Don't have the mental capacity to write paragraphs and paragraphs today, but felt like contributing. I personally believe that the ideal for factions lies somewhere between the Daggerfall and Morrowind methods of implementation, mostly leaning towards Morrowind.

I liked everything about the Morrowind guilds and the only thing that I would add is the random quests from Daggerfall. We know its not that hard to do these things because there are modders that have done kinds of things like this, Beth needs to simply re-asses it's priorities and realize that factions need quite a bit of work.

Heres my thoughts on factions.

The path through each guild should end with a choice, allowing the player to either become guildmaster or simply continue to serve as the right hand of the guildmaster. Leadership is not for everyone.

It should also not be possible to join all guilds. It certainly shouldnt be possible to join both the fighters and the mages guild, since they could have conflicting goals. It could however be possible to be part of a secretive guild such as the thieves or assasin's guild aside from being part of a publicly known guild.

The secretive guilds could have their own sources of information however, and through that they could prevent the player from joining more than one secretive faction.


I personly find the guilds a bit sterile so far. I dont really think that a guild needs a story to tell. It should be more random. There could be more missions to take than what would be required to advance. That could keep it interesting to replay.

There could be a message board for example at the fighters guild where various contracts are displayed. After that you can talk to the local leader to take up the contract of your choice. At all times there could be contracts for various ranks displayed, and other members could be seen taking the contracts as well. The quests could be a bit more random. Here and there some quests could be tied into the story, but most of it during advancement could just be random.

Each guild could have their own way of advancement of course, the mages guild should be less active in its missions than the fighters guild. In fact, I would propose a very different system for the mages guild, with several branches.


For the mages guild you could first be an apprentice, but at some point you could choose between an academic path and the path of a combat mage. Through the academic part you would become a teacher and advisor. At first you could handle complaints from villagers about their crops being destroyed or such, and you could fix that. Later on you could teach new apprentices and give advice to lords and ladies on important matters that require magical skill. As a combat mage, you could follow the common path filled with battle. It should really require destruction magic however and occasionly other spells as well.

Unless they are putting in climbing and such they dont need to bother with a thieves guild if you ask me, it wouldnt be worth the effort. Climbing and such would also make the assasin's guild a lot more interesting.

Those could have contracts too however, at the thieves guild you could boast about the things you have stolen and how difficult it was. You could build a reputation by stealing the most impossible objects without being seen.

Synod/College of Whispers
Dark Brotherhood/Imperial Penitus Oculatus (someone told me this is what colin belonged to in TIF)
Fighter's Guild/Local nordic fighting group
Thieves Guild/?????
Skyrim's political parties

I have been pondering the thought of sub-specializations in guilds. For example, there might be a more financial based thief, or a more stealth based one.

On the other hand, this might be hard to make work.

I Like the concept of at least some factions you join can effect the main quest. I do not want the main quest to directly be relient on these factions though.
An example could be if you are head of the Mage guild you can recrute some mages to help in the final battle. You could still finish the main Quest without being Arch Mage but if you are the final battle is going to be a bit easier.
I never completely understood why being head of the Mage and Fighters guilds all I could mannage to have helping me was one minor companion fighter from each quild during the final Oblivion battle. I should be able to have a whole host of mages, in my opinion.

Sans Oblivion
Go New Vegas

Reading this thread mades me re-realize how much I can't stand Oblivion and love Morrowind. I agree with especially with the first couple of posters that factions should go back to how they were in that game with of course maybe mixing in Daggerfalls style. For example if the game takes place in Skyrim, you could have some minor lore friendly factions that have a smaller amount of quests to make the world feel more immersive, but of course it also felt that way in Morrowind as well since those factions had you going all over the place for quests and to different officers in the faction to receive the quest making the world seem bigger than it was.

To the first question, I think there should be long quest lines with each faction. To the second question, the factions' plots should both be related to the main quest and have quests that is on it's own and not the main quest. To the third question, I think that you should be able to finish the main quest without going into factions. Besides, there should be speed run competitions to finishing the main quest. To the 4th question, I think the equipment in TES 5 should all be obtainable to the player. To the last question, I think that there should definitely be quests you can do over and over again to sell items to factions and get money in return. Because not only are you acting as a contributing agent to the TES 5 world in terms of trade, business, and supply to make it a powerhouse in the player's realm of TES 5, but you're making that particular faction stronger and more plentiful in supply.

I like the idea of 40 or 50 factions of varying size and importance. Local crime bosses, more than one smugglers group, entrepreneurs, gangs, cults, businesses and independent business people, rogue groups etc... All these in addition to the main factions, which there need to be a lot of as well.

I liked the "Go fetch" and "Go meet" quests of Morrowind, without fast travel they weren't redundant. In real life, you have to do irritating and mundane tasks to prove yourself to people within a group.

I'd like to see "major and minor" factions. The major ones (as in the previous games) would have serious "semi-linear" quest lines and multiple ranks, the minor ones could have just a few quests, or maybe a couple of repetitive semi-random jobs that you could do from time to time. Your ranking with the major factions should have a significant impact on the NPCs you deal with; some of the minor ones might also, but others could be inconsequential.

I'd like to see a few items be faction specific, either as quest rewards or available for purches only by members, but most rewards/items should be able to be gotten in more than one way. For example, you might get a "unique" item as a reward from one guild or political party member, or get that same item by taking a contract for another guild or faction to kill the NPC with the item. You could get it in either case, but they'd be mutually exclusive, so no way to get two. You might also get a piece of faction-restricted equipment or clothing by buying them as a member of the faction, but a local crime outfit might be able to supply one to a non-member for "the right price", or you could try to kill or rob a member of the group to get one.

Too many factions and they all start to get watered down as development time is split among them; too few and you don't have enough options to make the current playthrough any different from the last.

Some factions should be "open", so your participation would be known and should affect other factions' reactions toward you, for good or bad. Other factions would be "hidden", so the other NPCs wouldn't be affected by it unless your participation was revealed by a bungled quest or intentional mention by you or another member. Having the threat of your membership in an assassin's guild being made public when another assassin is caught and is being tortured to reveal information might lead to where you have to choose whether to either "silence" your co-member and possible friend, or to deal with the consequences of the public exposure.

I like how they were in New Vegas. Getting heavily acquainted with one faction that is diametrically opposed to another meant you couldn't be all things to all people. I liked how there were entire NPC's, suppliers, and the like that I would never know b/c instead of being friends with the Powder Gangers or Legion, I destroyed their strongholds and was villain.

Skill and attribute requirements for advancement would be one of the things I'd like to see again. Oblivion felt very unrealistic in that aspect when my Level 10 Warrior was not only Master of the Fighter's Guild, but also Archmage, Listener, Master Thief and the Gray Fox. Oh, and the Arena Grand Champion and the The Champion of Cyrodiil.

And still groups of random bandits attacked him on sight and chased him to the ends of the earth. Makes you wonder what Fame and Infamy was all about :shakehead:

Same thing I'd like to see is the different services certain guilds offer to go a lot deeper than what was present in Oblivion. As an example I'm referring to the watered down versions of putting Enchantments on items or making things through Alchemy. In Morrowind I had a great time trying to mix'n'match and see what enchant or potion I could create (with varying degrees of potency depending on your skills). In Oblivion is was just 'You can make this, deal with it' where every step along the way was through a levelled list.

My conclusion was that the developers thought Morrowind's game mechanics were too difficult to comprehend for parts of their target audience and they made this slick levelled-list watered down mainstream game that looked pretty and could have some appeal to a larger group of people; but in doing so lost its soul of being the living breathing gameworld with its intrigue, history and uniqueness.

But I hope Bethesda will try to go back to it's roots and make their next installment of the Elder Scrolls series more akin to the depth of Daggerfall/Morrowind. Those have been my favorite games because the world was rich and felt alive. In my opinion Oblivion was aesthetically pleasing but lacking in depth and substance; the soul of the gameworld was just not there anymore; plowed under with all the levelled lootlists, Glass/Ebony/Daedric Armor bandits and the be-everything-at-once approach where a magic compass guided me through a cave I've never visited and pointed me to the resting place of an item that was stolen by the necromancers (on sublevel 2, currently walking behind that pillar according to my GPS)...

So yes, please bring back faction restrictions, big questlines that need not be part of the MQ, varied services for each guild and a more meaningful/rewarding experience of being the head of your faction.

The only minor thing I had with Morrowind though is that the Mages Guild should not expell its new Archmage and attack him/her with deadly spells just because he/she accidentally picked up a pillow :facepalm:

:P

I agree wholeheartedly with most of the post, except for the last item. That was obviously a really expensive pilllow you picked up, hehe.

Someone posted a while back that the research Bethesda had done showed that only around 20% of people who brought Morrowind bothered finishing the main quest. That would mean that if the shiny graphics hadn't attracted so many people, MW would NOT have been a success really. Reviewers also didn't know what to make of a game that required hundreds of hours to fully appreciate, and trashed a cultural simulation for having basic combat and other relatively trivial things.

I personally was introduced to MW when it was given away to my friend with the new graphics card he bought years ago, it was being used to show customers what the card could do. I didn't get excited when someone tried to tell me about MW, because they couldn't explain to me how huge it was, all they could tell me was that it was a fantasy game that looked really good, and you could be a thief or an assassin.

The MW that some of us appreciate was a failure, a huge waste of time, effort and money when people wanted something different. Best we can hope for in TES5 is something between OB and MW.

PS Moderators aren't supposed to covertly trash OB and casual players on the forum, official policy of the moderators is that OB is a DIFFERENT game and casuals are DIFFERENT players. I can say that certain people might be thinking "I've been diagnosed with ADD, have an IQ of 90, drink twenty red bulls every night, i'm semi literate, but it's great because everyone seems to be making games that i like.", but i'm not a mod.

I'm curious as to why so many voted against having the faction choices influence the ending of the game.

This is a very cool feature of New Vegas IMO.

Wouldn't it make the factions more fun from a roleplaying perspective to know that perhaps a few of the factions have a real importance in the story and your choices will affect the ending of the game? Obviously this makes for great fun with multiple playthroughs. Otherwise, if the faction choices don't have much impact on the broad strokes of the narrative, it's a sort of wasted opportunity for the PC to have greater participation in the story being told.

I would definitely love to see more opportunities to interact with opposing factions. In Oblivion, there were not any opposing factions that I can recall offhand. For example, the Dark Brotherhood was never at war with the Mages Guild, etc., and there was no opportunity to side with Necromancers instead of the Mages Guild. It would be great to see some factions in ESV that have diametrically opposing goals, where the PC has to make a hard choice to side with one or the other but not both.

I want the same quantity of factions of Morrowind with the same quantity of quests. But this time with multiple solutions like FNV. And a reputation system if possible.
I don't want ending "sliders" like FNV so I dont have any interest in factions endings, a faction can interfer in the ending scene, but I don't want endings talking about what happened to the the world and it's people and groups after the mainquest is complete, this is Fallout's way of doing an ending.

Faction wars! I was playing STALKER recently, and I really like the rivalry between Duty, Freedom, etc. And in Clear Sky I like how you can side with the factions and capture points for them, etc.

And about 10 little factions like The Order of the Virtuous Blood in Oblivion, each one with a couple quests.

I DONT KNOW, SURPRISE ME BETHESDA!!! GIMME QUALITY AND QUANTITY!

I would like a small number of factions, maybe 4-8, and I definitely want them to have a plot.

Most importantly though, I absolutely don't want really dumb and obvious stuff like "The Magic Guild" or "The Thieves Guild". Instead of the factions focusing on different skillsets, they should focus on political or religious differences.

It's an integral part of the Elder Scrolls series... And it's kind of realistic, yes there should be factions focused on political and religious differences - as every game before Oblivion - but you can't say a martial arts school is dumb because they focus on a single skillset. It makes sense, people hanging out together, working on skills within a certain field, offering jobs and the likes. It makes perfect sense to me.

I love many factions but alot of quests. Anyone else agree with that. Also a second quest line after you become the leader. With randomly generated quests and issues after also.

I like the idea of joining a certain faction and becoming and enemy to opposing factions. It makes for good replay value.

If you svck up you should be allowed in both but with alot of butt kissing.

You, sir, think to small. Lets look at what Morrowind did.
For the fighters guild, you were pitted against your own guild, or the thieves guild, depending on choices. Telvanni was pitted against the other three houses, and the mages guild, but also extended the olive branch occasionally. The Morag Tong killed, pretty much, any faction, with the Dark Brotherhood against them at the same time. And those are just three brief examples.

Basically, Morrowind had a great step to what guild quests should be like, and it needs to be further expanded on with more choices of how to solve a quest.

This. I kind of expected for Oblivion to expand things, but unfortunately they made the guild elements much, much more simpler. With the new technology, imagine what you could do with such guild relations and new ways to do quests and work with people of other guilds.

The only requests I have for factions are:

A) More of them. The 4 basic guilds, with competitors and some political parties and religious organizations.

B ) More quests per faction, with some quests after getting to the highest rank possible (Notice I said "highest rank possible"; I think that, in at least 1 case, the highest rank you can attain shouldn't be the head honcho). Maybe like 10 storyline-quests, 15 non-storyline quests, and 5 post-advancement quests.

C) And finally, interaction between guilds. Good or bad, it doesn't matter.

Honestly I'd rather they concentrate on something besides "guilds". They feel kind of, limiting. First off, it means to get to any of the quests you have to join the guild in question. And there's the "Oh, you're in the "assassin's" guild. So all you ever do is assassinate people and get money for it." Or, you could have a quest where the leader of a cities wife want's him assassinated, and in exchange you'll never be bothered by the guards once she takes power. OR you could tell the leader and have the wife executed for treason instead. If you were in the "assassin's" guild the second option wouldn't make sense. By eliminating the "guild" structure you allow the writer, and players, to have more choice.