I mean, it's not like you can get any more railroaded than Skyrim
I think you may be 100% right
Actually, the clairvoyance spell seems to simply use the same pathfinding as the AI does.
It doesn't imply railroading, merely existence of retard friendly option.
I didn't say anything about the stories, because I think everyone can agree that they were shit. It's mostly a question of structure and how there's a sense of progression in the questlines. You start with mundane tasks and the actual storylines only get going when you're already a well-established member. You don't just walk in and become the Chosen One.
Question of length more than anything else. I think the CoW questline is the only one where you get an extremely meaningful revelation early on (well, this and the MQ, though the MQ is still better than in OB in this regard). As for the structure, having both main questline, sidequests and radiant filler is better structure than having only the main questline in each guild, so Skyrim has the upper hand here.
Fighters Guild: A few different guild houses around Cyrodiil, a number of people who give you quests. Get promoted and get access to tougher quests. Boring and generic as fuck, but it's pretty much what you'd expect from a guild.
Actually no. What I would expect from a guild is something like one of the guilds in MW or DF. You get job, perform tasks and earn privileges and ability to get less mundane tasks. What I wouldn't expect from a guild is mini-MQ. This said, epic mini-MQ beats hilariously inept attempt at epic mini-MQ, so Skyrim>>Oblivious.
Mages Guild: I never completed this questline because of how boring it got towards the end. Still, there's a clear sense of progression here. The carrot is the Arcane University where all of the actual benefits lie, and to get there you need to do a bunch of little quests for all sorts of arrogant assholes. When you finally get to the university the quests become shit and all sense of freedom is stripped away, much like what happens with every Skyrim guild right from the beginning, but the early parts are fine.
The "early parts" mean several banal shit boring recommendation quests. Even getting the mushrooms for Ajira in MW was far more exciting, because it was up to you where and how to get them.
Thieves Guild: You have to do a bit of investigating first on how to join.
Or get caught stupidly.
Then you have to pass the test to become a member.
AKA follow the pizza slice to the item before the NPC follows her.
The early quests take part in the Imperial City where you mostly do minor shit just to fuck with the guard captain guy. The quests get bigger and bigger resulting in the heist of the century (which is shit), and even some of the early plot threads in the questline are pretty nicely tied into the bigger plot before the thing is over. Although the quality of quests starts to decline towards the end, there's still a sense of progression there.
Well, no. Early quests are indeed better than Ob's usual fare, but later on you don't get sense of progression, unless you mean progression of fucktardry. And the whole shit is punctuated by pointless but necessary freelance thievery where you steal worthless shit while musing over how many actually valuable items you could get by just adventuring in this time.
The Dark Brotherhood: Again, you first have to find out how to join and then pass the initiation rite.
Or just murder some shit.
There are multiple stages in this questline, as you first take your quests from the guild hall where you can ask other assassins for advice, and later you become more independent and kill stuff just by yourself because you're such a professional. Again, you feel like you're making some kind of progress.
Except the quests are horribly railroaded (or at least doing them optimally is) and later on you're carrying the idiot ball and cringing all the time.
In Skyrim you pretty skip the early stages and go right to the endgame. You can't really even avoid any of the guilds because you've got DB and TG quests gang raping your journal immediately when you enter a city. The additional quests aside from the main questlines feel more like an afterthought. They're short and there aren't that many of them anyway. The radiant quests are just filler and could've been replaced by equally simple but a bit better thought out quests (for example, instead of stealing a cup from the shelf in some random guy's house, you'd have to steal it from a basement of a certain guarded house, or something like that).
Yes, the questlines do feel as if someone cut out all the beginning and most of the middle, but they are still more interesting. Radiant quests are actually the kind of quests you could expect from a guild, so they should have been more numerous, especially in the beginning, and sidequests, well, at least they exist.
That doesn't really have anything to do with my point, but anyway: what is there to do in Skyrim apart from questlines and dungeon crawling? Oblivion had a bunch of places I robbed, like warehouses full of expensive trinkets and clothes, the Ayleid artifact collector's house and a few manors. Of course, because of all the scaling you couldn't find any really useful artifacts
See the bolded part. There is much more to crawling in Skyrim - less agressive scaling, more rewarding exploration.
Crawling was pointless in oblivious, so you were left doing the quests which were shit.
Quests may be shit in Skyrim, so you're left crawling which is actually entertaining, doing quests only when it's convenient anyway.
Oblivion actually made a better use of its environment than Skyrim where everything except dungeons is just fluff.
Dude, what
Uh, how? I mean, it's not like you can get any more railroaded than Skyrim, and it does absolutely nothing to conceal it. You've got extremely linear questlines full of extremely linear quests. Then you've got a few terrible side quests that are hardly even worth playing.
How? By at least avoiding afflicting the player with idiot ball and cutscene paralysis. Quests are linear and shit in both games, although in Skyrim you at least get some minimal C&C.
Except that in Oblivion and Skyrim they tried to make every character have some kind of a personality instead of just being walking info dumps, and in both cases the result was terrible.
At least the typical personality in Skyrim isn't a babbling retard that begs to be mercykilled.
!
). Holy hell, their every game is essentially the same thing over and over in its pattern, kinda like BioWurr. It seems that quests are a bit... radiant (do X and come back in Y days), randomly assigned, and so far the provinces style is more like Skyrim than alien Morrowind.
. Had to bring the most effective potions and fortify effects, manage shouts, make good use of both melee and ranged with best poisons, maintain high mobility and reactivity to get the sense of accomplishment almost comparable to Dark Souls.
