They don't. The problem is that some posters here equate "casual" with "dumb". Casual gamers are just people who don't build their lives around playing games.

You don't have to be a casual gamer or a l33t h4rDc0r3 master of the universe to like games that have good gameplay elements, which aren't built around the idea of making things more complex for complexity's sake. This has to be the only forum where "streamline" is considered a dirty word.

From Software focuses on gameplay mechanics, and not fluff. Fluff is what mainstream gaming loves. Beth focuses on fluff. Fluff makes money.

But its still a genre that isn't tackled by many other companies, Bethesda really should be focusing on ways to enhance their games based on their track record and core audience, not some hidden other audience.

They made this game imo to attract the Call of Duty audience. This game OOZES call of Duty.
- Skills are useless. Perks are the real damage makers.
- Bows shoot like guns (you have to shoot "over" the crosshair to hit)
- There's "killstreaks" that you earn from the perks. You may not see it because its not distinctly called a "killstreak" but its right there. It comes from the Kill Animations that you only unlock by spending a perk point.
- There are no FREAKING STATS. How do you have a Elder Scrolls Game without stats? Even Fallout had more emphasis on stats than this game.
- Almost every "tedious skill" is broken as hell. Iron dagger * 100 = 100 skill in Blacksmithing. Wow, immersive.
- Melee combat is a joke, just swing your sword mindlessly till someone dies, which works good for Call of Duty players since melee combat doesnt exist in that game.

I mean the list goes on, I could talk about this for days. Skyrim sure as hell "sold out", and its probably just gonna get worse.

In the end every company wants to make money, so they all target the Call of Duty audience by trying to make Call of Duty clones. That's the problem with the gaming industry today.

You made a mistake by comparing Skyrim and Dark Souls though, the production of those games have two entirely different focuses. Dark Souls isnt' aimed towards "being hardcoe". It's aimed towards creating a truly
rewarding experience that you create through your own methods. They give you all the tools to do so by making the gameplay elements so deep and limitless. They encourage you to truly "be who you want" in their world.

Skyrim has very little of that, because it wasn't made for gameplay, it was made for fluff, and unfortunately that's how it'll probably stay for future iterations of the game. The core company goals have to change.

Skyrim could have been fantastic. Imo it could have been better than Dark Souls even, the potential is "there". I think as a rival company making a similar game (Miyazaki, the maker of Dark Souls, said Oblivion is one of his favorite games after all), they actually were making their game so good in an effort to compete. Not THAT much of it being their goal, but I'm pretty sure it had crossed their minds. I'm pretty sure they're disappointed =/.

Well I haven't seen higher quality writers(or a decent ps3 port) yet so they must have blown their fortune on the graphics, hmm?

I don't know, pretty much all the gamers I know IRL who do considers themselves gamers eat all this casual [censored] up, doesn't bother them as long as it's fun on the day and until the next fun game comes out - unless it's Gears of War, the lore of that game was srs bsns apparently - ; this whole distinction between casual and hardcoe is just wrong, all the other gamers I've met just doesn't care and wants to kill stuff.

Actually, I believe Dark Souls was crafted with the goal of punishing the player by killing them repeatedly until they learned a specific tactic for a boss fight.

Some people enjoy that kind of gameplay, but comparing it to the open-world gameplay of the Elder Scrolls is ridiculous. It's like comparing Sonic the Hedgehog to Myst. They're both great games, but they're completely different in their design and purpose.

I used to think they sold out to MS years ago, with how they treated the PS3 with Shivering Isles, but I'm not so sure what their deal is now anymore.

Of course Bethesda is a sell out. The PC community claim it happened when Morrowind went to Xbox. Thing is, if it wasn't for Xbox and then Porting Oblivion to 360 and PS3, there would be in most cases no Skyrim and continuing of the series.

Bussisness is now, make alot of money, not just make money. So Zenimax tells Bethesda to make tens of millions not just millions anymore. So of course to do this you can't just use the nich market anymore, but hopefully expand it to alot of people.

It's basically buissness.

But then again... if Bethesda was really a sell out, they wouldn't be taking 5 years to make TES games or Fallout games. They would be like Activision or other games where you only get 30-50 hours of game play and be released every year then. Instead we can have up to 200 or more hours of gaming. Can that be said for others?

So while I do think Bethedsa "sold out" by dumbing down the game for the "cassual gamer" I don't see them really selling out what TES is suppose to be. Do anything you want, when ever you want and have over 100s of gaming.

Mayhap, I'd like to think that for all it's mediocrity, Oblivion did a nice job on porting from PC to the consoles despite being such a PC-centric business for so long. Plus, you have to remember that Bethesda's strengths are creating a world the experience with a created character as your tool so see said world. They're not known for their stories or characters; so them investing in graphics, radient quests, realistic behaviors and other such effects would make sense.

wth are you talking about. for all i complain i still love playing all the tes games and the 2 fallouts.

like i said, it's the next game that will pretty much highlight their decision making process and seal their fate with me.

That is pretty much my opinion on Skyrim. It's a great game but a terrible RPG and a terrible TES game. Going back and playing Oblivion, the amount of stuff that was dropped is mindblowing.

Lol no not at all. This is a common misconception with the game. Dark Souls is not meant to punish you. The creator said so himself. "A lot of people may think that we're being mean or masochistic, but the purpose is for you to gain the glory of victory through conquering the situations ahead of you." Everyone and everything in the game does a lot of damage (SO DO YOU) but if you block, you can avoid all damage. If you dodge correctly, you can avoid all damage. If you learn the distance that enemies can hit you at, you can avoid all damage. You understand?

Even if you make a mistake, its not like you die instantly either, you can make mistakes. It just punishes you hard for making mistakes to teach you whats a mistake and what isn't, and it slowly teaches you to be smart, be cautious, stay cool under pressure, and figure out a strategy that works for you. Thats also why every weapon in the game is viable. Also, if the game was made for punishing players as much as possible and imbalanced, people wouldn't be able to beat the game at level 1 (Yes its possible and I've seen it done!).

You can't do that in Skyrim. In Skyrim, if a dragon does too much damage to you in his next attack (that you can't even block all the damage from), he chomps your head and throws you across the screen and you die. In my opinion that's MUCH worse than having the game punish you more for actual mistakes, because Skyrim makes you take unavoidable damage.

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Also, Dark Souls IS an open world. Everything you see you can go towards, its just that the Dark Souls world has less...unimportant crap in it, and more valuable stuff. What I mean by that is...you'll see carbon copy places all over Skryim, lots of reused assets and large open...empty fields. Because of that it gives the impression of an "open world". But you can't really go everywhere you see...without like horse jumping. Which is fine, worlds should have limitations if need be. But its just like...after you've explored a few caves you start to feel like you've explored them all.

In Dark Souls every place you see is unique, and crafted beautifully with difference between them. There's different biospheres, and every new area feels like "Wow holy crap this is a new incredible place". In my opinion that's a much better open-world kind of methodology.

Sure there are no generic fetch quests in Dark Souls. You don't have to deliver letters and books for an 1000 gold reward, nor do you have to go hunt down bandits who conveniently stole someone's Necklace, and you have to wade through an entire dungeon filled with bloodthirsty bandits for a NECKLACE, but the game has tons of quests, and a very deep story.

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People just too often hear that Dark Souls is hard or punishing and avoid it. Or play it for a little, die because they played stupid, and get frustrated and say the game is masochistic. It really isn't. Because it gives you all the tools necessary to deal with any situation, and also gives you the flexibility to make a strategy that works for YOU.

Honestly in my opinion Skyrim is more masochistic, because you really have no control over how you take damage. You have to take damage no matter what. If a mage is throwing fireballs at you, you can't dodge or block. If someone shoots an arrow at you, you can't dodge or block that either. You need a perk just to be able to block arrows, or walk while blocking... that's true maschism imo. It's like saying "You better take that damage and you better freaking like it!"

Giving someone the experience of "the glory of victory" is another way of saying, "This game is insanely difficult."

I've played it. Not for long, because I don't enjoy that type of game. And I don't consider it open world, because to my knowledge, you're pretty much working in one area at a time, not traveling all over the map doing whatever you want. As far as I know, there's literally no other game that does what Bethesda's done with their games in the sense of a truly open-world experience.

He's asking for our opinions, not what we should do about it.

I'm pretty sure we had all this talk of "selling out" and "casual gamers ruin everything" when Oblivion came around. So why are you people acting like Bethesda have only just sold out when you've all been saying it for the past five years and possibily more? At the end of the day, so called "casual gamers" have every right to enjoy video games as much as you do, and Bethesda employees have families to feed, so they're not bad or wrong for wanting their games to be successful. If you don't like it, there's nothing you can do about it.

It just seems to be like the attitude of most people here have is that of; "Everyone is stupid, 'cept us leet hard-core gamers." Imma right?

every TES game dominates the souls games.

You could not be more right if you were named Mr. Right McRightski.

Think you got the wrong forum, the Bioware forum is ------> that way.

Seriously, Skyrim is a huge expansive world filled with wonderfully designed dungeons, lots of (semi)interesting NPC's, tons of quest and things to do, this game couldn't be farther from selling out. Are there little particulars some people will like/not like (attributes, spell making, etc)? Sure but that doesn't constitute selling out. And as for the romances, I think you got that backwards, the RP'ers would love to have great romances put into the game, its the run & gun type players that would probably care less. The shallowness of the marriage system is more a symptom of no deep followers being in the game at all.

I can't help but laugh a little when people ask questions like "is Beth selling out" and I look around and see what the rest of the industry is doing. Beth goes so far above and beyond what everyone else in the industry is doing I can't see where these folks could possibly be coming from.

However, two things:

1) I think Beth sold out on the writer department. Definitely feels like cuts were made there. We've gone from hand-crafted stories and creatures in Morrowind to just ripping off cliché stories and Nord mythology in Skyrim. I've yet to really come across a story in Skyrim that made me go "woah," whereas the Thieves' Guild of Oblivion and the entirety of Shivering Isles deserved applause. So yeah, I think they "sold out" there in the sense that it feels like the writing department is literally gone.

2) The voice actors. I never really expected much, nor do I even care about the voice acting to this day. I'm really not picky about it. However, Fallout New Vegas did amazing with their voice actor selection. Every notable character got his own unique voice actor, and every single one of them had exceptional delivery and a memorable voice. I'm not saying ALL the voices were good; there were definitely some bad ones among the less important NPCs of course, but what I am saying is that before Fallout New Vegas, I never understood complaints about Beth's voice acting and even so, questioned if they had the budget for great voice actors. Fast-forward to now, it's clear to me they DO have the budget for good voice actors if Fallout New Vegas could pull it off, and yet Skyrim, again, seems lacking.
This may simply be bad management, however. It is true Skyrim has a lot of voice actors, but while the unique voices of Mr. House, Caesar and Ulysses are noticeable and memorable because you'll likely have hour long conversations with those characters, Skyrim, again with it's shallow writing, barely ever provides you with a conversation that exceeds two minutes in length. In Skyrim's case, they may have bought the good voice actors, but simply distributed them poorly, following suit with New Vegas' formula of giving important NPCs a unique voice but failing to realize that the important NPCs of Skyrim simply cannot compare to those of New Vegas. In that sense it would've been better to let the good voice actors voice random unimportant NPCs and guards here and there instead of reserving them for a single Daedric prince and that's that.

I agree that's a weird move from Bethesda, to make races and race selection unimportant in a game that offers such a wide variety unlike other games

Two things:

1) If you haven't played it for long, you haven't played Dark Souls. That's like me playing Skyrim for a few hours and saying I've played Skyrim. Dark Souls is usually an 60 - 100 hour + game for your first playthrough depending on your skill (if you play blind without any guides that is). After that, then the game will be pretty easy to cruise through. The game trains you to be skillful, you just have to play it. I think my opinion is unbiased, as I've played both games for 100+ hours so I have a pretty good "feel" for how both games play out.

2) It is open world, and since you haven't really played Dark Souls, you can't really say it's not an open world. There are extremely elaborate places to explore, many of which are much more indepth than any cave I've walked through in Skyrim.

Plus, that point kind of moot... No matter where you are in Skyrim or Dark Souls you're always "working in one area at a time". You can't split your body and work in multiple spots in either game. Unless you mean that Skyrim allows you to instantly teleport with fast travel to cut down on travel times, which in that case, is actually in Dark Souls too, just not in a cheap lame way like fast travel. (Spoilers) Shortcuts link areas together, plus there are other methods of "fast travel" later on.

But you have to actually play the game to know about that...

It's fine if you don't enjoy it (it just means you gave up too fast), but its something different if you comment on the game as though you really gave it a chance, because I don't think you did =/.

1) I understand your point, but I simply see no reason to play a game that I find incredibly frustrating for more than the 30+ hours I spent wanting to smash the screen in. I enjoy a challenge, not punishment. It's a matter of taste.

2) It's technically open world, but not in the sense that Skyrim is. If Skyrim were like Dark Souls, I wouldn't be able to get into Riften without getting a key or beating some specific monster that is unbeatable until achieving a specific level/goal in the game. This isn't a bad thing, but it's like saying Zelda is open world. You can technically try going anywhere from the beginning of the game, but you can't actually go anywhere you want without unlocking areas.

Anyway, this thread is about how Skyrim is being "dumbed down" for "casuals". I just responded to your post because I really dislike people drawing comparisons between two radically different games.

the point is that you should go praise that game somewhere else.

Yes. They've sold out to the casuals

Its not even about nostalgia. Its stuff like, effects that are on your character arent shown on screen. Why do I have to open a menu to look at this stuff. They made the game way to minimlistic