Legion, not to mention the upcoming Dawnguard and Volkihar questlines.

The Thieves Guild has a good length IMO but the others feel to short. I also find that the Companions seem pretty off. They should be noble and mighty warriors but you see nothing about that. I mean you beat up random people or kill a wild animal in a house. That doesnt seem like work a "mighty and noble warrior" would do.

It's even more ridiculous that none of those guilds decided on doing something as simple as rebuilding themselves, especially the Dark Brotherhood.

Please remember to use spoiler tags when appropriate.

May be boring but it still content.


Those that say they finished all the thieves guild comment in a day are so full of it, it hurts. I spent 12 hours straight yesterday and only finished maybe a fourth of the guilds content. My character is level 63: sneak 100, pickpocketing 100, lockpicking 100, speech 100, one handed 100, archery 66, enchanting 100, alchemy 100, I use heavy armor 100 enchanted. All extremely useful and it still took me 10-12 hours of grinding out those guild quest (main, additional, radiant) to between 1/4 and 1/2 of the guilds content done. So like I said BULL S*.

The other guilds are still very short.