Morrowind had better faction politics and I miss it every playthrough

[EbonyWarrior]

Playing through the Mages Guild questline again on my 5th run and man, I keep thinking about how much more weight faction choices had in Morrowind. Like yeah, Skyrim's factions are solid - the Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Companions all have their moments - but there's no real cost to joining everything. You can be Archmage, Listener, Guild Master, and Harbinger all at once without anyone caring. In Morrowind you had to actually choose, and different houses had beef with each other. It mattered who you sided with.

The Mages Guild in Skyrim is fine but it's basically just "do some fetch quests, become the leader." In Morrowind the politics were actually intricate - you had to navigate different factions within the guild itself, people actually opposed your rise to power. It felt like joining something with real consequences instead of just... collecting questlines.

I get why Skyrim streamlined it. The voice acting and quest design is way better, the actual story moments hit harder. But I do miss when the game made you feel like your choices were locking you out of other paths. Now you just speedrun every faction and nobody blinks.

Anyone else replay Morrowind occasionally just to remember what that felt like, or am I just being nostalgic?

 

[RiftenWanderer]

I get the nostalgia, but I think you're maybe remembering Morrowind's faction system as a bit more restrictive than it actually was? You could join House Hlaalu, House Redoran, and House Telvanni all at once in Morrowind too - there wasn't some hard block stopping you. The difference was more that the questlines themselves had you doing opposing things (sabotaging one house's operations for another), so it felt consequential even if you could technically be in all of them.

Skyrim just... didn't bother with that. The factions operate in complete isolation. You're never put in a position where joining the Companions conflicts with anything you've done in the Thieves Guild, because those questlines don't intersect at all. That's the real loss, imo. It's not that you should be locked out - it's that the game should make you feel the weight of your choices through the actual content, not through some behind-the-scenes restriction.

That said, I'm not sure Skyrim's faction quests are actually "way better" narratively just because of voice acting. The Thieves Guild stuff is honestly pretty thin once you're past the early missions. Dark Brotherhood has some good moments but it's also pretty straightforward. I think Morrowind just felt more like you were navigating a real world with competing interests, whereas Skyrim feels more like you're collecting achievements. Different design philosophies, but yeah - I see why you miss it.