Bethesda's games are all about choices and the freedom to do whatever you please whenever you please. In Skyrim, you play a Dragonborn whose legendary powers and prophesied destiny is sure to make your choices resound through the ages and shape the very world around you.
Well, in theory at least. For the majority of the time, it turns out your choices are pretty darn pointless — regardless of who you support, what you decide, and where you go. The story still plays out almost exactly the same way with very few differences. A lot of your decisions end up not influencing anything or anyone, despite how much they were built up, in the end, you'll wind up changing nothing with barely a reward to show for it.
Sometimes this is because the outcome is the same no matter what you do, other times it's slightly different, but still, amounts to the exact same ending. Minor changes to dialogue hardly feel worthwhile.
Either way, the result is that your investment in the story isn't satisfyingly rewarded, whether it's because you didn't see a mechanical change or because it's very clear that all you did was trade one NPC for the other. Collected below are the 20 most pointless decisions you'll have to make throughout your adventure of saving Skyrim.
20 On The Run
After Skyrim's charged opening involving a Dragon inadvertently saving you from being executed (and ultimately helping you defeat it), you'll find yourself seeking to escape the burning city. Suddenly, you find yourself stopped at a fork with two divergent paths and two potential allies calling to you.
On the one side is Hadvar one of the Imperial soldiers who were about to have you executed not five minutes ago. On the other is Ralof, a fellow prisoner who is part of the Stormcloak Rebellion.
You can freely pick either though as the exact same outcome happens, you escape the town and the person you went with asks you to come meet them elsewhere and requests you join their faction.
19 Give Us The Woman
You might come across a group of foreign warriors berating random women as they allegedly search for a Redguard women. If you manage to track down the woman in question, she'll explain her side of the story and claim innocence. She will also ask you to kill the man in charge of the warriors because they're assassins sent to kill her.
If you speak to the leader of the warriors, he claims she's betrayed their country and will be taken alive to be punished back in their homeland.
There's no real way to find out which party is telling the truth but in the end, it doesn't matter at all as the reward is pretty much exactly the same but you also never run into any of the NPC's involved ever again and nobody brings it up.
18 Hairy Ears
You're going to notice most of the Faction quest lines are on this list. They are some of the worst offenders in the "what was the point of all this again" category.
The Companions quest line is one of the most baffling. In my opinion, deciding to complete their quest line is an utterly pointless chore. To be fair, it does yield some cool werewolf stuff, but you're not really given any other option apart from "Hey, become a Werewolf. Why? Cause all the cool kids are doing it that's why." And, come on, you can't continue it until you give into the peer pressure.... Moreover, a few hours later, you're told that the cool kids all regret being werewolves and want you to fix it for them, but not you, they don't want you to be cured.
17 Hey, Look Over Here!
Sometimes you can't complete a quest without some outside help. Getting to choose which ally to help you can take a lot of time as you consider the pros and cons and each of the available options.
Making the correct choice could mean extra time to complete your objective, better rewards, or the plan being set off without a hitch, while a wrong choice could spell disaster and even result in someone's death or the mission being a failure.
In the case of the quest Diplomatic Immunity, it doesn't matter who you pick for the fancy ball, since any one of your companions will get tasked with creating a distraction. Hell, most of the people you choose even resort to the same tactic.
16 Giant Problem
The Orcs of the Largashbur Tribe have been having problems with the local giants for the last few years and now their leader Chief Yamarz has become weak and cursed allowing them to press the advantage.
They beseech you to get them ingredients so they can perform a ritual to a Daedra to remove the curse. Upon doing so, the Daedra says that they aren't going to remove the curse unless Yamarz brings them the weapon the leader of the giants uses.
He's none too happy about this but grudgingly agrees to do it, forcing you to help him out along the way he decides he doesn't wanna fight the Giant leader after all and tries to bribe you to do it for him.
Refuse the bribe, and he runs at the Giant and dies. Accept it, and he decides to try to kill you to hide his cowardice and....dies.
15 Till Death Do Us Part
Marriage is a beautiful thing that hopefully ensures many fond interactions, memories, and occurrences with a unique individual that you've pledged to spend your life with. Except for in Skyrim where it amounts to 100 septims and a home cooked meal every 24 hours... and literally nothing else.
Male or female doesn't matter, same as to which NPC you decide you want to knock boots with the dialogue is pretty much all the same: they all provide you with the above money and food.
You can pick whether you'd like to move in with them or you can have your blushing bride stay at your homestead with you, not that it matters at all either.
14 Does It Come With Tenure
I've never played a mage in any Elder Scrolls game. Heck, I never play a mage in any sorta fantasy game. Gimme a good sword and shield, or a bow and some shadows to skulk in and I'm set.
Which is why I was extremely confused when the College of Winterhold decided I was a great candidate to not only join them, but become their Arch-Mage despite my only basic knowledge of magic and my lack of patience for books.
After running a few errands for them and then killing the former Arch-Mage because he was going to destroy the whole world, I wound up accepting the title they offered me along with all the perks of being a magic-less Arch-Mage. Which were none. Literally, nothing extra was gained by me choosing to become the Arch-Mage apart from a sorta swanky room.
13 Villainous Mind
It's utterly pointless to make any sort of moral choice in Skyrim as there are absolutely no consequences in the game. Nobody looks at you any differently or bothers to mention that time you decided to cannibalize a priest. The only crimes you actually end up having to pay most of the time for are random crimes you commit outside of quests normally.
Unlike other games in its genre that offer you choices like Fable, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, or Fallout, nothing changes when you do crazy evil junk and nobody responds to it. Even your companions don't really care what you do, and just gormlessly follow you around carrying your crap for you. Oh, and dying at the slightest glance from an enemy bandit.
12 Lamb To The Slaughter
Even when you're given a choice between who must live and who must die, Skyrim manages to make it amount to nothing but hot air. Happening on a certain book will start a quest line for you searching for the cultists of Boethiah who is a Daedric Prince.
Upon finding them, you can choose to murder these creepy cultists wholesale, or walk up and have a chat. Either way, you'll wind up being told (by either a Priestess or Boethiah herself) that you better bring some poor helpless sap here so we can sacrifice them or else!
If you chose not to do this, and just ignore the quest in your log, they never make good on their threat.
If you do pick one of your faithful companions to slaughter, it doesn't matter since about five minutes later Boethiah get's bored and picks someone elses corpse to hang out in.
11 Assassinating The Assassins
The Dark Brotherhood persists through most Elder Scrolls games — and their presence in Skyrim is tenuous at best. Ultimately, there are barely any members left by the time you choose to destroy them or join them. Or you could just leave them alone it honestly has no noticeable impact on the world or the larger story at all.
If you do want to hold their fate in your hands, you need to get to murdering some find folks in Skyrim. Alternatively, you can attack the Brotherhood member and start the quest to destroy them all. However, doing either doesn't really seem to impact the world at all. Like all previous Elder Scrolls games, the Brotherhoods' fate will likely remain ambiguous in further titles.
10 No Limitations
My first character in Skyrim ended up being the leader of the Dark Brotherhood, the Thieves Guildmaster, the Harbinger of the Companions, the Arch-Mage of Winterhold College (with no magical talents at all), The Dragonborn, and the Thane of every hold in Skyrim.
Quite a bit of a list there with a lot of conflicting factions that I'm now essentially in charge of. Certainly, some sort of conflict of interest must be going on here. How the heck did I even find the time to lead all these groups?! Does anything get done without me around?
They may as well name me Emporer.
Either way picking to join just one or all of the factions in the game literally impacts nothing, nobody ever really comments on you being so good at multitasking nor forces you to pick where your loyalties lie.
9 Love Triangle
One of the first few quests you'll likely do involves two men arguing over a woman and a forged letter penned by his rival. You'll be asked to deliver the letter to the woman at the heart of all this drama in order to cause her to start avoiding the victim of the forgery.
Both men try this tactic — it just depends on who you speak to first. You can even rat out the jerk trying to forge the letter to her. Either way, whatever you do blackens the reputation of one of the men who then... don't seem to care all that much.
Throw Faendal under the bus and he'll still train you in archery (while grumbling about it the whole time) and even weirder he still hangs out with the girl.
8 Who You Gonna Call
Your favourite follower is interchangeable with at least five other people. While they do have different sets of skills they offer almost nothing to the plot, and it doesn't matter who you bring where aside from occasional useless filler dialogue that repeats over and over again there's almost no change.
In fact, none of them particularly care about what you do either, the biggest example of this is Mjoll, a self-proclaimed vigilante in Riften who'll stop at nothing to see the Thieves Guild destroyed and the corruption rooted out of the city.
But she'll follow you right down into the seedy underbelly and watch silently as you perform tasks and rebuild the Guild, hell she'll even help you quietly as you work your way up to being the Thieves Guildmaster.
7 Skyrim Is For The Nords... And Whatever You Are
The Stormcloaks are fighting for the freedom of their nation against the Imperial rule and Aldemari oppression. They're extremely exclusive comprising almost completely of Nords and suspicious of all other races. Occasionally they're downright racist too, especially of the Altmer which is why they only accept Nord recruits.
Apart from you, of course, if you want to join the Stormcloaks (or really do anything in Skyrim) your race doesn't matter. Even to the people who are supposed to hate your pointy ears accept you into their ranks without even mentioning it.
Heck, Ulfric himself will make you a pivotal part of his plans even if you're an Altmer with absolutely no hesitation or second thought about the fact that you are literally the race he's trying to kick out of Skyrim.
6 Beauty Is Only Helmet Deep
Character customization is a huge part of any RPG worth its salt. Honestly, it be the deciding factor when it comes to what game I'm going to sink time into next.
However, spending a few hours playing around with the sliders in Skyrim to make certain your character looks exactly like Nicholas Cage winds up being a colossal waste of time. Let's be real: Skyrim is a game meant to be played in the first person.
Yes, you totally play the game in the third person (why though?), but you're still going to be treated to the back of your head for a good 90% of the game. If on the off chance you managed to get a glimpse of your front side, you're likely going to be treated to a great view of the full frontal helmet you're wearing.
5 It Feeds The Rich And It Buries The Poor
The civil war plotline had such potential that was absolutely squandered since no matter which side you pick, you lose. Both leaders are jerks a lot of the time, however, they both still have good points so it can make you think really long and hard on which side you want to support.
Don't fret though! Either way, your choice is pointless. Once everything is said and done, the only thing it changes is adding some permanent damage to a single city, the uniforms of the guards, and a few of the Jarls swap who's in charge. Again, mechanically, it changes nothing — they're still willing to do business with you and give out the same quests. Besides no matter which side wins the Thalmor get what they wanted.
4 Get Your Head Together
Poor Roggvir, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He did his job (though there is debate over this) and wound up on the chopping block for it.
When you wander into Solitude for the first time, you'll be treated to the sight of a man about to be executed for opening the gate and letting Ulfric leave after he dueled Torygg if you had sided with the Stormcloaks you might be tempted to stage a daring rescue operation in order to free Roggvir.
If you attack the guards (and distract them long enough so that none of them can make it to the Nord), he'll run off and away to freedom!
Except the game still considers him dead, and all the NPC's refer to his execution as a shame. No matter what you do the game registers poor Roggvir as dead.
3 Cutthroat Politics
Once you've fought your way through the heart of the city held by the opposite faction then you chose in the civil war, you and your fearless leaders will engage in a short battle with the enemy before they've been beaten down enough to surrender.
After a tense conversation, your leader will decide their rival must die and that you should be the one to do it. You can choose to refuse this honour of murdering a beaten and broken man if you want but it doesn't really matter because a moment later your leader will do it for you.
Regardless of whether you did the killing blow or not, you can then even request that your leader not mention your involvement, both sets of choices change nothing though, X leader still dies and the war is over.
2 Murder Spree
It happens, you're feeling a little bored or stressed out so you decide to load a save in Skyrim and just murder a button of innocent civilians before loading back to the save before doing so.
But let's say an accident happens and whoops you've now slaughtered most of Markarth with no way of going back to your previous save, does anything really change?
Not really. A few quests might become incompletable but any critical NPC's are immortal, sure you'll now see different people tending shops and stalls but in the grand scheme of things the only real consequence is a bounty on your head and maybe some jail time if you mess up and leave a witness.
1 Fortnite
So you've fought hard for the faction you chose, you've captured holds, forts, and the war looks like it's going to end soon. And then you take a break from the civil war in order to do some of the main story's quests, only to wind up at Season Unending where you finally sit down both the leaders of the Imperials and Stormcloaks to chat about their impending doom.
As it turns out, all your previous work was pointless. During this peace talk —where you're trying to negotiate a temporary truce— you can just decide who gets what. All this without any bloodshed. Sigh. When will people learn!