Oblivion's Mages Guild questline gets worse every time you replay it

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

The more I replay Oblivion the more I notice how much the Mages Guild questline falls apart in the back half. Like the early stuff is genuinely solid - Anvil recommendation, the necromancer quest, even the recommendation chain feels like you're actually earning rank. But then you hit the Lich questline and it just... stops being about anything? You're suddenly hunting down some random Lich and his phylacteries and I genuinely cannot remember why I'm supposed to care.

And then Telaendril shows up and the whole thing pivots to "oh actually the guild is full of traitors" which would be interesting except it happens so fast and with so little setup that it feels like two different questlines got stapled together. Compare that to the Dark Brotherhood which has Sithis and the Night Mother woven in from the start, or even the Thieves Guild where Mercer's betrayal actually lands because you've been working with him the whole time.

I think the issue is the Mages Guild in Oblivion doesn't really have a central conflict until the very end. It's just recommendation quests in different cities and then suddenly conspiracy. Skyrim's College at least has the College vs Thalmor tension hanging over everything from the start, even if it doesn't go anywhere interesting.

Anyone else feel like the Mages Guild should've been restructured? Or am I just remembering the early quests as better than they actually are.

 

[EbonyWarrior]

I think you're onto something, but I'd push back a little on the early stuff being solid. The recommendation quests are fine - they're fetch quests with decent flavor - but they're not really building toward anything. You're just doing tasks for various mages and getting a letter. There's no throughline, no sense of why the guild matters beyond "collect these recommendations."

That said, yeah, the Lich questline and the Telaendril conspiracy thing feel disconnected. The problem isn't that it's two storylines stapled together - it's that neither one gets real development. You're right that the Dark Brotherhood works better because Sithis and the Night Mother create this weird, unsettling presence that makes every contract feel like it matters. The Mages Guild just... doesn't have that. It's not building dread or tension, it's just moving you through rooms.

But here's where I actually disagree with the Skyrim comparison: the College's Thalmor tension is mostly window dressing. It's mentioned and then nothing happens with it. At least Oblivion's Mages Guild conspiracy has some actual plot momentum at the end, even if it comes out of nowhere. Skyrim's College questline is shorter and tighter, sure, but it's also thinner. You're basically just learning magic and then dealing with Ancano, and the whole thing wraps up in like five quests.

I think the real issue with Oblivion's is pacing. If the conspiracy had been seeded earlier - if you'd noticed something off about certain mages, or if Telaendril had appeared earlier as an NPC - it would've landed way better.