..how Skyrim is more for "casuals" than Oblivion or Morrowind? The only way that it really got easier was the introduction of quest markers and fast travel - which came in /Oblivion./ TES, from what I've seen, was never extremely difficult. And Skyrim isn't much easier than Oblivion or Morrowind.

You want it easier??? Seriously? What's "Hard" about it?

..I never said I wanted it easier. I said it's /not/ easier.

They mean Skyrim's less complex then the old TES games...

1. Attributes were removed.
2. You can't make spells.
3. Similar quests.
There's a lot of other reasons too, but these are the ones that come to mind.

Its not about difficulty.

The excessive hand holding. It was there in Oblivion, but was just far more pronounced in Skyrim. Also, the selling out by making it appeal to the masses by introducing fancy kill-cams and what not.

because people are bitter, they thought tes was some niche thing, and now its lame cause the casuals are playing it. Granted skyrim did lose some complexity, many of the numbers were removed, classes, attributes, and that junk.

Although tes never did really do attributes very good, so i was fine with them being removed, just meant i didn't have to power level to raise my health and magicka.

..adding kill-cams makes it for casuals? When it's just an added feature that has no affect whatsoever on difficulty?

Attributes was removed. So? Perks were added. Which are /more/ complex then attributes. There's several different choices per skill, where as attributes were just a linear increase.

I don't see how the removal of spellmaking made things simpler, either. You didn't need to use spell making in Oblivion or Morrowind. In Oblivion you only could with a DLC or while in the mages guild, so...

Edit: Yeah, there is handholding, but come on. It was a paaaaaaain trying to find your way around in Morrowind, or at least it was for me. Mainly because the directions were so incredibly poor.

i agree with the first two points, but spell making was alot of fun in oblivion, and was probably the reason mages were so much fun to play as, plus there is something cool about testing your own spells out for magicka cost/effectiveness

I miss spell making as much as the next guy, but it didn't make the game "easier." In some ways, it made it harder, since you had to use premade spells and not something you developed yourself, which could be potentially muuuch more useful.

They call Skyrim "casual" because it's not quite as hard-core an RPG as Oblivion and Morrowind, and skyrim adds more of a fighting and combat element to appeal to a wider group.

I wasn't aware Morrowind was a hardcoe RPG.

Killcams are buggy and can give your enemy free hits while you're basically in sit mode...

Perks give you an alternate path for progression, and replace the automatic perks you gained as you leveled skills in Oblivion. Attributes and perks aren't the same, or as complex as each other. Even though you only "see" one value per attribute, they changed and affected many different things and gave you another value to role play with.

It makes it so you have a much more limited selection, and takes creativity away from the player.

It was for me too...the hand-holding actually isn't a big deal in my opinion.

As atronook said, it's not about difficulty. It's about it being less complex.

ok, lets get some things straight, there was little "hard" about Morrowind->Oblivion, you want Hard? play Daggerfall if the bugs don't kill you some random creature will.

Morrowind beat you with a spiked bat if you blindly ran into situations you didn't prepare for, a moment of silence for the thousands of players taking on a Skelly with an Iron dagger and being beaten into a Corner -Your weapon has no effect-

and you know what? they LEARNED

Oblivion and Skyrims supradigital Dwemer GPS system gave you directions to obscure artifacts in lost dungeons 4 levels down that have never been visted by man in over a Millenia, how is this not hand holding??

Everything in Oblivion/Skyrim is more or less universally resolved by swinging your weapon at it and killing it, as the majority of games today you are directed every step of the way and aren't allowed to use your brain, everything is shoved in your face as an advertisemant and at no point are you allowed to STUMBLE across something ;p

nothing wrong with a little direction, but when the game acts like it has 0 faith in your cognitive abilities, it gets easy.

It is a lot more shallow than its previous titles. There are a lot of fetch quests that make you kill and they have less ways to execute them. There is more hand holding in general and there is a huge emphasis on fighting. Attributes have been taken away and leveling up is very easy. Basically its nice graphics but little depth.

You can't solve 98 % of the puzzles in Skyrim or Oblivion by hacking it with a weapon....they didn't exactly hold your hand on those..stop complaining

The same things existed in Fallout 3 and F:NV. I expect player response to these alterations was positive in nature, so they inserted it into Skyrim. If something works for Bethesda, they're likelier than not to keep using it.

And besides, you can choose not to fast-travel, and disable the "hand-holding" features, if you want to be hardcoe about it.

At least those games are playable.Unlike Daggerfall.

Can I get rid of the magic compass?Besides,I never knew of these features.Except the fast-travel.

You can, but you're pretty much clueless about where to go because the NPC's don't really give you directions.

Casual gamers look for a quick thrill, and in Skyrim they went out of their way to do exactly that in more than one way, kill-cams are just the most obvious. There were very few spectacular moments in the previous TES games.

Thus, game was targeted towards casuals. I'm not saying they made a bad move, I mean, they want to make more money and that's fine. It's fairly obvious that they were going for a wider audience with Skyrim, and that's exactly what they did. But the people who defend them going "Oh, they're evolving..." I find annoying. No. They want more money. Pure and simple.

Edit:



Choose one.

Christ guys.

It's not that hard. Casual versus hardcoe gaming isn't about difficulty, it's about the way you play and the complexity that you are mentally capable and/or willing to accept from the premise of a game. I'm certain there's levels of Angry Birds or Peggle that are plenty difficult, and any hardcoe noscoper with every achievement in every majour FPS in the last ten years, or an hardcoe RP'er that beat all the main lines in Daggerfall the legitimate way without cheats or exploits on high difficulty and maxed out their character, or a chess grandmaster would have trouble just coming into because damn, simple things can be difficult without requiring dedication.

Likewise, games that have in the past been made to appeal to hardcoe gamers can sometimes be easily mastered by casuals, see Morrowind. All those skills, attributes, numbers everywhere, your weapons could miss... But as somebody said earlier, it wasn't hard, you learned from it. It was, however, complex; It didn't cater to casuals, it was just fairly accessible. It's a midcore game, and that is generally accepted by most "gamers" to be where a game should lie, not in the incredibly cryptic and tedious ways of, say, the Witcher series, or in the infantile and condescending lack of gameplay and overplayed humour of the Fable series. (Don't bloody get me started on pretty much any Bioware game ever. I don't even know where that falls, but it's bad.)

Casual games are games that
-Don't require much time to learn or master
-Don't have many variables on or depth in gameplay; They essentially play one way or a few ways, and you're only affected by what kind of bird you have in your slingshot or how much health, magic and stamina your character has (blatantly making my point cough cough)
-If they're in a series, cut out features and flanderise in-jokes as they progress
-Provide some form of hand-holding throughout the game, so if they don't want to (or even if they do), no player has to exert their minds; This manifests in hints systems, onscreen "walk here. Point here. Hold the shoot button for x seconds," and explicit directions to any goal through other means
-Have a "safe" world in which, unless you just really [censored] up and run out of ammo in an arcade style game or you die or something, you cannot make the game "over" or lose or even close paths to yourself, even if you try. Death is usually penalised by returning to the last save in games where applicable.
-Rather than rewarding the player by changing the dynamic of gameplay and increasing the level of opponents you can face or difficulty of levels you can complete, they reward the player with frequent (albeit admittedly highly rewarding the first several times) "flavour screens" wherein you get things like fireworks, cinematic kills, "badass" cutscenes and so forth; For an even more blatant example of this faux pas (in a "serious" game it is a faux pas, though it fits the mood of some games), look to the currently popular Lollipop Chainsaw, which has giant starbursts combined with its cinematic killcams that pretty much screams "BONUS YOU'RE GREAT WOW HOW DID YOU GET SO GOOD YOU TOTALLY BEAT THE FIRST HALF OF LEVEL ONE WE'RE PROUD OF YOU SPORT" across the screen.
-Reward the player for repeating parts rather than for increasing in actual skill; die to a boss? Go grind then come back. Hit the ceiling in Tetris? Get better at Tetris you git.

You can see that Skyrim doesn't meet (or fully meet) all of these points, but it certainly meets enough that if there weren't a few points of difficulty, if the perk system didn't add a little depth to your character and if the world wasn't so immense, I'd actually write it off as the first game in the series to be a casual game. A sixty dollar casual game of the year, how about that?

On another note, not suggesting it'll ever get THAT bad, but Skyrim is about as "casual" as the first Fable game, in all regards except the lack of railroading (the world was not fully explorable in Fable). We're kind of on a slippery slope as far as quality goes, and the blatant draws included to the Fable and similar communities don't do much to encourage faith.

I have never been attacked while in a kill-cam. Ever. For the hundreds of hours I have, whether I was using fists, bows, swords or magic. Never ever, never ever. And buggy? Just because something is buggy doesn't make it a useless feature. I'm sure there were bugs in the other games. Does that make it a "casual" game?

And just because there is a limited option on how to kill, that doesn't mean YOU can't be creative. Now you are asking for hand-holding with creativity. I don't know about you, but I can sure as hell kill my enemies without ever lifting a weapon or using magic. Nor am I leading them into traps. Hell, you can easily get some objectives without killing at all. Sure there is a focus on killing, but then again, are there any games out on the market now where there is no killing? Even in the damn Lego games you "kill" people. I'm not sure about you, but I feel there are many ways to approach any situation. Maybe I just think differently.


You can TURN OFF the quest marker. Just don't have the quest selected. And like I mentioned before, my current character has never lifted a weapon until 60 hours in. And even then I only use it on animals. In fact, I prefer fists anyway. So really, you just aren't thinking very carefully. If you anolyze your situation, you can overcome it with just about any tactic. There may be only one path in a dungeon, but they are many ways to take that path. I've played at least 10 different styles and don't think I've approached the same cave the same way twice.


Yes, just don't select the quest in your journal.


I don't understand this whole "Casual hand-holding" problem. So you have a quest marker? Big freaking deal. Don't use it. So there is a tutorial in the beggining of the game? A lot of people have never played TES and this is a good way to introduce the game. It sure as hell beats the tutorials in other games. There is nothing hand-holding or casual about these features. You are just pissed off that you precious RPG has become modernized. And what the hell is wrong with kill-cams? I mean really, now you are just nit-picking. It is a additive feature. It takes nothing away from the game.

I really don't understand the contention for this game. It has a few features for an audience that doesn't want to have to wander the entire area of Skyrim looking for a simple dungeon. I mean really. Get off your high horse and stop using the journal markers.

For example, the quest "The Black Star" opens with the journal entry:
Aranea, a priestess of Azura, says I am destined to find "an elven man, who can turn the brightest star as black as night." She believes he is in Winterhold.

Explain to me why you would need to keep your journal markers on. Because, I know you don't need them on and can follow these directions. Most quests are like this. Sure there are some, like the Companion's quests, that don't do this. But if you are worried about breaking immersion, it is fairly easy to roleplay a quest marker into this. I mean, you would think the companions would be able to mark on you map where Ysgramor's tomb is. I mean, they would know, right?

So, I don't see the problem. The only problem I see is a true lack of creativity. The game may physically prevent you from doing things, but mentally, you can get around them. It isn't hard.

And sorry if I came off rude, I didn't mean it. I'm just a bit fed-off with the whole talking down about Skyrim when it is a really good game. And this is coming from a PS3 player who seems to get the short end of the stick in terms of support. But that is another day.

I'm just telling you why people don't like kill cams. I never agreed kill cams made the game casual, I just don't think they fit inasmuch as say in a turn based combat game like Dragon Age. And the werewolf maul killcam-I had 2 free hits taken on me while it was playing, and I've been interrupted by bandit killcams just before my last attack hits(killcams can trigger before an attack even hits and interrupts attacks).

I'm asking for more options to nurture creativity in the game. You can be creative to an extent in a game, but having that creativity be nurtured, fed, and encouraged by the mechanisms in games never hurt. More options are almost always better.
That is a scary thought.

They did take out a lot of major things like attributes, and a lot of quest are just going to dungeons and doing some simple request. But it doesn't make it "casual" or whatever it is you're calling it. Though Skyrim is less complex than previous TES games.