Skyrim - Thieves Guild and More

I'm posting this primarily for Twenty Sided's examination of the Thieves Guild quest line in Skyrim but I'll tack a couple of other things at the end.

Shamus Young has a critical three-part look at the writing and structure of the Thieves Guild quest line in Skyrim (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), finding it poorly designed and executed. I'd argue he misses the point on a couple of things but, overall, the first piece notes a number of obvious inconsistencies. I havent read the others (haven't finished the quest line) and obviously, massive spoilers apply: this pulls apart the quest line, so you need to have finished it:

The Thieves Guild is not the worst bit of writing in Skyrim. (I think I’d give that honor to the quest in Markarth where you have to deal with the Forsworn.) But I don’t want you to think I’m cherry-picking some halfhearted sidequest. This is a major part of Skyrim and a lot of environments, characters, and cutscenes are dedicated it This is a shame, because the Thieves Guild questline is a mess. It’s unnecessarily terrible, failing at multiple levels and attempting things that aren’t even needed. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning…

In other Skyrim news, Jay 'Rampant Coyote' Barnson recently started playing the game and, for any Italian readers, La Maschera Riposta let us know they have their review up.

Finally, IGN has an article on what a "Legendary" sample of developers are playing and Skyrim comes up an awful lot.