I've played every core TES game; Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Obilivion, and Skyrim. I was even a beta tester for Daggerfall back in the day!

But I think it's with Skyrim that I finally 'get' the core design principal of TES games - the be anything you want to be go anywhere you want to go idea.

I've clocked about 70 hours in Skyrim so far. Unlike prior TES games, I find myself not wishing this or that was changed. I've finally come to appreciate the core design principal. I'm glad for the TES games because there really is no substitute. And there are plenty of other CRPGs out there that have gameplay that I very much enjoy that is different from TES games.

So my hat's off too for Skyrim and TES in general. Thank you Bethesda!

Not sure if trolling or just blind...

Just to name a few: Meaningful Character progression, world filled with handcrafted, contextual detail, an organic, albeit still a little formulaic scaling curve.


Oblivion was just one long math problem. You spend 20hours in the game, and you can effectively predict everything from that point. What loot you'll get, what enemies you'll fight, etc.

Skyrim could certainly use more stats, on that i agree. I would prefer having attributes back. To me however, stats are secondary.

Well, since you played NV, you know what a true quality questing system is like, without the need for the nostalgic glasses. Skyrim's system is vast quantity, with rather little quality and no branching or options whatsoever. But yes, it does draw you in, mostly for the vast world exploration and beauty.

Way to not do your job. That game was a trainwreck of bugs on release, ten times worse than even Fallout: New Vegas. (Granted, Daggerfall is 3400 times larger)

Agreed, it's amazing how much bethesda can fit into their games.

It was a long time ago. You can put your pitchfork away. Most of us did everything we could do to communicate to Bethesda the game wasn't ready. But beta testers have zero say-so about anything the developer or publisher wants to do (at least for Daggerfall anyway). All we could do was tell them what we thought and the consensus was that the game wasn't ready.

Bethesda chose to release the game in the state they did. It was their decision, not ours as beta testers who were well aware of a larege number of problems.

Yeah all these new cats whining how Skyrim is a buggy release... they ain't seen nothing yet. If only they played unpatched Daggerfall...

As for OP, I agree. The world of Skyrim is beautiful. I play at a very slow pace, heavily role-play so I'm not joining all guilds and doing all sidequests in one character. And definitely no maxing out with Alchemy/Smithing.

Sometimes I'd fire up a game just to have a virtual stroll in Skyrim.

The game has a lot to offer if you take your time with it.

There's a lot of this kind of complaint made against Skyrim Crixus - and it's perfectly valid. Choose decision x, and it turns off path y - choose decision y and it tuns off path x type of quests appear in a lot of games. Also in a lot of games you get quests which give you a choice to have a good or evil conclusion to them - which puts points into morality meters.

While they are good character defining mechanics, I have never felt I am making those decisions for any other reason than to see what content is revealed after those decisions have been made. When I got halfway through Fallout 3 playing as an evil character, I gave up. It just never felt like I was evil and the only reason I was doing it was to see the content that the devs had made or to gain evil karma points.

By not having any of these mechanics, Skyrim succeeds in allowing you to create a multitude of characters with many more facets to their personality. The way it does this is very simple - you are given the choice to accept a quest or decline it. Take "Discerning The Transmundane" for example: you can always tell Septimus Signus to shove it if you're playing as a good character, or if you're particularly evil you can accept his quest.

It's this accepting and declining of quests that make your character who they are. There's really no need to have conent locked out or have some score to keep track of. It's allowed me to create wildly different, multi-faceted characters, thanks mostly to the shear amount of content on offer. I'm looking forward to playing a pacifist Khajit based on my pet cat, and a Breton serial killer - Sutclif, The Riften Ripper. No other games even come close to that level of 'roleplayability.'

Great post.!!!

I for one would like to second that

I'm sick of seeing people not appreciate the game for what it is. I bet they can't play any other rpg games as much. Even the little things like wild life running randomly past amazes me. I even went for a swim in the lake next to Riften whilst building up my alteration and was amazed at the underwater detail.

The amount of content in the game is huge but I think the game world is a bit small. There should be more expanses of wilderness between the cool stuff.

Well, i do use glasses The world is better sure, but that's all. The perk system has potential but has too many "increase damage", etc. perks. If they really did make a diffrence all characters would end up different. Gameplay-wise Skyrim has nothing Oblivion didn't have. Except dragons and kill-cams Oh, and the new magic delivery types types (stream and glyph), but they also removed one (on touch) and a butt load of spell effects.


So you can in Skyrim. More easily even due to smaller enemy and loot variety.

It is like jpeg compression: It looks pretty enough overall, but if you look closely you realise it is just the same thing repeated over and over and over and over and over and over....


(Honestly, real life is much the same way, but it has better resolution than Skyrim.)