I did a search of the forums, but finding no adequate thread decided to create one.

ITT: We will be discussing people's opinions on the Elder Scrolls faction quest lines, advancement, and end game.

It seems to me that many people have expressed a desire to be able to have meaningful play beyond becoming the head of a faction; this is logical.

In my opinion, the faction quest lines should only get "epic" after you become the head of that faction. Bethesda allows you to toil long and hard to become a leader, now let the player exercise his leadership.

It seems to me that there are a few ways to employ this.

1. Bethesda designs the faction quest line to continue beyond becoming leader of the faction, that accentuates the role the player can play as leader of the faction. (Roughly 50% of the time spent becoming the leader, and 50% of the time spent as leader).

2. Bethesda programs into the game a political/societal simulator, that the player can tap into at various levels of leadership within the faction, and that helps to drive quest generation and game-world reactivity.

3. A combination of the above.

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Besides this many people have expressed an interest in "random quests".

I think this idea has much promise.

1. Bethesda programs in a quest-generator, that can have loaded many different types of quests for the different factions.
- I think this option would best be shown through example.

Fighters Guild: Random Quest 1: Creatures in a Basemant: Script: Spawn a plausible creature in a random house's basemant. Radiant AI of NPC sees creatures and reports to Fighter's guild a request to rid the house of the creatures. Player can go to house and get rid of the creatures.
Random Quest 2: VIP escort: Script: Spawn assassin NPC/s whose goal is to assassinate important figure. Radiant AI of NPC gets rumor about attempt, and reports to fighter's guild a request to protect him on said day the attack is supposed to happen. Player can protect NPC or become a detective and attempt to locate and apprehend or kill the assassin before the attack.

Mages Guild: Random Quest 1: Restock alchemic supplies: Script: As the mages use the resources in the guild they go down, when they reach a certain level they inform the player of what they need. Player can go and get the required numbers and type of ingredients and return them to guild.
Random Quest 2: Recover magical artifact: Script: Magical researcher finishes studying tome or object and now wants to acquire an artifact that exists somewhere in the game-world (mechanic via a registry), and asks the player to go get it. Player acts like indian jones and acquires artifact through much toil and daring. Returns artifact to researcher, or keeps artifact to self, etc.

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Certain factions should be mutually exclusive to enhance re-playability and increase the meaning of faction choice, also to maintain game-world and lore consistency.

There could/should be more things to do for faction leaders: Whether it's a couple of quests unrelated to the main 'story' of the guild (IMO a faction doesn't need to have a certain story that runs through it from the start until the end, but that's another story.) or just some other things to do. Real things to do, not 'pick up a reward every week' or 'recruit a generic mage guy as a companion'.

I think it's not far fetched to come up with a quest line that doesn't put you at the top after its conclusion, after which there's nothing for you to do, but instead makes you the head of the faction when you've been through around 80-90% of the quests, with still more to come. Becoming the head of a faction shouldn't have to be the end goal/reward.

I actually think that implementing some quests for when you reach the highest rank in a faction might not be a bad idea, because as it stands, once you become the head of a faction, you really don't need to have anything to do with the guild after reaching that point, implementing some sort of quests for faction heads, or really, just adding anything interesting to do once you reach that point. Becoming the head of a guild is supposed to be something you look forward to, but right now, it's just kind of boring because there's nothing worth doing once you reach that rank. Also, while not quite related to the topic at hand, the rewards for becoming the head of a faction should also be improved somewhat, because with the way it was in Morrowind and Oblivion, becoming the head of a faction is actually where being involved with the faction stops being rewarding because at lower ranks, you get rewards for completing quests, but without that, all you have is a title.

I'm against randomly generated quests, though, because the way I see it, there's simply no way randomly generated quests can be varied and well written, eventually, you'd inevitably find that all quests are just generic tasks to x or fetch y, with only the identity of x or y changing and the location changing, and the Elder Scrolls already has too many quests like that, we adding to the problem by allowing the game to randomly generate an infinite supply of them is the last thing we need. I'd much rather reach a certain point where I realize I've done everything and that all there is to do is start over, but be able to say that it was all worth the time I spent on it then still be able to do quests but not want to because they're all painfully boring and generic. Really, I'm against randomly generated content in general, but at least if say, landscapes are randomly generated, they can be decently varied and convincing if the generator is good, with quests, you simply need a designer's creativity to make something interesting, having a computer generate one automatically based on some random variables just can't replace that.

And yes, certain factions should be mutually exclusive, because some factions may have conflicts of interests with each other, and it wouldn't make sense for the player to be the head of two conflicting factions, an example of this from past games would be the great houses in Morrowind, while most factions would not prevent the player from joining them for being part of a specific conflicting faction (Though I'm pretty sure that some such factions would still have conflicts in their questlines.) once you joined one house, you could not join the other two, I am aware that there's an exploit that could potentially allow the player to be part of up to two houses, but I'm pretty sure that's a flaw in quest design and not something that's supposed to happen, the way it's supposed to be is that you could only join one house, and this made sense, since the great houses were rival political factions that are often known to have conflicts with each other, it would not make sense to be part of all three, and it made it so that the choice of which, if any, house to join was an important choice that would effect the future of your character. Yet with Oblivion, it seems Bethesda decided to make this irrelevant by making all the factions that are specifically noted to have conflicts with other joinable factions (Like the Blackwood Company versus the Fighters' Guid or the necromancers versus the Mages' Guild impossible to join.) and all playable factions did not care or even acknowledge your status in other factions.

I'm for more stuff to do when you hit the top, as certain factions endings made me feel kind of lost with what to do, but I also don't want randomly-generated quests that eventually boil down to go here, get that, return. Not much fun in that.

It's interesting you mention that all you have is a title. Would be awesome if having that title influenced the way you interacted with the game world and the other characters. For example, because you are arch-mage, you are required to sit in on counsel meetings at the capitol and may be tasked with solving certain magical related problems that arise in the empire.



I see your point about the random quests. I still feel like no matter what, there will be the fetch quests, and the go to X and kill Y type quests (whether that means assassinating someone or kill creatures or bandits). What if they were just extra padding added outside of the more interesting quests hand-crafted by the brilliant writers and designers at Bethesda. A system something like-- hand-crafted interesting quest A, then you have to complete one or two random quests, then you get to do hand-crafted quest B, etc. Or perhaps make them entirely optional.