Board Thread:Off Topic/@comment-11276487-20130921180001/@comment-207.207.120.200-20140402090029

I like Dragonking's idea, to be quite honest.

In Dawnguard, you had the choice to join the Vampires or the Dawnguard, and even though you still ended killing the Big Bad in the end, both stories offered different playstyles and gave different insight to the same basic series of quests. I imagine that siding with Alduin would be like siding with the vampire lord dude who's name I don't recall off the top of my head--sure, you kill him at the end, but you could go about destroying the Blades and killing off the Greybeards and Parthunaax and whatnot.

Hell, Alduin could even turn you into a Dragon Priest at some point, a la the Undeath mod.

Open world games (in my humble opinion) like this ought to be about making choices-- and being shuffled along the main questline without any real options besides "do I want to kill Parthunaax or not?" is not really how condusive to a flexible gaming experience. The more choices you are forced to make, the more replay value the game has, and while Skyrim has a hell of a lot of replay value (I have ~600 hours clocked lol), the more the better.