If there’s one thingObliviondoes better than any otherElder Scrollsgame, it’s factions. I don’t have fond memories ofbraving the Deadlands to thwart Mehrunes Dagon; I have fond memories of playing the killer in a murder mystery and unravelling a necromancy plot stretching back centuries.
So, when it came to playing the remaster, I was ecstatic to get stuck back into the Thieves Guild and relive what I’ve long thought was one of Bethesda’s best questlines. But maybe I should’ve left it as a memory.
The Story Is Great, But There’s Too Much Menial Work
One of the big issues withSkyrimis that you can take charge of every single faction with ease. You don’t do any grunt work: you waltz in and are the most important person to have ever existed as you’re handed everything on a silver platter.
Progression in Oblivion is more subdued. You have to earn recommendations from every guildhall to join the Mage’s Guild proper, kill enough targets to draw the attention of the upper echelons of the Dark Brotherhood, the Black Hand, and, in the Thieves Guild,prove your capabilitiesby fencing enough goods. It’s a decent idea in principle, but casing joints and robbing homes just isn’t fun.
Especially not when fences are so fiddly, only operating at certain hours.
The game’s loot system is incredibly poor. You lockpick chests to get cheap tankards and a measly handful of gold or the occasional pelt. Valuables are few and far between outside of handcrafted quests. Your best bet is robbing stores in the Imperial City, but that just amounts to casting an invisibility spell and grabbing everything of value in sight. NPCs aren’t smart enough to make stealth an interesting mechanic, so the legwork to earn your reputation in the guild is the dullest string of fetch quests in Elder Scrolls history.
It’s a shame, because the heists are incredible. Stealing tax records for the Waterfront lends itself perfectly to the Robin Hood inspirations, and having Hieronymus Lex reassigned to get him off the guild’s back is an ingenious way to highlight the differences between the guild and the Dark Brotherhood. The issue is that momentum is constantly brought to a halt by the busywork.
Skyrim Was Right To Streamline The Thieves Guild
The Mage’s Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests are more involved, giving you plenty of scenery to chew on. Handcrafted storylines position you as an ordinary guildmate or assassin, helping local halls with their problems or taking on menial contracts to earn your rank, but these are still memorable, self-contained narratives. You aren’t tasked with crafting ten new spells or killing six random people to unlock quests. The Thieves Guild is constantly undercut by these arbitrary barriers, and it says a lot that the entire system can be cheated anyway.
With a high enough Mercantile skill, it’s easier to grab valuables in the middle of the heists and pawn them at ridiculous prices, making it so that you hit every single fence requirement right at the very start. Most of us do that because fencing is a paper-thin way to pad out the questline. Yet fans always use it as an example of how mechanically rich Oblivion is when compared to Skyrim.It’s not: it doesn’t come close to the other guilds in how they make progression feel earned, or even the more streamlined approach of its sequel, which is far better paced.
Skyrim suffers from having the Dragonborn be a jack-of-all-trades, handed far too much responsibility far too quickly, becoming every guild’s master in what feels like days, but Oblivion isn’t any different.Youbecome the Archmage,youbecome the Listener,youbecome the Grey Fox. The busywork doesn’t make this any less true, it just adds boring stopgaps between the quests. It’s easy to see why Bethesda got rid of them for the sequel, as controversial as it might be, because in hindsight, the needless guff to become the Grey Fox ultimately made the Thieves Guild a slog to get through.
