Didn't you follow the story at all?


Damn... There is a shout that clears fog, Alduin USED THAT FOG to capture souls.. You were trying to get rid of it... But he made it return 3 times... Get it now?

You guys are missing the point. It's a Bethesda games, therefore ANYONE can finish the MQ. People who want challenges? They can do the optional stuff. If saving the world was hard, heroes couldn't do it.

*sigh* you totally missed the point. no matter what brilliant idea you come up with, or anyone else or the devs or or or...you get the idea, someone else out there will have your exact same reaction to it. basically, it's impossible to please everyone.

The point being that the end of the Main Quest WASN'T a brilliant idea and was poorly executed. As previous posters have said, it is very anti-climatic and Bethesda missed a great opportunity to talk to important characters, get more back story, and to end Skyrim on a good note. I'm surprised the entire Sovngarde portion wasn't redone. I don't know how they looked at the ending to the Main Quest and considered it a finished product and a suitable end to the game. I would much rather have the endings described here in the thread than the one in-game. Considering most of the ideas posted only took a few minutes to think up I'm confused on how Bethesda decided to go with their idea with all the time they had to develop and test the game. I would have hoped they would have looked at the ending and decided that the final battle just didn't live up to the game and wasn't extremely underwhelming.

Regardless if you are satisfied with the end or not, given the previous games they've made, it's hard to disagree that they could have done better.

I just dragonrended Alduin and ran around while the 3 heroes killed him.

oh don't get me wrong, there are things i would have done differently. but no matter how i would have done it, there are people that would still hate it. same goes for you or anyone else. how on earth can you possibly design anything that 100% of all people that buy/play it will enjoy? answer: you can't. i'm not saying you should throw your hands up and not even try but realistically, any way they would have made it end there would have been the exact same type of complaints.

As a prelude to the real fight, the fog is supposed to be a tension-builder. Then when the fog is cleared, the real battle begins.

That's like saying "Alduin USED THAT TOOTHPASTE to clean his teeth, by brushing your teeth repeatedly, you are using his toothpaste, and he gets weaker"!!!

No matter how you try to spin it, that's not very "climactic".

The mechanic could have been used in an interesting manner - you wander out and get caught in the fog, under attack by Alduin - having to shout to clear the area to find where he is, whilst your companions get grabbed... or maybe clearing the fog to find Alduin standing in right in front of you...

Instead, it's more like the toothpaste answer - I suspect they ran out of time, still better than the ending of KOTOR 2 though...

I think having to shout away the fog would have been cooler if the fog actually had a detrimental effect to your character, like slow health/magicka damage or a slow effect or something, and if the enshrouded area were like 10 times bigger, making it necessary to shout it away in order to find how to get to the Hall. But as it is the foggy area is so small it's ridiculous to think anyone could get lost in it.

This is a non-argument.

Saying that "you can't please everyone" does nothing to address the flaws (or potential strongpoints) of Skyrim's storyline. It's like if I were to reincarnate Adolf Hitler (Godwin's Law) and nominate him to be president of the United States, I could easily defend my nomination with "you can't please everyone, someone's bound to hate my choice or any potential candidate that gets nominated." That statement does NOTHING to address the concrete facts and issues though.

Having said that, I don't think it's outrageous for us to be mad that Bethesda spent more time coloring the sky and programming fog-based combat than working to make the second battle with Alduin more challenging OR write some conversations with Shor and Ysgramor, ESPECIALLY when Morrowind provided us with good 15 minute conversations with Dagoth Ur and Vivec, and Oblivion made us listen to the theories of Mankar Camoran as we walked through Paradise. Alduin on the other hand just says "herp derp I'm a dragon, that means I want to kill the world. Why? Because I'm a dragon herp derp," and the heroes and gods just say "go talk to that guy with the quest marker over his head."

My gripe with the end battle wasn't the fact you had to fight with allies, or the fog (I actually liked the fog scene)... it was the fact I'm essentially an over-glorified assassin, and you can't sneak attack a character who is in combat.

As a result my "epic finale" mostly involved standing on a rock spamming arrows at Alduin 'til he keeled over. I mean, sure I can spam arrows very impressively (Slow time, get 6 arrows into the air at once!), and I was using my powers of illusion to guide my friends into combat and strike with greater precision and effect... but, really, the bards would've prefered it if the dragonborn did single combat with the beast, and had landed the finishing blow by climbing upon the beasts back and de-braining it with a pair of butter knives.

Instead he died to a hail of sharpened sticks

Guess I'm just a big weirdo, but I thought it was awesome to stand alongside the heroes in Sovngarde and shout in unison to push back Alduin's hold on the area in order to bring the Dragon God of Time himself out from hiding to engage in the final battle. It did build tension.

But then, some people just want to play a game when they pop in an Elder Scrolls title.

Skyrim has a lot of missed opportunities like that.
Potema and Pelagius the mad.
Awesome.

But you dont get to talk to them about anything at all and in the end its just a bit of a let-down.

A lot of Skyrim feels rushed that way, the only really decent part about it are the dungeon crawls, I guess most development time went into that.

I would have gladly waited another year for Skyrim if that meant we had decent perks that dont do what a skills job is, if we had decent dialogue, quest log, spellmaking.

The more I play Skyrim, the more I find it lacking in everything that used to make Elder Scrolls great.

Its a very good dungeon crawler and a skillfullly made action/ adventure game.
But I want an RPG dangnabbit, and I want people that have more than one line, repeated every 5 sec ad nauseum.

In Oblivion our characters stand there and watch the final battle. In Skyrim our characters can just stand there and watch the final battle after clucking like a chicken three times. I guess they figured this was some sort of an improvement. epicfailending_v2.0

considering you can actually take part in the final battle i'd say it is a pretty major improvement. LOL

Yeah I can take part but really I don't have to do a thing and it'll be over quick. So the only difference from the OB ending is that I can move around and watch from different angles. WOW! Awesome stuff Bethesda!

/applaudincompetence