Funny how no matter what they do people will hate them for it. I'm in that group I guess lol.

The typical forum writer doesn't represent the typical player. Most players are quite happy with now being able to actually finish a quest line without having to quit their day job and divorce their wife to have the time to do it. It's a minority that's looking for the type of commitment that you're describing to a game. That minority, though the majority of posters here, can use the radient quests to fill out the experience.

more detailed dungeons and more side quests does not equal a better game.

The people who think Skyrim is a more cohesive time and place have confused Skyrim's more sophisticated writing and conversations with character and guild building. Yes, the writing in Skyrim is more earthy, more 'believable' to many- and the graphics ever improving will always make the experience more beiievable than earlier more rudimentary graphics. Without character and guild building and interconnected storylines, you are getting surface without the depth.

you forgot the end

Radiant sidequest>Radiant Sidequest>Radiant Sidequest

only after 20 times (+4 actual good quests) do they allow leadership

..which is a bad thing because..?

And I don't mind, in fact I even think the faction quests are better than in Oblivion, but its no excuse for them being so short. I mean I tried so hard to save as much content as possible and still I became arch-mage way too early, I didn't even want it, but they told me that I HAD to act quickly or the WORLD WOULD BE IN GREAT DANGER. I was so surprised that I suddenly was archmage, and the person who told me that was a really old man skilled in magic that must have been at the college for like 40 years. Why not him? I killed this Thalmor, but what does qualify me to become archmage of a Mages College? That was the reason why I abandoned this character, I mean, he joined the college and two weeks after that he became archmage, although he isn't even skilled in magic at all.

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Guilds are shorter but better, Companions is debateable but the other 3 are better.

and you know this how exactly. do you have some poll that says that most people dont want lengthy involved games. i think that the tens of millions of people that play MMOs which usually require hundreds of hours for just one character might disagree with you. dont presume to know what gamers want or dont want.

also, skyrim is one of the best selling games of all time and compared to most other games and especially compared to other top sellers its a very long and involved game. it just doesnt stack up well to fallout NV or previous TES games.

Well this is the future folks, remember they said they had Radiant story handle almost everything for the guilds but found out it was monotonous so I take it they went and put what they could at the last minute.

The solution being for Beth to program it into a path to force you to complete x amount of guild SQs before advancing through the MQ, or you could just do it yourself....

Agreed.

I was admittedly disappointed in this, especially since what with radiant story they should have had plenty of time to make quests themselves, what with all the filler quests now handled by a quick system. Still, the guilds are fun, and somewhat memorable, but I just didn't feel with some of them I had time to feel integrated into the guild as a low-rank before suddenly I was leading it.

Things like thieves' guild had a good compromise in that you could artificially lengthen them yourself - indeed you had to to become guild master, so that was nice. But the companions don't let you stay a low rank doing misc quests at all - you're forced to go on with other things, and the progression is way too fast.

That said the rest of the game more than makes up for this, but it's something to work on in the future. Keep going Bethesda, so long as you don't slip up again (I disliked Oblivion)

Hows about we backtrack to an honest to Ghu CRPG, like Daggerfall? You started in a faction as an apprentice. You had to do X number of random quests to advance to the next level. And that wasn't in the same guildhall. Any quest you did in any associated hall counted. You never became the head of the guild. The higher you moved in the guilds, the more options became available to you, depending on the guild. And they at least -tried- to tailor the fetch and carry random quests to the guild in question. Winterhold should have had you start as an apprentice, practice with 1 master, do a few quests that related to being a mage, been promoted to journeyman, Have the first steps of the situation that happens start. A few more related quests takes you to master (and in dungeons where weapons are ineffective; you wanna be a mage, then make you use magic), then the whole situation with Ancano blows up, and you get to be archmage -then-. You actually earn it, not handed to you on a 3 dungeon silver platter.

Sadly, they are making a killing on a game design that Bubba can get into with one hand on his controller and the other on his budweiser. That kind of kills the hope that we might get a real CRPG, not a wimpy action/adventure game.

Oh, an no, mmo's have nothing to do with this whatsoever......

Exactly. For me, I always start these new games as a generic native character who tries out everything. On a whim I went to the College of Winterhold and joined them. Before I knew it I was on a quest to save the world. While I had some difficulty in acquiring the Staff of Magnus, I was done with the quest before I knew it and I was made Arch Mage.

I think I'm not wrong when I say that every guild in oblivion had longer quest-lines than all the guilds in skyrim combined

In TES II: Daggerfall, you had to do at least 20 quests for a Guild to reach 100 Reputation with that guild, which was required to become the Guild Master. You also had to meet a skill requirement for each rank. All of the quests were randomly generated though.
In Skyrim, throughout the Companions questline, i only had to do 2-3 Radiant quests along with it's main quests in order to become Harbringer. It was really short.

no way. the last thing i want to be is "do everything character" i have different characters for different guilds. my warrior guy never joins the mages guild and vice versa for my mages. being the hero of skyrim, the arch-mage, the harbringer, a nightingale and head of the thieves guild, and the only listener for the DB in decades is just to silly.

@ korbu that sounds a hell of a lot better than what we have now. even morrowind required that you at least have profiency in that skill in order to advance. hopefully a mod comes out that requires that you have x number of perks in one of the three main branches of perktitude in order to advance in a guild and you would have to have lots of perks in magic to become archamge or lots of perks in combat skills to become harbringer. thats how it should have been done from the get go.

lingwei had an excellent mod for oblivion called choices and consuqences which did pretty much that so its certainly doable for skyrim.

What stinks about the Companions is all of the menial quests that happen after you become their leader. Killing Frostbite Spiders and bears for townsfolk are the kind of thing a lower ranking member should have to undertake before getting more important quests in the Companions storyline.

With the radient quest system, it's up to you to determine how much "work" you want to do to make it make sense to you. I personally like the fact that they leave it up to the player rather than simply requiring a set number of the filler quests. Players who opt not to do any of them give up complaining rights as to length.

They were not only short they also were designed for casual gamers. I know 'casual gamer' is cliche but it's true. How else could you explain a Nord Warrior with no knowledge of magic besides the heal and fireball spell the game gives becoming head of the mages guild?

I can understand maybe making the Main Quest accesible for casual gamers but Bethesda needs to throw some meat on them bones for people that want to sink 100's of hours into their game. Make the guilds longer.. also requre the player to be certain levels before they can advance to the next rank in the guild. Make the player work for that [censored]. They'll appreciate it in the long run.

I disagree. You can start a new game, leave Helgen and become leader of the Mages guild as a level 3 character with no knowledge of magic. That is something to complain about.

the mages of the college entrusting you to be the archmage after three quests and a few days is just silly no matter how you look at it. what they should have done is require that you do most, if not all the side quests, in order to become the archmage or harbringer. clearly you have no idea how most jobs work. you dont become president of a company after a few months on the job.

I think guild stories are better, but way shorter unless you do sidequest on the run. The MQ is not shorter, though.