If you remember this outfit/mug combination from my Shadowheart video... no you don't <.<

"Ah, okay, this appears to be this game's version of the Fighter's Guild, eager to be a part of this."

"Turn into a werewolf or you're kicked out."

What the hell Todd.

I'd like to add: Skyrim has werewolves occasionally roaming around that you be attacked by.
You can't contract lycanthropy from them, though. That would get in the way of the cinematic experience of having waifu Aela give you her werewolf blood.
That, and adding a different line of dialogue if you already happen to be a werewolf would make the game dangerously close to being a good RPG.

"He wears that armor, he dies"

Meanwhile Farkus is wearing regular steel armor. Lol

I was spoiled on the werewolf reveal because I am Czech and a character being named Kodlak is basically the Czech equivalent of him being named Rewolf or Werewo.

theres a version of Skyrim that exists in my head thats much more interesting, birthed from a decade of lore speculation and theory crafting in online communities that when i reconnect with the literal text of skyrim im always astounded how shallow and incurious it all is.

I always think about how originally the "werewolf form" was just going to be a model swap to give the player a wolf head and you attack with a "special" wolf claw weapon and that was it. The guys in charge including Todd said "that's good enough lets ship it", and it took a dev within the team basically creating the whole werewolf system we have now on his own as a proof of concept to change their minds. Without that devs ambition to make something better, and freedom to work on it without having to check in with Todd every step of the way, werewolves in skyrim would have been embarrassingly bad. There are a ton of things like this in skyrim, where the game was saved from being a laughing stock by devs who fought to make the game better, after the leadership had already deiced it was "good enough". Now all the devs who did this are gone, or they are being stifled by having to get the ok from Todd for every decision they make. They can't make good games anymore bc the only thing keeping the company even somewhat decent quality were the devs, and they can no longer save Bethesda games from their incompetent leadership

they hit a once-in-a-lifetime banger with Morrowind and with each sequel asked "But what if we made it more boring?"

"If you're paying attention" hit me hard.  I just started playing Skyrim so I wander into a farm, pick some veggies, then turn around and I'm getting yelled at for not joining in a fight I didn't even see happening.

skyrims writing is full of cool ideas not nearly fleshed out enough to be actually good. a group of fighters which is deeply embedded in the history and culture of an entire region, but has the secret of being werewolves only known to an inner circle and a group that actively hunts them, is a cool concept. it couldve been awesome if, after you find out the companions are werewolves, you could reject it and join the silver hand, and they could be an actually fleshed out faction. maybe their leader is an ex-companion, maybe they tried to expose the companions for being werewolves but nobody believed them because the companions are too important to the people of skyrim. theres so much more depth that couldve been added, just like every guild, but as they say, skyrim is as wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle.

I made a new character for each guild in my Skyrim playthrough. I took a lot of time making my first Argonian archer character for thr bard's questline I'd never done before. I was having a lot of fun with her. Then the Bard's questline was over in just an hour. Jesus christ.

What always bothered me about the first werewolf transformation is that it places you in the city by default- despite the fact that in that same room you drank beast blood in there's a way directly out of the city. The companions literally could throw you outside the city, but instead chose to toss you into Whiterun for rampaging.

The problem with all the major questlines in Skyrim is that they look good in bullet points, but don't have decent writing to expand on it. Another great example is the main questline when it comes to Paarthurnax. Delphine's demand makes sense, but it is handled very poorly in the game.

I had never realized how souless the "Somehow they managed to kill Skjor." line feels. It's some "Somehow, Palpetine has returned" level writing.

"What went wrong?"

God, where do I start?

How, by Azura, am I sitting here being impressed by ESO writing next to Skyrim, this is a new experience to me

I just wish they had split off the werewolf stuff into its own storyline, or if it wasn’t ready, just save it for Dawnguard.

There’s a really cool story buried there about returning the Companions to a status of glory. There’s just not enough space with the wolves.

i remember this old theory i read about the silver hand when i was younger. it was that they were secretly former members of the companions who hated the new werewolf leadership and felt that it was dishonouring ysgramor. i always thought that was super cool, and while that’s not really the direction your reimagining went with, the proposed rewriting reminded me of that anyways.

The silver hand definitely needed more development. How cool would it have been for them to be a branch of the Vigilant of Stendar who are considered “nearly as feral as the beasts they hunt” by other Vigilants. Silvered weapons, werewolf parts on their armor as trophies. Perhaps bankrolled by the Silverbloods as suggested by @Ampathetic . They could have been a genuinely cool and complicated faction.

IIRC there was a cut plotline where the Silver Hand were revealed to be an exiled branch of the Companions who left in disgust after finding out about the deal with Hircine all those decades ago, which is why they also hunt fragments of Wuuthrad and carry various books relating to Companion history. They think of themselves as the true heirs to Ysgramor's legacy, while those in Jorrvaskr are blasphemous pretenders