I have loved every TES game since Arena and really have enjoyed playing Skyrim.

But over the past 20+ years, Bethesda hasn't brought their level of polish to where it should be at this point. To their credit, they have become noticably better and fixing game-breaking problems relatively quickly. But they continue to mostly ignore the small details which any one on its own is not a big deal, but when they add up into the hundreds, you begin to see that http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes5Mod:Unofficial_Skyrim_Patch.

Game after game is an experience filled with a sloppy finish that appears shiny and near-perfect from a distance. But delve into the game in detail and you will experience an avalanche of small and annoying glitches that drag down the gameplay. It's a sort of 'death by a thousand cuts' experience.

My first 'red flag' went up when Bethesda announced their release date for Skyrim. It was the super-marketing-cool date of 11/11/11. Right then and there I knew it... here we go again. And sure enough, Skyrim was released, like all TES games before it, in a very buggy state.

But Bethesda has patched Skyrim more than any other TES game you protest! That is true I don't disagree. But I'd argue that 3 of those patches were for the sake of a forthcoming DLC and the rest of the patches address a teeny tiny fraction of known issues and upon reading any of the short patch lists, underwhelming doesn't express my reaction enough.

To make an admittedly poor anology, let's say that Skyrim's graphics were slightly better than that of Doom 2 of 1994. I suspect if that were the case, many of us would be writing on these boards saying, 'c'mon guys, your game looks like Doom 2 from 1994. Can't you do better? Even just a tiny bit?' That is what I'm saying when it comes to their polish - both pre and post release. Can't you do just a tiny bit better?

Am I asking or expecting a perfect and bug free game? Not at all. The notion of bug-free software of any kind - with the invention of the internet - that ship has sailed. What I would like to see are levels of improvement in the area of polish that improves from one game to the next much like the graphics improve from one game to the next. I don't think that's an unreasonable request for a committed fan of 20+ years and a company who's been making games for 20+ years.

So here I am. I'm in my 216th hour of my very first playthrough of Skyrim with my one and only character to date. I've been playing Skyrim since early 2012 and have been taking it very slowly and in general really enjoying the game (thank you Bethesda I mean that). But the experience, like all the other TES games has been a turbulent one.

The periodic nerve racking unexpected crashes to the desktop. The occassional hard lock ups. 'Ok, I can live with this' I think to myself, 'many other games cause these things - it's not just Skryim' I rationalize. Then i turn in a quest. And it's sitll in my log. 'It's just a minor niggle' I sigh to myself - 'no big deal.' Later I notice that the quest that's finished but still in my log, well I still have the quest item for it in my inventory and I can't drop it. And when I go into my house sometimes things go flying around. And oh there's that dead ghost's ecto-plasm from when I killed it back in hour 10 of the game. Then looking through my quest log, oh yeah there's that quest I can't finish because it appears that the NPC I have to talk with is underground. Fast forward to hour 216 and I've got a quest log full of finished 'active' quests, a quest log with more than just a few quests I can't finish for one buggy reason or another, an inventory I have to unneccesarily wade through to find things I need because a bunch of things i don't need are still there and can't be dropped. I can easily go on, but I think I've made my point well enough.

At hour 216 I finally finished the 'No Stone Unturned' quest. That is arguably one long-winded quest and you may or may not like the reward you get. But most notably, that the reward fails to show up anywhere is a glitch that, with the backdrop of all the other glitches, is so annoying that it evokes actual anger. Then, after 2 seconds of googling you find someone has modded out this glitch and one has to wonder, with 8 patches to-date, why didn't someone at Bethesda fix this small problem for a quest that for some people spans 200 hours?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. The polish - or lack of it. When you actually play Skyrim and really get into it and spend a lot of time with it, these glitches really rack up quite a lot and it's too bad because Skyrim is a fine game.

The conseequence of all this, for me, is that I won't be buying TES games anymore on or near their release date. I will wait for it to be discounted. I will not buy DLCs anymore as they are released. I will wait for discounted package deals. I am a big fan of the TES series so this is a disappointing decision for me. At the same time, I do want to support Bethesda because I want to see more TES games. But I just can't do that anymore to the same level I have been. I will return to being a day 1 purchaser of all things TES if there are any signs of a real focus and effort to improve polish both pre and post release. But until then I will be a 'restrained fan.'

That's an honest and fair post, I think.

That's a lot of words you just used right there.