This was something that bothered me about Oblivion (keep in mind that the only times I played mages/fighters guild was for the GS on XBox):


And after that? Nothing. You have a piece of light armor that makes the guards ultra-hate you, and makes members of the Thieves Guild love you. There are no more heavily guarded locations that you get to test your skill against and no more special commissions for you to earn a good pile of gold from.

This bothered the hell out of me, and I really don't want to see it happen again.

Here's my suggestion: When you go and finish the guild quest chain, firstly, you DON'T become the guild master, if the guild master has to change its one of his lieutenants, not the guy that was able to raise through the ranks in a matter of days by attending to some of the matters the guild had to face for those few days. It just doesn't feel right that last Thursday, I was just inducted into the guild. and now I'm supposed to be running the whole thing.

Second: How about some randomly generated quests, you make 5 or so locations, you go and talk to your guilds respective handler, and based on an RNG, you are told to go to one of the five locations where a random item spawns and you either have to sneak or fight your way though the location and get the item of value. Then you make your way out of the area and turn in the item. When you exit, the area locks down and you can't get back in until you have another quest dealing with this location. This could work with the Thieves Guild and Mages Guild, as a valuable item or arcane artifact respectively. To add in quests for the Fighters Guild, you could have them play bodyguard or protection duty, where they have to insure that a person or object of high value gets safely to its destination. The Assassins Guild that Skyrim will offer will do the opposite: you need to kill a randomly generated target that will be going to it's destination, and you get a bonus for never being seen/the bodyguards don't find you.

You can also fail these repeatable quests when the object of value is moved to a new location (Thieves and Mages), the person you are supposed to protect dies (Fighters), or the person makes it to his destination (Assassins).

I think this would make guild much more fun. Any thoughts?

I like this idea, I had the same frustration where you finish all the Guild quests and then....Nothing....

You just get gold from time to time and companions. Yay.

1+ for idea, even though I've heard of this many times, I surely hope they can put this in.

I′m with you on that one! There should be something to becoming the leader of a faction/guild. Duties, power, random quests and so on.

I love the idea of randomly generated quests, as I feel it allows for greater roleplaying as a member of a guild that actually does stuff outside of whatever questline they have.

I think it would also be nice if we can see random guild members around the world doing their job instead of just hanging around the guild halls or drinking at the local tavern. In Oblivion, very rarely there might be Orc Adventurers in caves, so maybe sometimes we can find Fighter's Guild members in caves or escorting random noblemen, Mages Guild members researching a ruin, but Thieves' Guild and Assassin's Guild (probably DB) members would only be known to you if you are part of their guild.

I quite like being a Guild Master, even though it is sort of unrealistic to rise up the ranks so quickly. However, if you did so much for the guild in so little time, you should deserve some recognition, and if you prove your leadership capabilities I don't see why the guild leader should not be you, so long as you have the capability and determination, and merit that surpasses that of other members.

However, I would like to see an improvement of the Guild Master system, if you ever do become one. I feel that we should be able to get followers from every Guild once we are of high enough rank, and we should be able to commission more specific tasks to our members, for example I want to be able to select the contracts my Fighter's Guild takes on, or send my Thieves to burglarize a select house, or send my Assassins to assassinate someone (already possible in Morrowind with mods) or send my Mages on an expedition to research the effects of flora and fauna in a certain region.

i agree. I was disappointed that all I could do after the dark brotherhood was go to a statue once a week and get information to go kill somebody, then go give it to the weird lady under the well. =) I was always wishing that I could've gone and killed the person myself. that would've made it so much better! but yes It would be cool if somehow even though all the quests are done, you have something else more to do after it.

If I remember correctly, there was mentioned that guilds are going to have randomly generated quests now. Forgot which publication said that, but I remember reading it.

There is supposed to be a new faction system, so I'm optimistic about better factions in Skyrim. Still, I don't want to feel like I'm the only member of the guild that's actually doing something while the others are all sitting in the guild halls and towns.

If they could implement something like the Give Your Orders mod from Morrowind, and add in unlimited random (even if generic) quests that are completely optional and out of the way of the guilds' main storylines, there could be so much fun to be had with Guilds, especially if the AI is good.

Imagine going on an assassination contract with a fellow assassin, and as your target moves along a road you tell your fellow assassin to provide overwatch with a bow in the woods near the road while you dash forward and stab the target in the throat with your dagger. As his bodyguards chase after you, arrows fly out of the woods, dropping them in an instant. :toughninja:

I'd hug you for giving me this info, but that would be gay. So, I'll just say kudos.

If your a fighter, you pretty much get unlimited dungeons to storm.

If your a thief, all of the rich houses should have some incentive for you to burgle in the same way.

i too remember reading somewhere about having a "job", and assumed it meant the guilds have regular work for you.

i think the top job shouldn't be available if you're not able to do some kind of management of and have some repsonsibility to the guild. and although it could potentially be fun the "guild management" concept sounds like the kind of thing gets left out as it's too far from core gameplay.

maybe fairly simple authority is possible as you rise in the ranks: you could order the lowlier members to accompany on guild quests for a share of the reward or something.

With Radiant AI maybe there will be unwritten quests that naturally form. Like when you become guildmaster if you killed somebody maybe their family will kill a lower level guild member and then the guild declares war on their family and this would open up hundreds of new quests and this could happen with any family or group or guild. Like the quests get auto designed to the environment.

Regarding rising up through ranks it was much better in Morrowind, where newbies were prevented from doing that by the Guild requirements

OK being told 'The Guild appreciates your devotion to duty, but you simply don't meet the requirements for advancement' was annoying at times, but actually much more realistic since you'd expect the higher ranks to require higher skills. Unfortunately it was a bit ruined in MW by how easy it was to get massive gold and use that on training to rise up through the levels

The point I'm making is that it is perfectly possible for the devs to arrange it so that people can only rise through the ranks over time, getting rid of this feeling that you can join a Guild one day and take over as Guild Master the next day

Yes there are quotes somewhere that says under certain circumstanses if NPC's like you a radiant AI quest will pop up unscripted.

Depending on what they meant by "liked", this could be a simple reputation / disposition check..
Or hopefully based on certain other creteria, ilke joining and reaching higher ranks in a guild.

However random quests are in, we just don't know how or how often yet.

yes, this idea is awesome, they should have infinite random quests after teh guild story is over. I mean with radiant ai they don't have an excuse not to do it

Yes. They said the guild quests are handcrafted, but some randomly generated quest related to your guild and your guild rank would be awesome. Say your a Silencer in the Dark Brotherhood for a Speaker of the Black Hand. Radiant Story finds a NPC of Murderer rank, and gives him a quest for you. He finds a contract too hard, and wants you to take it from him. It could be along those lines, or someone off the street could take a chance and ask if you kill for money, in which you can reply positively or negatively, and have you kill a NPC generated in a designated dungeon.

Or perhaps if you are an Associate of one the new Mage guilds. You will get a quest to pick herbs for an alchemist in the resident guild hall, or something small and mundane due to your low rank.

It would be awesome to get random quests with varying difficulties based on your rank and standing with your guild. I fully support this idea.

I think that it'd be a great idea for the AI to react with actions and actions react with quests but I hate the idea that, such in Morrowind, when you kill someone you are no longer able to finish at least 2 different quests, or, such in Oblivion, when you did REALLY want to kill someone you find that you can't, because they were, at some point, related to a quest you completed at the beginning of the game. An interesting idea would be to have alternate quests, e.g. you killed a monk you needed to get a relic from, you now have to search through mr.monk's stuff to hunt down a confidant that knows about the relic, but, due to your actions, you have made it harder to understand some aspect of the relic.

Another idea, addressing the very annoying tendency of guild members to never leave a room, would be to send them on errands, perhaps three errands per character that could loop throughout time, allowing for a more realistic time interacting with guild members as, sometimes, they wouldn't be at the guild and you'd have to sleep off the wait, or, while you're not at the guild, you may run into a guild friend running an errand and, occasionally, trigger a short battle sequence wherein you and your guild mate could work together to be rid of the threat, thoughts?

in dark brotherhodd i want to only be able to go up to speaker, not the leader.

Haven't Bethesda recieved a lot of criticism for their randomized dungeons and quests earlier? I am not so sure they would want to try that again. Endless quests sounds great. But the problem is that those endless quests become repetitive and doesn't fit into the overall narrative. Its reduced to "Get item A from location B for person C" and the minute you hand it in the questgiver have forgotten you. This isn't to say that quests with some random elements are bad, definately not, it makes re-play more interesting. If anyone of several crooks can be the bad guy in a sidequest its more interesting than if its always the same guy.
Clever and ambitious "nerds" have been trying to teach computers how to play Dungeons and Dragons (or pnp rpg's in general) for many years, the downfall is always that the computer has no creative imagination on its own. So far.

edit:
The pod-cast with Todd on gameinformer tells a bit about how Bethesda are trying to make Radiant Story sculpt quests based on templates but with more dynamic elements in it. And that it hopefully will be hard to tell if a dynamic quest (or favor as Todd also call it) is hand written or generated. He say he doesn't wanna hype Radient Story, but it certainly sounds promising.

There is also an alternative use for random tasks. The whole idea of them is to provide something to do, so this can be captilized on instead of calling them quests. Bartenders could for example hear rumors about places from guests and just reveal locations that the player hasn't found yet. It could make it easier to find interesting places without having to take the time to explore every nook of the wilderness, but I am not sure how people who love exploring would react to this.