Jesus christ.. what was it, 5, maybe 6 short quests?

In an hour i went from being taught how to use wards to... being the arch-mage?

Just doesn't feel right. Doesn't feel right at all.

I don't know, I kinda enjoyed it. Took way more than an hour for me.

The other guilds are the same, I really don't like it :/

Skyrim is a very short game, the main quest lines are shorter than they were in Oblivion and Morrowind and a lot of the content of the game seems to be in the random dungeons of the world.

Really I know the meat of TES has very much so been in the random locations you can bump into while exploring but I feel they spent way too much powder into those and way too little into the main quests in Skyrim. At first I was very surprised after hearing a Bethesda employee did the main quest before hitting level 3 but after doing the main quest myself I didn't find it to be so unbelievable.

Don't really like the direction of this however, it seems Bethesda is aiming for quality over quantity where quantity actually dictates the quality of the game in many ways when it comes to TES. (More spells please, and I'll take my blobs back if that's what it takes too.)

The entire college experience needs an overhaul. Once modders get hold of the kit this will be a new game for the PC, I look forward to that. I look at Skyrim as being a beautiful canvas upon which modders can create a game, but not as a complete game in and of itself.

I thought the dungeons themselves were epic, well designed, and took quite a bit to complete.

The transition from student to Archmage is incredibly jarring, though.

lol it took me a minimum of 2 hours in labarinthian. sorry for spelling!

lol it took me a minimum of 2 hours in labarinthian. sorry for spelling!

I haven't started the College, because of RPing purposes, but I know the Companion quest line was fairly short. The Thieves Guold, however, is rather involved if you try to complete everything. Haven't started the DB line yet and the Bards College is very much a joke.

yeah the college was definitally the biggest letdown for me, especially in terms of length. Plus it was my first questline i complete and i went into this game picturing morrowind/oblivion sized factions and i was super let down realizing that all the guilds are that short. ya know.

took me 1 h to complete the whole guild questline :sadvaultboy: im not even mentioning DB missions lame lame lame and complete bs compared to oblivion quests

I liked it...maybe because i don't rush through questlines. I don't head straight to the next dungeon but just explore and whenever my journey takes me to a quest i do and enjoy it so i spent besically at least 3-4 days doing the college quest.

Yeah, but the bulk of the Thieves Guild quests, the ones for rebuilding the guild, are generic randomly generated quests. Go to x and do y. No story to them whatsoever. No consequences to them, either. I mean, seriously, you go plant stolen items in someone's house and nothing ever happens to them. Heck, I got asked to plant a stolen item in the same house twice! And when I opened up the chest to place the stolen object, what did I see? The first one I planted in there!

Cut those out and the Thieves Guild isn't much longer than the rest.

It sounds like you rush through everything and don't take your time and enjoy it... also crank up the difficulty a bit?

This is also a key for me. i take my time and love to explore.

The Dark Brotherhood quests REALLY need to be redone. While the actual quests themselves I think are pretty okay, none of the kill contracts are even remotely inspired.

And why am I doing a regular cave dungeon as part of this questline? Shouldn't I be, I don't know, assassinating people? In interesting ways with cool bonuses? Like Oblivion? The quests aren't really fitting.

They were going to make the game longer, then the devs took an arrow to the knee. No in all seriousness this game is lacking due to them wanting it out on 11/11/11. So much time was spent on the graphics and making the game look amazing they forgot that we, the customers, like gameplay more than shiny things.

This ^

You know, though? The quests often have a sense of urgency to them. If you go along with that urgency and press forward with the next task, without forcing yourself to stop and smell the roses along the way and... oh, butterfly! etc, it shouldn't feel like you've done a few menial tasks and suddenly your the arch-mage or guild master. And that's pretty much how all the faction quests are.

You're missing the point of Skyrim.

I agree that the questlines are on the short side in Skyrim.

Ditto....and took me far more than an hour to become archmage and the final reward is very nice.

The problem is the quest markers. With the GPS pointer telling you exactly where to go, it can be hard to avoid homing straight in on your objective. If you end up doing it like that, instead of wandering a bit and trying to do some finding on your own, you end up completing the quests very quickly. You zero in on your objective, kill everything between you and it, and win. That's pretty much all there is.

If you turn the quest markers off and wander around a bit trying to figure out what to do next, instead of beaming straight towards it, the quests seem longer. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1305203-ugh-bethesda-these-quest-directions-are-just-so-poor/.

Not quite, I've been trying my best to take it slow, roleplaying and keeping to what my character would do, yet I find some parts of the game being far too short. For example the mages guild, one person mentioned urgency, that's one reason it felt very short to me. In an RPG if there is a sense of urgency to a quest my character won't suddenly forget about it, no it will be a very high priority for my character. That's what Oblivion did better, it had a ton of quests with little urgency to them to start with while they still had their own story and flavor. And at the end when you had done the quests in every town you got to the main line of quests at the arcane university which had a small epic quest line that had urgency and importance to it.

In Skyrim it's like they skip making you do all the prerequisite quests and just throw you into the arcane university and the main storyline still manages to be shorter than it would be if you were just thrown into the arcane university at the start of Oblivion.

And there is no sense of rising through the ranks at all (heck, there are no ranks...), Oblivion was already doing this pretty hastily with some towns like the quest in Anvil where...

you get thrown into a high risk situation to your very being against a murderous battlemage even if you just joined the guild

... and in Morrowind this was done even better where most would start out doing the quests for Ajira getting her alchemy ingredients from the wild and helping her with her rivalry against Galbedir, and then you get to have your hand at more dangerous tasks.

In short the pacing in Skyrim is all wrong.

I agree this was my idea that I shared on the forums for the guild:


You enter the College of Winterhold are announced the rank of Novice. Yes, Novice mage before Apprentice. They don't know you. They don't know your skills, you cannot just be an apprentice. The main teacher, teaches you the Novice skill Lesser Ward. Now he wants to send the Novice mages out onto a field test, they must work with one another. It should be a small dungeon of some sort, so you get to know the other Novice Mages and it gives a feeling of progression with them later on. The field test should probably be a small mine or cave filled with wolves or something slightly insignificant. After you clear out the cave you report back to the teacher Toldifor. He says to come back the next day, your Novice training isn't done. And you won't be able to advance the rank if you don't do non main guild quest, so your teacher tells you to go ask around. They will ask you meaningless task. Like picking up their package in Whiterun or collecting them a certain amount of herb, etc. You do those meaningless task and then the next day you talk to Toldifor. He says news travels fast and he's impressed by my work. We do another major minor novice quest and then quest are opened again for those people we asked with minor task again, this time a little more impressive like their work is being destroyed by Skeevers in a mine. The next day you come back and Toldifor says it's time for your first test. You do a hard, but major quest. Probably in the research that will lead you to the Eye of Magnus. It would be interesting if you found the Sarthal Amulet in a completely different ruin and Toldifor wonders how it got here. After the test you are hired to the rank of Apprentice mage and are given an Apprentice spell. Again you go and assist the other mages with quests, maybe something more substantial for an Apprentice mage. Toldifor major quest. Mages minor quest. Toldifor test, you find the eye of magnus in Sarthal. It's unlikely that they'd want you an Apprentice mage to help with the Eye of Magnus. After reporting to the Arch Mage you're told to go off and help the other mages with anything they need. While you work Apprentice mage quest, the Arch Mage visits you and brings your rank to Adept mage and he ask you to find information about the Eye of Magnus, where it came from,etc. Also you get an Adept spell for the rank up. You do the quest and finally are able to track down information, give it to the Orc. But the rest of the project of the Eye of the Magnus again is restricted from you. And you end up doing minimal quest for the other Mages.