Comparing The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Oblivion's Thieves Guild
Sean Clark analyzes the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim's Thieves Guild questline.
As I have been playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, I desired to tackle the game’s Thieves Guild questline in pursuit of the unbreakable Skeleton Key (I still suck at lockpicking) early on. I completed the questline, and I couldn’t help but think of how vastly different it is from the Thieves Guild questline in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Spoiler warning for both Oblivion and Skyrim ahead as I analyze the differences and decide which of the two is better.
Before I start comparing specifics, the best place to start is an overview of the plot. In Skyrim, you meet Brynjolf in Riften as he is trying to frame a merchant, Brand-Shei, in the marketplace. Regardless if they succeed or not, they fight your way to their hideout in the Ratway (Riften’s sewers). After you intimidate citizens for money and help out the influential and greedy Maven Black-Briar, Dragonborn become a member and are immediately tasked with breaking into an estate to screw over Maven’s competition.
After more missions, the Dragonborn are tasked with tracking down Karliah, who allegedly killed the former guildmaster Gallus Desidenius, with the help of the guildmaster Mercer Frey. In typical Skyrim fashion, it is revealed that Mercer was actually the murderer and tries to dispose of you, but we were saved by Karliah, who was actually Gallus’ lover. Later, the guild discovers that Mercer stole the Skeleton Key from the Daedric Prince Nocturnal, wiped out the guild treasury and is planning on stealing the Eye of the Falmer.
Karliah, Brynjolf and the Dragonborn become Nightingales, servants of Nocturnal before the trio track down Mercer in a dwemer ruin and kill him, taking the eye for themselves. The questline ends with the player returning the Skeleton Key to Nocturnal, doing odd jobs to bring in cash flow and becoming the Guildmaster.
Oblivion’s is much different. The player, or Hero of Kvatch, meets Armand Christophe in the Imperial City Waterfront District at midnight after getting arrested and released from jail, tasks them and two other recruits with stealing a journal as an initiation quest. After succeeding, the Hero does various quests to eliminate the guards’ presence in the poor Waterfront District, stealing items from the rich and getting artifacts from heavily guarded tombs. In between missions, they must fence (selling stolen goods) a certain amount up to 1,000 gold to unlock the missions.
Eventually, the Hero meets the Guildmaster, the Gray Fox. After stealing several artifacts for him, he unveils to the Hero a grand plan: for 11 years he has put in place the ultimate heist. The goal is to steal the Elder Scroll from the Imperial Palace. Once you succeed, the Gray Fox tasks you with delivering a ring to the Countess of Anvil. When we give the ring to her, the Gray Fox reveals himself to be the Count of Anvil who disappeared a decade ago when he inherited the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal. In front of the Hero, he renounces his old life to reunite with his wife, giving them the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal and making them the new Guildmaster. He accomplished this by using the Elder Scroll to break Nocturnal’s curse; whoever uses the Gray Cowl will be forgotten in history.
To begin the comparison, the guild in Oblivion actually resembles a Thieves Guild. With the fencing system, it feels like a fluid system where stealing is narratively impactful and you make a lot of contacts while doing so throughout Cyrodiil. On top of this, to be qualified to do high-profile heists, you have to bring money into the guild and show you can actually steal high-profile items, meaning you have to be good at lockpicking and sneaking.
In Skyrim, you’re less of a thief and more of a muscleman. You intimidate, bully and frame people while engaging in the typical Skyrim dungeon-crawling. Yes, dungeon-crawling happens in the later Oblivion quests, but it forces you to be good at lockpicking to advance in those dungeons (an essential aspect of thieving). I understand that you are trying to rebuild the Skyrim Thieves Guild, but there is little thieving involved in the questline. This is particularly jarring when playing Oblivion’s as everything revolves around thieving.
Also, a major difference is the purpose and thieves’ code of the guilds. In Skyrim, the Thieves Guild answers to the universally hated Maven Black-Briar and makes sure those associated with them keep in line. Meanwhile, Cyrodiil’s has a strict honor code: no killing, no stealing from other members and always protect the poor. I love that beggars are the ones who give you vital information at the beginning of missions for a small fee, giving them more of a use than Skyrim ever did. You can imagine which guild I had more emotional investment in.
The final heists were a mega difference in quality and I cannot stress enough how Skyrim’s dropped the ball. In Skyrim, you do a typical dwemer ruin dungeon crawl and stop Mercer from completing his “heist” and take it for yourselves anyway. On top of this, when the player is forced to serve Nocturnal for eternity (which is useless because we are literally the Dragonborn, whose gift was bestowed upon us by Akatosh), there is literally nothing that Nocturnal gives us that aides in stopping Mercer. In fact, the Dragonborn has to return the Skeleton Key that Mercer stole for no apparent reason other than it is our duty as a Nightingale (there is no consequence for keeping it).
On the other hand, stealing the Elder Scroll from the Imperial Palace is one of the most incredible and challenging missions I have ever played. The Hero has to use artifacts they stole in previous missions and intel the Gray Fox has collected to sneak in using a secret passage underneath the city. I had enormous frustrations with the challenging enemies in the tunnels and all the lockpicking needed to progress (I came in with over a hundred lockpicks). However, getting the Scroll after posing as a reader in front of blind moth priests was exhilarating. After escaping down a chimney, I was able to escape the city, pay off my bounty and become the guildmaster. The challenge of this quest makes that title feel more earned than Skyrim. Ultimately, the ending feels satisfying, unlike Skyrim where I feel like not finishing the questline is the better route so I don’t have to ever break and buy lockpicks again.
Alas, there is one major issue that prevents Oblivion’s from being perfection. Notice I have not mentioned the Skeleton Key from that game yet. Well, the Skeleton Key actually has nothing to go with the Thieves Guild and you get it from retrieving the Eye of Nocturnal from a troll cave and returning it to Nocturnal’s shrine. It is a stupidly easy quest to achieve (opens once you reach level 10), meaning that if you get the Skeleton Key before tackling the Thieves Guild, all the aforementioned quests aside from the final one become significantly easier. I was very frustrated upon realizing this as I thought you would get the Skeleton Key as the reward for stealing the scroll.
Ultimately, you get the Gray Cowl and a free house as a reward, but everything I did felt less significant (I realize I could have looked it up but I didn’t want to be spoiled). Luckily, the fencing system, the honor code, the final mission and the actual emphasis on thieving still make Oblivion’s Thieves Guild questline significantly better than Skyrim’s.