Even some of its biggest fans would agree that Skyrim's main quest isn’t the game’s strongest suit. The Elder Scrolls 6 is on the way, and many fans will be hoping that the main questline will be more compelling the next time around.
While The Elder Scrolls 5 provides a huge open world and almost unlimited freedom to explore that setting, in order to help achieve that level openness it deprioritizes its main quest to the point where most of the game’s most memorable moments take place in other questlines, or as random occurrences in the world. However, there are some ways that The Elder Scrolls 6 could improve upon its main quest without compromising the freedom of the game’s player character.
Here are just a few ways the next game in The Elder Scrolls series could make its main quest more epic than Skyrim’s.
More Developed Companions
The first thing The Elder Scrolls 6 could do to improve its main quest is develop some of the companions that players meet along the way. One of the problems The Elder Scrolls faces with its companions is that there are a huge amount of them in the game, making developing them to the same extend as a companion in a game like Mass Effect or Dragon Age extremely difficult.
However, there are plenty of companions who appear in Skyrim’s main quest who could have been fleshed out a little more. Almost all Skyrim players end up with Lydia as a companion at some point if they make it a certain way through the main quest. There’s no reason that Lydia shouldn’t have some extra dialog which specifically references some of the events of the main quest as they unfold, especially since that dialog could be reused by any companion with the same voice actress.
There could even be some unique companion dialog which is only unlocked by playing through certain key moments in the story with certain companions present. Capturing a dragon in Whiterun, for example, could surely have drawn some comments from companions.
Fallout 4 even shows that an open-world Bethesda game can have more developed companions with their own side quests and motivations without stepping in the way of player freedom. Nick Valentine is a great example of a fleshed out by unobtrusive character that the next Elder Scrolls game could emulate in its main questline.
Giving Main Quest Characters More to Do
Companion characters aren’t the only ones to show up in the main quests of an Elder Scrolls game. Delphine, Esbern, and Parthuurnax are all examples of relatively fleshed out and compelling characters in Skyrim’s main quest, but The Elder Scrolls 6 should take that one step further.
Since most players will play through the main quest of an Elder Scrolls game at least once, the developers should prioritize fleshing out some of the characters they know the player will meet along the way, or at least tie them back to the player's actions so far. As it stands, many of the NPCs encountered in Skyrim’s main quest get about as much development as a random NPC in the world.
During the quest Diplomatic Immunity the player breaks into the Thalmor Embassy. This would be a great opportunity to set up a well-developed secondary antagonist – the Thalmor leader in Skyrim. However, Bethesda misses that opportunity, and after the embassy quest the Thalmor are barely heard of again in the main questline. Not only that, but there are other characters along the way who are disappointingly underdeveloped.
At the end of the same quest the player has the opportunity to free a prisoner in the Thalmor torture chamber. While he expresses gratitude, he’s quick to disappear into the world with no additional dialog to hint at why he was taken prisoner, and no way for him to express his gratitude to the Dragonborn. There are plenty of ways this could have been made more compelling.
Most players pass through Riverwood on their journey, and pick a side between love rivals Sven the Nord and Faendal the Wood Elf. If players sided with Faendal, the elf could have been picked up by the Thalmor for openly courting a human woman. If players sided with Sven, the bard could have been kidnapped for throwing the name of the Aldmeri Dominion around while slandering the elf.
In any case, there are easy ways that small roles like the Thalmor prisoner could have been made more compelling by either developing the character more or using characters that the player has already interacted with to make the moment more meaningful. This touches upon another major change which should be made to the main quest in The Elder Scrolls 6.
Main Quest Memory
Skyrim’s main quest would have been a great opportunity to reflect some of the player character’s deeds back at them. While it might be unreasonable to expect Bethesda to create a world that remembers and reacts realistically to all of the players’ actions, the main quest could be prioritized in terms of reactivity.
For example, the discovery that the leader of the Thieves Guild in Riften or the Archmage of the College of Winterhold is the Dragonborn should be a very different experience to playing through the start of the main quest as a nobody. Alduin, for example, could have at least refer to the Dragonborn as "mage," "thief," or "assassin" depending on which questlines they had completed most recently. All this kind of change would require is diversifying the game’s dialog at some key moments to acknowledge the player's actions, making the game more able to respond to a greater variety of possible player states and world states during the main quest. A little in this regard would go a long way.
Major events in the world like the outcome of the Skyrim Civil War and the assassination of the Emperor of Tamriel are never even mentioned during the main quest if they have already happened. The Elder Scrolls 6 should prioritize the reactivity of its main quest to make the next game feel like a truly generational step forward from Skyrim.
Not many Elder Scrolls fans play the games for the main questlines. However, if Bethesda were to craft the next game's main questline with some more compelling characters and a greater sense of how the events of the main quest interact with the world, the main quest of The Elder Scrolls 6 might just be one to remember.
The Elder Scrolls 6 is in development.