anyone hate how.... oblivions factions svcked?


the dark brotherhood were meant to be some obscure group of guys that are extremely hard to track down and were incredibly efficient. the atmosphere was terrible

in oblivion it felt more like a cult that ocassionaly told people to kill someone. whats more the "evil" thing felt so cheesy. SITHIS,SITHIS,SITHIS,SITHIS. Lucien lachance had this ridiculous voice that made me think "what the christ?". the dark brotherhood werent a group ofpeople, they were these things that would never shut up about sithis, they werent even discreet about sithis, no mysteriousness. they just told you everything. it was pathetic.

although the quest "whodunnit?" was so fun, mainly because of the taking advantage of the incredibly stupid ai and laughing at the voice acting


the thieves guild was made entirely out of honourable people, and nothing important was ever stolen

the mages guild required no magic skills, and nearly every quest was centred arouned necromancers.

the fighters guild were very honourable. quests werent very memorable either. and no quests seemed to be like services for other people (exept that lion problem one, which was pathetic)

the main quest [sp] was about a cult that had no reason to destroy the world trying to destroy the world.[/sp]


they all felt so cheesy



i/you hopefully want


fighters guild quests to involve
- joining up with large bands of warriors and helping out a town/destroying a town in a large mercenary's vs someone else battles
-going alone to fight some opponents
- leading a small band of warriors to ambush a convoy/raid a place for a Purpose (not just because there are things there)/destroy a village
killing an enemy of the guild via assasination
training militias

the fighters guild should have atleast two enemies. the further you go into it, the less noble it becomes. at the start you should help people, towards the end you should crush potential rival guilds and train bad mercenarys/ assasinate people (assasinations that dont have to rely on stealth) :wink_smile:

the mages guild should involve....
collecting rare stuff (fungus,artifacts, essence of obscure animal 32 etc)
fighting rivals (not just necromancers for gods sake)
consulting with daedra
going into daedric realms to do the above (hopefully not the same one, or daedric realms that look the same)
performing magic tricks
finding out how to do something to do something else
teaching a spell to someone
summoning something cool, and then having a quest concerning that thing you just summoned

thieves guild quests should involve
stealing a particular item from someone/ a faction-
hijacking horses/carriages and bringing them somewhere else
stealing many items in a weird way
rescuing thieves from prisons

also- thieves guild guys should not get angry at the player for murder on every mission, specific missions are fine, but not every mission


the assasins guild (most likeley the dark brotherhood ) should
be mysterious, and not blatantly obvious about something. (oblivions dark brotherhood was moronic)

the quests should obviously involve assasinating people, ONLY assassinating people, also- no black hand, the notes are a good idea, but a courier should deliver them to you
the spicing up factor is
how hard it is to find the target
where the target is
if you have to do a grand escape afterwards/ have to charge past hostiles to get to your target
if you can use your persuasion skills
the means of which to kill (poison,traps or just the blade)
other little conditions
a time limit


other faction guilds are probably based upon one of these guilds, just coppy and past and then add lots of twists. there should never be a good/evil thing

apart from better factions and faction quests themselves, I hope the faction system is a bit closer to FO:NV when it comes to selection. This increases re-playability by a considerable amount.

YES

One can hardly deny that's true. It makes me think back to the main quest of FO 3. So what are we doing here?
Fighting a military group stemming from the original US govt that wants to bring civilisation and order that have a particular way of caring about people with a group that seemingly equals them in the end. All they want is activate the water purifier and all we want to do is risk all our lives to... do the same thing with "possibly" the same results?! Wait... What?!
It often just seems this is the only plot BSG can come up with, sadly enough...
I can't agree more on the part that decisions you take should be more morally ambiguous. That's all I've been hoping for the stories of RPG's and most recently The Witcher proved in a masterly way that this is so satisfying when realized properly.

My impression is the game was not meant to be so childish it just came that way because of the poor actors, poor text writers and poor acting. Some of the dialogue lines are quite clever, but most of them are as clichee as it can get. And interpreted by poor actors they sound cheesy and artificial. The Dark Brotherhood didn't feel as dark as it should, agreed. The fighters guild didn't feel as warriorish as it should. Of course the quest lines associated to the guilds (except DB that was the best) were not mind blowing either, but I think the worst thing in Oblivion was the class B dialogue system. Every quest, every story is given by NPCs and if NPCs don't act well according to what they say, they sound artificial and kill the credibility (of themselves AND of the quests they introduce you to).

Yeah, I mean, it's not like an elder scroll is important, heck, I wipe my [censored] with one!

In all seriousness though, while I would like to see more greyness in the quests, there's nothing wrong with a little black and white now and a again to make you feel like a genuinely good/evil person.

I personally like the black and white choices. I like when the choices are gleaming with goodness, or shrouded with evil. I wouldn't mind having a third middle road option, but I didn't like how FO:NV did it, where there was some good and bad, no matter what side you chose. Everyone else seemed to like that about FO:NV though, so maybe I just have a screw loose or something.

We stole an ELDER SCROLL in the Thieves guild man. I'm pretty sure that's death penalty.

EDIT

The Main Story was pretty much about summoning the Deadra of Destruction if I'm correct, that was pretty evil. I enjoyed it.

The Mages guild was going in the right direction, because in those times the separation of necro and magic was all there. I think there wasn't too much magic based on the fact that people are not interested in magic, but want to do the guild stuff. Maybe something can be done about that.

I love the fighters guild, but off the top of my head can't remember a lot of the quest...I was too busy fighting lol.


I don't see a problem with the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild or Main Story. The Thieves guild was amazing in my opinion. Dark Brotherhood had good immersion. Main quest was fun, but i get side tracked easily (I just beat the main quest first quarter this year when I had the game since it came out). The Mages guild could use improvement, but it did reminded me a good bit of how morrowind was.

God we had to gather stuff for ppl in Morrowind, talk about hard work to get noticed.

In reality, there is no black and white, no good and no evil, so yea it should all come down to motivations and priorities.

I prefer black and white choices as well (that's just the kind of guy I am), but I do think there is room for grey as well. The problem that many games have with morality and choices is that when offering an evil choice, it's really evil. For instance, in the two Knights of the Old Republic games, you had dark side and light side choices. The light side choices were fine if you wanted to play a good jedi, but if you wanted to lean toward the dark side, you had to pretty much be a mass-murderer. Where's the selfish, but not violent choice?

Or perhaps my problem with New Vegas was that my character was put in a bad situation that he had to make the most of and given several options of grey and one of evil (supporting Caesar's Legion).



I disagree. I do think there are black and white (good and evil choices), but that's a discussion for one of the other boards.

I like the angle where you join a good guild to do good work, but as you climb in ranks you go "hey, this is NOT what I signed up to do". How do you proceed? Severe consequences far ahead.

NV did a better job of developing complexities of inter-faction politics. All of them were corrupt crooks and there was no clear "good" or "bad" faction. I think Skyrim will move in this direction as well.

Agreed in general. At the very least, if they're intent to stick to black and white, at least we should get given the option to follow either road - much like the "Raven Rock" quest in Bloodmoon.

And yeah, it *is* cheesy. I normally have no problem about that, being able to both enjoy the songs of Rhapsody and laugh at their preposterousness, except that it kills immersion to some intent. Though the quests were immensely poorer, I was so much more Morag Tong than I was DB.

I also prefer more black and white situations. I do think there is room for grey, but I really am not a fan of how NV did it. No one was really good, and no one was all bad. I wasn't left with any choice that I really wanted to make, instead it was a matter of "Who can I stand the most?" IMO, that's for voting in elections.

As for replayability, I like it, but only if it's done well. In NV, I don't actually think there is a lot of replayability because you can remain on good terms with everyone until near the ending of the game, so it doesn't give me a lot of incentive to start over from the beginning when I know I can just do everything the same until I get to the end. If this game is going to feature only being able to join certain guilds (if you join A, you can't join C), then the storyline of the game needs to change enough to have an effect on gameplay.

There should be some sort of perk to being the patriarch of ____ guild. Whether it's calling fellow fighter's guild members to battle, sharing in profits from stolen goods, or marking annoying npcs for assassination.

I like grey scenarios. People and factions have their own interest and motivations for doing what they are doing which is what Fallout New Vegas did well, especially with the NCR who very much resembled the modern government in how it functioned.

I kinda disagree with some of your complaints about the various guilds in oblivion, but I do agree having "grey" spices things up. I've always liked the "chaotic good/robin hood" vibe of the thieve's guild though.

I don't think we'll have to worry about things being too black & white, there's always been lots of grey in the ES universe.

The Followers of the Apocalypse are the only true good faction in New Vegas, but that's just one exception out of about 15 other factions.

Grey is far superior to black/white. I don't want to feel like a goody-two-shoes if I side with him, but I don't want to feel like an evil demon if I side with her. In real life, as stated above good and evil don't exist. I think it should be similar. People who prefer black/white...You've been kidnapped by crappy plots and over-use of cliches, you have Stockholme's Syndrome...

I think there should be a mixture of Black And White and the Shades of Grey equivalent. Now, I know this sounds rather strange, but let me finish.

This is all hypothetical,
But lets say, there are two groups of people...um...The Telvanni, and a big powerful Breton house, both have about the same amount of magical and military might. Now, for the conflict, let's say that there is a fledging assassin's group that's stolen money from both of these major entities.

The Breton Noble house is all for finding the people who stole their money, and simply getting it back, killing those who get in their way, whilst the Telvanni wants to rip apart this entire little guild, get their money back and generally show their dominance.

Now which side do you choose. The Breton Noble House is leaning towards the good, by letting the majority live, the Telvanni is leaning towards the evil but killing them all, but neither is really one or the other.

These are the type of choices I want to see.

Also, remember, the above was completely hypothetical.

Good point. I was thinking mainly of the MQ with Mr. House, NCR, Legion. They were all crooked in some form or other.

NO


I agree with everything you said except that. I DESPISE time limits. There are very few exceptions, like the battle of Bruma, obviously a time limit made sense with the Siege Crawler marching through the Great Gate. But for assassinations and such, please no. This isn't Assassin's Creed, I don't think time limits would be implemented well and only become keyboard-snapping-frustration.

I hate time limits too. But they are sadly a bit evident for a lot of quests. I'm not saying a short time limit which would make you rush or miss other opportunity, but it makes sense that if the Night Mother has been invoked so this dude should be off, you couldn't be able to wait three months before getting around to do it. That's even more crucial for other non DB quests of the "saving" type. Oh hey, let's not go to Kvatch in like, ever. ERM. Problem much ?

I agree it would bring a lot of constraints, but it would also give the player a sense of a timeline, of time passing, instead of being a confuse mess of quests.

Grey, grey, and more grey please, Bethesda. It's worth considering that grey by its very nature can be so close to black or white that the difference is subtle indeed, depending on each player's interpetation of events; greyness doesn't imply a middle road, but a lack of fixed absolutes, and everyone will see a slightly different shade. I'd much rather RPGs let players come to their own conclusions, just as NPCs should come to their own. Don't bludgeon us over the head with whose is correct.

As far as factions go, I think the single best thing Beth could do is write the NPCs in such a way that that they are never (or at least, very rarely) unfailing paragons of their particular faction's ideals, but rather people with their own agendas aligned to a greater or lesser degree with one faction or another.

I'd like to see differering, and sometimes conflicting factions-within-factions, where rival mages compete for guild rank, thieves with different methods argue their case to guild leaders, brutal mercenaries hire the PC to dispose of higher-ranked and more chivalrous members of the same Fighters Guild, and so on.