@ Smokeyman - I was about to bring up World of Warcraft. After playing that game for years I can attest that the average player is an idiot, but even they get along fine with attributes, needing to define your character's skills and make informed choices (through talent trees), high risk of failure, etc. all of the stuff we want in Skyrim.


That's actually not true. Many of the older guys have been forced out of the company, including many of the masterminds who worked on Morrowind. Todd Howard is arguably one of the last 'important' people who has been with Bethesda since the early years.


The only conspiracy here is probably an Accountant-driven one. "Okay we're going to allocate $100,000 to quest design, $2,000,000 to tree design, and $2,000,000 to voice acting because those last two are what sell the game in the brief interviews and screenshot/gameplay footages."

Edit: Look at this list of the Morrowind team and see how many important people have since left the company. http://uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Development_Team

The Big ones: http://uesp.net/wiki/General:Ken_Rolston
http://uesp.net/wiki/General:Mark_Nelson
http://uesp.net/wiki/General:Michael_Kirkbride
Even Gary has been downgraded to just an 'Animator' for Skyrim http://uesp.net/wiki/General:Gary_Noonan

This is some damn good 'baiting' if you ask me. You really know your stuff.

Also

66. Bandits and other hostile NPCs react the same way to a guy in a fur armor and to a guy in a daedric armor.

I may be mistaken, but that is not accurate. Off the top of my hat, I can cite but one major dev who moved on to team up with another studio, Ken Rolston, now part of the Kingdoms of Amalur team, which, incidentally, does not seem to be that great. Most of the major producers are seasoned BGS members, but, again, I could be misinformed. And of course, there's Todd himself. He meant well. He just screwed up on selected occasions along the process.

See my edit to the previous post.

Obviously the worse list of complaints i have ever seen.

Do people not realise that the Dev team are restricted by what the publishers allow them to do. I'd wager that they aren't allowed to make more complex game in fear of losing customers.

I could only come up with 77 annoying things about Skyrim.

1. No Skippable Tutorial
2. Preset Character creation
3. Have to choose Hadvor or Ralof, can't choose neither
4. Bugs, Bugs, and more bugs
5. Too many essential Characters
6. Dialoge when walking near an NPC
7. No Spell Creation
8. Magic is no longer magic, it's just flash without substance
9. Esbern
10. Delphine
11. Can't finish the Golden Claw without getting the Dragon Shout
12. No Mithril Armor
13. No Light Skinned Redguards
14. Bretons can't have regular faces, they must be rounded
15. Radiant Story
16. Blade and Blunt being seperated into One Handed/Two Handed
17. The amount of streamling
18. The Horrible Journal
19. Can't complete the Civil War quests unless you start the main quest
20. Can't complete Forbidden Legend without joining the College of Winterhold
21. Can't kill Maven Black Briar
22. No Option to destroy the Thieves Guild (They will forever be mediocore if you don't join, that's still no excuse though)
23. Quest markers aren't optional
24. No toggle for Killcams
25. Attribute system or lack of good attribute system
26. Too many bad perks
27. The Mephala Daedric Quest
28. Can't be a Blade while Parthuraax lives
29. Alduin being too easy too kill
30. All the characters you create are the same
31. Civil War
32. Can't avoid Forsworn Conspiracy, if I do the note stays in my inventory as a quest item
33. Companions
34. Guilds are too short
35. Dragons
36. Winterhold is too small
37. Weapons and Shields don't disappear
38. Atomic Nirnroot
39. No Dragonbone weapons
40. No Weapon/Armor Degradtion
41. Clavicus Vile's Daedric Quest
42. Player Vampires
43. Player Werewolves
44. Respawn for dungeons takes too long
45. fininte merchant money
46. Game doesn't explain how to get Esbern or getting to Septimius without joining a guild
47. Stone Of Barenziah quest can't be completed without joining a guild or doing the main quest
48. No Reputation system
49. No real choices in quests
50. No Waterwalking
51. No Open lock Spells
52. No combat in Water
53. Not enough spells
54. Not every town has a smelter
55. Can't complete Companions questline without becoming a Werewolf
56. Can't complete Thieves guild questline without becoming a Nightingale, can't choose not to be one either
57. Marriage
58. Not enough Khajitts or Argonians
59. Hardly any content from Blades
60. Birthstones replacing Birthsigns
61. Not enough Dwemer Ruins (Should be double the current number)
62. Morthal Hold has hardly any content
63. No Stamina loss when swinging a weapon
64. Two Handed Weapons swing too slowly
65. Can't Smith Arrows
66. Can't cut arrows from corpses
67. Forced Event with NPC's including Brynlolf
68. Not enough Unique Equipment
69. Level Scaled Quest rewards
70. No Horse Armor
71. Bosmer and Altmer look ugly
72. Altmer have to be yellow skin color
73. Horses are forced to be in 3rd person while riding
74. No unique High Level NPC's wearing powerful armor like Morrowind
75. The UI for containers is bad, no divider
76. Unique equipment isn't amazing statwise
77. Daedric Artifacts aren't as powerful as Legendary Smithed Daedric Sword/Armor

I really won't go back an forth with this. You may very well be right. But I distinctly recall a number of producers saying otherwise and I think even Todd talked about this long time partnership live around E3. My point holds: Todd, the Team, mean well. They make mistakes. They made mistakes. Some more serious than others. If you subscribe to the conspiracy theory than you've struck a vein of pessimism which won't allow for any comeback. This game, this series, is, would be, ruined once and for all, for the driving force would no longer be Creativity but Money. I, on the other hand, recognize they're but human and as such bound to make mistakes and, here's the difference, possibly correct them.

these actually make more sense than the OP's.
well, MOST of them at least...

It isn't the Dev team that are out for money as such but the publishers who tell them what to do!!!

I want to make it clear that I don't think Todd Howard or anyone else on the design team is some evil genius trying to screw us all while taking our money, or somehow are willfully making bad choices, sabotaging their game, or else poking diehard TES fans in the eye on purpose.


I think this is an argument that could be made as being the reality for Bethesda, perhaps most video gaming companies. It doesn't stem from anything Todd Howard does though, if it does exist it comes from the corporate bigwigs and the Accounting department.

I was a tad too cynical in what I wrote, I guess. But when it comes right down to it, I'm pretty sure an awful lot of perfectly good aspects of the TES series, and Skyrim in particular, have suffered due to money trumping creativity. Not that creativity doesn't exist, or that the people working on the game aren't trying to make the best game they can within those monetary and related design limits. But the fact that money and release date concerns did pretty obviously affect the contents and quality of what is in Skyrim today, saddens me. And makes me appreciate those companies with a hard and fast "we'll release it when it's done" policy, like Blizzard and Valve, all the much more.

I wrote a real, 5+ page review of the game about 2 months ago and the thread was locked.

Gotta be all the crybaby whining on the forums about the same game the people who are complaining about have played for hundreds of hours.

After reading this I went back and watched some interviews with Todd Howard and Pete Hines done just before and just after release. They talk about how they all (devs too) played different iterations of the game over and over and kept changing things. Todd speaks of how dragons were a small part origianlly but kept getting elevated in focus and story as they kept getting cooler. It seems that if Skyrim suffers from a basic mistake it may be that the final content was not "frozen" in development soon enough to be able to then really polish the game and the content they had.

That would include the repeatative dialog, bugs, glitches, quests to nowhere that seem to be littered throughout the game. It also speaks to why the glitches are so hard to find and fix. As they added and then took out whole aspects of the game I'm sure many dangling scripts got left in because someone was not familiar with all the other aspects of the game that script delt with or depended on.

None of this speaks to the OP's topic really except to say BETH made choices that some of us cannot see the sense of. As a quick example: I cannot fast travel in a wagon when encumbered but I can on my horse. I do not dislike this, it's that I do not understand it. It defies common sense. We all know you can load more in a wagon pulled by one horse than one horse can carry on their backs.

My previous post has other examples where the game world sort of misses the common sense mark.

I'm referring to the fact that the Innkeepers walk with you to your room, but there's usually only one room in the whole place and you can get there and sleep by the time the inn keeper has walked there.

I'm not sure if you're arguing for or against handpicked loot, but I don't think every single piece of loot in the game should be or can practically be hand-picked. There should just be a lot more than there is in Skyrim, or at least if there is going to be randomized loot, the pool of items that can potentially appear in a certain place needs to be smaller. Like... it's fine if there's a random chance of either orcish boots, orcish gauntlets, or dwemer shield to be found in chest x. It's not fine if there's a random chance of any single piece of armor in the game to be found in that chest, because it means loot between locations has no significance at all, so there's no reason to go to new dungeons... just clear out the same one over and over and get any item you want.

It's not only baiting, I really hope betheda developers read this and see what I mean. I didn't supply long arguments because I think if you're paying attention while you play the game it should be pretty obvious how the things I listed are annoying.

I agree with everything.

That didn't really make sense, but do you mean that the people who complain have played for hundreds of hours and you think that's hypocritical? I'm sure I haven't played for more than 200, and with a game this big you need to play for a long time to experience all it has to offer before making a judgement. If I played for 5 hours on one character and completed 25% of the main quest and nothing else, I'd be missing 90% of the game's content, and it wouldn't be a very good basis for saying "The game's content is boring overall."

You also can't run while carrying too much weight, but you can still somehow jump.

There is a difference between whining and criticism.

Yes, notice that nobody has said anything like:
"Skyrim svcks and I hate bethesda for making it!"

I'd say that was quite a bit of overkill, with some truth peppered in. Personally, I'd slim it down to:

1. Achievements do not impact the world. Factions hold no bearing.
2. No combat on horse back.
2b. Horses AI
3. Role playing is pointless. (IE food does nothing, no drink, pointless wood cutting)
4. The Dungeons are too easy. I should have to work my ass off, to get a scarp of clothing that barely protects me from impossibly tough monsters, and struggle against fantastic bosses.
5. Lack of diversity in equipment/enemies/dungeons

Wow it sounds like I hate this game, after reading all that.
I really don't. I love it.
I just... wish I could love it more.

My problem is (and perhaps you would concur) is that everytime I start to love Skyrim again there's some new terrible idea or game design that I discover, or I'm having fun and then run out of stuff to do on that character because they focused too much on graphics and there aren't enough quests/guilds/structured things to do.

The thing that annoys me the most is how you can become the leader of every guild and run around in the armor of opposing factions (wearing archmage robes while Farkas complains about Winterhold) to no effect. This game needed a faction/reputation system.

Yes, I defiantly agree.

No libraries??

What is at the College then?

Don't dis the Head Librarian either, he is mean.

You ought to try roleplaying. It can 'free' you from the need to have quests in order to have something to do. There's always plenty to do - hunting, woodcutting, chatting with your character's friends, or just exploring. Try taking a walk through the Rift, or take your character hunting around Falkreath early in the morning and returning to the inn at night for some mead and a bed.
Also, the radiant quests provide plenty to do, the guild quests are well written (with the possible exception of the Companions, which I'm not a big fan of) and the radiant quests ensure that there's plenty to be done.

And I'd like to remind you that just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's a 'bad game design decision' or a bit of 'terrible design', because there'll be plenty of people who like that feature.