Never done an honest day's work in your life for all that coin you're carrying. Eh, lass?

Never done an honest day's work in your life for all that coin you're carrying. Eh, lass?

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shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=14422
how does somebody write this bad

>Come into town having committed not a single crime
>This nigger comes up to me and calls me a thief anyway
>I don't even have much gold on me at the time

Fuck this guy.

>lass
>playing as a girl

I bet you use sex mods too

Does anyone else feel like a huge opportunity was missed by not making the Thieves Guild questline about sneakily overthrowing Maven, carefully cutting off all her resources and getting her arrested so that the Thieves Guild could once again operate independently of outside influences instead of being Maven's cut price thugs.

Because that would have been a much more interesting story than pseudo-dark brotherhood, which is basically the quest line we got (you sneak into some places, poison some people, it doesn't matter if you murder everyone instead of sneaking around then at the end you kill the original guild leader and sell your soul to a Daedra).

Thieves Guild sucked ass in Skyrim.

But how would that allow me to canonize my special snowflake waifu in TES lore?

I wanted it to be more grounded, no magic bullshit, no gigantic conspiracy, just dirty thief work.

the guilds in Skyrim were all rather mediocre

>main quest requires me to meet this man
>cock blocks me until I agree to carry out some complex scheme involving people I don't know or give a shit about

uninstall.exe

>the guilds in Skyrim were all rather mediocre
I've played through the College of Winterhold's questline at least twice, and all I can remember is fighting a dragon indoors. Extremely disappointing compared to the neat Necromancy-based quests in Oblivion.

The non-main quests are fun, though. Anything involving witches. The burned down house in Morthal.

It was such a weirdly rude thing for someone to say, out of the blue. Even if I was a thief I wouldn't want some dumb asshole telling me that in public.

I love how Shamus isn't afraid to shit on how bad Bethesda's writing is but still enjoys their games. I feel like more people should be able to do that.

The Spoiler Warning Let's Play of Fallout 4 is a fucking slog, but he brings up some real gems every now and then. Also, seeing Campster's own friends talk shit to him in their own Let's Play is a treat.

The thieves guild story is shit, but god damn do I get hard for Nocturnal and the nightingale set.

>4E201
>being an elf

Maven wasn't an issue for the thieves guild. She was one of the last things propping it up

>not ignoring him and just going straight to the thieves guild, attacking any snownigger thief that gets in your way

It doesn't even take long since the sewers are not that big.

>tfw massive deja vu from this entire thread, so much so it makes my dick hard and instead of getting breakfast I need to fap

I fucking hate this

>lass
Also why is he Scottish?

>no option to join forces with Mjoll and purge Riften of the Thieves Guild and the Black-Briars

Thanks for this amazing """""unparalleled player freedom""""" Todd

Watch what you're saying or I'll suck your dick CUT OFF I MEAN CUT OFF YOUR DICK

i'm not afraid of you

Of course she isn't, she is essential.

>play argonian
>equip nightingale set
>they didn't even bother to make it fit for argonians
classic bethesda. same shit with the shrouded brotherhood cowl.

Why were the dragons Russian?
Why are the Dunmer Australian?
Why aren't the Imperials Italian?
Why are the Bretons American?

>>play argonian
This is where you went wrong.

This.

Skyrim had 0 story for non human races

>Bretons
>not French

FOH nigga

Yeah, this was really weird. One of the very first dialogues you hear coming into Riften is someone complaining about the Thieves Guild and how someone needs to take it down. The fact that they don't give you the option to do that feels really bizarre since that's literally how you're introduced to them.

Skyrim and Oblivion have some nice voice acting when it's not generic npcs. Shame they never bother with fleshing out the characters.

The kids in New Vegas flat out mocking you for pointing a gun at them is great.

Bretons are celts.

>those potions

>find the labyrinth
>expect to find a moderately complex maze
>mfw what we got

Fuck those cretans.

Your Majesty the Queen Victoria of England, extend your reach beyond your borders and across the face of the globe. Worry not over the possibility of defeat for your loyal redcoats and overwhelming navy will surely carry the day. Not once have you done an honest day's work in your priviliged life for all that coin you're carrying, eh, lass? Winter is coming

Half of Europe is celt.

>imblying
Celts were displaced by germanic tribes.
Celts only really persisted in brittany, cornwall and scotland.
The irish are potatoes, not people. They do not count.

Thanks for this, I'd forgotten how shit Skyrims quests were

youtube.com/watch?v=PhgSkHwYHew

Fucking ugly ass six-head bitch

>The irish are potatoes
So they're 100% of the population in Oblivion

You're fucking done.

Are there any files left in the vanilla game that imply the developers were going to add an anti-Thieves Guild quest? I'd be shocked if there weren't.

>Did you honestly think your arrow will reach me before my blade finds your heart?
The line that made me cringe the most.

Brynjolf walks up to me, a total stranger, and says, “You’ve never worked a day in your life for all that coin you’re carrying around.” This is a really screwy thing to say to an adventurer. (I imagine running over mountains and fighting through tombs is pretty labor-intensive.) I guess he’s supposed to be insinuating that I’m naturally a thief, but he says this to the player regardless of what gear they have or how much money they’ve got. It’s also odd because you can’t steal for a living until you join the guild, because you have no way to unload stolen goods. He’s implying you’re a thief, when by definition you can’t be one yet. So no matter who you are, he’s flat-out wrong. It’s also odd to be approached to join the Thieves Guild. I get that the guild has fallen on hard times, but this still feels awkward.

I do a little job for him where I steal a ring from person A and slip it into the pocket of person B. I’m actually railroaded into asking why he wants me to do this. Apparently Bethesda thought everyone was too stupid to to untangle the threads of this thuddingly obvious frame-up. This is not the last time they will underestimate the intelligence of the player.

Once that’s over I do an initiation where I have to run around town and extort money from a few of the locals. Once that bit is over, we settle into the main plot of the questline.
I’m sent to Goldenglow Estate, a bee farm. Maven (the local crime boss) buys honey from the farm and uses it to make mead. The owner of Goldenglow has stopped selling his honey to Maven, and so I’m supposed to teach him a lesson by burning some of the hives and clearing out his safe.

When I rob the safe, I find a bill of sale inside. The owner of Goldenglow sold the property to a mystery person.

Dun dun dun!

That's the most anime shit I've heard in a while.

Yeah, not exactly a nail-biting moment. At this point I was already feeling a little underwhelmed. Someone is engaged in a plot to reduce the margins on mead production for the local crime-lord?!? This is not exactly a tale of intrigue worthy of this sort of guild. It’s not theft. Heck, it’s not even illegal. This might work as some sort of “business tycoon” quest line, but for the Thieves Guild?

Next I’m sent to see Maven. The quest line has been building her up, talking about how important she is to the guild and how she has half the city in her grip. Fine, except once this quest is over she never comes up again. I don’t mind if the game puts in interesting “flavor” characters, but Maven is cutthroat in a very bland way, she never seems terribly important, and she’s not at all imposing. She’s just another map marker to chase down on your way to the end of the quest. Despite her build-up as some kind of crime boss, she comes across as a cranky dimwit. You don’t even meet her in an impressive office or estate. You meet her in an open hallway of the inn. She doesn’t even have a bodyguard.

Maven is a jerk to me, and then she sends me to see a guy named Mallus. He sends me to Honningbrew Meadery, which is is a mead distillery in the city of Whiterun. It competes with Maven. The owner of Honningbrew is about to hold a tasting for the captain of the guard, and my job is to poison the mead.

Okay, this is where the quest line starts to come apart. First of all, you have to put the poison into this mead tank (pic related)

Shamus also glosses over the fact that the starter quests for the Thieves Guild are street gangster nonsense. All you do is threaten people or beat them up. It's not called the Muggers Guild.

>playing as a female

FUCKING CUT UR BALLS OFF AND DIE, FAGGOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Then walk next door where the tasting is taking place.

The poison I just planted next door is now in this small keg. Somehow.

Anyway, the captain of the guard takes one sip, and then instantly arrests the owner of the place, promising that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars. The Thieves Guild makes a big deal out of never killing their victims, but this doesn’t seem all that different than killing to me. I mean, I thought the point of the Thieves Guild was to act unseen, and to take valuables without hurting people.

You can murder a civilian in broad daylight and allow the guard to take you to jail for a modest span of time. (Or just pay a 1,000 dollar fine.) But inadvertent food contamination with no victims is worthy of life in prison? It’s a worse offense than murder, even though it might have been an accident or sabotage? And the Honningbrew owner never points the finger at me, the mysterious stranger who he recently allowed into the distillery? He pulled a fresh batch of mead from the vat and never saw fit to taste it himself first?

Then the captain of the guard tells Mallus to take over, and Mallus tells me he’s going to start converting the distillery to make mead for Maven.

Wha??

Look, if the health inspector shuts down your McDonald’s, the police don’t come in and give the building to Burger King. Who owns this place? What’s happening here?

I check the books, and find this place was cutting a deal with the same mystery person who bought Goldenglow. I bring this information back to Mercer Frey, and he’s very concerned. He says they’re obviously facing an organized and well-funded enemy. He’s impressed with them.

Dude, are you kidding? We just made a fortune. This foe cut a deal with this distillery, but we did a bunch of nonsense and now we own it. (Or run it. Whatever.) They bought the Goldenglow bee farm, but now they don’t have anywhere else to sell their honey. They spent a fortune, and have nothing. This other party is not a criminal mastermind. (Hoo boy. Just wait.) They tried to legitimately compete against deeply entrenched organized crime, and lost everything before they made a single shiny coin.

Mercer says they were doing this to drive a wedge between Maven and the Guild. How would making mead accomplish that? If a bunch of people conspire to control all the beer in the city, and then someone else tries to sell beer, the conspirators wouldn’t necessarily turn on each other. They would probably work together to drive out the competition. That’s the whole reason they conspired in the first place.

Mercer, worried about this inept non-threat, sends me to see Gulum-Ei, the guy who brokered the property sale. After a bunch of screwing around, Gulum-Ei finally breaks down and tells me that the mystery client is Karliah. Twenty-five years ago she apparently killed the previous guild leader and then vanished. (Twenty-five years. Remember that.) Now she’s back and… trying to break into the mead business? Or something.

Karliah left a clue. She told Gulum-Ei that she was going “back to where the ending began”.

Mercer believes that this can only mean one place: The ruin where she killed Gallus, the previous guild leader. Mercer decides to meet me there so that the two of us can kill her.

I arrive at the ruin to help Mercer Frey kill Karliah. There is this short bit of dialog at the start where Mercer is able to pick the lock of an “impossible lock” door. Then halfway through the dungeon he does it again, bypassing a door that you normally can’t open, even with maximum lockpicking skill. This becomes important later.

I have to say that Mercer is about the worst thief in the world. Instead of letting the player pick off targets from the shadows, he charges into battle, screaming combat taunts and blocking my arrows. He blunders into traps, even though any halfway-leveled stealth character has access to a perk that makes them immune to setting off traps. He’s actually a liability for anyone trying to use stealth. And I imagine that “stealth” is a pretty common appraoch for players who are running through the Thieves Guild questline. Crimey.

Then at the end of the dungeon, I enter the final chamber and suddenly fall over. Karliah has hit me with a paralysis arrow which will never exist or be mentioned again in the gameworld, despite the fact that it would be the Most Useful Thing Ever. Then she and Mercer talk. It is revealed that Mercer was the one who killed Gallus (the old guild leader) and pinned the crime on Karliah. She admits she can’t hope to beat Mercer in a fight so she turns invisible and runs off.

Having outlived my usefulness, Mercer then comes over and stabs me.

Outside, I am revived by Karliah. My character quite reasonably greets her with, “You shot me!”

“No, I saved your life,” she explains. See, the paralysis arrow she used on me slowed my heart rate so I didn’t bleed out. It took her a year to perfect the poison, so she only had enough for one shot.

Karliah dear, if you had shot Mercer Frey then my life wouldn’t have needed saving in the first place. You dunce. If you push me in front of a bus and then save my life with CPR, that doesn’t cancel out the crime of pushing me in front of a bus. What if he’d decided to cut my head off? Your plot-arrow wouldn’t have done me much good then, would it? You had two targets: A stranger, and the super-powerful, completely evil guy who murdered your best friend and who you admit you can’t hope to defeat in battle. You chose to shoot the stranger, then run away and let the bad guy kill the stranger, then tried to recruit the stranger. What is wrong with you?

If it took you a year to “perfect” the formula, then why don’t you make more now that you know how? Why didn’t you make enough for a few arrows, just in case you missed?

So much of this could be fixed with just a few common-sense changes to dialog. Instead of Karliah getting self-righteous about saving your life, have her say, “I thought I was shooting Mercer. It was dark and foggy in that tomb. I wanted it that way for the ambush. I wasn’t expecting Mercer to bring someone else. Sorry you got caught up in all of this.”

This would make her action understandable, and might make Mercer seem kind of clever for bringing you along.

You could also have Karliah explain that she stole the paralysis arrow from some wizard in Cyrodil. This would:

>Explain why she only had one.
>Explain why you can’t make or obtain more yourself.
>Establish her as a thief.

Boom. Two painful contrivances fixed with some very small alterations to dialog. This wouldn’t fix all the logical, conceptual, and thematic problems with this story, but it would avert the need for both Karliah and the player to behave like complete fools to make this section work.

She says that she has found Gallus’ diary. Unfortunately, it’s written in an unknown language. Gaullus was a human, but wrote the diary in some other language for unknown reasons, and now we don’t know what it says.

She says her plan was to capture Mercer and bring him before the guild to face his crimes. How was that going to work? She has no proof. Everyone thinks she killed Gallus. Now she’s gotten involved with this foolish scheme with the mead-brewing, which simultaneously made her look MORE guilty while also wasting all her money. She was planning on dragging Mercer’s limp body into the guild headquarters, where they would remember her as the person who killed the old guild leader, tried to interfere with their mead business, and then ambushed their current guild master. And in her defense she was going to hold up a diary which none of them could read, which couldn’t be confirmed to belong to Gallus, and which might not contain anything useful even if it was translated.

And it took her twenty-five years to come up with this plan?

Now, you might argue that she didn’t mean for everyone to find out about the mead-brewing business. However, her entire plan depended on the guild figuring it out. She left all those clues, and then came to this ruin to ambush Mercer. What if we hadn’t tracked down Gulum-Ei? What if Gulum-Ei hadn’t spilled the beans? What if Mercer hadn’t picked up on that clue about “where the end began”. What if Mercer decided – quite reasonably – that there was nothing to be gained from walking into an obvious ambush and decided to hang out in guild headquarters? I guess she would have sat in that dungeon until her dumb ass froze to death.

She sends me off to see some scholar to see about having the book translated. I guess she’s been too busy for the last quarter century to look into trifling details like that.

The scholar tells me that the diary is written in ancient Falmer. The Falmer are a race of blind, underground-dwelling mole-people who hate the outside world and kill anything that enters their domain. Only one man knows how to translate Falmer: Calcemo the Mage. Off we go.

Calcemo refuses to help. He’s just completed his study of the Falmer, and is completely unwilling to share his findings. So, I have to break into his laboratory and steal his research notes.

Wow really? You need me to steal something? Funny that after all these hours of screwing around, the first job that sends me to really steal something is coming from someone outside the guild.

It turns out Calcemo’s “notes” are a giant stone carving built into the ruins. I don’t know what the carving says. It’s evidently a translation guide? As far as I can tell, it was a guide written by the Dwarves, to explain how to translate the ancient Falmer language into modern-day common, which didn’t exist yet. Makes perfect sense.

(This is actually a quasi-puzzle. You have to gather a roll of paper and some charcoal from the next room, in order to produce a rubbing of the engraved text. Of course, if you happen to have those items already from compulsive looting then the rubbing will just appear without explanation, but it’s still an interesting idea. Of course, it ruins the prospect of us actually stealing a physical object, which is something I was hoping I’d get to do at some point in this quest chain. I suppose, this is kind of like copyright infringement, which some people think is theft.)

>STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE

Die in a fire faggot.

Why does Nocturnal lie about making the Thieves unlucky when Sai is the Skyrim God of Luck?

I take the copied engraving back to the scholar, and we meet Karliah in the basement of an inn. Calcelmo the mage spent years studying that engraving in order to unravel the Falmer tongue. I don’t know why. The scholar is instantly be able to read the diary as soon as I show him the rubbing. At last we get to see what Gallus wrote all those years ago.

The scholar reads in little bits and pieces. It’s hard to do it justice here in this write-up, but the main points are:

>Gallus observed that Mercer was living a lavish lifestyle, spending vast amounts of coin.
You can’t be serious! You’re telling me a member of the THIEVES GUILD was rolling in money and living large? What’s the world coming to?

>Gallus suspected that Mercer was stealing from the guild vault.
Dude, you were the guild master. Don’t you have some way of tracking this? Don’t you know what’s in the vault? Can’t you have someone keep an eye on it? Isn’t that, like, your job?

>There’s some mention of the “Nightingales” and the “Twilight Sepulchre”.
We’ve been hearing about the “Nightingales” now and again throughout this quest line. Apparently they’re some sort of super-secret society. So secret that nobody believes they exist. Mercer, Karliah, and Gallus were all members. And to get super-pedantic: Did the ancient Falmer really have a word for “Nightingale”? And was something that specific really detailed on that rubbing?

Karliah freaks out at the mention of the Twilight Sepulchre. It turns out that whatever Mercer has done, it’s bad. Like, super bad. Karliah tells me to meet her back at the guild headquarters. We’re going to confront the guild.

Ah fuck, I forget, what's this guy's name again?

Oblivion's mage guild quests were trash after the bit where you run around to all the guild houses.

Not Skyrim level trash, but still garbage.

Because its easier than saying that she doesn't let the shadows they hide in keep them as hidden as they could, or even should.

You can make pralyzing arrows fairly easily though

As average as Skyrim was, I think it did Thieves Guild perfectly. You had to actually earn a take to do any big jobs, and your magical artifact feels deserved after all the shit you pull.

And of course the fact that everything you steal is used in tandem for your biggest heist.

So we’re now working for Karliah, who was framed twenty-five years ago for murdering the guild master. Mercer is the real murderer, and now he’s running the guild. The old guild master was Gallus, and we now have a translation of his journal. So far we’ve learned that:

>Mercer Frey stole from the guild vault.
>Then he stole something from the “Twilight Sepulchre”.
>Then he killed Gallus, blamed the murder on Karliah, and ascended to guild master.
>Then he ran the guild for 25 years while Karliah did a whole lot of nothing. (Well, she found Gallus’ journal. I would think that finding the personal journal of your best friend, partner in crime, guild leader, and lover ought to take less than two and a half decades, but what do I know? Maybe it was, like, way, way down in the couch cushions.)

Then Karliah and I head back to confront the guild. (Er. Confront them with what?) The guild members are angry when we arrive. The thing with Gallus happened twenty-five years ago when most of these people would have been kids, but they seem to know who Karliah is on sight. They want to know why I’ve brought this murderer into the guild. Then Karliah shows them the translated copy of Gallus’ journal. Brynjolf reads it, and immediately concludes that Karliah is telling the truth.

Shut up kid

Fucking soak your head for saying such garbage, you idiot.

I’ve written before about “story collapse”. That’s the process where some plot hole or nonsensical event irritates you and causes you to analyze the story more closely, which reveals more problems, which leads to more scrutiny, until the whole thing falls apart. This business with presenting a translated diary as evidence is where it happened for me. Up until this point, I’d been just mildly irritated with the quest chain. At first I just thought the tale was a bit dull and convoluted, but once this scene happened I began looking more closely and uncovered all of these other problems.

Why would any of these people accept this diary as proof? It was written out by that scholar guy. They can’t read the original, and even if they could they have no reason to believe it’s legitimately from Gallus. How do they know we didn’t just write whatever we wanted in a book? But no, the will and loyalty of the entire guild turns on this single bit of “evidence”, and they immediately embrace the woman who was trying to “ruin” the guild yesterday.

The dialog gets really sloppy here, with Brynjolf reading from the book and saying that, “Mercer has been stealing from the guild for years,” when the book is obviously limited to events of 25 years ago. For further proof, they decide to look in the guild vault. Someone points out that the vault door is un-pickable and requires two different keys to open. One guy uses his key, then Brynjolf uses the second, and they look inside

It’s gone! The vault is cleaned out!

There are so many problems with this that the complete deconstruction would be an article in and of itself. But to cover the major points:

If he’s been stealing from the fault for “years” then how did nobody notice? I assume people have been putting treasure INTO the vault? Didn’t they ever notice that the loot was vanishing? And what’s all this for? Why would the guild pile up riches in some common pot? Is this some kind of hippie communist Thieves Guild, where everyone shares? Why don’t they just split the loot between themselves? I doubt they have to worry about paying property taxes on their sewer-base. More importantly, the entire quest line began with repeated references to how the guild had fallen on hard times. If they were so broke, then why did they have a vault full of gold? Or if times were so tough, why are they so distraught to find the vault empty? How do they know that Mercer is the one who cleaned it out and that he was acting alone? You can explain some of these questions, but only at the expense of others. This entire sequence is deeply flawed, and we’re only just getting started.

All of this is supposed to be a huge reveal, but it falls completely flat. We don’t have any stake in this. Nobody really talked about the vault and it was never established that people cared or even thought about this vault. We never saw inside of it until now, so it’s not a terrible shock for the player to lose something they didn’t have two minutes ago. Instead of being a turning point in the story, it’s this awful traffic jam of fridge logic.

The thieves ask how Mercer got into the vault, since it needs two keys. You would think that thieves would be able to wrap their heads around a conundrum like this. You know: Maybe he made a copy of one of the keys? It’s mechanical, not magical, so making a copy shouldn’t be that hard, especially if you have 25 years to work on it and you know where the originals are kept.

You mean Oblivion, right? I can't tell if you were being facetious or just accidentally typed skyrim instead of Oblivion.

Oblivion is a mostly garbage game, but the Thieves guild is one of the great parts.

>sell soul to nocturnal
>doesn't stop your master gallus getting killed
>you go on the run for 25 YEARS while the murder lives the high life
daedric prince my ass
karliah got a raw deal

This sequence hinges on this two-key business, but the game never even explains how it works. Brynjolf has a key. Devlin has a key. Does Mercer have a key? Are the two keys the same? Are they interchangeable? How many keys are there? Does anyone else know about Mercer’s super-lockpick ability? On and on. I’m not saying these questions are plot holes. I’m just saying the game didn’t give us enough information to understand this crime or make sense of anyone’s reactions to it.

This is exactly the sort of thing you get with story collapse. If the rest of this story had been tight, focused, well-paced, and logical, most players would skate right past this sort of business and expect things to make sense later. But once the storyteller has blown their trust and failed in obvious ways, I start analyzing and second-guessing them. I’m willing to bet the original author didn’t have any answers to any of the questions I posed in the previous paragraph.

We’ll find out later how he opened the doors, but it’s beside the point. The hard part of cleaning out this vault has nothing to do with opening the stupid door. The vault doors are well-lit, and the outer room is always full of people. Even if the doors weren’t locked, how did Mercer get these noisy, heavy things open without anyone noticing? And then how did he lug seven treasure chests worth of loot under a light, across the room, and up a ladder without anyone noticing? Even if he had perfect invisibility, people should still have noticed these very prominent doors being open.

I’m sorry guys, but if he made off with that much bling all at once without you noticing, then you deserved it. In fact, your anger strikes me as being really, really hypocritical. We’re all thieves here. We know how this works. You guys just suck.

Brynjolf then sends me to a house that Mercer owns in town. Mercer never stays there, Brynjolf tells me, but I’m supposed to look for clues there anyway. I break into Mercer’s place and check it out. In the basement I find Mercer’s plans, which I bring back to Brynjolf. He explains that the plans show that Mercer is going after the Eyes of the Falmer. This is a major pair of watermellon-sized gems. This job was a pet project of Gallus before he died. Brynjolf says Mercer is going after them as a final insult to the guild.

Dude, it’s been twenty-five years since Gallus died, and you never made any move for these jewels. I think it was really sporting of him to wait this long. You had plenty of time to go and get them if you wanted them. If you couldn’t be bothered then you get no sympathy from me.

Brynjolf says that if Mercer gets his hands on those gems, he’ll be gone, and set up for life. So we have to stop him.

Isn’t he set up for life anyway, now that he has seven chests worth of loot in his pockets? If he’s going after the Eyes of the Falmer, then wouldn’t he have taken his plans with him? Maybe he got those gems months ago? Or years ago? Rather than chase him into the tomb and hope he’s there, why don’t we camp the exit and wait for him to come out? Why not figure out how he plans to leave Skyrim?

Before we go after the bad guy, Karliah says we have to follow her. Mercer is a Nightengale(!) so we can’t hope to defeat him without preparation.

Game designer: Once again you have shot yourselves in the foot. You could sell the idea of Mercer being a badass if you hadn’t already forced us to team up with him and shown us what a complete clown he is. You undercut your villain before you even established him as a villain!

Even though we’re supposedly in a hurry to follow Mercer, let’s follow Karliah and see what her plan is.

So we meet these two idiots at Nightingale HQ, and Karliah tells us we’re here to “get the edge we need to defeat Mercer Frey”. Now, if you want to defeat Mercer Frey, all you really need to do is challenge him to a contest of not screaming a combat taunt for ten consecutive seconds, but whatever.

In the last segment, the story fell apart for me. This bit is where it pissed me off. We’re going to join the Nightingales.

Dear Bethesda: Do you understand that nightingales are birds, and not usually associated with power, cunning, or even darkness? I mean, I know you’ve got the word “night” in there, but the name actually means “‘night songstress”. As in singing. They are not harbingers of danger, adventure, or secrecy. They’re actually cute, fluffy little birds. It’s a terrible, terrible name for your super-secret cult. You basically named yourselves, “The Adorable Little Songbirds”. It sounds really stupid to hear people talking about “Nightingales” like they’re something insidious, and that’s before we see how completely useless they are. I can’t shake the feeling you were thinking of owls, crows, ravens, or blackbirds.

Karliah leads us through the secret entrance and ominously tells us, “This is Nightingale hall. You’re the first of the uninitiated to set foot inside in over a century.”

Sigh. Unless you, Gallus, and Mercer are all over a hundred years old, that can’t be true. Mercer is a human, and he can’t be more than fifty. So the last initiation would have been about, what? Thirty years ago? At most. Now, the Nightingales do have another facility (we’ll get to that later) so you could argue that Mercer’s initiation took place there, but there are only two rooms in Nightingale Hall: The armor room, and the oath room. There isn’t a single desk or bench in the place. What is this place used for, if not initiations? Was anyone paying attention when they wrote this?

(oh god this is way longer than I thought it was but I'm already committed)

The game has you click on the “Nightingale Armor Stone” to receive your armor. A stone. What is this? Is it like, a container? Or does it magically produce armor for anyone who pokes it? You have to put on this armor, and Karliah tells you that “You appear ready for the Oath.”

Oath? What is this? What are we doing?

See, this is all some kind of bargain with the goddess Nocturnal. (She’s kind of your go-to deity for thieves, at least for those who have a religious bent.) Step one is putting on this armor. I’ll say now that this armor is not very impressive. If you’ve bothered to level smithing or enchanting, then you probably throw away stuff more useful than the Nightingale armor. It gives bonuses to stamina and one-handed weapons. This is ideal if you’re a warrior type, and useless if you’re, you know, someone sneaky. The bonuses on the armor are almost completely at odds with the secretive nature of this cult. The only useful bit are the boots, which muffle your walking. Nice, granted. (Although I have the exact same bonus on my existing boots, which have about double the armor value.) Okay, the hood makes illusion spells slightly cheaper to cast, but the #1 illusion spell a thief would want is “muffle” and the boots give you a constant muffle spell without you needing to cast it.

And yes, you must wear this armor while taking this oath.

I suppose it looks cool in a kind of conspicuously secretive way, like a guy wearing a “Shhh. I’m a ninja” T-shirt.

>Karliah dear, if you had shot Mercer Frey then my life wouldn’t have needed saving in the first place. You dunce. If you push me in front of a bus and then save my life with CPR, that doesn’t cancel out the crime of pushing me in front of a bus.

top kek

holy kek I never realized it was THIS bad

So Karliah finally explains things to us. In order to defeat Mercer, we must become Nightingales. Doing so means swearing to serve Nocturnal in this life and the next. You serve her in life, and in death. And in return she gives you… the game never actually says what you’re supposed to be getting out of this. Oh, Karliah acts like we’re getting super powers or something, but in this deal no actual powers are conferred. You might say we’re getting this crappy vendor trash armor in return, but we get that before the oath and it does nothing to help us defeat Mercer. There is no reason to accept this deal except that this idiot questline requires it.

Mercer was able to open the guild vault because he stole the Skeleton Key. It’s an artifact of Nocturnal. It lets you “open any door”. (Of course, when you get it, it does no such thing. It’s just an un-breakable lockpick with no other bonus.) It supposedly allows you to unlock your full potential, which is why Mercer is allegedly powerful. As Nightingales, they swore to protect the key and make sure it’s never used. (Which sort of makes you wonder why it exists in the first place, but whatever – gods don’t really need to make sense the way people do.) Apparently Mercer defiled the temple by stealing this key, which he’s been using to steal from the guild.

Karliah gets all high and mighty about this, but of course she never bothered to check on the key or the temple during her twenty-five year exile. If she did, she wouldn’t have needed to translate Gallus’ stupid journal to figure out that Mercer took the key. Stealing the key brought a curse on the guild, giving everyone bad luck, which is why the guild is supposedly on hard times now.

You do get some (really, really crappy) once-a-day powers as part of becoming a Nightingale, but you don’t get those until after you’ve defeated Mercer.

Autism Man

So then we have this stupid ceremony where we all pledge our eternal souls to Noctural, who manifests as a glowing orb of light with an agonizingly smug voice that makes you want to throttle her disembodied neck. She even says, “Karliah, I’m surprised at you. This deal is clearly weighted in my favor.”

Yeah, I guess it would be, since YOU AREN’T OFFERING ANYTHING.

So now we’re Nightingales, with all the rights and privileges that entails. (None.) Along with the costs. (My soul, apparently.) And we can finally go after Mercer, now that we’ve given him a massive head start. Our team of morons (and we must include the player as one of the morons, since you have to role-play a moron to agree to Nocturnal’s deal) meets at yet another ruin where we hope to corner Mercer Frey.

I meet up with Karliah and Brynjolf. Assuming he’s the slowest man in the world, Mercer should still be inside trying to recover the Eyes of the Falmer. Now we just have to go in and murder him.

Say… I don’t suppose I could talk you two guys into staying behind, could I? No? That’s what I was afraid of.

We’re here in this ruin with Karliah and Brynjolf to kill Mercer. Now, we’re all members of the Thieves Guild. In fact, we’re all members of the Nightingales, the secret cult within the Thieves Guild. You would think that if anyone is ready for some sneaking around, it would be these two. But you would be wrong. You would be so wrong. You should be embarassed at how wrong you’d be. Here is how a fight goes:

Whoops I meant Oblivion, yeah. Skyrim was utter garbage. But Oblivion did it right. I also have the same opinion on the Dark Brotherhood, because it feels like Skyrim tried to replicate that feeling of losing the Brotherhood, but made them slightly less interesting. Thus the effect didn't hit as hard.

And also Astrid is just a moron across the board, and her attempted atonement was stupid.

I, striking from the shadows, drop a foe with a single arrow. The other foes in the area notice this, and begin searching for me. If I were on my own, I would slink away and hit them again from another vantage point, until they were all dead. With the Nightingales in tow, things work a bit differently. As soon as foes begin looking for me, these two idiots start screaming combat taunts, running out into the open and starting a huge melee. This attracts every foe in the room. They block my shots until they run out of hitpoints and go down. (They take a knee. They’re actually immortal.) The foes then abandon them and make a beeline for me, thus forcing my squishy, stealth-focused character into this huge clusterfarg of a battle. Assuming I manage to survive, Karliah and Brynjolf then stand up and spout a couple of triumphant taunts.

This is a move right out of the Leroy Jenkins playbook. (More of a pamphlet, really. It only has one play.) It is completely mystifying to me that the designers would saddle you with these two morons for this extended dungeon crawl. They ruin the atmosphere, they ruin the gameplay, and they’re a constant reminder that the quest I’m on makes no damn sense.

Their one saving grace is that they are just as stupid and clumsy as Mercer, and you can lead them into traps to amuse yourself.

We reach the final chamber and the game has the nerve to grab my camera for a cutscene. It stands me up and forces me to listen to the other characters yatter on while I’m prevented from taking any action. Mercer uses his powers to make Brynjolf attack Karliah. So after babysitting these two idiots through the entire complex, they’re out of the fight. This is a shame, because this is the only fight where they might be useful.

Yep. Dark Brotherhood and the Thieves Guild were the two things the Oblivion main game did best.

Now, the game hasn’t really pulled the player out of stealth. Although, it’s perfectly understandable for the player to think this is the case, since your foe is looking at you and talking to you. By reflex I hit the crouch button as soon as the conversation ended, which caused me to stop sneaking, since the conversation hadn’t actually outed me. This camera-grab is sloppy and frustrating, but I don’t have time to dwell on all the reasons this is bad from a game design perspective. Let’s just move on.

The room we’re in is collapsing. Karliah mentioned something earlier about how Mercer’s power is causing this place to become unstable. It’s not clear if he’s doing this on purpose, or how it could possibly benefit him, or where this power is coming from. Is it some secret power held by the Skeleton Key? Is this an innate power that the key unlocked? Who cares! Camera shaking means tension and excitement!

Karliah and Brynjolf loop through some canned messages while they fight, and Mercer brings out his well-worn collection of combat taunts. It is, I have to say, very chatty in here. Anyway, Mercer bites it and I grab the skeleton key and the Eyes of the Falmer so we can leave. Mercer’s earthquakes cause a tunnel to collapse and the chamber to flood. This would be a cool sequence if this entire setup wasn’t so humiliatingly contrived and absurd.

We make our escape. Outside, Karliah tells me that it’s time to take the skeleton key back to Nocturnal. She can’t do it, because she’s afraid to face Nocturnal again after her failure. Thank goodness. Maybe Nocturnal will pay me for babysitting these two.

So I’m sent to a new ruin. Inside the door I meet the ghost of Gallus.

Yeah. In case you thought that whole, “Serve her in death” business was just hyperbole. We’re apparently doomed to spend eternity locked in the dusty old tomb. Sadly, the other Nightingale ghosts have all gone insane and will attack me on sight. So, I might end up spending eternity locked in a tomb and insane. This deal with Noctural is the most expensive nothing I’ve ever bought.

I get to the end of the dungeon, stick the Skeleton Key back in its proper Skeleton Lock, and Nocturnal shows up to blather at me. She’s so smug she should challenge Reaver to an eye-rolling contest.

Karliah ends the questline by talking about how the guild is restored and there are pockets just brimming with coin out there. There are valuables, ripe for the taking! Let’s go be thieves!

Pffft. Why start now? Hey genius, how about we start with tracking down the seven treasure chests of loot that Mercer swiped? No? You forgot about those didn’t you? Oh well. Have fun picking pockets. Loser.

I get it. This last quest is supposed to be ironic, because we’re returning something instead of stealing it. Except, it fails at this because none of my other quests ever had anything to do with stealing valuable items. I extorted money with vandalism and threats of violence as part of my initiation. I stole a document (and committed arson) at Goldenglow Estates. I perpetrated fraud and food poisoning at Honningbrew Meadery. I attempted the murder of Karliah. I made a copy of some intellectual property by making the rubbing of the translation guide. You might think that the Eyes of the Falmer count, but that wasn’t a heist. Those were in a ruin. If that’s theft, then Indiana Jones is the biggest cat burglar in history. Theft was never, ever a theme of these quests, so one more quest of non-theft isn’t ironic at all. It’s just more non-Thief crap for me to do. You had idiot berzerker companions with you for the two set-piece dungeons, so the missions barely involved sneaking.

Let’s recap:

Mercer stole the Skeleton key, which allowed him to rob the guild. Then he hung around and ran the guild diligently for twenty-five years. (Maybe he was stealing, but it was never enough for anyone to notice. Nobody ever complained about his leadership.) Then once they were (allegedly) broke, he cleaned them out and left. Isn’t the point of theft to get something for nothing? Why didn’t he rob the guild twenty-five years ago when they were supposedly flush with cash? Working for a quarter century seems like a pretty labor-intensive means of theft.

Gallus knew Mercer was stealing from the vault, but he never took action. He was the guild leader, yet he made no effort to expose Mercer. He knew Mercer had stolen the Skeleton Key, but he never told Karliah. We don’t know the details of what happened when Mercer killed Gallus, but if Gallus had just said something then Mercer’s entire plan would have failed.

Karliah was blamed for the murder and then did nothing for twenty-five years. She never tried to clear her name. Never checked on the temple she swore to protect. Never tried to recruit new Nightingales to replenish their ranks. When she did take action by going into the mead business, it was convoluted, expensive, doomed to failure, and ran counter to the goals of clearing her name. When she at last had the chance to capture her nemesis, she shot a stranger instead.

Brynjolf (and the rest of the guild) accepted the translation as irrefutable evidence that the guildmaster was the Bad Guy. Then they somehow failed to notice someone carrying off seven chests of loot that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

Nocturnal is a deity (or some sort of supernatural being) and doesn’t need to make sense that other characters do, but for the sake of completeness: She created an artifact and then formed a secret society to prevent anyone from using it. When she was betrayed, she didn’t bother telling her remaining follower. She never revoked the powers she gave Mercer after he took the key. Instead, she put a curse on a group of people who had never heard of the artifact, had nothing to do with its theft, didn’t benefit of its use, and who had no way of making it right.

The Player is railroaded into accepting this idiotic sequence of actions, is prevented from asking reasonable questions, and is forced to ask stupid ones. (Particularly at the beginning.)

You know what? I would tolerate all of this willfully stupid and lazy writing if the quests themselves worked thematically. In Oblivion, the Thieves Guild quest ended with a major heist of an item of supreme value from a well-guarded location. (You actually steal one of the Elder Scrolls, for which this franchise is named.) The Dark Brotherhood quests in Skyrim are a fun chain of assassinations, beginning with bottom-feeders and ending with a daring, audacious kill that will go down in Tamriel history. Along the way there are twists, turns, and betrayals. Sure, there are a few plot holes, but at least you’re playing the part of an assassin. The Thieves Guild quests are this muddled chain of gibberish actions that don’t follow any sort of logic and don’t have anything to do with sneaking and stealing.

(and then I see the article is linked in the first fucking post and I am deeply embarrassed for this autism)

The Thieves Guild quests were packed with cruft. The game had to explain property dealings, the structure of organized crime in Riften, mead brewing, the purpose of the Nightingales, the nature of Nocturnal, and the business with the Falmer language. The game would force-feed you a bunch of exposition, which usually was only important for one quest. (And was often illogical or self-contradictory.) Then instead of building on that established base, the game would bring out a new slate of plot elements that needed to be explained. This can work when the writer has a passion for world-building, foreshadowing, and a knack for misdirection and plot twists, but that is not the case here. This writer had no head for this sort of thing, and I don’t understand why they went to all this trouble.

None of this was necessary. We didn’t need the Thieves Guild quests to try and tell a convoluted tale. Once again, I’m not insisting that all games be Portal or Planescape Torment. (Although, a few MORE games like that would be nice. But I digress.) I don’t demand that every game have solid gold writing, or be long, complex tales with a huge cast of characters, deep imagery, profound ideas, and multiple twists. All I ask is that there’s enough story to give your actions context, and that the story (long or short) make sense. The Thieves Guild quests could easily have been a series of thefts, building up to a single audacious heist. Maybe throw in a betrayal at the end if you want to be really fancy.

Some parts of the missions were fun, but those moments happened when the story left me alone for a while. If all you want is a little shoot & loot, you’re better off just wandering around the wilderness, diving into random dungeons. If this quest had been a stand-alone game, I would have given it a Goldun Riter Awward in a heartbeat.

The guy made an analysis of the mainline TES games and it's really interesting.

One of my favorite quotes:
"Morrowind had axed broken stuff, stuff that should be trimmed. Oblivion was happy to axe things that merely could be trimmed. If Long Blade and Short Blade could be combined into Blade, if Axes and Blunt Weapons could be merged, if a couple of the less-popular factions could be quietly discontinued, then perfect; the result would be leaner and let the developers focus on the core elements.
Skyrim was far more extreme than either title. It was no longer about fussily paring down the same system; it was about questioning why those systems had to exist in the first place. One could pretty well predict the shrinking of the game’s cruft from Morrowind onward, but nobody could predict just how drastically things dropped off with game V."

"Like in Oblivion, the game offers a variety of factions and quest types to every character without forcing players to choose. But there’s a critical difference, and one that’s arguably generated most of the game’s popularity and controversy: where Oblivion permits one character to access most of the game’s content, Skyrim permits one playstyle to access most of the game’s content."

shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=29808

user, you know damn well that's Ted Bundy.

Nigga that's Thomas Edison

> where Oblivion permits one character to access most of the game’s content, Skyrim permits one playstyle to access most of the game’s content

Holy shit, that actually sums it all up pretty well. It also sums up why a lot of popular RPGs feel so unsatisfying to play these days.

The Thieves Guild should be hard to join.
Same with the Dark Brotherhood.

In Skyrim it was rammed so fucking far down your throat that it's silly.

When I played Oblivion, I made it through the entire game without knowing the Thieves Guild was fucking there.
I heard the rumours, saw the posters and the loading screen and assumed "well obviously it isn't real, it's just flavour."

Then I stumbled upon the meeting place and sure enough.

I only found out about the Dark Brotherhood late game because I accidentally murdered someone, and got spooked in my sleep by them.

Good read, that was my first time reading that pasta, thanks for dumping

>I heard the rumours, saw the posters and the loading screen and assumed "well obviously it isn't real, it's just flavour."

That's just you being stupid, and probably a child too.
I myself had trouble joining it because I was a child and didn't bother with the posters.

Not realizing that it was obviously a real thing though and thinking it was just a rumor in game is pretty dumb though.

>Eh, lass?
How did you know?

Oh yeah, I was a fucking idiot.

But my point is that I'd rather you to have to go looking for it as opposed to forced quests to "introduce you" which you can then ignore until you want to join them.

Sadly that's never going to happen again, hiding that much content and expecting a player to investigate rumors is asking too much these days.

And yeah, finding the Thieves Guild for the first time was amazing, I had also found the Dark Brotherhood door before knowing what it was and wondering what was behind it.

No no, you're certainly right about that, I didn't complain about that part of your post. The way Oblivion handled those two guilds was great, even down to how you join them.

>make a fantasy game
>make a guild for mages
>make a guild for fighters
>have rumors of a thieves guild
>turns out it's just a honeypot scheme concocted by the guards to catch and imprison thieves

I hated the Oblivion Thieves' Guild quest, I wanted some, quick, dirty money then up the challenge like pickpocketing in broad daylight, well timed diversions, and ending with stealing the High Chancellor's jeweled boxers. Instead its some shit about the Grey Fox, restoring identities because Nocturnal has reasons, wow dude I don't give two shits about it I just want my money.

Oh well I apologize.

ayyy