Civil War questline is genuinely pointless and the game knows it

[DragonbornVet]

Playing through Stormcloaks right now on my 6th run and I just realized something. The Civil War doesn't actually matter. Like, the game tells you this upfront - the Greybeards say "go find Paarthurnax, stop wasting my time with your war" - but it's wild how little the game cares about your choice either way.

You can side with either faction, do all their quests, win the war, and then what? You get some new guards in your hold and maybe a few NPCs change their dialogue slightly. The main questline doesn't care. The Dawnguard doesn't care. The Thieves Guild doesn't care. You literally could have not done it and nothing changes except the final boss fight you're forced into.

Compare that to something like the Thieves Guild where finishing Trinity Restored actually makes Riften feel different, or the Dark Brotherhood where the questline has actual weight and consequence. The Civil War just... ends. And then you move on.

Imo it's the most expensive fetch quest in the game. You're running between holds grabbing supplies for a war that the game itself is telling you is irrelevant. At least when you're doing radiant jobs for the Thieves Guild you're getting paid and the game isn't pretending it matters to the main plot.

Anyone else just skip it entirely now or am I being too harsh?

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

I think you're being a little harsh but not entirely wrong. The Civil War questline definitely has less structural weight than the faction quests, but I'd push back on the "pointless" framing a bit.

The thing is, the Civil War is supposed to be background noise to the actual crisis - the dragons returning and the Alduin problem. The Greybeards literally tell you this, yeah, but that's kind of the point? Skyrim is tearing itself apart over ideology and succession while an existential threat is happening. That's thematically coherent, even if it's not dramatically satisfying in the way a tightly-written questline is.

Where I agree with you: the mechanical payoff is genuinely thin. You don't get much for winning. The hold guards thing is cosmetic. And yeah, compared to Trinity Restored where the Thieves Guild actually reclaims the Cistern and you feel like you've rebuilt something, or the Dark Brotherhood where you're reshaping a whole organization, the Civil War just... resolves and moves on. It's more about the journey (and roleplay) than the destination.

But I think that's partly because it's meant to be a choice you make based on who you believe in, not a quest you complete for rewards. My Stormcloak runs feel different from my Imperial runs not because of what I get at the end, but because I'm making different decisions about who rules and why. That matters more to me than whether Ulfric or Tullius gets a better death scene (which, ngl, neither of them really do).

The "expensive fetch quest" comparison is fair though. A lot of the war quests are genuinely tedious busywork.