I've recently been playing through the guilds again for Morrowind and Oblivion, and one thing I have been thinking about is how, especially in Oblivion, there is a lack of choice. A guild is a member of proffesionals, and you are a sort of mercenary in this guild, except for the Mages Guild. You should have the option to pick and possibly decline missions therefore. An assassin doesn't neccesarily have to accept his mission, he can decline it on moral standards because it might involve killing a member of a cause he is sympathetic to, or because he thinks that is a waste of his time. Also, if you can decline missions, if you do a mission it should have possible rewards or repercussions. For instance, you could choose to accept a mission defending a Mages Guild member who is exploring a Daedric temple, which would boost your reputation with them, or you could accept a mission to rob the Mages Guild, reducing your reputation with them. If you declined a mission, this would be the no consequence route, but it might be hard to advance in the guild if you are too picky with missions. Of course, this would require a large amount of possible missions and for there to be randomly generated missions.

Secondly, I would like for the guilds to be a lot harder to advance through. It should involve getting a good disposition with the person who will promote you, doing a lot more missions than previously, and also the skill/attribute requirements of Morrowind. It prevented a thief like me from becoming the Archmage. There was a thread a while back which talked about using in game tests instead of a skill check. I mean something along the lines of, you must open a magically locked box using a spell, or you can choose to train a novice in one of the guilds skills, and if you are not skilled enough you cannot train him.

Finally, I would like more end content after you become leader of the guild. In all of the games, becoming leader of the guild meant you were done. No more missions. As leader of the guild, you should have MORE duties and possibilities. When you become the leader, you shouldn't be sort of shrugged off and told you don't need to do anything, you should have to recruit others or help on a particularly difficult mission.

I agree with you on all of those points. The guilds in Skyrim should definitely be more in depth and interesting and not too easy to advance through. You also got to remember that Bethesda wants to release new info on the factions in Skyrim. I can not wait!!!!! :celebration:

I think the concept that you will advance until you are the leader of said guild is quite old. Realistically, a guild leader has many responsibilities that should be quite time consuming. Those administrative duties, for obvious reasons, have little to no place in an action/adventure rpg. They are boring. They are WORK. That is the reason they never let you be the count of Kvatch in vanilla Oblivion, there wouldn't be much fun writing laws, rebuilding cathedrals, and collecting taxes. I think the amount of guild content you should be able to do should be vast, yet limited in the sense that you should not be able to be a member of every single guild in the entire game at any given time. Many of the guild's core values are, in fact opposed to each other.

Perhaps they could let you become the master of one guild, and a high lieutenant in another. I love to see all of the content as much as everyone else, but if they made each guild big enough so that one is satisfying enough per playthrough, then there wouldn't be much harm in imposing this limitation. If, however, that proves to be too daunting of a task for the developers, I'll be content with the way it was.