Skyrim's quest rewards

[Hans]

Having just played Skyrim again (Imperials this time), I noticed something that has been bothering me for some time. When I saved the College Of Winterhold, I became Arch-Mage, I saved the Companions, I became Harbinger etc.etc. That just does not make sense, I mean, I know it's a game and you are supposed to be rewarded for your hard work, but come on, there are NPC's who can still kick/burn my ass and have been member of their respective guild for years and years and they are just going to follow a n00b?

Also, you, as Arch-Mage, are still tasked with doing irrelevant jobs, finding this, locating that.. Not really Arch-Mage of Harbinger work.

Instead, why not make you a Champion? Or a Honorary Guest kinda thingy...
In my humble opinion that makes a hole lot more sense.


Could just be me here...




(just wanted to share a thought)

 

[Doom972]

That has been a problem with the series for a long time. I still remember being disappointed when I achieved the top rank of the Morrowind Imperial Legion. The guards still treated me like a common civilian if I broke the law, and I couldn't give guards orders.

 

[SajuukKhar]

That just does not make sense

Yes it does.

-Kodlak says in his journal you are the most neutral person in the companions, whereas each of the other circle members are to biased one way or the other.
-To beat the Thieves guild questline involves beating the other guild master, and after almost single highhandedly reviving the guild, you kinda earned the title of guild master.
-You don't become the leader of the Dark Broterhood, the Night Mother and Sithis are the leaders, you are just the listener.
-The "arch-mage" title is mostly just a title, the College is based on individual work, not some organized school like the Mage's guild.

because skyrim is aimed at the console market and as such is designed for the player to play as much as possible in one single play through and never touch it again as they move on to another game. so you end up with every character who is pretty much a different flavour of battlemage jack of all trades

plus the immersion in skyrim is as wide as an ocean with the depth of a puddle.

bethesda really tend to skimp of the guild quest lines once you finish them.

hell you can become archmage and only cast a couple of spells in the entire game

That would be true, except both Morrowind and Daggerfall were the exact same way..... and neither of them were aimed "at the console market" or "designed to have you do everything in one playthrough".

You, like many people, seem to confuse "being able to do everything in one playthrough", with "they intended for you to do everything in one playthrough".

 

[Soopy]

The simple answer is "Because, Elder Scrolls."

They've always been wonky in that department. In the past I put it down to a hardware limitation. Don't really have an excuse for Skyrim though. Skyrim promised a lot and didnt really deliver IMO.

 

[GundamSentinel]

For me that's always been the biggest problem with the Elder Scrolls games: nothing you do has any real impact on the world. Whatever you accomplish, even if it includes saving the world from God-knows-what, the world and everything in it will keep treating you the same as if you were a level 1 nobody.

Maybe an inherent consequence of having such an open game world, but to me it always seemed that Bethesda was too busy making a world that they forgot to put an actual game in it. Skyrim is a particularly bad example of this. It took me some time to realize this, but I haven't really enjoyed an Elder Scrolls game since.

 

[siomasm]

Whatever you accomplish, even if it includes saving the world from God-knows-what, the world and everything in it will keep treating you the same as if you were a level 1 nobody.

Hands to yourself, sneak thief!

 

[Soopy]

That would be true, except both Morrowind and Daggerfall were the exact same way.....

Except that's a fucking lie.

Factions in Morrowind have skill requirements, rather lofty ones for the top positions, if you're wanna get to the top of a faction in anything resembling a timely fashion, then you're gonna have to focus on what kind of character you wanna play.

You're gonna have to be real fucking dedicated if you're gonna be the leader of just say, 4-5 factions in one playthrough, much less all 16 of the joinable factions.

Not to mention that some factions lock you out of others.

All of this, pretty much sums up why Morrowind was such a good game.

 

[Remus]

Because Skyrim is a plain, bad game.

Level scaling fucked that series in the ass and killed any sense of accomplishment, why the fuck would anymore want to become stronger when the respawning bandits are gonna be exactly as difficult to kill anyway.

That, and Skyrim is so utterly non-reactive and lazy that you can, in fact, become Arch-mage without knowing how to cast virtually any magic at all.

Level scaling isn't nearly as prevalent in Skyrim as it is in Oblivion. There are obvious cases of it - tombs that will be populated by entirely different monsters if you go back to them after 10 levels. But there are places that will stay a certain level regardless of what level you are. It's why it's unwise to travel too far NW along the river if you're not lv 15 or so minimum - if you happen upon a pack of sabre cats you'd be swallowed whole. A lot of dragons, namely the ones guarding treasure or words, and some of the random encounters, will stay a certain level so if you come to them late in the game they're almost stupidly easy. Many of the bandit forts don't scale so going from being murdered in 2 hits to clearing the same camp in seconds much later is entirely plausible. This is kinda why there are just as many people complaining that the game is too easy. I honestly enjoy the game for what it is. I don't expect Dark Souls when I play Skyrim. I expect a reasonable amount of challenge in an immersive world that's completely and thoroughly explorable.

 

[Remus]

I expect a reasonable amount of challenge in an immersive world that's completely and thoroughly explorable.

Well then you must have come away pretty fucking disappointed.

I'm kind of confused where this whole "It's not supposed to be Dark Souls" thing came from, my problem with Skyrim has never been that it's too easy, even if it is pretty embarrassingly easy.

I mean, I love Morrowind, and toward the endgame, that game basically plays itself because you become so ludicrously powerful.

But that's the point, once I get that far I SHOULD be powerful.

I don't dislike level scaling because it makes things "easy" I dislike it because it murders immersion.

There's no fucking reason that my level 30 character should be meeting Bandit Lords with so much fuck health that I have to whack at him for several minutes while he poses basically no real threat to me because the scaling is so stupidly set up that health scales way, WAY more than damage does.

The world of Skyrim is dead, cold and non-reactive with all the depth of a fucking tea-spoon, it is the antithesis of immersion.

Even the exploration is a fucking joke, sure there's a lot of places you can go, but there's only like, 20 actual dungeons, the rest are all copy-pasted templates of those 20 dungeons, that and the dungeons are all fucking linear corridors.

The loot isn't worth a shit, because for some UNGODLY reason, Bethesda decided to balance the game like it's a fucking MMO, and even the ancient relics forged by the Gods are fucking worth garbage that aren't worth the weight they take to carry. Because god fucking forbid that the player gets to feel powerful in your single player RPG.

The game is really just worthless, not even mods have been able to salvage it as of yet.

And for a Bethesda game that's the LEAST you can fucking expect.

Wow that's a lotta fucks for ya know, not giving a fuck. It's funny how so many people are perfectly willing to shit all over this game 2 years after its release when it garnered so much praise at the time. So you played it for 50 odd hours and got tired of it. That's still more time for your money than your average single-player game. It's only when the newness wears off and people go for that second playthrough that the flaws really stick out. Isn't that the OP's point? The immersion was lost when certain major questlines didn't affect any real change in the world around him, a problem scores of games have, not just Skyrim or other ES entries.

 

[James Joseph Emerald]

I think the issue of NPCs barely recognising who you are is an off-shoot of the core problem with Skyrim (and The Elder Scrolls series in general): the writing is lazy, bland and generic.

Imagine if each questline was as engaging as an episode of Game of Thrones. And your station in society (i.e. 'class' in the normal sense of the word) and race actually factored into your personal story. That would be amazing.

I think a big part of the problem with Skyrim's story is the lack of (social) class disparity. It's hard to take kings/Jarls seriously when they let a low-level thief barge into their throne room and start fiddling with their royal banquet. And it's hard to take anyone seriously when you're a landed noble and peasants are still giving you lip. It feels like more of a theme park ride than a real living world where respectable people get respect.

And there really isn't any reason for it not to be like that. I don't think the barrier here is anything more than not wanting to pay proper writers to do a decent job writing up believable interactions between characters. Easier to rely on clichés, bland characters and flat, predictable dialogue.

I'd bring up The Witcher II as an example of what Skyrim could be, but honestly there's something about that game that bores me too. I haven't played enough of it to put my finger on it, but if I was to guess I'd say the problem there is the pacing. Too much slogging around doing busywork. Which is a problem it also shares with Skyrim.

 

[mavkiel]

Thieves guild - As others pointed out, you brought the guild back from the brink of ruin. And you have a very strong patron.

Dark brotherhood - Consider the assassinations you pull off. You also gain the backing of a patron.

mage guild - You have a point there. However, I personally just consider it a meaningless political office. You sit around and look important while all the heavy lifting is done by the professors in the various schools.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I don't think being "arch-mage" is so much a title that invokes how powerful you are, just how willing you are to maintain the guild's day-to-day issues. Basically its the "we're all more lazy than you are so here, you be archmage". Its not like the D&D title of Archmage where you're basically up there with the other Forces that drive the world your character lives in.
"Back in my day, Archmage used to mean something, now they hand out that title in the mail with sample boxes of Tide..."
-Random Venerable Mage Guild member

 

[Xdeser2]

That would be true, except both Morrowind and Daggerfall were the exact same way.....

Except that's a fucking lie.

Factions in Morrowind have skill requirements, rather lofty ones for the top positions, if you're wanna get to the top of a faction in anything resembling a timely fashion, then you're gonna have to focus on what kind of character you wanna play.

You're gonna have to be real fucking dedicated if you're gonna be the leader of just say, 4-5 factions in one playthrough, much less all 16 of the joinable factions.

Not to mention that some factions lock you out of others.

Playing devils advocate here: it doesn't matter because Morrowinds guilds were just busy work, at least in Oblivion and Skyrim Bethesda put some work into making the guilds interesting (even if they had varying degrees of success). You can tout skill requirements all you want, but honestly just putting arbitrary walls in your way instead of designing interesting quests seems far more lazy.

Also, no faction locks you out of any other, its just a disposition bar that gets altered. You can conceivably be the head of House Telvanni, the head of the Imperial Legion, and Arch Cannon of the Temple all at the same time.