I better check those statues out later

His apperance reminded me very much of the Elder God in Legacy of Kain actually.

No.

I like him, but he is severely undeveloped.

He is nowhere near Handsome Jack. Jack is easily one of the best antagonists I've seen in a game this year. He fits the world perfectly and is easy to hate while maintaining some sympathetic qualities. Miraak just doesn't have enough distinguishing face-time / dialogue to flesh him out fully.

I agree, he was good but handsome jack was awesome. evil as hell but funny at the same time. Far cry 3's 2 antagonists are pretty high up there too, They made vaas truly insane like and the other guy was just f'ed up but they were so believable and more serious than jack and quite sick in the head. lol

bethesda needs to work on it more.
we have had a ganon [mortal of a disgraced tribe, discovers power that corrupts him, hindered by hero from attaining goal, defeated but not destroyed eventually returns and ammasses more power than ever before, conquers and oppresses, reincarnated hero returns to end the conflict] dagoth ur fits the ganon archetype perfectly.

now we need inspiration from other more complicated bad guys.
illusive man
powerful, influential, somewhat likeable, uses and abuses his influence in the name of good but goes outside convention to get things done. believes he is incorruptible ....gets corrupted anyway do to an arrogant and foolish decision, and him and his entire organization are put to use by his enemies against his former allies.
[edit, HANG ON A MINUTE!! could this fit miraak? i know this sounds stupid, i know, but its only because he has no lore to back him up. what if miraak was not so evil before he died, perhaps he was simply corrupted by hermy and is struggling to break his corruption at all costs and has lost all sense of morality?

i personally think the best villain has been mankar camoran. his philosophical approach to the destruction of tamriel is quite brilliant...he is the kagnarac of the third era as far as how drastic his actions were and strength of his motivations. it all made sense, but was bad...but also he was right...but if you play a non MER race you might be very offended. lol

I felt like he was always being over shadowed by HM, I felt like I barely got to talk to the guy. He was great and all but I dont know if he was top of the list for vilians. HM is definatly up there though, he was creepy and I hated going into his realm.

HM was freakin scary

Actually as someone said, having little background is Miraaks main strength, he's completely ambiguous, you could see him in any way you want.

This.

One of the things that make(made?) TES great was the "historian's approach" - conflicting accounts, mythos, manipulations of facts, lies, misguided beliefs regarding gods etc. And some things indicate that

I really wish we could have got more info on him. When you finally fight him, I couldn't believe it was over so fast, no bug speech, no attempt to join with you and turn against HM. It all felt very anticlimactic, HM even steals the killing blow. The leak said you could run through the main quest in 10 hours if you hurried, I'm almost completely done with Solstheim, all misc quests and I'm 8 hours in. Didn't really try to hurry, just have a strong character.
Besides the beautiful armor, I think I liked dawnguard better.

The main quest?

It is short but guess what? You have all solstheim to explore.

This. You don't even learn much about Miraak. He's pretty shallow and boring. I just wanted his armour to be honest. Compared to other game baddies like Handsome Jack and Vaas he pales in comparison.

I agree with this. I watched lets plays on youtube and by the end of it I found HM to be very intimidating. MAJOR SPOILER:

Super anti-climactic considering they played him out to be like the big attraction of the DLC.

All depends on your level. Lower levels will feel like they're going toe-to-toe with Darth Vader. Higher levels will know from the very start that he's going to get roflstomped, chewed up, spit out, all the while talking trash at you about how awesome he is. He was like Harkon, in that regard. You just go along with what he says, all the while having your bloodlust slowly build up because you can't deal with his arrogance just yet.

You haven't even played it.
You cant judge.

There's already LPs of it. Thing is, most of them are done by idiots who skip dialogue or just talk bs over them. That Eskimo dude's Let's Play is the one I want to watch since he seems to care about the story more.

Yeah, I expected him to be Ulysses. Instead he's just another villain, although he is a whole lot better than Alduin, but that's not exactly hard. Shame, the Dragonborn MQ could have been the true MQ to Skyrim.

Is it as I fear? Miraak truly has no background in TES lore and he just pops out of the blue? I assume he is not the Greedy Man is Skaal tales. I'm on PC, but I want to know because I don't want to get disappointed on how hollow the storyline will be (again).

Your only fed scraps of information of his true backstory, since it was so long ago, most people dont even remember Miraaks name.

Actually that's a good point.

Pretty lame to give the first Dragonborn literally no backstory.

He does have backstory, but its mostly ambiguous.

Like what?

We know literally nothing about him. Hell, we don't even know how he ended up serving HM.
We know 1) his name and 2) he claims to be the first ever Dragonborn.

reading here makes me sad Sad. But from what i played in dragonborn,i love it. still dont know what to think of the MQ yet. feels like i am just getting started,but what if i am at the end now? then i am dissapointed

He found something out about the dragons and defied them.

He was VERY high up in the dragon-cult, respected and held in high regard.

He's known as the "traitor', since most people forgot his name.

There's more, little details also.

This is true. I was surprised how quick we were able to fight him. I thought he would have real motives and add more interesting lore as to how he came to power etc.