The Thieves guild in Morrowind was on the brink of being pushed out of business by the Camonna Tong
On top of not really having pushed itself into business yet.
The guard dialogue suggests that the "thief armor" is not supposed to be something the other characters instantly recognize, for all intents and purposes it's just particularly good leather armor.
It's still a standard, faction exclusive armor. You'd think thieves would wear whatever they can get their hands on and gets the job done as opposed to custom made gear that unambiguously identifies them as TG members.
Well you didn't possed any superpower both in DF, Morrowind and Oblibion
Other than
CHIM quickload.
"I've seen you in my dreams" was pretty high on my supernatural bullshit scale, although strictly speaking it wasn't *PC's* supernatural nonsense.
Skyrim doesn't have shit on the atrocity that was Oblivion's MQ setup.
Both are atrocious
I can't really agree. Oblivion's introductory segment was a clusterfuck of contrived nonsense, whereas Skyrim's while actiony and scripted, generally worked - you didn't have moments where you'd stop and think "wait what" because shit happening just didn't make sense.
Yes, the game suffered from massive pacing problems due to instant gratification epic shit (dat dragon fight, faction questline pacing) later on, but that's still preferable to having the whole plot hinge on the emperor, his elite bodyguards and entire secret service simultaneously suffering from prolonged brainfart. And dat dragon fight, at least has you backed up by massive supporting cast that can generally hold their own.
its that the hiking simulator part of TES is far more superior in Skyrim; No Potato faces and Skyrim actually looking like snow covered shithole as it was portrayed in lore doing the trick; also locals starting good nord fashioned civil war the moment Empire was in turmoil beats the lack of any political intrigue in Oblibion
Especially given that Cyrodiil was supposed to be rife with political intrigues, there was suddenly a power vacuum, and Skyrim's civil war backstory/underlying lore is actually pretty well done.
still if Oblibion was made now you would have to untastfuly rape St. Allessia corpse to make MQ more MAJESTIC.
Never really liked St. Alessia.
Besides, you already had the PC tastefully rape Tiber Septim's corpse (or at least scrape his blood off his armour, presumably with a spoon).
I agree, I liked the fencing aspect in Oblivion too, was a nice integration of more freeform game mechanics into wider quest structure. In other words it basically rewarded you for adopting the playstyle the guild already endorsed - pretty smart. In Skyrim, the Thieves Guild didn't really have much to do with actual thievery.
Well, there are guild sidequests, and having thieving playstyle forced upon you doesn't work if there is nothing worth stealing.
Also, the thing I didn't like about fencing mechanics was that you could never sell stolen goods to normal merchants. Sure, there should be risks involved, for example, Skyrim's style hired thugs having chance of being sent after you and victim's disposition decrease whenever you sell ill gotten goods to a legitimate merchant, but you should be able to try and sometimes succeed (and hired thugs were a decent implementation of delayed consequence based on generic mechanics).
Ideally every faction or guild in a game of this type should give you a different feel and mood from the rest of the game. As a mages guild member you should feel like a scholar, a researcher, a fucking bad-ass Telvanni wizard death machine. The fighter's and warrior's shit should make you feel like a grunt, a war machine, a fucking Viking. And of course a thieves guild sort of thing should make you feel like a rogue, a Garrett, a sneaky and charming speedster who never gets caught and no one knew was there. Morrowind did a really good job on all three of those, honestly, though for the fighters they really focused on the mercenary angle more than any kind of noble warrior aspect, which is fine. Anyway yes, I think you nailed it, Morrowind excelled at setting those moods. For the Temple and other factions too.
Oblivion's thieves guild went for the stupid Robin Hood thing, and like most of Oblivion felt over the top, cheesy and too high fantasy.
It isn't really true, though. You already had the Bal Molagmer in Morrowind (and that's as Robin Hood as it gets) and overall TG felt nicer in MW.
Then you got freeform fence quests.
In some regards - guild being more obscure, joining being more difficult, better integrated thievery, I'd actually consider OB's TG to be incline over MW's which is more than can be said about pretty much anything else in the game.
The main caveats of TG questline in OB were that there was a questline and that freeform thievery was rendered pointless by level scaling.
And dat "we've ran out of ideas/resources, so giant hourglass".
It was the best questline in an otherwise unbearably shitty game, though.
Sneaky archers are very fun in Skyrim though
Not in unmodded game:
But the thing with Skyrim is that it has a lot of stuff implemented as if for a much better game and RPG, but prevented from working to its full potential (for example AI effectively neutered by hilariously short alert times), which makes it easy to massively incline with mods, while Oblivion was broken on much more fundamental level.
thieving in Morrowind became pointless after a 5 minutes. Money was never an issue.
You could still use it to acquire rare or even unique gear.
P.S. It's quite amusing to see all the praise Morrowind has been receiving here. I remember when it first came out, pretty much everyone here crapped on it as it it was the worst game ever. - end of old fart rant
Then a lot of people realized they were actually crapping on it for not being Daggerfall 2.0, but it's a great game in its own right.
There were definitely a few times when I just had to stop for a while during the Skyrim Thieves line because it was so stupid, but I never really realized how much of it was so poorly put together until I read this
great article deconstructing it.
Started off wrong.If you have no/low cash and poor gear Brynjolffs introductory speech changes.Author should have at least tried to see if it changed instead of assuming.
I know it is only a minor point about an article filled with minor points.
Also, the worst bit of writing in Skyrim wasn't the Forsworn quest but the College of Winterhold.
While it's singular quests generally work, more or less, the entire story arc just doesn't make sense.
A Master Wizard on the Mage Guild... who's a dumb orc that has only ever casted a light spell.
Another example of Skyrim seeming nearly as bad as Oblivion on the surface, but actually being much better put together - you have a test of magical ability on entry and while it's irrelevant in unmodded game, modding magic skill to have more impact automagically makes it a requirement for entry without having to mod the quests themselves.
Inside Skyrim there is a proper RPG (or at least aRPG) struggling to get out.
, streamlining and Consolosis happened
-ed Playing this one with only graphic mods and few lore friendly patches/fixes and it is great game except combat of course (which is PC stat based at least).
