Given that all the other prisoners save Thorald just sat in their cells even after I freed them and wiped out the thalmor, I suspect the thalmor wouldn't have much trouble figuring out it was me when they send some troops out to investigate.

Yet somehow dead people are putting kill orders out for me. I also get people somehow knowing I've stolen from them when there's no one in their house.

I still enjoy the land very much, and there are many corners of Skyrim I haven't seen yet. I feel like I'm constantly doing something that prevents me from exploring cause there's so much going on.

One thing I will agree on are the guilds. Now, I've only just completed the Companions as my only guild so far, and while it was an ok interesting quest line, particularly the last bit, it was pretty anti-climatic returning to Jorvaskr. I was expecting a grand reception, but instead there was just a drunk dude sitting at the table yapping away about something I couldn't even be bothered listening to, and no one else were to be found anywhere. I was pretty bummed about that, but at least one of the city watch noticed my fine new Harbringer threads and gave me some kudos.

The quests and factions from Oblivion are better, but Skyrim's world is zillions of times better than Oblivion's. The whole time I played Oblivion I wished the world was as good as Morrowind's, when playing Skyrim I only wish for Beth to make even MORE amazing places to explore that are as incredible as Skyrim's world.

Oh, crap. I rolled my eyes too far back and now they're stuck this way. AAAgghhhh Nooooooo my eyeeeees!!!!

We have enough of these threads about "Skyrim is a step back" or "How Skyrim svcks" Just go play Oblivion and be done with it.

People have the right to post their opinions. Don't like it, don't read it.

Of course it's an opinion, but what made it lame for me - apart from the general lameness of the story (apart from the VR bit which was unexpected and interesting) and crappiness of your dad - was the way you basically had no choices. The 'evil' ending was the same as the 'good' ending except you did something for a faction you weren't allowed to join and would shoot you on sight anyway. BS made it lamer as 'saving the wasteland' just meant business as usual with a few water caravans wandering about.

Crashes have nothing to do with the game itself. Bethesda did the QA, so blame them. They were also responsible for what engine it used. It was their game - they hired someone else to make it on their terms. You can see NV cynically as a rushed out attempt to make cash out of a popular franchise using a totally obsolete engine. Fortunately it turned out a winner because it was so well written - a department Bethesda are weakest in.

And in case you didn't notice, the gameplay did change - crafting, hardcoe mode, iron sights, weapon mods, new chems...

And it's not about Obsidian being an 'ideal developer' - it's about them having people like Chris Avellone who highlighted just how rubbish Bethesda's writing is in comparison by doing one of their games for them.



It was totally different to F3's world. IMO F3's world was awful - it had no coherence whatsoever. And had stuff like Little Lamplight and Tenpenny Tower that didn't make any sense if you thought about them for more than 30 seconds. Stuff was plonked all over the place with no reason for it being there other than be part of a quest or give you stuff to shoot. NV was portrayed much more like a functioning world that made some kind of sense. Bethesda have IMO improved with Skyrim whose world is much better designed than F3's. But for me the problem is their storytelling is medicore to painfully bad and they don't seem to even try to give NPCs any character. Just look at the enormous difference in companions in NV compared to Skyrim - NV gave you a smaller selection of companions (though comparable to F3) with backstories and some kind of personality - Skyrim gives you a whole range of cardboard cutout pack mule/meat shields you're given no reason to care about. Lydia is designed to be the first companion the average player is likely to enounter, yet she has no story whatsoever. She may as well be an android. Only Cicero has a story and he's not everyone's cup of tea. That's actually a step back from F3 - at least you knew a little bit about the F3 companions.

With Skyrim, Bethesda have excelled at artistic design, improved their combat system, created an amazing world and made a really fun game. But their writing svcks big time and seems to be getting progessively worse as time goes on. I really am dreading F4 - I reckon it's going to look amazing, sound amazing and be great fun to play - but have atrociously bad writing. Bethesda are making action games now - the narrative that underpins the game is secondary to running round fighting stuff - as long as it's big and epic that's all that will matter.


I played it to death and never felt forced into any quest. I've even done a playthrough based on the notion the courier was brain damaged by being shot in the head and attacked everything and everybody they met. No quests were forced on that character. Which quests does it force on you? Which quests have NPCs imposing their quests on you and not giving you an option to decline?

Honestly, its right in the middle for me.

I for one don't really mind the scripted events as it makes the world seem alive for me. But after you have seen them once or twice they are now boring. I do hate that they shove a majority of quests in your face along with the fact that they have little to no real outcome to the world. All guild quests (except DB) were shoved in your face. I mean the companions fighting the giant 20 minutes in the game was a piss off. The DB thought was interesting because I had no idea that quest had anything to do with it so i was surprised.

There are times where i find quests randomly and those are always a surprise. I remember once in riftin as i was passing a guard he spoke about a tower not to far away. It placed on my map but no quest was given to explore it. 24 hours later I remembered about and went to explore for a nice little quest.

The only people in this game that seem to know what you do and who you are, are the guards.

Yep I realized that when I tried to save a guy from being executed and the game no matter what I did would not let me save him. I clearly stopped the execution and killed all the guards but the guy would die every single time because it was scripted.

Same here I clearly steal someones things without them knowing and somehow they send someone after me with distinct orders to kill me.

hey now I think fallout 3 direction was spot on for what they were going for. They were going for chessy 50s scifI b movies and they hit that and the atmosphere down pat. The only reason why I didnt have a problem with the ariting was strictly on the npcs walking around and having different conversations with who came into their path. Bethesda wasnt going for the original fallout feel, they were gling for a creative giant moshpit of chessy 50s b rated movies with an end of the world wasteland atmosphere and they hit that dead on, but storywise not counting npcs random conversations and the highly interesting tidbits of prenuke notes, the story was terrible, but so are most chessy b rated movies.
Fonv was spoton the feel of the original fallout games, incredible story writing, better combat, more diverse almost everything. It was a fantastic game, but tje only problem was that what fonv weaknesses were fo3 strengths and vice versa. The wasteland wasny as detailed as fo3s was nore did u have npcs having random conversations nor did u have an abundance of past tidbits to find.
Fallout 3 gave u one helluva a physical world to explore, whereas fonv gave one helluva literature world to explore.
Both games had consequences, I dare say fo3 had way more options of choices.

Overall I was so expecting the exploration type world of fo3 with the story, options, diversity of fonv combined.....

Well I agree on some things said here. The NPC's don't recognize enough of what the main character has done. All the repetative dialogue. The short quest lines related to certain groups. Always becoming leader of an organization just by doing a few tasks. Yea there are definitely issues with Skyrim and things that could have been done better. But that stuff hardly makes the game linear and that is what always gets the arguments going here. Obviously quests are going to be linear and unfortunately most of the dungeon areas are too. But the overall game world is anything but linear even with the mountains.

Speaking of mountains, do some of you want every one of these open worlds to be a huge flat pancake? Do you want to always be able to walk in a straight line from the middle to anywhere on the outside? I honestly love the mountains in Skyrim and found it to be a great change of pace over previous games. There is still plenty of area to roam around in both above and below ground. The mountains to block progress when traveling in certain areas but so what? That's what mountains do in the real world too so I don't get the gripe there. There are typically paths up and over them as well as around them or tunnels through them. A lot of them can even be climbed. I never felt that they funneled me anywhere. They just feel like a natural part of the landscape.

@Merv Without being on the PC and using cheats there is no way to get around the invisible walls in NV. I'm talking about the walls like you would find around the main Deathclaw area. Those force you around to the main entrance instead of allowing you to approach the pit from multiple angles perhaps using sniping to take out the Deathclaws from a ridge. There are walls like that all over NV that totally prevent you from playing the game the way you want. Instead they channel you through a pre-determined route. That is not open world to me.

Nothing forces you to do any quest. This is nonesense. I have over 300 hours with my primary character and I have only completed one quest line and am still having a ball. Only you own head is forcing you to do quests, not the game.

Yeah I know there were invisible walls - I encountered them a lot and they were a very common complaint. My bone of contention is writing.

Though it's not like they were everywhere and you couldn't explore the landscape. It's just they were done in a bad way where they were present. I'm not one of the people moaning Skyrim is geographically linear because I don't think it is - I think the Skyrim geography is very well designed - certainly better than NV in that department. Though I never felt 'chanelled through a predetermined route' in NV - more some slopes it looked like you should be able to climb over you couldn't.

Though with the specific example you give, I think the devs were trying to avoid people sitting on a ledge and sniping the deathclaws in perfect safety. I don't think it's unreasonable for devs to try to stop you turning what they're intending to be a challenge into a turkey shoot. But really, they should have made the surrounding terrain obviously impassable.

Not exactly true. You cannot do the civil war without also doing the first few main quests.

Of course the game can't force you to do a quest - unless it seizes control of your character - but it forces quests on you. Some examples -

~You can't walk into Markarth without a quest it's impossible to decline from the outset triggering. If it's 3 in the morning the market will still be trading just so you can have a quest forced on you.
- When blood on the ice triggers the same NPCs will stand in exactly the same spot, never move and talk to you whenever you walk past until you do the quest which you are given no option to decline
- You can't walk past a certain house in Markarth past a certain level without an NPC harrassing you to start a certain quest
- You can't walk into Riften without Brynjolf coming up to talk to you, in my experience frequently butting in when you're trying to go and talk to someone else. That's after you've been approached by that other guy with his useless prattle the moment you walk through the gate and had that other scripted conversation leading to a being asked to do something with a seemingly unfailable persuade check that just happens to get you a potion that's very useful for what Brynjolf asks you to do. How convenient!
- You can't go to the College of Winterhold without being forced to join and initiate the questline
- You can't even overhear a Stormcloak or Imperial without 'join the...' popping up.

No they can't make you do quests, but they can force a load of junk into your quest log and present you with endless scripted situations that give the distinct impression you're on a set of rails identical in each and every playthrough where they're determined you won't miss anything because you the player are apparently incapable of seeking out quests for yourself. You will see exactly the same sequence of events each and every playthrough and be regularly prompted to do exactly the same things each and every playthrough. And you will be given virtually no choice in how you go about doing those things should you choose to engage in them.

^ amen

^ On my third playthrough now and I find myself running from city to city just to get those scripted events out of the way so I can get down to randomly roaming the world, hopefully modders will tidy them up one day.

This really.
And personally, I find the prospect of replaying a game to find that my plot to doublecross the Powder Gangers ACTUALLY gets acknowledged and seeing HOW the NPCs react to it more interesting than wandering around for 2 hours to potentially see FIVE WOLVES chase a deer, which I've never seen before.

Eagle15 made some good points about accepting new changes and moving on, or not. Also the point they made about several handfuls of people being noticed compared to millions of fans/players. Still shame on you bethesda! Shame on you for "selling out" and catering to the mainstream and more conventional masses. No offense to anyone and im sure there are exceptions to this rule, but there is a reason that many hardcoe RPG-ers were brutally picked on in high school. Its because we are not mainstream and conventional. I know im not and im damn proud of it! So please bethesda; stop listenining to your wallets and the "casual gamer" crowd and listen to your true fans! People that keep coming back to TES and Fallout for the brilliant open endedness of both game world and game play. And in the form of a cynical pessimist: not theyll read this. Thanks for listening to me rant.

Ah, right! I forgot about the prisoners. One of those actually teleported through the bars to ask if she could keep the steel sword I dropped after becoming overloaded. I said, "Sure," and she promptly trotted back to her cell. It's pretty clear the detection system employed for some of these "consequences" either went entirely unfinished or was constructed with little to no thought.

There are a lot of bad design choices in Skyrim. The layout of the land is not one of them. It is mountainous terrain. So be it.

More then one person has posted this same thought already. They should at least use the search function.

Love this thread... time to react..


Best reaction in this thread... by miles!!!
What surprises me in the current war on nay sayers is this..^
Merv gives a very fair assessment of Skyrim as is.. but points out one of its major flaws.. Story, consequence and choice..
What do people do and I transcribe:
-Go play Oblivion.. ??
-You don't have to follow the main quest
-To me it works all your examples are untrue because I experienced them differently...
-And my favourite you don't roleplay properly..

Why can't you people follow that if the story was given a little more depth, a little more choice.... a little difference in the way NPC's are acting and reacting... This game would be so much better..

Quoted for:
Only noticiable if you play it like an exploration game.... which it isn't...
I never ever hit an invissible wall in NV.... To me it's sacrificing a bit (both sides are exagerating their pov) of the freedom to make the game more challenging...

Most of the people are arguing that the linearity is actually a step backwards.. in choices.., world consequences.. etc.
As Merv shows the world etc.. is a technological feat.. but quest design leaves a lot to be desired..
People complaining about those views.. Really tell me why can't we complain about it? If it was more like people as Longknife and Merv described.. wouldn't you agree it was an even better game ..??

Bravo mister... so have many people praising and thanking Bethesda, using entitlement won't win you any votes...(nor is it it a legit argument... you think a thread is a repeat.. report it)

if u sit down at a resturaunt to eat and u alrdy paid for your food, do u only complain once if ur food is bland or the wrong order?

As quickly as I am to pointing out many many of skyrims faults, alot of tje good thays in skyrim is necause they listened to the complaints. Radiant system as broken as it is was implemented because so many people complained overtime that when u goy to the top of tje guild, there was nothing else to do for it. Allt of people complained about the prospects of fast travel and so they gave us carriages to ride as a tip of the hat to morrowind players. Alot of people complained about the copy and paste dungeon layout so all t.he dugeons are handcrafted and unigue.

Skyrims a fun game and it shows they at least glanced at what we liked and what we didnt because some things were being changed or added. So no, as long as its constructive critism or if stated flat out wasnt their style, then no these threads do need to kssp popping up so that by chace if they do look or quickly glance theres something that shows that and what improvements need to be made.