I believe the main quest in this game will have a nice slow pace to it. Where you can do things on your own time and just do whatever while leveling and questing and whatever else the game will offer, which is what a sandbox type of game is about. Unlike Oblivion where you felt a sense of urgency with everyone, crying and yelling about the gates opening and rtc, but if you did whatever it made the crisis feel far away and you kind of lost immersion while doing all those other quests and no ones seems to be doing anything.

Anyways back to my thoughts. I believe Beth may have played a good hand with all these dragon slaying, soul and word collecting. It was stated somewhere that we will have to slay dragons in order to obtain their souls to expand our power of the Dragonic(or is it Draconic?) speech. Also we will be in search for these special words that we will learn, some have stated we will discover them in dungeons.

How I tihnk the game may progress. WARNING: possible spoilers and speculation below, you have been warned!






My theory:
I believe he will escort us to the Greybeards, you will probably have an option to accept or decline his offer of escort or the invitation to the 7000 steps. Go to the Grey Beards and learn what you are(unless Esbern hasn't told you yet) and possible learn your first shout.(possibly the force shout or maybe perhaps we pick through 3 shouts that may pertain to each major class: Warrior, Thief, and Mage.) After this a dragon might assault the Throat and you got a chance to showoff your skills and svck some souls. Or they will tell you of the phrophecy and say that you must defeat Alduin by collecting these dragon souls and learning the shouts. They might give you places of interest or areas where they are current and may ask you to learn and scour the land and research for more of these hidden powers and to search and slay the lesser dragons to gain experience for Alduin in the final showdown. I believe this will give some level of urgency but give you incentive to explore this sandbox game and meet many characters and rare items on the road. Because who knows who might contain some hidden word? Some old Altmer researcher of dwemer ruins? A dank tablet down in some old tomb of some lost forgotten king? And of course Dragons will always be there to serve you death or become great practice for Alduin.

What do you guys think? Anything wrong with this? Your speculations?

i seem to recall in the podcast, Todd Howard mentioned a scene where the Greybeards call out to you to climb the seven thousand steps to the peak of High Hrothgar and meet them, and once you meet them, they tell you about you're destiny, or something like hat, so it doesn't sound like your speculation is correct, but that does seem to indicate that there is likely to be more buildup than Oblivion before the game tells you you're destiny, maybe not quite like Morrowind where you did a fair amount of going around speaking to informants about various things before you were told about the real reason you were sent to Morrowind, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see less of a sense of urgency than Oblivion. Now to say that I don't expect to see moments when the game urges you on, but I doubt it will be constant, and there will be times when the writing acknowledges the fact that you're free to take you're time. Since Oblivion was already criticized for the false sense of urgency it tried to give you, so I'm sure Bethesda is aware of the criticisms, so it would seem logical for Bethesda to try to adress them in Skyrim.

for the love of Christ use the [censored] spoiler tag !!!!!!

I liked it how in Morrowind+Daggerfall that you could completely ignore the main-quest if you wanted to and live in ignorance of the impending danger like most of the NPCs.
In Oblivion most of the world was someway affected by the Oblivion Crisis so you felt obligated to complete the mainquest or and were relectant to start a new character because it would undo all that world saving you just did.

I did use a spoiler tag and I warned you with the red text and the sub title.
Also the stuff not under the spoiler tag is just complete speculation by me.

@ Selbeth your right, I also recall the . I forgot about that completely until you mentioned it. I'll try to recorrect the post, but let me know what you think of the rest of my speculation.

Heh heh eh.. :sweat: