A concern regarding the guilds in Skyrim

[Demut]

There is something about the way guilds were constructed in Oblivion that bothered me a little bit. In all of them you became automatically the guild’s leader at the end and all that was left for you to do after this was to collect the generated income. I would have preferred the option of even more missions instead of this rank. Can anyone here relate to this? With the Radiant Story feature it might be possible to do it differently this time and to have a continuous stream of missions coming your way but I am not sure if the developers at Bethesda kept that in mind.

 

[winterhold knight]

It has not been announced yet

 

[hexperiment]

Well, I'm not really sure about that. My guess is that you can be the leader of each guild at some point. But it would be more realistic and cool if they make use of Radiant story so that your job in each guild never really ends. I'm sure there's a limit to this though.

It was really silly how you can be the champion of the arena, grey fox, black hand, archmage, madgod etc... all on one character. I think they should've gone like 'Hm? Aren't you the archmage of the mage's guild? What are you doing in our fighter's guild house? I assume you got a business with us? Don't you have something to do?'

 

[Demut]

Yeah, it would probably a better idea to limit this in one way or another. I mean in the end this would also increase the replay value because you’d have to play it more than once in order to experience all guilds.

 

[winterhold knight]

Yeah but then if someone only wants 1 play through (not me) they can do it all in 1 account

 

[Demut]

I don’t think that this is a valid complaint. Using that logic games shouldn’t have multiple endings because you would automatically miss out on the other ones.

 

[Jeruhmi]

I understand what you're saying. Basically it was too easy to become the leader of each guilder in Oblivion, and you could easily generate lots of income. I personally hope that they make it harder to become the leader, as it just takes a lot of fun out of the game.

 

[hexperiment]

pffft. who would want to play with just one character in skyrim? That's just sad when there's so many builds and races to choose from... That's like throwing your money away except that money goes to Bethesda.

 

[Demut]

I personally hope that they make it harder to become the leader, as it just takes a lot of fun out of the game.

That is one aspect of it, yes. It was kinda weird to become the guild’s leader just after a couple of days after joining. They should definitely stretch the required time. Perhaps by providing missions only after a certain while so that you can’t do them back to back.

 

[hexperiment]

You're right. Becoming a guild leader did take couple of days... I mean, mage's guild took more because you had to go get recommendation from each city while you had to steal a lot of things in thieves' guild to proceed to the next quest but there wasn't much limit as to when you can proceed with your quest. But honestly, it is pretty silly that someone would try to rush a questline.

 

[winterhold knight]

I did all guilds in 1 day so they ain't that hard so yes they do need to extend the length or make more guild side missions and more you get in each guild.

 

[Demut]

Do you mean one in-game day or an actual 24-hour day? Because the former would be pretty damn fast ...

 

[Renegader]

I'm pretty sure he means a 24-hour day. I don't know who counts their days in Elder Scroll's time

 

[Demut]

Well, I was talking about Elder Scroll’s time ;>

I mean, it seems weird that in the world of Cyrodiil you were able to convince people over the course of, like, 48 hours that you would make the perfect guild leader. You know, from a complete rookie to the master of everyone. It’s kinda unbelievable that they would accept you that quick. They almost didn’t even have a night to sleep over the decision ;D

From the few negative things that I have heard about about the game so far this is one aspect. NPCs trust you too soon and give you important tasks almost right after they met you.

 

[hexperiment]

Well, they use the 'you're a stranger so I can trust you since I can't trust anybody here' trope. Also, the guilds are always looking for new recruit. I think there should be some initiatives to join a guild like a pledge (that would prevent you from joining other guilds?) since you instantly get access to free bed and food.

And yeah, NPC do trust you too fast. Just a few clicks of speech wheel, their frown turn upside down. Hopefully speech in Skyrim is better, more realistic and more useful.

 

[Demut]

A pledge or something along the lines of that sounds like a good idea to prevent the previously mentioned guild-leadership-stacking. Regarding that trope, yes, it makes sense in some situations but certainly not all of them. For example, if one quest is about retrieving a valuable item for an NPC it would be unrealistic for him to just trust a complete stranger.

I also second your call for a more useful speech skill but I hope they retain some sort of minigame since I liked the one in Oblivion.

 

[hexperiment]

hmm... I guess. I didn't enjoy the mini game. It was pretty trivial and could be replaced with bribe pretty easily. When I'm talking to NPCs, I would like it to be some form of coherent dialogue rather than JOKE COERCE BOAST ADMIRE wheel. I like the fallout 3 one and I like the one in fallout new vegas even more. It looks like speech attempt is governed by random chance of success like fallout 3 though... I really hated that since sometimes I would quick-load until I succeed. But I guess it's somewhat necessary since you can just distribute skill points like you can in fallout and you increase the skills by practice.

 

[Demut]

Agreed, chance is a stupid method in this case. Maybe the success should depend entirely on your speech skill so that certain options only become available once it is high enough (like in “Mass Effect” for example). I enjoyed the minigame because it made it a bit more interactive. Perhaps the minigame could become easier the higher your skill is (in the same way the arm wrestling minigame in “The Witcher 2” got easier depending on your strength)?

 

[hexperiment]

yea but if you could use speech checks only if your speech skill is high enough, how can you increase your speech in the first place? this is some serious dilemma behind designing this game. I'm not really sure if there's a correct solution to this problem, honestly. Mass Effect is just linear with paragon and renegade options. In Skyrim, you can talk to almost everyone and you won't be having meaningful conversation all the time. Speech is a game mechanic that gets you stuff in Skyrim as opposed to Mass Effect which uses it for story-telling. So I guess mini-game is somewhat necessary but Fallout shows us that you don't really need a minigame for speech checks and it could be used to define your character.

Skyrim will probably take Fallout's example. Since your skills increase through practice, there's gotta be many trials to increase it. Fallout obviously had limited speech checks but it didn't matter since those speech checks are very useful for quests and you can just distribute points to speech every time you level up. I'm really curious how Skyrim is going to tackle this issue... they don't cover on speech much, unfortunately so we won't really know how exactly it'll work out. Judging by some reveal speech perks, there's gonna be some percent chance behind speech. I think it would be nice if it was 100% success rate if your speech skill is just high enough, rather than like 97% in fallout 3. I raged hard when I failed that one.

 

[N3w_2_$kyr1min]

I heard that after you become guild leader, you continue to get missions given to you.. I'm trying to remember where I heard it from. I think it was a youtube video series called something like 'Skyrim: What we know so far.' and seemed pretty credible.