Needless to say, spoilers down below.

In my opinion, I think Oblivion's main quest is the weakest of the big three ES games. Morrowind's was fantastic (lore-wise at least). Skyrim's was good enough to finish and feel satisfactory. Oblivion's...I honestly have to force myself to finish it.

• A Daedric Invision that never really happened (I know about Enhanced Daedric Invasion, but it's seriously outdated and has a reputation of being buggy and unstable). City Counts think the Oblivion Gates are a big deal when nothing happens to their cities. You'd sooner see a cliffracer flying over Chorrol than see a Daedra attack a city.
• A weak antagonist (Mankar Camoran, not Mehrunes Dagon), both gameplay-wise and lore-wise. I didn't even realize he was the "final boss", per se, when I fought him for the first ever in Paradise. I thought he was just an elf trying to protect his master, Mehrunes Dagon, who I assumed was the end boss.
• You don't feel special/unqique. The Nerevarine did something only he could do. The Dragonborn did something only he could do. The Champion of Cyrodiil did something anybody with talent could do. It's a worthy feat, yes, but nothing special.
• You're the 7th Champion of Cyrodiil.
• Most mission structures during the main quest were stale and repetitive. Besides retaking Kvatch (which I should note is also poorly done), most of the beginning of the main quest was running back and forth doing asnine tasks like waiting for an Argonian to decipher a book, following a guy through a sewer while he walks slow as molasses, etc. After you give Martin the Mysterium Xarxes, he'll ask you to go on four boring fetch quests. Bethesda attempted to spice this up by saying "Nobody has ever went there and returned alive", which honestly doesn't help much. However, I'll admit, the Battle of Bruma was pretty cool.
• I'd rather watch glue dry than try to close Oblivion Gates. What's the point anyway? It's not like leaving it open will have repercussions since the Daedric Invasion is a joke. Plus, what's my incentive? Bethesda expects me to go through a lackluster version of "hell" for, what, a Sigil Stone? Please.

The Knights of the Nine DLC + Knights of the Nine: Revelations (mod) is a more worthy endeavor than the original main quest. It kind of pains me to rant about how bad Oblivion's main quest is since I love the game so much, but I can't be biased.

Tl;dr: Daedric Invasion svcked, main antagonist svcked, you're not unique, most mission structures were repetitive and lacked any sort of imagination, closing Oblivion Gates were worthless.

Well, that's my two cents. Opinions?

Liked the idea of the main quest but found closing all the oblivion gates a bit repetitive.

I disagree with these points.

I like that you're not some special chosen one and hope the next games pick up the trend again. It makes your success much more meaningful and being told you're special kinda cheapens the whole deal if it's done poorly (Skyrim...). The fact that people still hail you as a hero even though it was Martin (the frickin final Dragonborn Emperor) that stopped the Crisis is proof of how awesome you actually are without any help (aside from being the protagonist, of course.)

The title of Champion of Cyrodiil is also a great honor. There's a reason there's only 6 before you in all the time the Emprie's existed (one of those possibly being the protagonist of Arena).

Truth be told, I feel the main quests of the games are getting worse and worse as the series progresses. Oblivion's the middle child; not that bad but not as great as its predecessor. There wasn't really a sense of urgency in the main quest, at least not a meaningful one. If you're RP'ng then sure, you might not screw around but there's no actual pressure to finish it. No one is being murdered on the streets like Dawnguard. 'Course, there's still things like severed heads impaled on spikes out on roads that have Gates spawn near them and butchered horses everywhere. At the very least there's an implication of bad things happening. But they don't exactly get worse.

I'd also say that the quest structure is pretty par for the course for this series and I haven't seen much change in its successor.

Regarding the daedric invasion that never happened, Maskar's Overhaul adds periodic daedric invasions to various cities, which basically spawns a bunch of daedra outside the City being invaded. It is not a big scripted quest mod or anything like that, but having daedra actually invade an area is a nice touch. Now when you speak with a guard who says to stay off the roads because of sightings of the daedra, he actually might be speaking the truth.

100% agree with this. I don't like the "chosen one" mythos and that is one of the reasons Oblivion is my favorite of the three games.

I'll agree with a couple other comments above. I don't like the whole chosen one thing either. Morrowind did an acceptable job with it, but Skyrim is really shoved down your throat. I like the fact that in Oblivion you are not the hero that saves the world. You're just the guy on the side helping the hero (Martin) and making things happen behind the scenes.

But I find in all TES games so far, the main quest is really just an epic way of introducing players to the game world and it's features, so you can go out and do everything else the game has to offer, either with that character or a new one. I really think it's worth doing the main quest of any Elder Scrolls game with your first character even if you never touch it again.

I agree, I don't like "You are the chosen one!" thing, which is why I liked Oblivion, it takes a step back from the standard "Only you can save us!" thing and has you helping the hero instead, as Dreamed1 put it,"Behind the scenes."

My memory of Morrowind is fuzzy, but I'm pretty sure you are not the first person to get send in hopes that you would be the Nevarrine. In fact I'm more than certain that Azura send more people on the quest.

Skyrim? Force feed me the whole chosen one aspect, with the word walls EVERYWHERE. I hated it >:

Yeah, you have to advance the main quest quite far before you become the Nerevarine. First you have to do a bunch of stuff, and then you visit the Ashlander tribes where learn that you may have potential to become Nerevarine, but it will be along road to realize that potential. Other questlines have you either killing false chosen ones or convincing them they are not really chosen. Then Azura has a bunch of false chosen ones that she collects. I've never gotten quite that far in the Morrowind main quest myself. I've never made it past the visit to the Ashlander tribes.

To be fair, this is true of Skyrim too. We are just some ordinary Joe off the wagon until we fight our first Dragon. No one, not even the Greybeards, knows we are Dragonborn until that instant.

There is some "chosen one" in Morrowind too. Azura informs us at the beginning that we are "Chosen." Some downplay this (it's easy enough to skip over the video) but it is part of Bethesda's game. It's also possible to headcanon that she has said this to others but I see no hard evidence for this. It is my opinion that Bethesda meant for us to believe that we, and we alone, were chosen by Azura.

We have a mild form of "chosen one" in the beginning of Oblivion too. The Emperor recognizes our character from his dreams. And because of this premonition involving our character he entrusts us, not Baurus, with the amulet.

If I were to pick one game out of the last three that threw the least amount of "chosen one" at us in the beginning of the game I would pick Skyrim. However, once each game's stories have reached the midpoint I think Oblivion does the best job of trying to side-step the "chosen one" trope.

In my opinion, it happens much more quickly and abruptly in Skyrim than Morrowind. Here is why I think that. In Morrowind, you start by being asked to deliver a package, and when you do that the old skooma addict first tells you tells you to go out and get some experience before he is going to give you orders, and later if you come back, he will send you on several quests before you go to the Ashlander tribes. The Ashlander wise woman is the first one to tell you that you have potential, and that's all it is at that point, just potential. And I have never taken it any further, so I cannot comment much on what happens next, but it felt like I had been pursuing the main questline for a long time just to get to that point. I remember doing several quests in the main questline and pursuing it for what seemed like a long time before ever visiting the Ashlander tribes. I was many hours into the game by this point after playing every weekend for a few weeks.

In Skyrim, you are asked to deliver a message to the jarl, and if you do that you are asked to go on one quest (only one) to get a stone tablet. If you return with the tablet, a dragon attacks and if you happen to wander through that cell, you will absorb its soul when it is killed (whether you had any part in its killing or not) and from that point on, you are recognized as Dragonborn by everyone. I was maybe a couple hours into the game by this point on the first day I got the game, and I even remember the exact date, since it was Novbember 11, 2011.

Unlike Morrowind, where I had to make a real effort just to advance the main quest to the point where you meet the Ashlander wise woman, and at that point your character has the option to become Nerevarine or not, in Skyrim, you have to meta game and specifically avoid certain seemingly innocous quests in order not to be the Dragonborn.

Unlike Morrowind, where the transition from nobody special to Neverine is gradual and you have to voluntatily undertake specific quests to become Nerevarine (that's what the wise woman said anyway), the transistion in Skyrim is abrubt and occurs fairly early in the questline, without you having voluntarily pursued it or done anything particular to earn it. Even if you never go to the greybeards, you can learn new shouts, absorb new souls and have the title and abilities of Dragonborn.

EDIT: and the way I view the opening video in Morrowind is that Azura gives all the potentials the same dream.

What makes Morrowind different is that you don't really have anything to make you special outside of being handpicked for the job by higher authority, like the protags of the first two Elder Scrolls games and Oblivion.

In truth, every protagonist is "chosen" just by being the protagonist, as I had already said. It's just how each game handles it that puts one over the other in my eyes, with the first two not even acknowledging it, Oblivion never bringing it up again past the Emperor's premonition, Morrowind making you work for your "specialness" and Skyrim shoving it down your throat at every turn (and giving you your special abilities far earlier than Morrowind).

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Another one of my complains, for the game in general, is how certain things in the game seem to rely on you progressing in the main quest when they shouldn't be. Like Dagail only offering you Mysticism training if you've closed enough Oblivion gates even if you've never started the Main Quest and there is no Oblivion Crisis happening at the time. One of the few cases of the Devs not thinking of everything after all.

I'll grant you that. Morrowind unfolds its story at a much more leisurely pace than either Oblivion or Skyrim. Of all the five main quests in the series, Morrowind's is my favorite, partly for this reason.

I agree with this too. Heck, I wasn't even sure I was the Nerevarine. I got the distinct impression that several people were backing my candidacy purely for political reasons. My character might have been a lucky imposter for all I know. This is the kind of fascinating ambiguity that I miss in the later games.

I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for Skyrim's main quest here. I agree with what you said earlier in the thread: the series seems to be getting weaker with each game. After Arena, I think Skyrim's main quest is the weakest, on several levels.

This thread reminded me that I have to play Morrowind. ;D

It's what I loved about it too. You could deny you were Nerevar's reincarnation right up to the end and the game was ambiguous enough about it where you could be right. Although both Almalexia's dialogue and Kirkbride's statements kinda throw a wench in that, but not enough for me to completely abandon the idea that being Nerevarine was something you worked at and even the PC could have failed in. (Morrowind is also the last game where you could fail the main quest.)

As for the second part, you didn't. I just wanted to back up the notion that every hero is "chosen" in some way and make it clear why Skyrim's handling of the PC didn't sit right with me.

That said, I feel like Skyrim attempted to go back to the way Morrowind handled the Main Quest in terms of showing you around the world and its factions(in a way I didn't care for) and (poorly) attempting to weave background lore into the story. Hey, at least they tried. Oblivion only really led you to the Arcane University and I feel like you had to really go out of your way to find out anything about Camoran. Though it could be because I found the commentaries to be a bit...confusing.

Technically you can "fail" the main quest in Oblivion too...you just don't have the option to "continue in the doomed world".

My opinion of the main quest is most neatly summed up by the fact that I've played over thirty characters in this game and I've done the main quest a total of three times. One of my characters is relatively unwillingly plodding through it right now, but that's only because the alternate start mod that I tried with him, for reasons that I still don't understand, pretty much shoves the main quest down the character's throat. I had no idea it was going to be so aggressive about it, and I've long since deleted the mod, but since it doesn't start shoving it down your throat until later in the game, the damage was already done with that character.

All the rest of my characters, by one roleplaying tactic or another, have avoided the MQ or it doesn't even exist in their world, simply because it has so little appeal for me. There are a couple of good quests scattered here and there through it, but overall, I just find it to be tedious, annoying and ultimately unsatisfying.

I've only completed the MQ one time. It wasn't even with a character that I planned on doing the MQ with, or that was even especially well optimized for it. It was more of an odd concept character that I just kept playing. He eventually found his own "voice" as a character and the results of his victory were surprisingly satisfying. He was an Argonian who started out not particularly fond of men or mer, which made the playthrough a bit easier since he really didn't feel terribly bad if a guard died during the siege of Kvatch for example.

In the end he had become more understanding of humans and developed a loyalty and respect for Martin Septim himself, and he found it especially satisfying to note that when all was said and done, there were TWO statues of reptilian saviors with tails - Akatosh in the Temple, and himself in Bruma. At which point it dawned on him why he had been chosen, and exactly who had done the choosing. Prior to that, he had been a bit confused about why he was put in all of these situations.

It really was an epiphany moment for both the character and me, because I had only chosen an Argonian more to mess with the character creator options and had never really intended to play him that long. He was the first (and only) character I have made who started to take on something of a life of his own where I was the spectator and collaborator, rather than purely the puppet-master.

Regarding Morrowind: After playing through the main quest a couple of times, I really came to appreciate the ambiguity of the actual story, and that what really happened is left completely up to the interpretation of the player. I found my most satisfying play-throughs were those where I picked one of the options (A. - You really are the Nerevarine foretold, B. - You were an agent of the empire who was knowingly going through the steps of an old prophecy so as to manipulate the behaviors of those who believed it, and those who understood the political implications of it) and then had my character act with those motivations.

In the end, whichever way you chose, you were still left in doubt as to which was true, or were both true.

The only thing that compares in Oblivion is deciding whether you are truly an agent sent by the gods or one of them at least, or just the only person in the game world who understands how to level up their skills and actually leaves a town to do things.

Edit - Bruma, not Bravil

This is why my characters tend to be very much "not-me." It's why the majority of my characters are female (I'm male.) I discovered that I much prefer to play RPGs as a disembodied "observer" or "spirit companion," rather than inserting myself into the story. My character is somebody I care more about; I'm just not that interesting to me. The play becomes more imaginative, and my characters are free to develop in surprising directions.

I have no desire to play an aging male Nord with bad knees; I get enough of that when I'm away from the game.

Very cool story. I always hope when I start a new character that those moments will come. Sometimes they don't, but they're awesome when they do.

I'm surprised I'm the only one in this thread who actually likes the whole "you are the one" concept. Maybe it's because I just came out of a Morrowind playthrough and completely adore the Nerevarine. Oh well.

While a nice and welcome feature, I feel like most, if not all mods that attempt to enhance the Daedric Invasion don't meet the point of an indefinite invasion. Even if you add increasing Daedra spawns within/outside of city walls, the sense of progression and danger will always the same. You never feel like the Daedra is overwhelming Cyrodiil. It'd be nice if, for example, the further you progress through the main quest, the more of a presence the Daedra will have. For example, by the time you get to the Battle of Bruma quest, all of the cities will be attacked by a nearly unending wave of Daedra. Shops will close down, civilians will barely come out of their houses, buildings will burn, castrated bodies will be hung, the sky will be hellish everywhere you go in the Cyrodiilc region, more people will gather by the city chapel for divine protection, etc. By this point, the player will not be able to continue their day to day activities, thus making the main quest a more immediate priority.

I know I'm just hoping for a savior to pick up on this idea (I really hope someone will do something like this). I just want to FEEL worthy of the title of Champion of Cyrodiil. I fail to see the greatness in saving a country from an invasion that never was.

So, uh, yeah. My additional two cents.

I'm sure you're not the only player who feels this way.

The thing is that most of the "regular" posters in this forum have played for quite a while, either with numerous characters, or for a long while with one. In either case, the Main Quest diminishes in importance, in the mind of long-time players. (Some of us never finish it at all.)

Elder Scrolls games are unique in that they don't have a single "Main Quest" which invariably unfolds as you play. Depending on what you do, the Mages Guild quest line, or the Fighters Guild, or some other thing may become the primary focus of play.

In fact, though, there's actually a "suggestion" in the game that matters are indeed worsening as time goes by. First a few gates open, and then later, the gates open outside each city. We're told (by listening to overheard conversations) that gates are opening up all over Tamriel, not just in Cyrodiil. "Sleeper agents" of the Mythic Dawn become active, and start attacking us in broad daylight. A lot of the "horror" is suggested, rather than thrown in our faces.

I would personally dislike the kind of changes to the game that you describe. I don't see the need for in-your-face gore and violence, and it would not be consistent with the rest of this game, where falling enemies get a momentary splash of red, and fall down "dead" but unmarked. I'm not saying it has to be that way (I play Fallout3, and don't mind the gore there), but it would not be consistent with Oblivion as it was meant to be experienced. This game is one of the last of an older style of RPG, where it wasn't necessary to indulge our eyes with what we could easily imagine anyway.

In Oblivion you were the assistant of the actual main hero of the story, all the lorebooks in Skyrim referencing the Oblivion Crisis mention it being averted by the eternal hero Martin Septim with the help of his loyal servant the Champion of Cyrodill [who misteriously vanished after the Oblivion Crisis, some say to mantle Sheogorath]

If you felt like you weren't really a "Chosen One" , that's because you weren't. Not in the eyes of the people at least, just the deceased Emperor.
That your particularly felt that you weren't special or unique was Beth's goal for Oblivion. You're just one of the several Champions, regular people who distinguished themselves while in service to the province.

Heh, reading this reminds me how horror movies changed from Alfred Hitchcock to Wes Craven. I can enjoy both but they are very different styles.

In MOO I've added the ability for Daedra to invade regions based on any Oblivion gates in the area. When progressing through the main quest these invasions become more dangerous. Closing the gates would remove the invasions, giving the player character an incentive to close the gates. However, the main issue with too extreme invasions is you'll end up with empty cites, broken quests, etc. Not sure if this could be done without turning all npcs essential, which isn't very realistic either.

I've got you beat here. I've done the main quest exactly one time. I've tried many times to make myself get interested in doing the main quest a second time, but I just can't. In fact I lost interest before I even finished. I shoved the difficulty slider over to easy (for the first and only time in my Elder Scrolls career) so I could get it over with. The reason I put even that much effort into it was because I wanted to see the statue.