I personally loved the main quest. Especially the final battle!

Can't agree with you there. I really had to force myself to complete Morrowind unlike Oblivion.

The Daedra attacked Kvatch and quite often they will attack the guards outside the other cities.

Mankar is mentioned pretty much every five minutes. His Commentaries. His cult. His two children. You even meet him prior to entering Paradise. Did you miss the part where he took the Amulet of Kings? It was pretty obvious that he would be the boss.

Also, so what if you didn't fight Mehrunes Dagon? Why would a mortal be able to take on a Daedric Prince anyway?

Oh god I'm tired of being the repetitive cliched demi-god. Why does it bother you? I hated being the big cheese in Morrowind and Dragonborn and following a chosen path. At least Morrowind did a decent job of this by making out whether you were the Nerevarine ambiguous.

Quite a few quests in Morrowind and Skyrim were stale and repetitive. I don't remember any running back and forth in Oblivion. All the quests were rather unique and varied to be honest.

Why do you want to rush the game? It would be strange if the Argonian deciphered a book immediately. It would be strange if Baurus started running threw a dirty sewer.

I liked both the Morrowind and Oblivion MQ's with their gradual progression, where I found Skyrim's "You're the dragonborn" awesome at first, but after a while it was boring, because the penultimate "you're definitely the chosen one and only you can save us" was given too early in the game. For Morrowind, the prophecy is quite vague, so you're not guaranteed to be the one, IMO.

Maybe that's me, but in terms of MQ strength, I would rate Skyrim as worst, then Oblivion and then Morrowind as best.

Oblivions is still pretty good because you're not the only one: Martin etc.

That said, the gates and daedra could've been better, but it was good for its time.

I missed this when it was first posted.

I've long dreamed of a mod that would do exactly that. That, to me, would be the ultimate way to avoid the main quest, for those characters who have no interest in doing it. The whole thing would get settled anyway and the history would unfold just as it's meant to anyway - it'd just be that someone else (I nominate Savlian Matius) would be CoC while my character was off being a hunter or a vampire assassin or an arrogant swordsman or a morose mage or... whatever.

I don't even know where to start to make something like that though...

On my end, the Main Quest is my favorite part of Oblivion. I didn't bond with many characters in Oblivion except for Martin and I liked the whole of the Blades. Yes, shutting down Oblivion gates was annoying and they could have cut them down to six total in the entire game and it would have been more than enough but I enjoyed everything from delivering the amulet to freeing Kvatch to visiting Paradise plus infiltrating the Mythic Dawn.

I am a fan of BIG EPIC QUESTS, no matter how often they're done, though.

If people want to roleplay a guy who just does the Dark Brotherhood or Mage's Guild or whatever, that's their business but the games should be about the BIG HEROES.

People who, if they didn't exist, would be standing over the ashes of the world.

Personally, I think the MQ was really good. Not the performance, but the writing was. The performance was ruined by uninteresting gates, and the fact that we never saw small armies of daedra marching towards cities, fighting the guards. Or at least see some aftermaths of battles. The world design around the gates, the gates themselves, and the absence of the feeling of an invasion was what ruined the MQ.

Still, it was Epic.

You are only required to close three gates in order to complete the MQ: The Kvatch gate, the Bruma gate with Captain Burd, and the Great Gate. The rest are completely optional, and don't much affect the game.

The problem with big, over-the-top quests is that the player then starts expecting each game in the series to outdo the previous one. It's just not possible to do that, so it eventually leads to disappointment.

Save-the-world stories are really, in my opinion, a cop-out. By making a story "epic," the game developers are distracting the player from the fact that the plot lines are linear and full of holes, the characters are weak, and there's no real "change" caused by the player. "Saving the world" means that it's all there, just as it is. There's no real "result." They don't even rebuild Kvatch, unless you install a mod.

Worst of all, roleplaying is severely limited when a certain type of "hero" is required to do the job.

Good stories require good characters, who change and grow. And I'm not talking about leveling up and getting better gear.

J.C Denton from the original Deus Ex is a perfect example on that imo. I would elaborate but I′m afraid I′d do a Renee if I did

Yeah, it's kind of funny that a game which many people don't regard as a roleplaying game does a better job of character building than any of the Elder Scrolls games do.

I appreciate the Elder Scrolls allows the freedom for people to disregard the main quests when they want by doing other kinds of quests but, bluntly, I don't feel that way about them at all.

I love Morrowind, Skyrim, Oblivion, and the Shivering Isle's quests above everything else.

For me? Favorite part of ES? Kicking gods and demigods asses.

I respect people who like being thieves or Dark Brothers but it's a minor part of my enjoyment.

I actually loved the Main Quest.