What kind of alternate starts would work for skyrim?

[6Domino6]

Personally I think that any start would work as long as they had a way to DELAY Helgen until you actually arrived, but that would come with the issue of NPCs everywhere possibly making references to events that haven't yet happened...modifying them to delay that talk would take a while unless they actually have a "if MQ=" requirement for their speech but I doubt Bethesda thought ahead that far...

 

I'd even take to being the only survivor of a bandit attack, a farmer's son/daughter who starts off doing menial tasks at the farm and perhaps loses their family while they are off completing the quest to kill the wolves eating the livestock, be "imprisoned" as a stormcloak officer, or perhaps start barely alive after being attacked by stormcloak fanatics (we know they are out there!)

 

But I love the gory stuff.

[Flamegrilledsam]

The main problem I've had with the vanilla Skyrim opening is that it gives the player no reason to side with the Empire/Thalmor. To join their army or help them in any way.

 

I feel that you can change the entire start of the game with a few (probably not so) simple dialogue changes...

 

As soon as you finish character creation, Hadvar asks Rikke what to do with you, you're "not on the list." At this point, Rikke makes the decision to kill you anyway.... However, If she were to say "Hmmm... Leave him/her over there, we'll deal with him/her later." (or similar) and you get sent to stand behind where they were standing or something, to watch as the Stormcloaks get executed, there would be a reason to start thinking "Hey, well these guys aint so bad after all."

 

From there, everything pretty much plays out the same as before. Dragon attacks, Helgen destroyed, you decide whether to follow Radolf or Hadvar into the keep and so on.

 

There'd be some options that need taking out, like when you talk to Balgruuf there's an option saying something like "Yes, I had a great view as the empire was about to chop my head off."

 

So yeah, there's my alternate start idea.