And not because of the storyline.

It is the mechanics. Even in a Bethesda game I have never seen such a buggy, unreliable and frustrating questline. This includes Dagggerfall.

Hark at what happened this playthrough:

- Moving to the first Imperial camp, Rikke has no dialogue. No fix works. Reload.

- Exiting Highgate Inn, game crashed. Reload.

- Delivering forged documents, game crash on travelling back.

- After blackmailing the Riften woman game crashes every time I leave castle Riften. Four times in a row. Reload from first quest.

- Rikke has no dialogue to regain Riften. Reload.

- No soldiers show up at Fort Greenwall, reload. Get stuck trying to leave Riften castle again. Reload from first quest in questline.

- Moving to the first imperial camp, Rikke has no dialogue.

- Battle for fort Dunstad, game crashed at 45%.

AARGH!!!

What is supposed to be a fun distraction has turned into an incredibly frustrating experience. Literally no step in this questline can be done smoothly.

I don't want to listen to a single word of that dialogue anymore that I must have listened to twenty times already. At times like these I really miss the ease and immersion of text-based dialogue that I can just skip over. This is so the oppposite of a fun gaming experience, it has practically ruined my entire playthrough.

I am of a mind now to just delete this character and play Skyrim again in half a year or so when the memory of this terrible annoyance has subsided somewhat.

I simply can not fathom how this questline ever got past the testing stage. There are so many gamebreaking bugs it is unbelievable. It's like Bethesda just does not care.

Well, I feel better for venting a bit.

Anyone else have frustrating experiences with the mechanics of this questline?

Latest bug:

- Questline will not progress past fort Greenwall. No map marker pointing towards Winterhold. Rikke thinks I still need to capture Greenwall.

Probably going to have to reload from first quest again as I have already redone the battle twice now.

I feel your pain! also hate the arguments it causes on here when actually its not even the main focus of the game.

i usually avoid civil war its too buggy and not worth playing

Apart from all the debate about this, wich is caused by there being very little background on the story making people project their own predilictions onto the questline, I am just very, very frustrated about all the hoops I have to jump through to get this bugfest to work.

I have started the questline from scratch four times now and it keeps bugging out.

It also bugs out on the same things over and over again and it is impossible this was not found before release.

They have to have known how terribly unreliable this questline was yet they said 'will not fix'.

It is just shoddy business practice, selling people a broken piece of software.