» Tue Dec 13, 2011 10:30 pm
the game pretty much pushes every damn quest in your face, but the main quest is the worst. he says to "part ways" but he sits waiting for you on the only road out. your naturally gonna go to riverwood eventually because its the closet merchant, at which point that scene plays out whether youre there or not and gerdur/ alvor approaches you and begs you to go to whiterun. whiterun being the trade capital of the damn province, you will probably end up there at some point, and what do you know, the court wizard in dragnsreach is by far the best place to get some spells for those schools you cant level yet because you know enough to have them at level 25 but not enough to cast anything in them. of course you cant go 10ft in dragonsreach without that the housecarl getting up in you face, at which point blagruuf goes on a long-winded speech whether you care or not, and walks over to the court wizard, instructing him to pester you about the freakin dragonstone every time you talk to him until you get it. but since farengar is an annoying [censored] as it is, if you can deal with that, NOW you dont have to worry about the main quest.
granted i havent seen what just exiting some of those conversations might do, but OB and morrowind handled this much better. you received a letter of warning not to f**k around, but its just a letter, and even then caius basically orders you to just f**k around early on. you could pass off the tutorial dungeon in OB as the mad ramblings of an aged emperor afraid for his life. chorrol wasnt important. even then, weynon priory had no real purpose outside the main quest, so you will hardly accidentally progress it. and then kvatch has no real purpose outside the main quest either; you can just ignore that. or once you take martin to cloud ruler... he is safe with the blades, your work is done. its not just about NPCs interrupting me about some crap i never cared about the moment i enter their general vicinity, its the whole structure of the questline. all they had to do was at some point have arngeir say "well if you really want we can train you, but i really think you should go out and get a feel for the way of the voice hinthintnudgenudge". not only does it remind the player that this game is about running around doing what you want, but its also completely fitting with his character.
at any rate, its not about being physically forced into a quest; you people are so quick to assume the obvious extreme that we all know isnt the case. its about a feeling of "do it NOW" every time your within ear shot of something quest related whether you care or not. TES games have always, as they should, provided excuses at points in the story to support your running off and doing what you want. in fact id say thats the whole point of the main quest in TES; to give you an excuse to run around the province. the only time skyrim does that is when it forces you into a thieves guild quest.