I have been playing like crazy for the past few days, and I can say without a doubt, this is one of the best games of the last few years. Especially the visuals and art style are by far my favourite realization of the Elderscrolls universe, the combat system is satisfying both with weapons and spells, and the new fourth era setting brought some interesting changes to the world setting that make it more interesting. There are a few things however that could do with some major improvement.


My first big criticism is that the PC port of the menues is just bad. Not only is it awkward to control, it's also full of bugs.

The skills menu is just really difficult to navigate, getting to the perk you want is just weird. You try to go over to a perk and end up in a whole different skill tree all the time, if you navigate with the mouse you have to use the wheel to zoom back out. The dialogue and inventory screens are also completely buggy, like nobody even bothered to test them.

-When you actually click the Exit options in the dialogue screen you will exit out of the dialogue, but the NPC will also spout the response line to the last dialogue option at you because it thinks you clicked it. The only way to leave dialogue without causing this is to hit tab.
-When you remap the shout button to somewhere other than Z which is an awkward button to hit all the menus will show the favorite button as the new button you mapped to, but you still have to hit Z to acctually favourite something.
-When you read a book and exit back out to the inventory, then try to read another one the mouse controls sometimes go unresponsive and only come back after randomly clicking around for a while.
-Assigning hotkeys is convoluted and not explained anywhere.
-Your status effects are burried so deep in menues it's just a pain. You won't know that you're sick until a random passerby mentions it because you have to go into the magic menu and then to a sub menu thereof to see if anything is affecting you.
-In the crafting menu when you craft an item the menu completely resets, if you want to craft another one you have to select it again before you can do so.

That's not all the things that are bugged/broken about it either, just what comes to me from the top of my head right now. Seriously, what compells companies to give a giant middle finger to their PC audience like we're second rate gamers? This is just plain disappointing. In a game that obviously took thousands of manhours to make nobody could be bothered to create a semblance of good mouse controls for the menu? Oblivion did a MUCH better job and that was also co developped. The menus on PC are unworthy of a great game like this.



The other big criticism I have of this game, and this is a bit more abstract.

The storytelling is just not really up to par with other RPGs anymore. There are way too many instances where I feel like I'm being railroaded down a certain path of action with no alternatives, like the quest writers simply didn't care to anticipate that different players have different reactions to something. For example, the only way to deal with a quest that asks things of you that your character simply wouldn't do is to just not do the quest. You can't remove it from the questlog though, so now you're just stuck with it on the log for all eternity. I'll give a few examples:

Mild spoilers ahead, highlight to read!

You will at some point in time randomly hear about a boy who is performing the ritual of the night mother. This is now in your quest log, it won't go away. You can seek him out, and when you find him he's performing the ritual waiting for the Dark Brotherhood to appear. If you speak to him the game now assumes the fates have brought you to this place to become the assasin. It doesn't give you an option to back out of the quest, it doesn't give you an option to try and set the boy on a differnt path, it doesn't give you an option to accept the quest but proceede to deal with the target differently... It simply assumes you overhead a conversation about a nightmother ritual so now you will always have the dark brotherhood quest line on your journal. The only way to not answer the call is to simply ignore the quest. You can't resolve it in any way that fits with a character who isn't an assassin.

At some point in time you will run into a random Argonian who suggests you put out the fire in a lighthouse to make a ship run aground so that he and his buddies can steal the cargo. The game now plops this in your quest log as a main quest, not even in the Misc section, and it just stays there, even if you think it's an idiotic idea. Can you tell the guard? Nope. Can you prevent his gang from wrecking ships? Nope. In fact, his gang does nothing at all until you put the light out, so once again you're stuck with another quest on the log that you can only resolve by doing exactly what it asks of you, you have no choice at all in the matter.

In the first town there is this love triangle with two guys wanting the same girl. You talk to one of them and he gives you a letter to deliver in the name of the other suitor. If you think that's kind of underhanded and warn the other guy he gets angry, composes a fake letter himself and asks you to deliver that. The game now not only removes the dialogue option with their love interest that lets you deliver the first letter, it also doesn't give you one to deliver both letters and save the poor girl from being courted by those two jerks. Why?


Another factor in the game is that a lot of NPC offer hardly any dialogue options at all, when they should offer a lot of them. For example, the leader of the Stormcloaks. Eventually your travels will take you to Windhelm, whether or not you have picked a faction in the game, and you can walk into the palace. He's right there and you can just go up and talk to him - but you only get one single strand of dialogue to follow. The only thing you can say to him at all is that you want to join his cause. You can't ask him what his cause is, you can't disagree with him, you can't ask him about how he knows the Thu'un, you can't tell him that you think the dragons are more important than the imperials right now ... The game simply doesn't offer you any dialoge options that you'd think would be interesting lines of conversation with a powerful character like that. The same is true for the leaders of the legion, and a lot of other characters. Just like the quests it maneuvers you in the same situation where the only way to diverge from the singlular path of conversation a character offers is to simply leave.


Lastly, I find that your choice of race does absolutely nothing in the context of the game. I play an Altmer and I was kind of expecting a little more out of it. The Thalmore will talk down to you and accuse you of Talos worship, the Stormcloaks will let you join their ranks without even the hint of a question of your loyalties... The game builds this whole sense of racial issues in a really great way, but fails to make any of them apply to the players character, and that's where it should really matter. I mean, yea, I understand that they can't write every quest differently for every race, but they should have worked at least one race specific quest into the game to give you a sense that what you picked matters in some way.


So, where the storytelling is concerned is really where Elderscrolls has the most room to grow. There has to be more than one way to deal with a quest. It's simply annoying to have your entire quest log cluttered with stuff you can only ignore simply because you like to enjoy different aspects of the game with different characters. There just need to be ways of dealing with situations within the bounds of your characters morals. If you play a character that observes the law you should have an option to stop people who are proposing a criminal action to you rather than just walking away and being stuck with a quest you will never do. It's very disappointing that in a game that is supposed to give you freedom you simply don't have the freedom to react to quests in your own way.


This is a great game, I really love it, but these are the two things where I see room for vast improvements. Of course in a second I will get mauled by obsessive fans who took one look at this thread and went "Negative oppinion of Skyrim? Must attack!". So yea, flame shields on.

Wow, this board is brutal right now, my thread went to page 2 the instant it was posted. Now I feel like writing all this was even more of a waste of time than writing stuff on forums is anyways.

Meh. I dont understand why people are annoyed by the fact that you can't remove quests. And the game doesn't assume you're an assassin, you just happened to meet a boy who wants his orphanage head to die, just like most quests. You don't know for a fact that this will lead to the DB storyline.

Edit: and I agree in the "choosing sides" thing. Fallout 3 was much better in this regard. But it didn't bother me until now ... Thanks! -.-

When you've travelled the land for 20+ hours it does get pretty damn annoying to have half the quests in your log in the "don't do" category.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said.

It's a great game and I'm having a blast playing it, but it gets frustrating at times. And not because it is hard but because it feels broken.

My main issue right now is with controls. They don't always work. I am playing an assassin, and I have little to no health. Most things can 1 or two hit me dead. So I need to not get hit. I sneak around and backstab pretty much everything I can, and run away if need be. Some times I'll try to stand my ground but I have to execute things perfectly to survive the fight, and I can't do this when the keys don't work.

Most of the time I can't shout. I'll hit the key repeatedly, hold it down.. nothing...and I'm dead. I usually use shouts to try and save my skin. But It rarely works that I've adopting playing without it.

Also my combat keys don't always work. I usually do two handed power attacks, but sometimes one of the attack keys doesn't respond. Even with single attacks I'll hit the key and nothing. I'll have to hit my other attack first and then I can use it again.

I end up reloading so many times because I die due to the fact the game doesn't do what I'm telling it to. And it's not the timing of it it just does not work. I'll stand there and only hit the shout key and nothing will happen, other than my death.

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Quests:
To add to your quest rant. The game also pretty much forces you to use the waypoints. They give you very little information when your given a quest, not enough usually to have any clue where to go. And like you siad your quest book gets pretty full of stuff, and looking at them you can't even tell what most of them are about, they're so vague. "Go see such and such" "Go get this"...ok go get it for what, for whom? "Bring it back to 'Bob' '"...ok who and where is Bob again... I've got about 20 quests open(not including the 20 more in miscellaneous). And most of them I don't remember what they are for. And it would be nice to be able to at least Hide the quests you're not interested in doing, not just unselect them for waypoints. And what happened to the quests keeping track of all the quest related dialogue?

I miss morrowind where they gave you all sorts of directions and info in you log book that you could go back and read to find the directions on where you needed to go. Although even that was hard to go back and make sense of.

And I believe Oblivion was similar to Skyrim as they added the waypoints in so they figure they could just dumb down the quest info and make you just follow the cursor to your next objective.

I don't mind having the waypoints, but it would be nice to also be given enough information to proceed without.