Baldur’s Gate 3 has spoiled us a little bit. It’s an RPG that’s so expansive and massive that it reacts to almost everything a player does, but it’s worth remembering that it’s exceedingly rare to find an RPG that does that, and even moreso almost two decades ago.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion is one such game that definitely wanted to give players as much free choice as possible, but didn’t quite have the resources to make sure ALL of your actions made sense in the game’s world. This was a lot more evident in the game’s guild quests, as Bethesda didn’t quite take into account that you could become the leader of each guild in a single playthrough.
Oblivion Remastered Players Aren’t Fans Of The Game’s “Guild Overlap”
Unfortunately, Oblivion Remastered hasn’t really addressed this problem, and a lot of fans are now remembering just how silly the issue could be from an immersion perspective. On the official Oblivion subreddit, a user called TheReal8symbols made a post about the issue, complaining about two instances where people in the Thieves Guild ignored the fact he had finished the Mages Guild questline and was already Archmage.
They mention how the Misdirection side quest for the Thieves Guild is “particularly terrible about it”, describing how they still had to steal the Archmage’s staff and leave a note for them from Methredhel. Considering they’re already the Archmage, meaning they had to steal their own staff and leave a note for themselves, you can see how goofy that might be.
Other players share how they usually get around the issue, explaining that they tend to do the evil guilds first, and then go for the Fighters and Mages guilds as a “redemption arc”. A player called LilacAndDoves even goes as far as creating different characters for each guild, as they think doing all of them in one run is “too immersion-breaking”.
A lot of people also bring up Morrowind’s approach to the same problem, which used to lock you out of certain questlines depending on your actions, and it would be nice to see the return of that system for The Elder Scrolls 6. Then again, we may be old and gray before that comes out, so I guess we’ll have to settle for goofy Oblivion quests for now.
