Thread by @DiscordianKitty

Noooo. Listen. My memory is a little fuzzy but one of the biggest and worst changes in Skyrim was how the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood didn't even attempt to have a certain, twisted morality, the way they did in Oblivion. 🧵

https://twitter.com/PearlRiverFlow/status/1418218177926946816

Oblivion Thieve's Guild had certain rules, chief among them the rule that you DO NOT MURDER on the job. We are Thieves, not Assassins. You also DO NOT STEAL from the poor, beggars etc. We do not take from those who don't have anything.

The game had serious in-game consequences if you broke these rules. Thieves Guild was the most fun questline in Oblivion. You felt like Robin Hood at some points. Very steal from the corrupt elites in charge to help the oppressed.

Thieves Guild in Skyrim? Not only are the rules about murdering people gone, the game ACTIVELY ENCOURAGES you to murder, by dialing up the detection on all the NPCs you meet in Thieves Guild quests to 11.

I still play Thieves Guild quests with my old Oblivion morals, and I have played most of the game, and I can tell you, the quests that are the hardest to sneak past people without murdering them are the Thieves Guild quests.

It's much easier to just kill everyone, and you don't get into trouble.

Infuriating. And then instead of that morality, what does the Skyrim Thieves Guild introduce? Some weird religious shit about being a good Christian idk.

Oh my god, and they don't even let you keep the best Daedric artifact - The Skeleton Key - because murder, stealing from beggars and the poor, etc, all of that is ok now, but BLASPHEMY against the so-called 'goddess of thieves' is immoral.

What??

As for the Assassin's Guild, their questline is the other best questline in Oblivion, and a major reason is their twisted sense of morality.

Like, you kill the target you were paid to kill, and only the target you were paid to kill. Because we're assassins, not common thugs.

Oblivion assassination targets also often had this information left around that you could find. There was often a way to discover the motive behind the assassination. It didn't exactly justify the murder, but it gave it a *sense* of some sort of reasoning

Sometimes you straight up didn't feel bad about killing the target. Sometimes you could mutter "he had it coming" under your breath. Like you're not pretending to be morally good, but you can play a character that feels a certain amount of justified in their actions.

Skyrim, again, totally got rid of that. Like, one of your first targets is some poor beggar who's still mourning the death of his sister.

What the fuck, Skyrim?

And again, you get into zero trouble for just wiping down everyone around the target, and zero reward or recognition for being professional and precise. It takes all the fun out of the Skyrim assassin's guild.

Oblivion rules with these questlines were so much more fun, I still follow those rules in Skyrim, ten years later, despite the game actively discouraging it and certainly not bothering to reward you for it.

It's actually very sad how Skyrim is the legacy game. Lore-wise, immersion-wise, it's the worst in the series.