I've been wanting to do this for a while, and this is critique Skyrim from the perspective of being a game. That is, just try to point out, for the devs and anyone interested, what the game did right, and wrong, from a gameplay perspective. Which is not a review, reviews say "whether I liked it" and then "give a score" and try to indicate "whether you should buy it". This isn't that.

The Fantasy of all Fantasies

I think the key to The Elderscrolls Success is that it allows players to live out a fantasy of being someone (usually a heroic type) in a realized fantasy world, and it doesn't put too much constraint on how people go about that, nor too much definition on who they are as a character.

In other words, its a series that has tried to capture some of the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons. A large portion of enjoyment in both series seems to come from people defining their own characters and their motivations in their heads. While other games and intellectual properties ranging from the mostly defunct Might and Magic to Fable have placed the player in a realized fantasy setting, they have all defined the character and what they can and can't do far more than The Elderscrolls has.

Obviously this overall game design is a winning one, and something that has been continuously "done right".

But is there anything that could be done, better about it?

The answer here is, frankly, yes. If you've seen the unquestionably http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/5020-The-Elder-Scrolls-V-Skyrim by Yahtzee, AKA Zero Punctuation, or even if you've tried it yourself you'll notice that it is incredibly hard to be a poor nobody in Skyrim. Or to struggle at all, at anything really. As with any objective the player may wish to achieve being poor, or struggling for something, or etc. is just as valid an objective as any other, but it's actually incredibly hard to struggle in Skyrim. You are almost guaranteed success around every corner.

Every dark dungeon will always be defeatable, there's no challenge to picking a town clean of every possession, and in the end you are given most things near on a silver platter. This not only does not serve those wishing to not be a wild and incredible success, but is also a disservice to anyone seeking any sort of challenge to accomplishing things. Now, it is perfectly true that any one game can not be all things to all people. But I feel willing to suggest some sort of basic challenge could be presented in the series, enough to at least keep those not wishing great success from the very same being foisted upon them, while at the same time not overly hampering those who's wish does involve success.

Location Location Location, also things about coffee being for winners and The Setting!

There is something dreadfully missing from the genre of modern Fantasy that is not from its related genre of Science Fiction, and that is originality in setting. Now, immediately there are going to be people who will argue against originality in setting. That elves and dragons and land that looks incredibly nordic in culture is far preferable to other, less familiar things. I say right now that there is no business need to engage such people whatsoever.

Why? Because such people are an incredibly small, if vocal, minority. There is a vast amount of humanity that is perfectly capable of accepting and engaging with entirely new and fairly alien concepts for entertainment purposes; so long as they are introduced in logical, connected, and easy to understand manner. For example, the top grossing movie of all time, by a factor of 2, is about blue space cat people that ride pterodactyls on a distant moon that circles a gas giant. Which means that several hundred million people around the world found this concept easy enough to spend $8+ and a few hours of their time on.

Now, admittedly a game is best (for the developer) sold at the launch price of (usually) $60 and is thus a bit of a harder sell, and so consumers may be more risk averse about such things. But my point is that if such foreign concepts as those displayed in Avatar can get $8, then merely pushing out beyond the increasingly stale accepted fantasy genre tropes will not be particularly risky. Certainly you may have those threatening to take their business elsewhere, but what product doesn't have that? In fact the addition of originality may in fact bring on more customers than the potential loss of the aforementioned vocal minority. Regardless, the point is that Skyrim does indeed stick very closely to the stale fantasy genre tropes when there is no need to do so.

Gentlemen, Prepare to Defend yourselves!

Ahhh, what's the use? I can't be particularly nice about this, three times a promise of engaging combat in an Elderscrolls came, three miserable failures. As with anything, literally anything anyone can imagine, there will be those who defend TES's combat. Moving on from those people, the combat has been characterized as boring, a chore, worse even than Oblivion's, and many other such things. And from someone trying to take what objective standpoint that can be taken they're all correct. I would talk about what Bethesda has been doing wrong, but it would be easier to give examples of games that do combat right.

A recent example that can be better, and more succinctly dissected is Kindgoms of Amalur: Reckoning. What does this, also fantasy open world(ish) rpg, do right? The combat in this game is first off highly responsive. This means several things, first that when the player presses a button something happens very quickly and very obviously. If they tap the "dodge" key then around a hundred milliseconds later, a tenth of a second, the players avatar will be rolling a dramatic distance away from its previous position and will then quickly resume the stance which indicates combat readiness.

I.E. Things are fast, input is carried out quickly, and the results are very clearly communicated to the player. Whenever the player hits an enemy, with any weapon, there is a very clear and immediate response of what that did. Thus, the game's combat is responsive, but that's not all it does right. The other thing the game does right is that the combat is dynamic. Meaning position and timing matter a whole lot. If one of the games enemies, a troll, is about to smash your avatar it is (nominally) imperative that the player responds with a good response, the wrong response can lead to a massive drop in health. Thus the game presents different situations in which the player needs to do different things. After the "smash" attack, a clearly advertised animation is followed by a clearly advertised opportunity for attack without fear of retribution.

In other words, the player nominally doesn't just smash a button but moves around, and uses timing and other skills in order to succeed. No this is not to say the game even need be particularly difficult for at least some engagement. The Fable series, which has a similar, if lesser, combat system is fairly easy in terms of skill that is needed to surmount the presented enemies. Never the less Fable's combat has almost universally been remarked to be more engaging than any of The Elderscrolls games.

Getting back to Amalur, what did that game get wrong? I shall borrow from this years Game Developers Conference to paraphrase, if a player feels comfortable using the same learned tactic over and over again, then introduce an enemy that that tactic doesn't work against. Unfortunately for Amalur this is something the designers didn't do. Many players will no doubt arrive at a time in this game when most every enemy can be defeated by infinitely stun locking, or temporarily stunning, enemies until they are dead. Combat then becomes tedious, and you are reduced to nothing more than mashing a single button over and over again. Rounding off to the point, The Elderscrolls has the opportunity to avoid this but hasn't yet.

Ce Ne'st pa Una Personne

To translate from French, "This Is Not a Person". Or rather, while The Elderscrolls has improved mightily, game over game, in presenting non player characters as a person there is still room for improvement. The Good: Followers that occasionally have something to say, little cinema like displays that kick off quests (scripted events), even random npc's have things to say! The bad: Dimwitted guards that forget they've been shot through the eye by an arrow in order to go "back on patrol", a lack of acknowledgment of title or accomplishment, and a lack of the truly unexpected. Which segways nicely into...

The Missed Opportunities:

Sound Design and Technical Stuff: The sound design of The Elderscrolls has always been weak, and Skyrim is no different. When modders, unpaid certainly and amateurs much of the time, can quickly and easily replace much of the sounds in a game with those generally praised as higher quality then there's work and potential enjoyment being left on the table.

As an aside (skip if you've no interest in technical aspects of game design). A new engine and much better tools are needed. I salute the artists for wringing such visuals out of such a dated engine, but a dated engine is what Skyrim is definitely running on. This not only means it laggards behind the cream of crop in terms of visuals, but makes it harder than necessary for the artists using it to produce something sellable in a market still highly concerned with visuals. In order to transition to the next generation much, much, much more needs to be done. Lighting should not take so many hacks and so many variables to make acceptable, so many compromises need not be made in model detail when no doubt the source models are already much higher in polycount. The list goes on, but the point is that the current development procedures at Bethesda have produced tools that require an inordinate amount of work for the results they produce.

Making a larger game. This will spread things out, that's good. The Elderscrolls has grown to be a cacophony of noise and opportunities, overwhelming at times. In tradeoff for this we get a land that struggles at times to feel truly big or epic. Oh sure, a lot of graphical tricks can help, but at times there's just no hiding that that large rocky peak is just a very tiny hill. But a larger, more spread out game can give a bigger sense of scale and give players a bit of a layback. According to (personal opinion) the designer of the most atmospheric game in years, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/165174/GDC_2012_Overstimuation_kills_atmosphere_says_Dear_Esthers_Pinchbeck.php

Certainly, again personal opinion, I enjoyed the long rides in Red Dead Redemption from place to place. And I don't think I'd be alone in suggesting that a loading screen can give a tiny, quiet moment to sit back and disengage totally (if that's what is needed). With the next generation of consoles, or some game machine, almost certain to bring the distant next Elderscrolls into the land of seamless game worlds it may even be a good idea to have other ways of spacing out all of the dungeons, quests, and encounters a player can find.

Oh that was wacky! Players love to engage each other over games that have unexpected outcomes. Its almost another direct benefit from a game that relies on complex simulations. Systems of simulation need not even be very complex in and of themselves if they are numerous and interconnected. Both experiencing and telling tales of how, due to some combination of AI and circumstances, some totally weird or off the cuff thing happened in a game can be highly rewarding. Unfortunately The Elderscrolls has never had much of this. I too remember the early tales of "Radiant AI" and how such did not pan out to the completed Oblivion. But being hard does not make a goal unworthy.

Coincidentally, this leads me to the end and my last hurrah for Skyrim, which has to do with that "letting the player fill in the story" bit in that last link I put up. If Bethesda did one thing right during constructing the world, it was to place things, and to ensure things were encountered, in a potentially interesting fashion. For my own part finding a mountain lion in a broken down cabin was both exhilarating and enticing. Why was there a mountain lion in a broken down cabin? The best story bits in Skyrim did not come out of any npc's mouth or scripted event, which were honestly a bit mediocre, but out of my own head. Letting the player fill in the story of places is as good a way to design the world as letting the player fill in their own character, and I salute Bethesda for it.

Well, that's it for my criticism. If I think of something brilliant I may add it. But there we are.

What am I supposed to say?

You wouldn't be able to sell a game like Skyrim if you couldn't achieve anything in it - that is, becoming powerful, rich, defeating the main antagonists and helping your friends. More to the point, you might sell the game, but you'd never sell a sequel.

And the world's as large as it needs to be. It doesn't *need* to take an hour to run from one corner to the other when the area is content rich, and contains so many hills and valleys that many have never seen and never will see, in fact such a big world could be disadvantageous. This game's just big enough that if you travel from most hold capitals to another, you have a variety of possible routes, you'll encounter anywhere from two to five random encounters, and probably take about ten to fifteen minutes all up. More than that would introduce tedium.

Skyrim is still an amazing game, and no one can deny that, no matter how many long-winded criticisms you write.

Not exactly what I was trying to get at. There are plenty of games that are larger than Skyrim, in fact it's become quite small by modern open world game standards. Also, I wasn't suggesting making it really hard to do anything. Just a bit harder than it is currently, a tiny bit more challenging while still easy enough for most people to get to where they want.

Get ready for the fan boi onslaught, it's coming. I thought the review was very good, particularly the part about the combat system. I am a little surprised that you didn't go a little deeper in the utter lack of dialogue options, the horrific dialogue that is currently in place for NPC's, and the mediocre quest lines (namely the guilds.. blah). Good review, though, and well written.

v_v;

Skyrim doesn't give everything to you on a silver platter.
All the success one can gain, besides quest-derived heroic stuff, is through understanding and exploitation of game mechanics... and the fundamental differences between a person playing a game and a character living in that world.

Of course you're going to get rich and do well with yourself when you don't have to fear death... when reloading from one of the many autosaves can be done over and over again so nothing is truly threatening any more. Sure it is easy when you can learn how to maximise your damage potential through understanding the system... something which exists as a medium through which the player interacts with the game world... Characters within that world don't have a nice predictable system to make life easy for them.
It isn't so much given up on a silver platter so much as the fact that it is a game, and the effects of that for the player character, are what serves to elevate their successes.


No, Skyrim's combat isn't all that great. Never has been for Elder Scrolls games... But I've never been too bothered. Everything is reduced to numbers in-game... and that is fine by me. It would be far tougher to represent combat experience in terms of how the character would actually move given relative experience levels. And given how much other stuff has to go into Elder Scrolls games.... that isn't really feasible.

I pretty much disagree with everything you said even on points where you praised the game. In some cases, it was the reasoning behind your points that I find flawed. It's very well written, though, and I thank you for sharing.

p.s. - "Ce n'est pas une personne"

So....what other open world games out there are larger?

Better combat in fable? Really?!

Maybe Fable II ... Going either way from there brings different problems.

I liked reading this. There are a lot of people who share the same views after experiencing Skyrim. Among what you spoke of, there are many other things we feel need to be stressed. I enjoyed playing Skyrim, for the most part anyway, but the game could have been so much better.


This is one of my biggest pet peeves in a game modelled after a vast territory, in which a setting is in place that entails adventure and discovery. That's the staple of adventure games, namely RPGs like The Elder Scrolls. It's been asked for quite a lot.
It doesn't really make sense to take less than a minute or two to cross the whole map, literally, and encounter dozens of monsters right outside your front door. You seriously begin to wonder how you end up being the first to 'discover' everything that's right in front of everyone's face, and Skyrim's obvious lack of space does NOT entail a sense of scale. You can easily find yourself in the same geographical position, sometimes without expecting yourself to, and everything then becomes strangely familiar.
It's Bethesda's best attempt thus far. And I'm referring to the mountains, but if scale didn't matter, Arena or Daggerfall wouldn't have made it big, at least for some people and, despite the fact that most of it was randomly generated.
Still. Passing by mountains is a breeze and travelling is nothing more than a walk through the park, with caves and abandoned forts and bandit camps within reach at every step. I don't need to search for something to find something, but I feel as if most of the fun would be the search itself, and how enticing it would be to find a place in an area void of much else. I'd feel rewarded merely for the discovery, and all those ancient lost tombs, secret bases, and abandoned ships would actually feel lost, secret, and abandoned. I don't feel rewarded for hundreds of useless loot. Extension of scale would make loot more worthy as they would be harder to find, take longer and be more risky to get to.
I ended up with so much junk early on, that I increased my smithing and enchanting to omni-like preportions before I recieved my first Daedric weapon, which ended up being a peice of [censored] compared to what I could make.

There's never been a game, movie, book, or piece of artwork ever made that has gone without criticism. Artwork will always be subjective per the individual. With that said, I think the OP is being a bit too obtuse in his approach to criticism. First of all, the underlying problem with your post is that you really didn't conjure up any viable solutions to some of these problems other than "Said game did it this way, so just copy said game". Well, it doesn't work that way. In reality, a game like Skyrim is massively complex and unless you fully understand those complexities you can't really say what a company should or should not have done. Secondly, you can live a life of poverty in Skyrim if you want to, I have done this on my Paladin build. It's just that its very hard to do and takes a lot of time and isn't very fun. But, thats what a life of poverty is supposed to be like. RP the way you want to, not all forms of RP are supposed to be equally rewarding, it varies with taste.

If you think the game is too easy then you can challenge yourself up turning up the difficulty and playing dead is dead, meaning if your character ever dies then you delete all of his saved games and start over again. This can actually be a very fun and rewarding way to play the game if you're looking for a more rich and fulfilling experience.

No, people can't. Everything is still easy, there is still never a dungeon to encounter that can't be beaten, still never a lock that can't be picked at level around level 1, still never a town that can't be emptied of every last possession. It doesn't work, and that's why I said it. And this isn't (just) a personal opinion, it's a large complaint made by many people.

I like to play the skyrm EACH DAY. I do not have any criticise. But sometime she make me CRAZY for example

my guy battle(combat) for example bearand she KILL ME when SUFFICIENT BLOWS HAVE LANDED TO CAUSE DEMISE!

I navigate the mountain AND FALL FROM HER resulting in DEATH?

The giant are capable of SUFFICIENT STRENGTH to cause my guy flight! WTF THIS IS FREAKING CRAZY AND NOT POSSIBLE

most time i have the best time and if I GET TO CRAZY then simple. Withdraw from skyrim! (for example watch TV place battlefield within xbox) when I dont feel crazy at the situation RETURN SKYRIM!




KING THE SKYRIM

1. Stop projecting.

2. Nobody is forcing you to pick a lock that is beyong your expertise, if you think your character shouldn't be able to pick a lock then DON'T PICK IT!

3. Robbing cities doesn't make you much money unless you have fences and use the "wait" feature so they can replenish their gold instantly. If you do this then its YOU who is exploiting the game mechanics. Stop exploiting the game and maybe you will have more fun. A player who is looking for a challenge doesn't use "wait" to speed up time, in fact a real player would slow down the timescale. See? I just projected my feelings on what a real player should be. Projecting is fun.

On combat; It is good enough for me. On the other hand, even oblivions combat was good enough for me, so my standards aren't exactly high.

Ah, If everybody pointed out flaws in such a civil manner. Good job!

The Op raised a point about what RPG's could be- the possibility of failure- and then before developing the idea dropped it. That was a great idea- one that RPG's are ready for. But Bethesda and everyonelse is heading the other direction. We've just been streamlined, remember? I may be wrong but dont recall OP saying anything about that.

OP says the sound was bad- I disagree. He said the world can play imaginative settings if we find them logically developed, and used as an example the blue cat people on an alien world fighting to save their world from the dreaded machines. There was some creativity there, and an awful lot of stereotyped shallow writing. So, I guess that's my opinion and the OP thinks about things differently. It grossed a lot of money but so does MacDonalds,and very few of us would say that means they make the best burger.

Op says nothing about Skyrim having lost the choices the player had in previous games, but did mention the lack of NPC interaction and feedback. I have to wonder how many Elder scrolls games and how much time he has in not to have included the loss of attributes, spells and spellmaking, and racial distinctions as part of the experience?
OP likes the combat in Reckoning- so does everyone. It would be nice- but at what cost? We just lost spell making because of graphics.

I think the OP had some insight and good ideas, but there was more production in his disertation than material. I lked the effort, and the tone- if we could all talk as conversationally and nonconfrontationally this would be a better place.

TLDR.

I imagine you have valid points. Hoping you didn't just say Morrowind was better.

Indeed, purely playerskillbased combat (like assassin's creed or the likes) almost totally negates any chance of actual improvement in skill based on numbers. If you'd solve this by better reflexes or something like that, than it would certainly mean going from beggar to god, which is not the case here in Skyrim. Please correct me if I'm wrong.


I strongly agree here. In my (clearly subjective) view, I felt that the Fable series (I played all three) did a good thing at being a little funnier, a bit more joyous, but had a very repititive combat system. It could be described as more dynamic then Skyrim, but I'd choose Skyrim over any Fable. I mean, in the end you become a master at anything, and whoopass everything with a (for me that is) poorly implemented magic system.


Although you can see I favor Skyrim in my replies here, this is just a fact, and nothing's going to change that. This is something a lot of people say/said and I couldn't agree more.


I agree and disagree and neutral, follow me here a minute:

Agreed:
- It's Bethesda's best attempt thus far
- Some things are just too close to cities to be believable sometimes.

Neutral:
- "...I increased my smithing and enchanting..." it does not relate to the junk you collect, nor should you be surprised that you can make crazy weapons with those skills together in my opinion

Disagree:
- "2 minutes to walk across the map": how on earth do you do that? Am I the only one who's thinking: "hmmm, going to Riften is a very long way, maybe I'll take the carriage"?
- Mountains sure are a breeze to pass by, but to climb them, that's another story. Don't know how you do it, but I really have just that right amount of problems to get on top.


Indeed it is. Exploiting your way up and then say it's easy, that just doesn't make sense.


Conclusion: There a lot of flavor based opinions for this game. There are a lot of missed opportunities. But there IS so much room for doing your own thing, it's hard to keep things running like they do.

I'd be happy to discuss any statement I made if reasonably questioned.

1. Try to kill a bear with a sword in real life and survive

2. Try falling of a mountain in real life and survive

3. Giants like those in game does not exist, so the question about realism is not valid

I wouldn't call Skyrim small by any means. It's average for an open world game. I think it's around 16 square miles. About the same range as Saints Row 2. Not sure about 3. There are bigger ones though. Red Dead Redemption is 28. I think it's a good comparison, since both are in relatively primitive settings (rather than cities).

A good read. I agree on most points, except perhaps sound quality and scale as I've never really had a problem personally.
Then again, I've never really wielded a mace or greatsword, but I can safely say that I have climbed up mountains, and considering that in-game that one can do it sprinting, the game is fairly realistic in scale it just doesn't seem so because you don't have to stop or sleep.

A lot in the elder scrolls, as you said, is up to the player to fill in the gaps, be that with the mind, modification or some other medium of creativity. With those they can also overlook the games shortcomings that I cannot not deny they are present. For example I regularly switch between various fighting stlyes in order to keep the game's mediocre combat interesting, whether that be through conventional means or something as robust as throwing various vegetables at them with telekinesis.

Yet one thing I found interesting in your review is you paragraph on constraint or rather, the lack of constraint. A major problem with a lack of constraint is that there is no way that you can govern any sense of challenge, without introducing constraint, which quite frankly, is not what the elder scrolls is about, as one bethesda employee said; "I'd rather have players overpowered than under".

Basically what I'm saying is, most games out there give you an entertainment experience, like a show. (not looking at current Final Fantasy series) Elder scrolls gives you a stick. It does not tell you what you do with that stick. You can break it, add something to it or simply admire its bark, yet at the end of the day, it is up to the player to entertain themselves and create their own experiences with their stick. The Developers give you the oppurtunites to create these experiences, yet do not predetermine them for you.

As said, I mostly agree with you OP, from a pure gameplay context. Yet as you said with your instance with your mountain lion, the gameplay isn't really what it's about, its about the limitless possibilites of what can happen.

At least for me anyway.

My issue with Skyrim has been bugs that is my main problem there.
Then lack of depth and no options.
The magic system is use one spell until you get a more powerful version with no versatility to the system.
We only have three weapon choices.
The guild quest are very short.

I agree with most of what you say, but there is one thing I like to point out.

I agree that combat could be more responsive and have more functions, but there is a problem Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls in general have here: It is very little over the top and this will put limits on how one can go about dodging and combat animations.

KoA and Fable have more freedom here making it easier to have responsive, fast combat that doesn't look out of place. Doing that kind of animations would look very strange in Skyrim, Oblivion or Morrowind because the style the game is set in simply do not support it. It would be like adding DA2's animations to DA:O's slower paced combat.

I think Dark Souls(haven't played Demon Souls so I cannot comment on that) is a better example of how certain things in combat should be handled as it has a much less over the top style than KoA(despite the fact that quite a few weapons are). Dodging is largely based on the armor you wear and if you try to dodge in heavy armor will generally be slow and clunky while lighter armor allows for more movement.

I pretty much agree Skyrim could have been a much batter game, though it is still my favorite.

Edit: Personally I prefer the "Epic Reality" setting more than something completely alien, but what setting one prefers is a matter of taste.