I like the idea that you can't become the leader of a guild if you do not have the required levelling. They could also make quests like that. Say you complete a few small tasks for the Companions, but from then on they have nothing for you, saying that you are not skilled enough for the tasks that they have left to do. That way you would actually be a well suited leader. They could make it so that the quest for leader can't be taken until you reach a certain level/skill in certain areas. That would also make it harder to be leader of all guilds because you would be specializing in a certain area anyway and you could only become leader of the guild that you specialization fit. Also, if your specialization didn't fit any guild, you could reach higher ranks, but you would never have what it takes to be leader. I think it would make sense for role playing purposes. This isn't to say that you can't become parts of the other guilds either, just you wouldn't be able to reach high ranks.

The word "commit" really strikes a chord for me. Without being able to commit to one side or another in a conflict, the PC in a way is no more than a spectator. Every NPC in the world comes prepackaged as either "guy you help" or "guy you kill", and every time you play the game, their roles are always the same. You can kill a quest giver, but you're not "supposed to". Much better if NPCs are just people with conflicting interests involved in situations with one another. Getting involved in a conflict means picking a side; making both allies and enemies. Otherwise it's really just Candyland, you know?

Yes, exactly, very well put..

While advancing through the ranks of a particular faction and eventually becoming its leader can be fun, personally, if I had the opportunity to be an important part of some guild in the middle of a nasty inter-faction feud, or in some way offering choices that impact the game world, I would probably enjoy that much more than becoming the leader of a guild in a compartmentalized vacuum like the Oblivion guilds.

Totally. The ability to participate in a real conflict means I will care about that conflict.

I don't think locking the player out of a faction is needed. It's rather borring that way. Rather the story should take the player's freedom into account.

For instance, the Rebels vs the Empire. If you side with the rebels, have a npc give the player an option quest that invovles them sneaking into the Empire's forces. Put on some new cloths, walk over to the empires base, and sign up. You get the same quests that you would have gotten if you went to the Empire first, and you learn more about the other side and it's goals by being around their people.

And then at the end of it all, the rebels tell you to kill a empire friend of yours, or to give them secret files about the empire, or simply to do something that would reveal yourself to the empire as a spy. You get the choice then to switch over to the empire or to stay with the rebels.

That way, you're asked to pick a side once you truely know what each side is about. You may have started as a rebel, but because of the quests you did for the empire, you've made friends. It becomes a much more involved question as to which side you want to join.

That to me is a much more tantalizing idea because whole different shades of gray can be created by that. Simply barring you from a faction because you joined the other is all to simple and boring. Much more can be done with opposing factions, quests with betrayal and grayness all over the place, rather than the game saying "No, you can't."

Good post and I completely agree. Turns out you actually are in favor of lockouts to some degree. I think your goalposts are farther down the field than mine, but we have the same idea. I don't think anyone wants to help one Rebel find his keys and then have the Empire kill on sight for the rest of the game. But a lockout at some point is appropriate.

(And the Rebel spy for the Empire thing works great for one conflict, but being a Companion spy for the College of Winterhold and a Thieves' Guild spy casing the Companions and a Winterhold spy working to take out the Rebels ... well, obviously it just isn't a cool excuse if you can play both sides in EVERY conflict.)

For guild quests, I don't see any issue being made masters in all of them. Remember, no one actually knows your identity as the listener and the gayfox so you are actually publicly only the archmage and master of fighters guild. It is not uncommon for a person to be the chairman for two or more organizations in real life and get paid millions basically doing close to nothing.

For the MQ, I'm quite sure they will work the civil war into MQ, and I'm sure you can only choose one faction. Is there any difference which side you choose? Only after playing can we tell,

Well, the spy idea works best for opossing factions.

I mean, I've always wondered why battlemages always join the mages guild and not a few joining the fighters guild. It's my opinion that if you ask someone at the College of Winterhold how to become a Battlemage, they probably would send you to the Companions. Thieves who want to learn some illusion magic get sent to a contact in the College...

And if you've never been caught before, the Companions shouldn't know you belong to the Dark Brotherhood when you go there to get some blade training.

At any rate, I agree that faction choices should hold more water, but there should always be that freedom. Or rather, freedom doesn't have to mean watered down choices.

Another good post, and of course not all factions will oppose all other factions. Still, I am hoping for a world in which there are a lot of situations with conflicting interests. When all the guilds work together on everything, it just has kind of a shopping-mall blandness to it. Go join the Fighter, Mage, and Thief clubs, all living in harmony, you know? Boring. Like in Morrowind, when they'd be literally right next door to each other, and I was like, why not just have one big guild?

Maybe you can join all the guilds, but many quests force you to choose to serve one faction at another's expense. The Companions want you to retrieve a legendary sword, but the Thieves' Guild hears about it and wants you to steal it for them, and the College wants to melt the sword to use the magic ore for something else. That's obviously a simplistic idea, but you see what I mean. You can give the sword to the Companions and the Thieves' Guild won't mark you for death, or even kick you out, but they won't be happy about it either. And maybe you'll never make Guildmaster that way. Meaningful choices, real consequences.

Basically I think it's lame if I can make every quest giver happy. I want to be able to make enemies with my decisions, not just have the bad guys be bad guys and everybody else be a quest giver I get along great with. I want deeper choices for quests than "Do I do this quest, or not?"

I completely agree. I really hope these are less generic than the guilds of Oblivion, more complex and engaging.

More than a generic employment office, or someplace to go to improve my blunt weapons skill, I want to join a faction because it is a fascinating organization with goals, compelling NPCs, rich backstory, etc.

Who is talking about meaningless lock outs, but if you have developed a specialized mage, you should be able to join and advance the mages guild or whatever they are called, but you should not be a good candidate for the fighter guild.

Want to join them and advance in ranks, ok, just develop those fighter skills beforehand.

This is what I meant by choices, because I chose to develop my character into a specialized mage, and this resulted in my being a better candidate to join the mages guild and not able to advance in fighter guild.

No hard wired exclusive guild, but perquisites make it difficult to have them all.

I wouldnt say the MQ was crap. It was just not good.

Interesting, so you're proposing a sort of minimum skill requirement to begin training as a mage, for example, or something along those lines?

In all honesty I'm against those as well. Skill checks are boring, and unimaginative. There's so much more you can do with these situations, rather than a computer checking to see if you have x skill high enough yet.

The theives into quest to get into it was perfect. It didn't look to see if you had x sneak skill, but you needed to be half decent at sneaking in order to pull off the test. How do we get jobs or into college's in the real world? They give us a test.

The best examples are the tests we had to pass to gain access to the master trainers in OB. Stay underwater for three hours to show you had solid alteration skills, deal x amount of hand to hand damage against a master to prove you're good enough for him to train you...that's what I'm looking for. Inovative ways that factions test the Dovakiin's abilities.

A magic dual against a teacher would be a whole lot more fun than the teacher looking at your character, seeing that you have over 30 in three magic skills, and saying congrats - you're in. Or even a written test to gain admitence. It is a college after all.

Yes, a minimum requirement to join, but also the next tasks should be more geared more toward the archetype of the guild, and those tasks gradually get more difficult and more specialized, so the unfitting naturally are filtered out, or forced to adopt.

Also at some stages some high level guild member, might point out that he does not think that we are fit to remain in the guild unless we prove that we can do so and so...

By the way, I thout about the theme a bit more and reached conclusions:

We have several types of quests.

Main quest, which should be universal and all the different character types should be complete, but it should gradually become more difficult and direct the players toward more dangerous areas, so that no underdeveloped character should be able to become the "Master of Skyrim" at level 7.

The guild quests should be more geared toward the relative archetype, depending on the guild of-course, so a guild dedicated to kill or repel all the elven people out of Skyrim, should not be picky on our skills, and would only require us to do the jobs at hand, but even those should require some principles and if we do not fit in those principles, we are warned and then out.

We chose not to follow those principles, and we met the consequences of our choices.

The "Radiant Story" by nature are intelligently chosen for the role that we had played until now, so they are good candidate to add more variety to each game, depending on our play style.

So some are universal quests and fit any play style, but some can be more geared toward mage type characters, and some can be more geared toward stealthy characters and so on...

Thus if we impersonate a rogue, we are a bit more likely to encounter "Radiant Story" quests that are more geared toward rogue type characters, but it would not rule out the other style of quests, but adjust the chance percentage a bit.

This would add tremendous replay-ability for the game, especially as those quests are semi-randomly chosen, and might become repetitive, so in the next games, when we choose another play styles, suddenly we see that we encounter new types of quests that we did not see before.

As for regular manually designed misc quests, or in fact all the other quests as well:

All the quests, can have several possible approaches, means or route toward the goal that might be geared toward different types of characters, so if you are a fighter character, you are naturally drawn toward the approach that is more fitting for fighter style characters.

And if you are a stealthy character, you are probably drawn toward stealthy approach of solving the quests, and the quest designers should provide different approaches and routes, to the quest goals, that might even be different for each approach.

This way, in the next games with different roles that we play, we might be surprised at new outcomes of the quests.

I would immensely love that, and It was what I meant about choices and consequences.

Edit:


Yes, I did not mean the reading of numbers and acceptance on the result and the requirements should be tested more in the initial task, so that if we could complete it, we are in, and if not, out. :goodjob:

Making a class and staying with it. Id call that a meaningful choice.

Skill checks don't visibaly show anything. It's the computer checking a number. I'd rather see my progress in the game itself. I'd feel much more like a mage if I had to go through a town and buy books - and actually read them and study their contents down to the detail, and then take an entrance exam to the College of Winterhold. Even moreso if I pass that having the next part of the test pit you against a teacher in a magic dual to see how long you can last/if you can take away x amount of the teachers health....

Erhem. What I mean to say is, I'd feel more like a mage if I had to do mage things like study and use my skills, rather than the computer checking to see if I have x skills high enough.

I LOVE all this.

Yes, I saw your meaning at the next read, and corrected mt answer before this post.

Sorry. :blush:

I agree. It should be done as it was in MW, or more recently, New Vegas. In my first playthrough of NV I was working for Mr. House, I killed Benny in the suite, found Yes Man, and activated the upgrades at Caesar's camp. But when he told me to kill off the entire Brotherhood of Steel, a group I had helped prior to working for House, I instead betrayed him and began working for the NCR. The story gave me hard decisions to in choosing to help one group over the other, and it greatly fleshed out the world and characters. I will be very sad if Skyrim does not have this kind of division during the entire civil war setting, which is all about picking one side over the other.

What helps extremely well is to have guilds/factions that actually have opposing viewpoints rather than separate agendas that don't much affect one another. The fighter's guild didn't really do anything in direct conflict with the mages guild. Why would there be a penalty for joining both factions? With the fighter's guild, why couldn't a mage join? A mage can basically do anything a fighter can given the skills and then some. The fighter's guild simply killed people or creatures, perfectly simply for a mage to do too given the right skills.

What there needs to be is direct conflict among guilds. A blunt example. Necromancer v. Mage's guild. They have opposing viewpoints as well motives, goals, ambition, and philosophy. Of course, one couldn't join these two separate guilds. A player that has their mind set in Necromancer ways will not want to join a Mage's guild. A souless, mindless person could have the capabilites of joining both as that is what would be required of a person who would want to join a guild that has the opposite opinions and lifestyle as what you currently believe in. Of course this applies to people who want immersion and believe in their character having an idenity of some kind. If not, then be the mindless wanderer that wants to explore both avenues. However, as far as direct conflict, there needs to be more obvious conflict. That's all there is to it. Without conflict what's the need for not allowing membership besides skill requirements or personal vendetta? If not direct conflict then perhaps intertwined conflict. Say the fighter's guild owns a set of property the mage's guild wishes to aquire, or perhaps the fighter's guild fulfilled a contract against a high ranking official of the mage's guild. There needs to be decisions which give reason to dismissal or refusal from a certain guild. Besides, certain guilds are assets to another. Say a mage's guild needs fighter's to clean out their guild hall because some apprentices accidently summoned some hostile daedra. If anything, some of these guilds can work together, they don't necessarily have to be in conflict either. Why spend time trying to divide certain guilds when their unison is a greater resolve than their own selfish autonomy? Sure, an Arena combatant would be a good fighter's guild member as long as you proved you had the morals of guild you which to join. I don't need bias inflicting my freedom. We fighter's guild members don't accept useless bloodshed fighters. Hmm...possible hypocrisy. So, most important, instead of trying to take pre-existing guilds and pitting them against each other, allow the joining of new guilds to increase depth.

This goes for all the skill talk. What exactly constitutes a mage? Must a mage have all around magic skills? Or can one be high in one school of magic to be apart of a guild? I'm sure if a character was a master of destruction, the mage's guild would cleary see them as an asset. Where as someone who is journeyman in all skills may be lower in one skill yet still would be more useful in mage's guild quests because they require a character to have all magic skills increased to increase in rank in the guild. Where does that leave the character that wishes to train only destruction? Requiring a character to raise said skills to join a guild infringes my freedom. Instead of building a character I want, I now build a character which allows me to push through the mage's guild thus breaking my character design. So basically anyone who goes through the mage's guild will be just like any other character that goes throught the guild questline except for a few exceptions. Now, I see that as game breaking. First and foremost comes my individual's identity and if the mage's guild or any other guild infringes upon that concept then that guild doesn't belong. Now, I can understand that skills would be required, but not to the extent that my character must be devoted completely to the guild. The last time I looked at the Arcane university, I don't see everyone needed a bunch of skills. There are distinct areas that each mage specializes in. Even the library, I don't see much skill needed there, yet there are people allowed in the Arcane simply due to their knowledge of books. Now, that increases diversity and immersion. My character has the knowledge from many books and the respect of them that at least he can get inducted in rather for his knowledge rather than skill. Although, I wouldn't want it to be real simple to get into the university that way. Many books and much knowledge would be needed. Again, with the college arguement, colleges expect you simply o have a general knowledge and some moral requirements most of the time, sure, yet they all expect you to major in something. The mage's guild, I shouldn't need a bunch of skills rather a magic skill in particular. That's immersion to me. Knowing I was inducted not cause I was like everyone else, but because I got in due to my unique ability in destruction or which ever magic school.

Certain guilds I can see having a specific required skill, necromancers for example. Pretty sure conjuration is a must, yet I shouldn't need must else besides my evidence that I believe in their philosophy, which, in case, blocks me out of the or multilple opposing guilds( nercro v conjurers v mages ex. of 3), not simply by induction but by doing quests which alter, antagonize, and ultimately, reveal my intentions toward a rival guild, making me useless to my opposed faction, that probably being mage's guild in the case of Necromancers. Skills have their place, yet shouldn't be groundbreaking to the classification of my character. Trying to tell me mage's can't be fighters and vice versa doesn't register to me. There's a philosophy behind each guild, a core of ideals and ambitions, and if a player can use their skills or convince others to help with their skills or tasks at hand(speech can go a long way, considering a lot of smooth talkers go a long way in the world) to achieve a goal that doesn't harm another guild then the the way I see it, allow the joining of a multitude of guilds. Even use the core class idea. Mage. Thief. Warrior. Every player can at least join one of each guild of class(Mage's guild, Fighter's guild, Thief's guild), yet entailed each have an opposite(Necromancer, Blackwood, Dark Brotherhood). This small idea allows good improvement even with it's lack of complexity. You can go so far for each or maybe not that far at all, but eventually, you have to decide where you belong.

no to being the master of all guilds. the ONLY guild that you should be able to join and become high rank in without anyone knowing is the dark brotherhood since secrecy is essential to their existence. the mages, thieves and fighters guild will not tolerate someone being a high rank in both their guild and another guild. doest matter if they are openly hostile, competitive or even best buddies. when you are a high ranking member of a guild im assuming that they expect you to focus on the well being of their guild and their guild alone. if your the VP of boht the fighters guild and the mages guild how are they supposed to trust that you will make the decision that benefits them the most at the expense of your other job.

i hope they make it more like NV and morrowind and not like oblivion. no more games for kiddies. i want a big boy game now.

as for skill checks i hope they do it like lingwes choices and consequences mod. in order to progress in ranks in the mages guild for example you had to go to one of the trainers and cast journeyman, expert and master level spells in front of them and they woudl give you a certificate. after enough certificates you could rise up the ranks of the mages guild. the higher the rank the more certificates you needed. the nice thing about this was that it was interactive and felt more organic than someone looking in your trousers to see if you measure up.

Unless there is going to actually be content for guild leaders, I don't particularly like becoming the head of a guild. I'd rather it be something like having a seat on an 'elder council' or something, which gives you the highest rank without the actual responsibilities and doesn't preclude membership in other organizations.

I certainly don't want membership in one organization effecting membership (and most importantly, quest availability) in others. I don't want to have to be doing wiki research every single time I make a decision to insure that I don't close any doors I'm going to want to be open later. I just want to be able to play and not find myself having to create a new character after learning that my current one can never obtain item X because weeks back he joined organization P which precludes him membership in club C from which item X must be gained.

Choices are only meaningful in a desirable way when you understand the ramifications at the time of making them. The choice to do a few quests for organization P shouldn't shut the door on entire storylines in club C that you may not even be aware exists when you are questing for P. What would be 'meaningful' about that sort of thing?

I agree with the point you made on the guilds it is preposterous that people who claim they role play join and lead every single guild it's not practical and as for meaningful decisions I would only really enjoy this on the side quests not the actual main quest.

Absolutely. This is something games seem to be moving away from. In some other games which promote choices as one of their main draws it all feels so shallow because while they do allow you to make "choices" there are rarely any "consequences" allowing you to always and end up at the same place regardless of how you got there.

I'm not really anticipating Skyrim to give us huge helpings of consequences, but yes I would love to see more of them. :icecream: