Yep! I agree.

Skyrim is not panning out to what Todd Howard boasted in his pre launch video's, thats for sure. The game's fun however over rides all my complaints. This game is FUN!!

We'll see what DLC provides. Game is a month old. Still very, very new. :celebration:

You CAN avoid joining the College during that quest, if you just go to Septimus directly.

But how would you know about him?

Problem is though, if you want to complete the Civil war quests or buy the house in Whiterun or Windhelm (to buy the house in Windhelm you have to get far enough in the Civil War quest) you have to recover the Dragon Tablet and that kicks off the whole Dragonborn and dragons spawning in the world.

I found him by chance while exploring Winterhold early in the game.

So I did his daedric quest, and consequently ended up with the elder scroll.

Then when I did the main quest Parthunaax didn't even give me a quest to find the scroll, since I already had it.


So , unless you were lucky, you'll have to join the college I suppose.

Clearly an attempt at railroading you through portions of content. They're afraid you'll miss out on how to join the college or thieves guild if they don't throw it there in front of you.

Example.

Level 10 Bosmer Archer, avoiding the main plot like the plague. I went to Riften to grab the amulet so I could check out the marriage thing for once. Unfortunately, the moment I walked into the Bee and Barb, there's good old Mr. B himself ready to lure me into his scheme. Now I have this idiotic quest initiation entry in my journal for the rest of the game--nagging at me with "See this quest? The one right here! You didn't do it, but you can! We didn't want you to miss out! Do it! Do this quest!"

Perhaps, maybe, if instead of the journal just listing your quests like you're playing some crap MMO, they could have gone the Morrowind and Oblivion route and made the entries a bit more in-character and put them in a book (hey we have that fantastic new page-flipping feature). "Met a weird man at the Bee and Barb. Asked me to do some weird stuff." Then allow it to get pushed back behind all of the other pages of nonsensical quest entries I have no intention of following up on. Here, past iterations were better; part of what made Oblivion feel alive was that the world didn't always appear to revolve around me. In this case, Mr. B approaching in that tavern just screams "we have this quest line for you to do." Instead, I could have happily uncovered that myself and felt rewarded for going out of my way to get information. They don't leave anything to the player in Skyrim, it's all just handed to you from moment to moment.

The only thing worse than having my hand held in an open-world game is listening to people defend it.

Post limit.