Profit can be a tempting concept for developers in such a rapidly exspanding market, this can lead to alot of disatisfaction to the audiance that brought the media to the forefront as it is today.

Its not just skyrim thats suffered this fate, alot of video games have slipped in recent years.
Lets look at cod eliet quickly, when it was released you had to imput your dob so it locked out 75% of activisions customers, 'luckly' as online is not rated they just stripped out the age test. This massive customer base cant be ignored but when they are aiming/altering content at that audience insted of the intended audience its a bit of a back stab.

Skyrim imo has had some similar design problems that i dont think are just about aiming for new players, but younger players.
For starters:
Dialogue in skyrim is poor, really empty in some places. Space maybe an issue for audio, so this may be exscusable, but not how childish it often sounds. That said with a text bases replys system there is no reason to not have variable or interedting retorts, in game they are very short or non existant. NV imo showed of good varible dialouge that didnt seem jarring that it often led down to the same out come. This illusion of interaction and sway on the world is important imo.
Tes(and fo) makes great use of text, be it notes or quest books, but now they are rarely lengthy and the journal has been reduced to a list?!(you want streamed lined, thats fine. Try more tab/pop ups, what ever, just dont leave it all out...) oh as for puzzles?! match the pictures?! i just bought my brothers three year old son a book with the same mental strain as the skyrim dungeon puzzles...I know they are new and no one likes being pointlessly stuck but seriously afew teasers or latteral thinking puzzles would not have gone amiss!

I wont touch on spell making or repair or any of the other features that have had alot of air time, i believe the words in beths rpgs are what holds alot of its substance, outside the gameworld, its self, alot of the features beth use are no way ground break, they need this intellectual high for there games to truly get back there old life span and prestige of 300hrs+(more like 1000 )

Hopefully we can see what beth are really capable of once more with some serious dlc, because Im fed up of really looking forward to what is apprently going to be a mature exsperenice, completly flattened by a lack of in depth elements and generaly pooh-poohing of text and speech, and real depth and maturity.
And know i dont mean it 'dont have enough blood, briasts and swearing init.'

Im going to have to start renting games again to see if the target audience is the same as there rating... Please Bethesda there are few good games companies left. I wish you had a more open repore with us here on the forums, i know there are alot of voices and some shout really load, but when alot of those voices have agreed and are passionate about it, it would be worth, at least, saying if you agree or disagree and why you think so.

EDIT: Hope this is better.

Sad but true, the dialogue is often short and childish, in discordance with the serious things that are being discussed. The puzzles in the dungeons are too simple and repetitive. This game does not feel mature enough to me, it's like it's made with children in mind.

yeah the puzzles are pretty lame, the hardest thing about them is trying to find the matching picture hidden in the room somewhere. and people still say it isn't dumbed down.

At least there are puzzles..not like the Jigsaw puzzles anyway...I'm more worried with the dialogues i agree that some of them are rediculuous.And also the voice in some Npc's OMG....

They should definitely hire you for dialogue in the next TES game.

I agree on the quality of the dialogue - in too many places it's immature or illogical, and sometimes both.

True. For the sake of more money than sin, business` play a sneaky trick of appearing to regulate to older gamers, but in fact are trying to get as many underage people as possible while pretending not to. it`s not as bad as Oblivion was (the dialogue and handholding was DIRE in that), but the age rating is really a joke. there`s barely anything in these games that truly treat the gamer as older.

Now Morrowind was different- that really did treat you like a mature gamer and didn`t care about bringing in 10 year olds. It also did well too, financially... But always greed eventually kicks in and so the dumbing down begins.

yeah some puzzles are better than none, it just would have been good if they had varying degrees of difficulty, instead of the one size fits all.

I agree, the "puzzles" are horrendous.

Why have puzzles anyway? Is anyone clamoring for more puzzles? I don't feel that is a big component of a RPG. They're simple, I agree but I don't feel the need to get challenged in that department in this kind of game.

I agree with the dialogs though. It's a small improvement over Oblivion which has the most basic and childish dialogs I've seen lately. There doesn't seem to be much thought put into them.

Voice acting improved a lot too but not enough in comparison with the competition. That mage in Whiterun... how did he get the part? It sounds like he's just reading the lines, not acting. Plus the diction problem... "to dishcush the oshtilitishs like the resht of the warriorshh" or whatever that was...

I miss the days when RPGs were not RPGS without puzzles and even riddles. Baldur`s II was one of the last great rpgs to sometimes tax you with a riddle or a puzzle or else!

I was always crap at riddles, but I was beginning to get better when computer rPGs started dumbing down and suddenly, the puzzles got baby-easy and stopped.

The irony is that Skyrim, is based on the Norwegian, viking times right? If you read a bit of the history, those people actually LOVED telling all kinds of riddles and figuring them out in the old days.

For those saying the puzzles are dumb why not also offer what puzzles you would like to see? Simply saying what exists is dumb without offering better solutions isn't going to point Bethesda in a better direction.

If Bethesda have done their research i`m pretty sure they know of all the riddles used about the time. Much of Skyrim is based off real Norwegian, Swedish ancent days. I doubt they missed the riddles or puzzles.

I agree, but it's not surprising. ES games have never had good dialogue or puzzles.

At least there's no Tower of Hanoi puzzle, like all Bioware games seemed to have at one point.

Only dialogue I was ever impressed with was one with the Grey Beards, especially the last ones you get with them when you kill Pathx. Besides that they should definetly be more blood, gore & swearing lol.

there should be more bacon as well for all the mainliest of men har har har..........CHEST HAIR!!!!

Did you just say "poopooing"? And then go on to complain about childish texts in game? Should I take your post serious? lol

I think they keep the dialogues short, because a lot of people have a short attention span now-a-days. Why, more and more things in life are made for quick use and access... 5 minute meals, instant coffee... etc etc etc

Anyway, I'm ok with the puzzles as they are, since I bought Skyrim because of the open world exploration, TES history, dynamic world and all the other wonderful things TES games have to offer. I was not planning on spending hours in a tomb, just to figure out some puzzle.

Sure, the quest dialogues can be short, but consider how many NPCs there are, how many quests... if you spent an hour talking to each of them, it would take years to just finish one quest line... just saying lol

Lets describe a proper RPG puzzle for a second.

Final Fantasy XII: Sometime in the 2nd half of the main quest, you came along a weird snowy area, full of ancient shrines. You would try to exit it, but you would always come to the right place. The only hint you had is a voice that echoed when you passed over a shrine: "In this sanctum shall the pilgrim find truth and illusion both. Illusion betokens the true way"
What was the solution? If you were careful enough, looking throough one of the many arcs of the shrine you'd see the illusion of a jungle, instead of the snow there was around. You had to go through that door, to the shrine straight ahead and do the same, until you reahed the last one.
In the next area, you had much more similar shrines and a magically locked gate in the end. You had to do the same as in the last area to unlock the bindings, then the gate will present you with a riddle, that mentions something about the summoner of the Gigas. One of your summonable espers happens to be called Belias the Gigas - you must summon it and only then can you open the gate.

Not that hard, but it can easily have you stuck for weeks if you refuse to look it up in some walkthrough.
And that was the easy part. Because, when you reach the center of the ancient city within these gates, you get to http://images.wikia.com/finalfantasy/images/4/4c/Final_fantasy_xii_giruvegan_crystal.png... and without any in-game map...

The reason why it's rated for advlts but aimed at children is because the biggest target demographic for video games is the north american manchild.

Yep they were made this way so they could get 12 year olds to buy the game, yet it is rated M.....WTF!?!?

christ i remember that from KOTOR, had me ripping my hair out. even DA:O had something similar with your companions standing on the blocks.

just some variety would have been good. even if they weren't all that difficult, there's only 2 types in the game, the matching pictures and the dragon claw doors. there was a flicking switch puzzle and a couple of floor puzzles in the main quest, they just needed to mix them up some more, more diversity even if they weren't more complex. though a few really difficult ones would have been good.

I'm pretty sure the guy meant "pooh-pooh" not "poo-poo". Especially since only the former makes any sense grammatically.

Ah yes, the Great Crystal. Now that's a proper labyrinth, unlike Labyrinthian Piperunliterally.

poop is poop, who cares how it's spelled? Either way, a grown person should stay away from using extreme childish sentiments, when trying to make a point!


LOL Quoted for truth! =p (and you know it guys... hahahaha)