I'm not sure if this topic has been brought up already but I want to know if I'm not the only one who feels like the Guilds need an overhaul. Firstly I'd like to say that I had fun with the guild quest lines especially the ones for the College. Bethesda did a good job, I just think it could be better. For one (and this is a personal one, you can dismiss it if you'd like) get rid of The Dark Brotherhood. I understand that this is unlikely because of the Brotherhood's popularity I just wanted to note how uninteresting and one dimensional and even sort of cliched I feel the Brotherhood was. Especially when compared with the Morag Tong. I'd also like more depth in the design of the guilds themselves. A guild for Mages, a guild for fighters, a guild for thieves... You can do better. I often find the lesser guilds more interesting and feel Like Guilds like The Silver Hand or The Order Of Virtuous Blood should be featured more prominently and that more distinct Guilds should be made. A Guild for spellswords maybe I dunno, it's a start. I also hated the fact that the Guilds were quite small in Skyrim. There were only like eight members of The Companions, three of which don't really have dialouge options or backstories and two of which are dead by the end of the quest line. This is the legacy of the mighty Elfslayer Ysgramor? I was totally underwhelmed. Same issue with the Brotherhood though I don't like them anyway so whatever. This is what I'm asking for Bethesda: Depth, more defined, more distinct, more fleshed out Guilds. What do my fellow players think?

The whole Guild thing has felt kind of paper thin ever since they took out the random quests.. which only appeared in Daggerfall! Morrowind's guilds gave you a promotion every two quests or so to Daggerfall's sevenish, and it just went down from there. Now it's like fetch me this parcel, you're the guildmaster! They should make guilds a much more durable experience with room to grow.

Or at least make it skill oriented, I remember trying to get my magic skills to a high enough level where I could achieve my next rank. Simple tasks do not warrant promotion, many tasks and matching skills warrant promotion. I agree with you completely as well, the guilds did feel light but the main reason, i guess, would be voice acting. It was so much easier when everything was text based and you didn't need to be read every peice of dialouge by a voice actor. Though I'm not bashing the actors they did a great job it's just hard to get depth when you have to do all that. It takes time and money to get all those people to do the acting, much easy just to write it all and have the player read it. But who has time to read all that?

Skyrim doesn't really have true Guilds, though. They have factions with their own main quest, usually with about a half-dozen minor quests for different members. Would have been nice if they pumped up the number of radial quests, but I expect better from any DLC/expansions.

I've been saying, the reason I like the Companions is that even though the Fighter's Guild made sense, in a way, because you want to keep all the mercenaries under Imperial supervision, it had no point in the lore. The Companions were tied back to Ysgramor and old Skyrim while still being a good combat faction.

So I suppose more stuff like that is what I'd like to see.

The one thing about the Brotherhood that bothers me is the psychopathic types who work in it. I liked the Morag Tong in Morrowind better because the agents weren't so messed up. They had sanctioned work to do and it was a job. Too many DB types need to be put away. Now, I know that adds some interest, but it's overdone. There should be more bread and butter killers who are not as clinically psychotic.

All the guilds need longer story lines to be believable. DB in Skyrim comes closest to that.

For the record- I thought the Mother in Oblivion laughing gleefully about death was silly. The Mother is a crazed psycho too? She should have been portrayed more with somberness and reverence for her job, not some In Cold Blood comic book patron. That side is over done in the DB.

Maybe they did this intentionaly to prevent young people from overidentifying with the DB. I don't know. Makes some sense.