While they were short, do you really have to exagerate like that? There are 6 main compainion quests and 13 side quests. I agree that only 3 of the main quests are of any appreciable length, but claiming you only have to do 2 quests to be the leader is just a lie.

Comparing the guilds to Oblivion, yeah they were short, too short.


The Companions- The storyline was just plain and simple, dumb, boring and left a "WTF was that crap?" moment in your mouth.

The Bard's College- I would not even bother calling this a guild, more like a waste of space in Solitude and pointless being in the game.

The Mage's Guild- Uh, comparing this story to the one from Oblivion, I have to say I was not impressed at all. I am still trying to understand why the Arch-Mage looks like the devil.

The Thieves Guild- Not bad, not bad at all. Could have been a bit longer.

The Dark Brotherhood- Not sure on this one, at some points I enjoyed it and other points not so much. I am disappointed seeing the issues people had with the aftermath of the Dark Brotherhood were not taken care of in this game. Furthermore I hate the Night Mother's voice in this game.


I miss that climb the ladder and the on the edge of your seat feel with the story lines. While it seems the guild quests were handled with care in Oblivion, the guild quests in Skyrim played out as if they all were done over lunch one afternoon.

Sure, sure, the side guild quests are nice to have, but you can have side guild quests and a good long main guild story with no need to sacrifice one or the other.

A guild should be all about getting to that top spot but once your there feel like your character did earn it, instead of this feeling of earning it without doing much of anything. At least the Thieves Guild does this, shame the other guild's did not follow suit.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the mages guild quest line shouldn't be what makes you feel like Gandalf, the stories you make should. My archer feels like Robin Hood because I travel they country freeing my Stormcloak brethren, have a group of theves I command, try my best not to kill, and steal from the unjust. Not because the thieves guild had a Robin Hood storyline. My barbarian is like Conan because he enshews magic in favor of naturally recovering, wears minimal armor when possiable, is supersticious yet cunning.

The overall experience of your character in the game is more important than the individual parts. If you can say the game itself is not fun or engaging, then you should be dissapointed. But if, like me, you enjoyed it as a whole, you really shouldn't have much to complain about. People are talking about how they put in 400+ hours into this game, 100+ per character. If you got a few quests that were dissapointing, don't forget about the 95 other hours you enjoyed.

I did feel the College of Winterhold quest line seemed short and ended rather abruptly. I was hoping to learn more about the Psijic Order, maybe visit a base of theirs, quiz them about the Thalmor. It was still fun.

The DB and TG quest lines did not seem short. Haven't done the Companions yet.

Ok, I get what your talking about, and I understand, regardless of major quest line length, there is still a fair amount of time you can sink into the game, but crafting a quest line that has a good climactic pace and outside the box questing doesn't have to change the overall content of the world and the stories you craft in your head, if anything it augments it.

I don't hate the game, quite the opposite, I love the world and have spent a couple hundred hours in it mostly enjoying myself. That being said I think there is a weird idea floating around the forum that constructive criticism and blind rage complaining are the same, I give my honest opinion to each major guild quest line because I love and care about the games, if I didn't point out both what was done well and what wasn't how can I expect the next game to be more enjoyable? and my opinion on this issue is that while the world, the flora, fauna, most of the cities, and random events that transpire were done well, almost undoubtedly the best so far in the series as a whole, the major storylines were for the most part bland and uninspired, the actual tasks in the quests were reduced to more fetching and less red meat. I love the game which is why I criticize its faults

skyrim has way more content overall than practically any game ever made, yeah i wish there were even more guild quests but overall there is more good quests than any game ever made...it takes a lot of time making a game this huge.

Hi guys,

I agree that, the mage and companions are shorter quest lines than previous games. I did notice in both counts, being arch mage/harbinger is purely a figure head role rather than being based on talent and ability. Now is this a cop out by the devs? Thats for a matter of opinion.

What I will say is though personally, I enjoyed both story lines in Skyrim much more than either of the questlines in OB. Infact I can't even remember most of those quests in OB, apart from the final quests being to do with a destroying a tree and killing some necromancer. Meh. How many of those quests where pure filler?

I loved the DB questlines equally in both, probably my favourite faction, maybe because the quests are dark but also humourous in places.
i didn't enjoy the thieves guild faction at all in OB and avoided it in new play throughs.

Though my memory for Morrowind is hazy. I think, the best content in morrowind was actually the questlines in the expansions (bloodmoon especially) and the main quest.

I think honestly the content/main storyline/setting of morrowind was the best of the last three but had 2nd best game's mechanics. I like the fact the fast traveling for one, was done by stilt [sp?] strinders and mage's teleports...(in fact apart from frost craig what happend to those teleports? I know we have fast travel as a mechanic but what about the lore aspect?!)

The leveling mechanics of OB and OB's main quest were awful. (Having to close each of those fricken gates!). Apart from Patrick Stewarts awesome dialog at the beginning I felt Martian's dialog was very hammy and stilted. When i went from xbox to pc the first thing I did was to install loads of those brilliant community mods to make the game actually playable.

With Skyrim, I love the mechanics. So maybe I'm no longer hard-core but I'm older now so don't have time to be. I think the game is beutifully playable; its not a grind fest nor do I have to worry about breaking a build/game because I made a mistake in picking skills and stats. Outside of the quest content, I enjoy the dungeon crawling more, the random things that happen, Dragon shouts etc.

One thing that has impressed me though is that sense that, Tamriel as we know and love it is on the brink of major cultural shift, the empire is now firmly in state of decline and I think the devs made a good decision in going in this direction. Wouldn't surprise me if the next TES why find the Elves in charge and rather than a civil war, we have an actual war.

If the next game could deliver the depth of morrowind with the mechanics of Skyrim I would be in heaven.

My main problem is Kodlak's Journal sounded... weird to read

"I love this new guy, he's been here an hour and I think he should be my successor, I really do!"

Reading that having not realised how quick the questline can go can be rather jarring

The quests really are too short especially without skill requirements. On the Xbox it took me like 17 hours total to finish the legion quest line because I needed to train my skills and I there were many more ranks involved and the legionnares in morrowind felt more like a professional army as your superiors wouldnt talk with you if you werent in uniform. In skyrim there are I think like 14 quests for the legion and maybe 4 ranks and my superiors never cared that I talked to them when I wasnt wearing my uniform

A lot of the shortness of the guilds come from the simple fact you are no longer forced to walk exorbitant distances to get to to a place. If you play the Guilds without using fast travel it easily triples their length, and that is where a SIZABLE chunk of Morrowind's guild lengths came from.


I remember the walk to some random Velothi tower, Vas I think it was, for the fighters Guilds, took like an hour and a half.

I walk all over the place in skyrim but the skyrim guilds dont have many ranks or none at all and you dont need to have the required skill to advance along with the few quests they already come with making even shorter than what I experienced in morrowind.

The ranks and skill reqs were removed because of how broken it was in Morrowind.

Rank and skill reqs meant nothing because you could train as many skills you desired per level and it was ungodly cheap to do so, even when it did get expensive Morrowind's habit of throwing valuable enchanted items at you every 5 feet made it hard not to have money.

Frankly it was an easily abused a useless system whose only purpose was to arbitarily deny people acesss to content for 3 seconds more.

It still better than not having anything at all. In the CoW you go from like apprentice to Archmage at least the legion (not sure about the stormcloaks) has 4 ranks and the companions the only rank is harbinger I think.

Companions have Initiate, Circle Member, then Harbinger.


also having something for the sake of having something isn't usually liked in game design. Unless they could find some way to make it part of the gameplay and useful I don't see them adding it in again.

Just like spears eh? Same length as a claymor in MW held in your Chars hands in a way that would make its range the same as a longsword yet it had twice the range of a claymor. It was broken but people want it back and it can be fixed.

That is a shame.

In Oblivion, when you join a guild, you have ranks such as associate, apprentice, journeyman, evoker...and have to complete recommendation quests to advance your rank You can also get suspended.
In Skyrim, no ranks, no suspension, complete quest line and boom you're thielf guild master, arch-mage?????
Very disappointing....

You can get suspended, Ive done it in every guild at least once just to see.

There are ranks in guilds

Ranks in the College? You literally go from Apprentice to Archmage.

why would you say that? the perks? I'd say the perk more resemble Diablo 2 skill tree's then Fallout perks.

I was actually enjoying the CoW questline. It was quite interesting up until the point it all just stopped. I hope we get to explore this in DLC.

The Companions is a little short, for mine, and you get to be one of the inner circle a little too quickly for my tastes. I feel there should have been a little more lead-in to it. I didn't mind the story of it, though.

Would have been better if you wher required to do alot more Radiant AI quest or other jobs from the members before being able to advance to the next companions guild quest.

That would have been nice

You have to do like 8-10 radiant missions before you go onto the next big one.

Look, the quest lines are short and shallow. We all agree on that. However, I truly do not think it was due to laziness or lack of skill on Bethesda's side. I rather think (read hope) that their focus was on building the world of Skyrim to completion before the launch date and that they planned to add more quest content through DLCS.

Also, a lot of the story is hidden in books and journals. Walk into a random cave and you stand a good chance of discovering a story through the way the scene is set and a few snippets form some long dead person's dairy. That's epic world building and for that I am willing to forgive them for not bombarding me with a million quests that stop me from discovering the little things.

Skyrim is an ongoing saga still under development. I'm sure we will be pleasantly surprised.

The eye of magnus was a nice buildup..too bad it ended in an unfinished way. And the bit that occurs after you're done, was just Ice anomolies.