I always make my first "playthrough" one in which I dont do the main quest, just to see what else is in the world. My main in Skyrim is a pro-Imperial (despite the fact that I wont do MQ) and he is law-abiding. So no thief or DB or Daederic quests (other than maybe Azura). I am a mage-thief in terms of skillset.

I generally domt like the Blades as a group so however you do those (main quest?) I will skip them. My first encounter with the Companions convinced me they were arrogant, and visiting their boat and seeing the fight convinced me they were losers. I have not started the mage stuff yet simply because the actually-in-school gimmick didnt fit my style. I dont think the bards quest stuff would fit my style.

So, other than side quests, what else is there? I know there is at least one temple quest. I have figured out that something is going on in Markarth (sp?). But are there any other major quest lines or factions in the game I have missed?

I have been having a great time in Skyrim, but I do feel like I have at least *seen* the starting people/events of all major quest lines.

But I am wondering, what else is out there as far as *major* quest lines? Anybody have a succinct list?

Well I felt tired of Oblivion after completing the main quest and Shivering Isles with Knights of the Nine, but than I didnt like exploring in Oblivion because I didnt like the Skeleton sounds lol. I dont mine Skyrim dungeons because its just Draugr and they are simply Zombies. I am use to Zombie noises because I love watching The Walking Dead, such an awesome show. But I know where OP is coming from once you get the mainquest and such done you have this sense of completing the game even if you didnt go dungeon crawling or what not but the Op seems to have dungeon crawled from the sounds of it with MainQuest and more. I also dont think the OP has drained her life into Skyrim either to do what she has done, Ive seen people where playing this kind thing just comes natural to them. So completing it in such a way she has done isnt impossible because it truly depends on the person who is playing it and their willpower to play. I know when I first got Skyrim playing all day didnt feel like playing all day, I was surprised so much time passed by. So good job Andreannah on completing this game to your most, I only hope DLC will help you enjoy another playthrough. The game still feels like I can enjoy it for months of course playing it on a PS3 can be hard to completely enjoy on my part because of some of the bugs, Luckily I have only ran into a few unlike others.

Then I'm sure you didn't miss anything, certainly not quests that come from following up on past quests such as



I was a little suprised to find out how many quests were acquired in dungeons and how many dungeons were/contained their own quests. I would have missed out on most of them entirely if I kept playing the way I started - collect quest in town, go to quest location, do thing, go to next location, repeat. Eventually though I was lucky enough to get side-tracked and beginning exploring for the heck of it. Off the top of my head, I remember finding these things in dungeons no quest had taken me so far:


Also quite a few fetch or "clear the ne'er-do-wells of type a from dungeon x" quests turned out to be a lot less generic than I had expected:



Also, some of the followup quests for some of the guilds are pretty decent. The mastery quests for the college have decent rewards at least - I did particularly enjoy getting to play around with the atronach forge and unlock its full capabilities - and arniel's endeavors was pretty enjoyable. Being able to hunt down a blood dragon with my followers in the companions guild was also pretty cool. As for the thieves' guild - they can be a chore to qualify for (like doing guild pre-requisite/side-quests in Oblivion often were) the 4 improve-the-theive's guild special assignments are worthwile.



What the guilds in Skyrim certainly were not missing was having to complete quests to gather flowers, gather mushrooms, find the reports on said mushrooms and flowers when the wood-elf enchanter hides them, or go half way across the map and collect bills in order to get to the meatier quests. Most of the oblivion recommendation quests were just such filler quests inserted between you and the mage meat. Those filler quests are still there, you just don't have to do them.

This does get to what the Skyrim guild plotlines were very much missing - pacing. I disagree that previous titles necessarily did this better by injecting filler before you could get to the interesting quests. This is at least as bad as the mistake of hoping players will self-pace and take advantage of availible in-guild side-quests, particularly when they're mostly (but not all) similar types of menial tasks.

The mage's guild for example should have interwoven that strange daedric artifact in the midden and arniel's endeavors into the main guild plot perhaps even as red-hearings in your investigations of the Eye. Since some of the apprentices have side-quests which are at-least amusing (accidentaly exploding undead for example) it might have also made sense to "take on instructor tasks and aid the other young mages" before you'd be trusted with something so important." This would have allowed for more reasonable pacing, familiarize you with the characters, and not nescessarily consist of worthless padding. Padding was how they used to stretch out the guilds, Skyrim goes a little too far in "self-pacing" them. Hopefully they find a happy medium next time.

I feel that way with any game. I've yet to find a game, RPG or not, that I feel like playing after the credits roll. I don't know why but it feels empty to me. If it's "over", I'm done.

Save unexplored content for another playthrough.

Yeah I wanna do the mainquest up to the first quest in the Third Act where you get that one Dragon. Read about many times since getting Skyrim but never did myself. Also Id put a spoiler warning but most people on the forums here problay know about it because they problay were watching everything new that came up about Skyrim pre-release and I dont know the code or figure out how to do the spoiler thing lol.

Yeah and for good or ill a lot of the content in Skyrim comes from wandering about away from structured quest-lines or returning to places factions/areas you thought you "completed." Dagon-hunting with the companions, arniel's envevors and mage mastery quests at the college, battling the wolf queen under solitude, and the 4 special (not including the insane collection quest) theives' quests you can do after being a prolific enough thief come to mind.

Andreannah has been very clear from the first post that she's talking about the MAIN content of the game, i.e. the faction quests and the main quest. And compared to Oblivion and Morrowind she's right, there's a lot less content. In respect to random quests there's probably a lot more, though. Dungeons are more varied and fun and you can enter a cave and run into a sidequest, which was something that didn't really happen much in Morrowind or Oblivion. So Bethesda obviously spent more time on this than on fleshing out the faction quests.

The previous given advice is a good one, though. Just put down the game a while and pick it up again once there are plenty of mods. The TES modding community is awesome and will bring lots of contents to Skyrim, I'm sure of that.

I've got about 70 hours in, and I have yet to complete any quest line except the civil war (and that just barely).

Visited the Companions and mage college, but I haven't even set foot inside the Thieves Guild, DB or Bard's College. I've been too busy being a Nord badass and exploring the amazingly beautiful dungeons and landscapes.

I would say this is on par with Oblivion, except all the ways that Skyrim has improved over Oblivion have left my jaw on the floor.

So are you playing the game wrong OP, or am I?

So much of that content was padding - like the radiant-story guild side-quests are. There also wasn't nearly as much to do once you were the head of the guild. Also, this isn't nescesarrily correct.

If we be fair and only count each repeatable type of quest as one quest, there are 24 unique theives' guild quests in Skyrim. There were 14 total in Oblivion. SImilarly, considering the college of mages, there are 25 unique quests (not repeating the radiant quests.) In oblivion there were 21 total mages guild quests (including being expelled and re-admitted.) If one does not do any side-quests or post-leadership quests then they do seem shorter.

The companions are the only one that has decidedly less content than its anolog in Oblivion did. Its also not supposed to be as large or important of an organisation as province-wide chapter of an empire-wide mercenary guild. Also, each of the Holds is treated somewhat like a mini-faction in regards to earning things like Thane. So I think that gets at part of the disconnect - these guilds aren't the major movers and shakers they were in Oblivion or Morrowind (in terms of lore they've kind of been supposed to be in decline throughout that period.) The college is not the controlling authority on magic in the region. The theives' guild (which is longer than it was in Oblivion) is a shadow of its former self - so part of the plotline is about rebuilding it. The same goes for the Dark Brotherhood.

I think that bit of the setting was easily missed though - that these factions are not whole anologs of their past counterparts and that there are lots and lots of little factions.

Are you going to tell us how many hours you've played yet? Until then, I don't see the point of this.

You get out of the fantastic game what you put into race to complete it explore nothing its a complete waste imho. So much to do other than the main quest it isn't funny lol...

Lulz, all the people saying you cant finish it. Please you have done 1 kill bandit bounty, you have done them all. Nothing changes, all dungeons are linear corridors. I thought metros in F3 were bad but damn.

You can do everything people, just becuase you keeo getting the sme damn quests dosent mean it lasts forever.

I am bored of it now, made multiple characters, playing BF3 instead and thinking of going back to AP and NV.

What people are saying is that she hasn't 'finished' the game yet if she hasn't explored the whole area. And we doubt she has explored the WHOLE area since the game hasn't been out that long.

Even though there are a lot, not every quest in the game is about collecting bandit bounties or some long lost family artifact.

It's the prevalent design trend to pile on the epic but that's a trap. The Mages College questline was non-stop epic and when it was all over all that I was left with was a feeling of hollowness. Same for most guilds in Skyrim, you do a couple of quests for them and all of a sudden you're the most important person in the guild. You seem to understand this but don't be so dismissive of these menial tasks, building up to epic is something Skyrim misses almost completely.

There's a difference between tasks that sound menial but end up being interesting - even in small ways - and padding that are just menial tasks and variations on the same 3-4 over and over. The quests I mentioned (particularly those helping arniel and the apprentices) consist mostly of not-so-menial menial tasks. That is, they are duties that befit a middling mage but they are either amusing in their own way or build to interesting - not to be confused with "epic" - conclusions.

There's a difference but there's no difference to my point that either of them are preferable to the way Skyrim did it.

Also greatly missing from Skyrim's guilds were ranks. The Legion had like three ranks for the whole line -- maybe four -- down from the 9 in Morrowind and it's the same with all the factions. You can justify that through lore but I don't think you can justify the loss in coolness.

Your point is a position that one bad bad way of doing things is the better bad way- my position merely that they're both bad. The previous way created needless tedium and this way lacks needed pacing. Its arguable which is the worse bad way to do it, but I'm not arguing that one is inherently and obviously worse merely that they're both bad in different ways and that it can be argued that either is worse depending on which bothers you more. I pointed out that the previous way wasn't exactly good either nor inherently appropriate to the current setting. The reason I do so is because I think it is important to consider that it could have been done differently than it is done in skyrim and was done in previous titles and that would be preferable to either.

I think its particularly important to consider this because the smaller and less powerful nature of these factions gave them the opportunity to do something that the passed up on. Given that each faction is smaller in number and scope, perhaps a more personal and involved series of quests would have offered both better pacing and more attachment to the factions involved. We're not essentially disagreeing I don't think though that this was not the way to do it.

I feel like the OP.

thats why I left for SC2 again. pretty I'll never finish it at least

Well I guess you're over it, so you probably won't be posting in the Skryim section any more. We'll miss you. Godspeed.

The date is well known to be the 3rd of Hearthfire (or the 8th according to in-game books, the wiki and the books are not in agreement on this, although showing up on the 3rd then the 8th would guarantee you see her one of those days), but the location hrm... one would have to assume it's either the Shadow Stone or back in the Twilight Sepulcher.

This I intend to discover sir. I do hope you aren't intentionally sending anyone on a goose chase here...

A short game? No way! I'm about 85 hours and I've only gone through two of the large towns. And the only one I've 100% explored is Solitude. And the only college I've completed is the Bard college.


Not a short game by any means.

There's a spell that will bring you to the front door. I cannot remember the name to save my life. And the horse cart is a god send too on those dungeon runs.

I beat skyrim with 180 hours of play time. Morrowing took me 1000-2000 hours and I gave up without beating it. Same for oblivion.

What gripes me the most about this game is the hundreds of critical NPCs... In previous ES games it goes like this for me. 1) find location 2) finish location, do all quests associated with location 3) commit genocide and kill everyone in location. 4) find new location.

To me, after you've given me your quest you're worthless and need to die. Having the entire game world dead short of 1-2 critical npc was the best part for me because it showed me that I had done everything. Here, you can't kill half the game.

That seems to kind of be the point in this case though. All them were written that way.

You mean you didn't notice? You're not joe blow the plumber, you're a dragonborn. The last of which defeated dagoth ur, was the unrivaled bad ass of bad assness of every guild and would be of every great house if it were possible! The one before that conquered the world. I think its very much intentional on bethesda's part to cultivate the feeling that you aren't just some random scrub no matter how much affinity some of you apparently have for playing that guy. Notice how Kodlik dreamt of you, notice how brunwulf or whatever had a feeling about you, notice how all the deadric princeses have their eye on you, etc etc etc. That was a very clear design choice, one i don't mind at all given the context.

As for all the e-knighting going on in this thread, link me the nvdes.

i'm basically in the same boat as the OP. ive done every main questline and every questline in every city. i have a few of the small villages (like that mining village) to do but those are really minor and really short.

usually the major part of the game that keeps me playing is getting every stat to 100. in oblivion, this took A LOT of time and effort. here, i can sit in town and get at least half the perks to 100 in a day.

hopefully the mods will be as great as they were for previous games.