I've been a long-time Elder Scrolls fan, but have always encountered things here and there that just irk me to no end in certain games (like the horrible map directions NPCs give you for finding quest objectives on the XBOX for Morrowind DX<). But for the other Elder Scroll games, I've never experienced the range of extreme love/hate specifities as I have on Skyrim. Here is my incredibly opinionated list as a veteran gamer and follower of the series:

LOVE

Gorgeous scenery (Especially some of the caves and caverns "joygasm!")
Incredible fighting animation
Soundtrack XD
Lovely armor
Lovely weapons
Owning homes where you can display these lovelies
Aerial viewpoints

HATE

Armor

The lack of variety, especially in stronger armor. I mean, why are you able to choose more between the different kinds of weaker armor you can wear, but for a strong defense, if you have more than one character, they're all going to be wearing exactly the same panoply in the end? (Especially if you experiment madly with different skill combinations like I do. And heavy armor is definitely up there in my line of the best in-game defense choices.)

Dragon armor (You mean I worked my smithing up to 100 to make the 2nd best heavy armor in the game that doesn't even look good when you compare it against all the other armor sets???) The light armor looks good, but the benefits to wearing light armor are minimal even for a sneaky character in the end (especially with that certain Daedric armor reward being out there...... > X-( )

Terrible Quest Rewards

Leveled unique items? Really? I worked my butt off for something I'm not going to be able to reasonably use? All I have is a trophy to display? All the Daedric rewards are pointless. All of them. Unless you have a hard-on for achievements.

The Thieves Guild is the worst. "You mean to tell me, if I want to be decently rewarded in the Thieves Guild, I can't complete it?" The reward in Oblivion for completing the Thieves Guild was TRULY epic. Your reward in Skyrim is a joke.

You can make better enchanted gear than what they give you in the game. This is a travesty! Why put something in the game that looks so great...!

on a mannequin!

Because if you ever want to play the game on a harder difficulty and not be instantly decapitated or be given very "pointed" flying lessons from a dragon, you need something strong enough to withstand attacks.

The quest rewards create a sort of catch-22.

Quests are there for you to have an immersive in-game experience while having fun playing the game. It's kind of boring to level up without having a goal to achieve. But in order to get a decent reward in Skyrim for questing, that's exactly what you need to do. You need to grind or be given something that's worthless.

Doing these quests helps you to level up your character without the painfully boring experience of just "grinding". But there also has to be a good reason for doing the quest without feeling like the only reason you're doing it is to grind. Hence the reason for a reward. But if the reward they give you is worse than what you probably already have equipped, or is a skill reward for something you genuinely don't care about, then you just did some cleverly disguised grinding and they may as well have handed you a poppy for all your efforts. I honestly prefer an rpg where the quest you're given is insanely above your level with an epic reward. At least then you can go find something else to do, come back, and be like "This was SO worth the wait!" Nobody I know plays RPGs hoping for instant gratification. Why make a reward scheme that reflects that ideal?

Leveling System

By removing the ability to customize your stats, the ability to customize your character into more accurately reflecting what you would like your avatar to be has been completely removed. Choosing how to develop your character's strengths allowed the game's difficulty to progress naturally. You could tackle what you could tackle because you made yourself able to tackle it. With the leveling system being what it is, you can run around and have done nothing but pick pockets, break into doors, talk to npcs, sold to merchants, dumped your perk points into nothing battle-ready, be level 10-15 before you know it, get out into the world and die because you could not control the strength of your character's strike as the world was out getting steadily stronger and you were left far behind focusing on making a profit.

The Mystical Lore is Left Behind

The previous Elder Scrolls games are pretty much dismissed and cast aside as a footnote in the books of Skyrim. The mystical influence of the Divines and the mind games of the Daedric gods have more of the feel of an in-game novelty, a sort of acknowledgment to the preceding games. Your character is far removed from otherworldly powerplay to engage in repetitive, too-frequently occuring battles with...

Dragons

They should have just left one dragon guarding every shout. The dragons have created bugs for me more times than I can count. They're an annoyance when you're just trying to get a quest done and every time you fast travel there's a bloody dragon. I get it! You're proud of your dragons! Now get them off my screen! You've fought one dragon you've fought them all...

Incredibly Short Quests of Importance

Hey! Look! This new guy seems like the perfect choice to take over our organization, even more so than those of us who've been struggling to rise up the ranks for years, even though we've only known him/her for maybe a month or so and this person has really, realistically, done so very little for us! XP

Houses

Okay, so you get to own a home. Okay, so you can put stuff on plaques and mannequins and bookshelves. But why won't you let me set anything down where I want? Why do I have a spouse or housecarl that says "You dropped this," and hands back everything I want to see set down on a table or stone outcropping displayed uniquely in my home. Otherwise I just go in and everything falls on the floor... At least in Morrowind and Oblivion you could decorate your homes the way you wanted to.

And my one beef with every Elder Scrolls game:

Boring NPCs

Yeah, Skyrim did a better job with dialogue than Morrowind or Oblivion, but I'm still not convinced that there's any life to these guys. In Skyrim, the animations from an NPC when you're standing there trying to hold a conversation is more funny than anything else. For the most part they talk to you like they're about to have an emotion, then it's like some invisible entity sneaks up behind them, pokes them in the small of their back and causes them to adjust their arms in discomfort from time to time. The only one who's convinced me that he might ever be the sort you'd actually see strolling the streets is Cicero (jester suit aside).

The Bottom Line

I like Skyrim, don't get me wrong. But I would have liked it better if the world was changed to be something else and sold under a different title. This is NOT what fans have come to expect from the Elder Scrolls series.

I pretty much agree with the OP's dislikes. I love Skyrim, it's a great game but it's definitely lacking in certain areas.

That's your opinion, I think that dragonplate armor looks far better than Daedric, Ebony and Orcish Armor and only worse than Steel, Steel Plate and Iron. Also that's were the smithing/alchemy/enchanting loop comes in handy (even though you don't even have to loop). You can hit the armor cap with EVERY armor in the game. Although it isn't about the benefits of Light Armor, it's about style.

Otherwise I agree with most of your points other than every daedric artifact is worseless. The armors have their worth if you don't enchant yourself and the staffs all have unique capabilities. The only really worthless ones (later in the game) are the weapons!

I understand about the looping, but from what I understand that's more of an exploit than the way the game was intended to be played. I mean, otherwise why make a base number for the armor at all? And yes, it is definitely my opinion that the dragon armor really doesn't measure up to my standards of a well-crafted design. It's the way, I think the helmet has sort of a Halloween mask look to it. Makes me feel more like I should be trying to trick-or-treat rather than preparing to charge into battle. That's just a design preference though, on my part.

hate

am not caring so much for the things you said , what really effected me is i was unable to push though out the game
becausae of failed quest . it got to a dead end yesterday so i remeved it and started playing rage .

love
i will restart the game for the 3d time . saving day by day and moving quest by quest .
between you and me i have a life time to waste .

Love: The graphics

Hate: Almost everything else

Bast, you failing because of bugs or because of game difficulty?

I love crafting in Skyrim.

I hate how limited crafting in Skyrim is. I mean, I would love to be able to have more variety, particularly in armor and weapon creation. And I also want to be able to create combinations of items (e.g. jeweled circlet + plate armor helmet = warrior crown)

I want to bedazzle my blacksmith apron!

lol game difficulty ? i play video games since 1980

http://www.bfstats.info/Battlefield/Statistics/Search/Player/deatHand999

elite online player

1500 hour on bf2

3000 hour on emperor battle of dune online

few AI games can beat me on hardest the only one i can remember is

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty

the missions where unrealistic to be beaten without other player drooping in . i asked on their forums but they said

am a newbie . well i can believe anything these days .

here is my problem here i cant complete my quests and keep my quest list clean

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1358665-restarting-the-game-over-and-over/page__st__30__p__20491441__hl__bastet__fromsearch__1#entry20491441

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1338161-i-want-to-work-for-bethesda-soft/page__p__20153798__hl__bastet__fromsearch__1#entry20153798

keeps telling this man . quest cant be done , item missing , npc not there . do this do not do that

the quest progress team should be fired that is all i said . any 12 yo boy could have tested this game in 1 week

and solve through the quests . everything else works great they did the hard job and failed the game for nothing .

missing text options the inability to complete the story .

and they wouldnt take some criticism . dont lie to your self , dont be
arrogant , quest progress team you ruined a good game that we waited
for years and your other mates worked hard to produce it ,
you are amateurs . leave this company or get the game dvd play
and ask your self why was i so Neglected .

i played fallout 3 and am playing rage i never saw things like skyrim before

Hey, take your own advice.

am not boasting am giving you facts , it dosnt mean am the best but it means i played 1000s of hours there isnt a game

out there since asteroids and tank combat and pac man that i didnt play , i played wing commander series for years man

during my high school and collage that game made me a drug addict you see ?

getting 1000 000 score in pac man was easy to me to restart the count from 0
some 12 yo guys thinks they are tough with thier 20gb games and monster pc
we used to do the job with a 3 mb floppy disc and jump up to the sky when the game is installed

The game is way to shallow, nothing you do in this game has an effect. Kill the emperor? No one cares to notice other then unimportant guards. Save the world from Alduin? Only guards seem to care. Atleast in oblivion npc's actually took notice of what you did.

There is definitely a serious bug problem with this game. When it got Game of the Year on the VGA's all I could think was that the awards must've been rigged. Which is why I wasn't making my love/hate list about the bugs in the game, with that notable exception with the dragons. I mean when you can boot up a game and be slammed with bugs that aren't even that difficult to come across, you know that either the testers seriously screwed up, or rushing for a "memorable release date" was clearly more important than putting out a finished product, ready to be picked up and played like any other critically acclaimed game you can pull off the shelves. People have defended Bethesda ruthlessly about the complexity of a game of this scale and I'm sitting here like, "Two Worlds is just as complex and much less buggy. Nothing in there has broken my game. Skyrim breaks constantly if you don't do things 'just right'." What Bethesda claims you can do with the world versus what the gameplay actually allows for are two very different things. They've definitely made promises they haven't delivered on.

Being able to explore the world before you activate quests, for example. Nope. There's sooo many places that you can't go, just because they're quest-related. And there's so many places that if you can go to them early, it breaks the related quest. The forums are filled with these examples. Even halfway competent testers would be able to catch that. Which means that someone with a lot of push in the company is either completely incompetent or just doesn't care. From what I can see, Bethesda was eager to release a game that would sell only because it had the name "Elder Scrolls" attached to it. Honestly, I've been having more fun recently playing Daggerfall. I have more freedom to do what I want to without fear of advancing the game beyond my levels or going somewhere that's going to break my game completely. Like I said, I like Skyrim just fine as a game. And when it's finished, I'm sure I'll get back to playing it again. I don't like not getting paid to do what the beta testers should have already done, you know?

Nvm, repeat post...

Arrogant. And Boastful.

I asked Bast about why he was failing quests. It's not arrogant to state that you are a legitimately good player then have proof to back that up when someone is questioning you about it. Then he posted about the bugs he was encountering. That is all. I'd rather not have blatant flaming going on when a genuine discussion is at hand, thank you.

Love: the world design, the music, the mountains, the dragons.
Hate: guilds questlines, simplified character stats, how the UI suits the PC, lack of consequences for choices.

Love: everything
Hate: nothing

I agree whole-heartedly. Bold and underline = I especially agree with these points.

The lack of consequences is an interesting point. Because I remember being rather irked with that at the start of the game, then the more I played I just kind of accepted that "That's just the way of the game" I guess until I forgot about it. But kudos for that one.

just what i wanted to say but with good english


facts . and numbers . and badges .
gaming needs skill . but there is nothing called good player or bad player .

a good player is a player that is having fun playing not fighting and feeling bored

when it comes to human opponent that is the real open ended world , a guy that you

can beat easily can learn and beat you a week later , gaming is not science it has no theory or rules
its just cartoons man . you can adopt to a game and be the best one in it , that dosnt make you something
a year later that game will be old and all your skill in it will be like falling tree papers .
controlling is the main issue here vs human
AI will have total control as it can macro every unit and move but then it cant develop its a s/w
yes it can beat you and will always win when its not set to normal human reflexes

i wish i can go 1vs1 in a big map with you on a game like doom 4 and ill show you what i mean .
its not about who will kill the other its all about haw much terror i will give you .

Love Khajiit and Argonians
Hate Altmer and Nords

OP I agree with your original post except about the dragon armor I personally like it but that is a personal preference.

I agree with this post as well.

Love: The art style of this game is amazing, the music score is one of the best, the combat is an improvement. I personally think the dungeons are a bug step up from the travesty that was Oblivion dungeons, now they just need some branching paths. Duel casting spells.

Hate: The magic system lacks spell creation and that gave us options and customization to our mages and it allows us to craft spells that suited our needs. We also need the old spell types hack for more versatility and it would make mages all around more useful and fun to be, as it is magic is very limiting. The quest lines are extremely short and they could have been longer. Why do we not have a reputation system the world does not reflect your actions neither does the NPCs we should also have a separate faction reputation system as well. I wish we had more armor, weapons, and clothing options there is not many in the game. I have to say it bugs, this game has way to many bugs. Why are we forced to have a housecarl if we become Thane why do they have to cone into your house with you why can't they guard the door. The respawn system in this game takes far to long and its also bugged and plants as and enemies do not respawn. I wish we had more factions to join so there could be more diversity to the world and that would allow us to explore more avenues of storytelling.

Agreed Khajiit and Argonians are far better.

Ah, yes, I knew I had forgotten to post something else that bothered me...! The lack of spell creation! All of those very good points. I made a joke with my bf about his in-game wife cheating on him with the housecarl while he's out adventuring. It's annoying that in order to have every room in the house fully furnished you have to get the housecarl as well. Like you said, at the very least he could be guarding the exterior. Even if it were the Nord's way, you could still maintain rp by saying you're an outsider and you won't tolerate it.

I know it's 30 days for a mine to respawn... Makes you wonder why it's easier to buy the supplies you need...

Which reminds me of one of my other biggest complaints with Skyrim....

You need to invest into Speechcraft for a shop to have a decent amount of money? No, no, to have the Riverwood Trader have a decent amount of money since the other shops don't seem to hang onto the investment for some reason... I mean every shop has less than 1,000 gold on average in their entire store atm? If they're in the habit of buying goods, why aren't they prepared to make an expensive purchase ever? Is Skyrim's economy suffering? I thought war was always good for business...?

The magic system took two heavy blows with the loss if spell creation and the old spells the magic system in this game feels unfinished like something is missing.

If my housecarls interfere with me trying to set up my house while I am trying to work around the exploding item bug, I will take them to the Throat of the World and cast them off the mountain all of the housecarls in the game.

My respawns are that long as well and I think its to long especially for the plants and enemies, also I an an avid user if alchemy and its irritating. My bug here some of my plants will respawn others will not not, and then at dungeons above and below ground the enemies never respawn and I've waited well over two months in different locations to get areas to respawn and they do not.

I have a greedy mage I am planning on making and I have drawn up his perks but in order to make him fully live up to his magical potential I will have to skip the speechcraft perks in favor of the magical ones. The shopkeepers need more septims, heck in Morrowind Creeper had five thousand. Then in Bloodmoon one shop keeper in Raven Rock had ten thousand septims