Oh, trust me, I don't WANT to..

In my opinion that just made Dagoth Ur unthreatening and therefore uncompelling though. Even now after rebuying the game a few months ago I can't get into the main story that much in part because it all feels so anticlimatic. Its like the first few missions are pretty much "go train but don't worry you can take your time, he's not leaving that mountain...." lol


Luckily though the story does pick up and start to feel like something I need to be doing fithough.

But yeah to me the fact that Alduin and the Mythic Dawn are actually presented as threats that need to be rushed help me actually take them seriously. I can find points in both games to branch off and do my own thing anyhow.

My opinion is the opposite of yours. I dislike the crude, ham-fisted, hyperactive manner in which the main quests of Oblivion and Skyrim are shoved down out throats. They are both as subtle as drunks. They shout at us, they harangue us, they tell us what to do every moment, every second. They direct our every activity as though we were children with attention-deficit disorder who could not put one foot in front of another and walk in a straight line without being guided by an advlt and told to go to Waynon Priory or Riverwood.

There is little subtlety, art, ambiguity, or complexity in either Oblivion or Skyrim's main quests. They are as artistically complex and involving as children's Saturday morning cartoons. They are constantly yelling at us to, "Hurry! Save the world! Do it! Do it now! Do it! Quick! Save the world now!"

Morrowind's main quest is not great literature either, but it has pacing and a bit of artistry. There is some fascinating ambiguity in the writing. It requires us to think every once in a while in order to fully understand what might (or might not) be going on around us. And that is why I take Morrowind's main quest seriously and why I do not take the main quests of either Oblivion or Skyrim seriously.

I really how they don't introduce a new IP, I'd rather they just release Fallout 4 and commit some of the team to producing DLC for Fallout 4, while the majority of the team focuses on developing Elder Scrolls VI. Hopefully they've already existed the pre-planning stage at the very least. As for another studio renewing the TES mobile games, I think this is a better time than any to do just that. Despite essentially being a Hearthstone ripoff and misusing the Elder Scrolls Legends title, Elder Scrolls: Legends is a start. I'd love for another studio to develop Elder Scrolls: Travels games, set in interesting locations like pre-destruction Winterhold for example, or any city of mainland Morrowind, like Necrom or Blacklight.

I think that is how main quest threats are supposed to be presented though. I would rather be rushed through it and have the threat actually seem dangerous over "Ah don't worry you can take your time the great ancient evil will hold off their plans until your ready."


What Bethesda should do though is start making the main quest be like the others where you have to find them first and you can be directed to them through rumors or something. That way the threat can feel real but it doesn't have to be experienced right away for those that aren't able to ignore it once its there.


I have to disagree about the later games having more depth and moral ambiguity too. Mehrunes Dagon maybe undeniably evil by human standards but I liked Mankar's reasoning that Mundus was actually a daedric realm and him trying to mantle Lorkhan to make his own reality.

Alduin wasn't just the insane Nordic aspect of Akatosh that myth makes him out to be. In reality he was more like an immortal dragon demi-god, the first-born of Akatosh instead. of merely an aspect. (And he still could be an aspect you never really know with this series.) I know quite a bit of people didn't like the twist that he wanted to subjegate over destroy but I apreciated that we didn't just get what was expected.

With Dagoth Ur yes he may be affable (so were the other 2 antagonists anyways) but his plan was still to unleash a horrible mutating disease to turn everyone on the island into eldritch slaves so how tragic and misunderstood can the guy really be. The fact that the tribunal turned out to be almost as shady doesn't excuse Dagoth's plans to me.