Oh, Matt. You sent me to Kotaku. I thought we all had an agreement here.

But the writer of that article failed to mention one thing and failed to understand another. What he didn't mention is that you can turn off any quests you want, and you won't see their arrow on the map or on your compass. (Like you mention, you don't cancel quests because the game leaves it open for you to pursue later).

What he didn't understand is that Skyrim (even more than earlier Elder Scrolls games) overturns the typical videogame model of dividing its content up into linear quests and doling them out in the form of objectives. It seems like that's what it's doing, but that'll quickly become overwhelming. And if you're arrogant as the writer, you'll call it a failing of the game.

But the quest list in Skyrim is more like TiVo's list of recorded programs — it's not a list of what you have to watch, but what you can watch. Like I said, I've spent over 150 hours in the game, and that's spread over three characters of different "builds" and alignments. And there are still big chunks of content that I haven't seen. There's an entire city's worth of quests I've never started, and a huge dungeon that I keep hearing about but have never visited. Again, it's all entirely opt-in; the quest log just gives you a way to organize it.

I can understand starting a quest and then expecting to get branching points down the line where I could role play as a good guy, bad guy, or somewhere in between. And I was confused the first couple of times I made that assumption and then was forced down one path or the other. I eventually realized that the option isn't take the quest and make "good" choices or "bad" choices, the option is to take the quest or ignore it completely. Most games can't do that, because they have to force you to see the finite amount of content they created. Skyrim has so much content that it's virtually infinite.

And as far as the sword & sorcery angle: I'd say Skyrim is a lot more like Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings, at least from the little I'm aware of Game of Thrones. There's plenty of wizards and elves and dragons and magic(ka), but the characters treat it as pretty commonplace and aren't all that reverent or mystified by it.