Don't fret OP. People will jump all over your back on these forums no matter what opinion you have.

If your opinion doesn't match their's then you are obviously just an idiot. No one is allowed to have their own opinion here. Didn't you get the memo?

For the record, I agree with you. The dragons (lore and backstory and all that crap aside) are kinda lame as far as playing a video game. I thought Oblivion was a better "video game". It was alot more work to close an Oblivion gate (and at least you got a sigil stone, deadric armor, and weapons for your efforts) compared to a one minute battle with a dragon where all you get is a soul (which becomes useless after you find all the word walls) and some crap loot you've already got a thousand times.

The topic isn't really about the difficulty of oblivion gates and dragons, or the loot you get from either. Regardless, Alduin wants to end the world as we know it; the Daedra want to control it. Both are bad, but the end of the world is worse.

Im pretty sure Mehrunes Dagon wanted to make Nirn look like his realm, thats pretty much the end of the world. I guess if your granted imortality to be put in a cage to be dipped in lava then I guess there is a future.

Skyrim's situation is much worse. Mehrunes Dagon is the dadric prince of change revolution, destruction and ambition, he would have cruely ruled over the world. Alduin won't physicly eat the world but completly destroy it all at once.

If you look into the history of Mehrunes, there's a few accounts of him not being a daedra at first. (Here's a http://www.imperial-library.info/content/fight-one-eating-birth-dagon)

Alduin cursed him because he kept hiding away pieces from previous kalpas in an attempt to make the world so large that alduin's belly would burst.

"...you I curse right here and right now! I take away your ability to jump and jump and jump and doom you to [the void] where you will not be able to leave except for auspicious days long between one and another and even so only through hard, hard work. And it will be this way, my little corner cutter, until you have destroyed all that in the world which you have stolen from earlier kalpas, which is to say probably never at all!"

Supposedly this is the real reason he keeps trying to get onto Mundus.

So, what does Skyrim suffer from?

Day-old Legend? Check (Craftable Daedric items).
Dude, Where's My Respect? Check. (Become Arch-Mage or Harbinger and people will still refer to you as "that new guy.")
Follow the Plotted Line? Check (No matter how hard you try, there is no reasonable way to avoid joining the College of Winterhold without meta-gaming knowledge)
Improbable Power Discrepency? Check (Alduin the World Eater himself has leveled stats)
Irrelevant Sidequest? Check (Balgruuf entrusts the fate of his city to you for telling him Riverwood needs an extra garrison and you saw a dragon heading to the city)
Menu Time Lockout? BIG Check (Change your clothes, down a few dozen potions, couple hundred pounds of apples, all in the space of a millisecond)
Overrated and Underleveled? Check (Final battle against Alduin is shockingly easy)
Plot Coupon that Does Something? Check (Dragonrend Shout)
Space Compression? Check (This one is easily forgivable, though)
Statistically Speaking? Check (Why can't I use that chair in a bar brawl?)
The Battle Didn't Count (Sub-Trope of Story Overwrite)? Check (First battle with Alduin)
Take Your Time? Check (Alduin will wait patiently for you to finish whatever you are doing before destroying the world)
>>Continue Your Mission, Dammit! Check (Delphine enacts a huge sense of urgency to get to Kynesgrove, but you can wait for years and the entire scene will wait patiently for you to arrive)
Took a Shortcut? Check (Delphine retrieving the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller before you despite a puzzle requiring you to Shout being present in the dungeon)
Video Game Time? Check (You can defeat Alduin, restore the Thieves Guild, perform the greatest assassination ever, and win a Civil War all before New Years)


And people wonder why this game is so unimmersive.

what always bothered me in OBLIVIONS MQ is the fact that if you had already beaten the Shivering Isles you should be able to call Auriels and Mazken to assist when Mehrunes Dagon finally invades the IC (at the end of the MQ).

anyways, I believe they are equally terrible.

Sure the Daedra were powerful and there were many of them, but anyone good with a blade had the potential to kill them.

there may be less Dragons, but they are mobile, can cover ground much faster, and will be reborn unless the Dragonborn absorbs there soul.

So as any hero or small army could of helped Martin Spetim to realize his destiny, Only the Dovahkiin has the potential to "DELAY" Alduin. and even then only Delay him, Alduin will come back at some point, lets hope there are equally capable Dragonborns around at that time.

Remember, tropes aren't (all) bad.

I think the one thing that I didn't like about the Skyrim MQ was a lack of suspense. Right from the beginning of the game, you're just being walked to the chopping block, solemnly accepting your fa- HOLY CRAP A DRAGON LOOK AT IT IT'S SHOOTING METEORS WOW!

I thought both dangers presented an equal threat. Oblivion portals flaming in the distant fauna was an unnerving sight, and having to kill the daedra and enter the portal into a demonic plane was pretty cool stuff. In Skyrim, I am always chilled and thrilled when I hear a dragon or see its shadow pass over me. And the dragon animations are excellent - from the flying to the breath weapons to the Godzilla-like roars - without question, they are the best dragons I've ever seen in a CRPG.

So we have demons spawning from transdimensional portals or dragons being resurrected from ancient burial mounds - both parties intent on killing everyone. I'd say it's a stalemate from a conceptual standpoint.

Wasn't saying any of them were good/bad, just that each trope listed there is a test of the player's willing suspension of disbelief (like it or not). Sometimes, you get a lot of those at once and then the immersion gets broken because the game has gone beyond the WSoD and did something silly. The ones I can forgive fairly easily are:

Day-old Legend
Follow the Plotted Line (to an extent)
Improbable Power Discrepancy (to an extent, enough to keep high-levels challenged while letting low-levels know they are not ready for this yet)

On the topic of Improbable Sidequest, I am referring to Balgruuf treating you like a hero (and rewarding you as such) after you brought him a fairly simple message. Before you actually battle the dragon (at which point naming you Thane is well justified).

Menu Time Lockout
Plot Coupon that Does Something
Space Compression
Statistically Speaking
The Battle Didn't Count (only if it only happens once)
Take Your Time
Continue Your Mission, Dammit! (So long as I don't get the living hell annoyed out of me)
Video Game Time

See? I'm not saying they are all bad, I'm just saying Skyrim has a pretty huge number of Gameplay-Story Segregation tropes going for it that lead to quite a large number of immersion breaks when several compound on you at once.

well if Alduin destroyed the world it would just create a new cycle and start all over again

if mehrunes Dagon invaded everything in the plane would basically be slaves of daedra so yeah.... I think oblivion MQ wins

but Im begining to hate the Bethesdas MQ's for TES I liked fallout 3 where if was finding your good old dad then saving the world unlike right of the bat your going to save the world

In my opinion, the plot they tried to use was just too impossible to do proper justice, when it has to butt heads with the "do whatever you want, even be joe nobody" gameplay styles. The end result is everything in the story being watered down and largely irrelevant. The civil war, the whole thing with the dragons, all of it felt weak and not as important as they should have been.

Alduin and his dragons don't come off as threatening. They are largely disorganized, and lack the power they are implied to have. It never even once felt like we could possibly lose, fighting the world eater never felt like a struggle. Basically it was just us riding along on the whole "destiny" plot line, with no means of ever failing. Tsun, and the 3 dead heroes could have easily taken down Alduin without the player's help, which makes no sense at all.

If you're going to have a jab at it that way, you're playing unfair. At least you know what happened after the Oblivion crisis, you're already looking at the future of it. But you don't know yet what the consequences will be of the dragon resurrection. The consequences may consist of what we already see now - dragons spawning everywhere, but Alduin defeated (hell maybe even half of them turning friendly because you spared P'nax) - as well as Alduin getting revived a bit later again to absorb the world. Like the Greybeards are speculating: your actions could possibly only postpone the fate of the world. So you can't really compare both situations right now, as the consequences of the happenings in Skyrim still are unclear.

Aside from that, we don't really know what the goal from the Aldmeri Dominion is yet. Unless you want to take rumours as truth. So for all we know, they might simply want to unify the whole of Tamriel, because they got some intel some Akaviri dudes will start an expedition again to invade Tamriel (and the Akaviri are tight with Talos). They're actually poor misunderstood elves, trying to save everyone, and their secret motto is "For Love and Peace! \/"

Is it really "delay"? the only thing we know is that we didn't get Alduin's soul, and he just kinda exploded when 'defeated'. We don't know whether he survived or not. Not getting his soul can also mean he's not a real dragon or some such. Or that he's already been killed, and is the spawned version of himself.



Oh, by the way: Oblivion =/= hell. What you get to see in Oblivion is Mehrunes Dagon's plane, not Christian Hell or anything. The area is called the Deadlands. I think "Oblivion" itself refers to the "Void", the space where the daedra live. Each of the big daedras have their own planes there.

This makes an additional point: If Dagon had taken over, it wouldn't have stopped or even bothered Alduin... and there would be no Dragonborn to save the day... however, that said Alduin would clean up if Dagon had won, so in a way Alduin is the more powerful one.

Yeah, the daedric invasion was totally way worse because daedras have enslaved humanoids in the past also, right!? Oh, wait, that never happened, it was just the dragons that enslaved all the humanoids.

Alduin was so powerful that he could control all of the other dragons and he forced them to enslave humanoids. Nothing even close to that scale happened with the Oblivion Crisis. The Oblivion Crisis was dealt with in a very, very short amount of time. The Dragon War lasted for many years.

I don't understand why some people are proud of this. You never did the main quest. Cool. You're missing out on a pretty good questline because you think you're stronger willed than us or something?

Actually, the entire TES series is about doing things the players' way. Doing the MQ hasn't ever been a requirement. And in fact, even doing the MQ doesn't mean that the WAY you chose to complete it will be canon (which is probably why people don't bother....)

Every TES game, I've done the MQ on ONE toon. That's it. There's no reason to do it on more than one. Beth decides what the nexgen "player winner" did or did not do anyway.

Dagon would have destroyed Nirn as we know it. He would have broken the hold of the Aedra on Mundus and restored non-linear time. So the results would have been beyond the comprehension of mortals.

Alduin was going to reset time itself, so goodbye Mundus. Although it would have been reconstituted in a roughly similar fashion with a few bits and pieces staying consistent.
The MQ writers never made the mechanics of this clear because they were being pussies and didn't want to explain the way the Aedric spirits work, and wanted a pint-size fightable boss monster.

actually it's dagons plane of oblivion if he took it over than he would have control over it but still that is questionable , that is interesting Dagon vs Alduin in a fight

According to Nordic myth, Alduin fights Dagon all the time, and Alduin always wins. There's a whole bunch of stories about it you can read.