Poorly designed? So you're saying making content appealing to 1 group instead of 256 groups is good design?

You sir, are dead wrong beyond all comprehension of the word. Doubly so because there aren't even any consequences for the polarizing issues in the game. It's just arbitrary and removes all suspension of disbelief for all but one character archetype.

Seriously, what is up with people saying "Poor design" like they actually know what it means?

1/Overall writing - excessive scripting, some truly awful stories full of gaping plot holes and terrible dialogue, bland uninteresting characters, lack of dialogue options for the player or decisions with consequences. My major gripe. I firmly believe Bethesda badly needs to sack whoever comes up with this drivel and hire some writers.

2/Maybe should be part of 1/, but game design that constantly tries to railroad the player and assumes they automatically want to be a combination mage/warrior/thief. In other words, aiming directly at the lowest common denominator mass market player.

3/Race doesn't mean anything - there's a whole really interesting potential mechanic that is being ignored. Presumably to avoid upsetting the legendary 'casual gamer' in some fashion.

4/Inexplicable absence of any kind of optional hardcoe/realism mode. Mods are there but can be very buggy. And game isn't designed with it in mind which doesn't help.

5/Can't walk past NPCs without them constantly repeating the same inane lines over and over again. This is probably the leading cause of homicide in Skyrim. The Skyrim my characters are in that is.

Yes I realize that there aren't any consequences and even hardly any really polarizing options. I thought that complaint was really funny. Again there should be hard choices and they should have consequences. There shouldn't be less of what is already almost nonexistent.

You're obviously playing a different Skyrim than me.

Every faction quest is a polarized hellhole that forces you into one (Not even two) options. You're told what to do, and how to do it, and your options are: Follow or avoid the content.

I'm slightly confused. The two of you seem to agree 100%. :/

I just think he's missing my point. How Skyrim is made, they put a lot of arbitrary weight (Polarizing) on the quests, but with only one executable option most of the time, it doesn't work. (The second option being to avoid the content)

An example of doing it right in Skyrim, is the minor quest involving Lynly Star-Sung and the Black Briar's son in jail. That's a polarized issue, but has two appropriate outcomes.

An example of Doing it Wrong, is all of the Factions (Dark Brotherhood arguably exempt). Even the Thieves guild runs into the problem with the whole quasi-religious nature of the Nightingales. Basically signing over your eternal soul for absolutely nothing.

So basically I'm saying, if they're going to make linear quests with no room in-game to shape the outcome, make sure the content appeals to a broad spectrum of personalities. Better?

1. Lack of accomplishment from finishing Main Quest
2. No Attributes
3. Lack of character development
4. No real choices
5. Imbalance between melee damage and magic damage

1. Horses. 'Nuff said.
2. PLEASE, overhaul the bow animations. I've shot bows for years now and its not practical nor accurate to shoot a bow sideways. You can crouch and shoot a bow normal. Take the sideways shooting out.
3. Please make cities bigger. Why is it that the minor holds are as big as towns? Cities should be BIG. Minor holds should be as big as regular holds now, and tows should be as big as minor holds now.
4. Make smithing useful. As an example: I start the game and get a set of iron armor. The chest part only covers my torso, but I can get iron and leather straps to make shoulder guards, and add those onto my armor. Now after I do that my rating goes up, and so does the value, and obviously the look changes. Going a bit further, there should be multiple options for how the shoulder guards should look. You should be able to use one suit of armor for a very, very long time, and never get tired of it.
5. Make sneaking harder.

Bonus: When you kill someone with a set of armor on, you shouldn't be able to take the armor off of them and slip it on. Why? Because to kill them you obviously destroyed their armor first. This ties into smithing. You can take the ruined armor to a forge, and with a couple ingots you can repair the armor. And yes, I am advocating for the return of weapon degradation.

Bonus Bonus: If I'm sharpening a steel battleaxe, why can't the grindstone show me sharpening a steel battleaxe instead of an iron sword?

I guess you're using the wrong words for what you're talking about. Polarizing options would mean that there are dilemmas in which one option is just as troubling as the other (at least that's what I took it to mean). I agree with you now that I know you meant that there should be more options.

5. Though an improvement over Oblivion, Skyrim is still not nearly as deep as Morrowind.

4. Smaller cities (Dawnstar, Falkreath etc) feel small and generic, and not worth visiting.

3. Vampirism and Lycanthropy both kinda svck. Vampirism abilities are weak and werewolf form is no stronger than normal.

2. Short, shallow guild questlines. Since these once formed the bulk of an Elder Scrolls game they're especially disappointing.

1. PC and PS3 versions are lazy ports of the now-preferred Xbox 360 version. --> Atrocious UI and optimisation problems.

1. Weapon holding stance, it looks really strange to me.
2. The College of Winterhold, I love the location, the quests were the disappointment.
3. No spellmaking.
4. The quantity and quality of voice actors, even a game like Wizard101 has more and better voice actors.
5. All characters you can create look old.

1. Enemies killmoving me
2. Farmers rushing to fight dragons :S
3. Werewolf player one shot'd by Plunderer archers.
4. Weak drain life spell for vampires,
5. The invisible items for vampires(thieves guild hood, ebony/blades shield) is disappointing.

1. Weak RPG elements
2. Ridiculously linear storylines
3. Boring, menial side-quests
4. Dull, two-dimensional characters
5. Sluggish first-person camera

Another thing I can add is alchemy is not nearly as good as it was in oblivion.

1 - no beast legs!
2 - UI
3 - no attributes
4 - and the fact that game expects of you to play a nord

1. The dialog is dumb as hell. Please Bethesda fix this in your next game, the options are so limited, and most of the time they give me one thing to say, at least put more options! And IF there are more than 1 option, they either 1. don't fit my character or 2. are stupid things that no one would say, every NPC has the option "What do you think about the war?" or "Does the war affect you?"

2. Forces you to join some factions/start a quest that you don't want to begin.

3. The fact that they could do so much more with factions/quests but they all feel unfinished.

4. Few spells.

5. Not many factions! And sometimes you don't even get a choice in quests like helping the gray manes and you can't even help the battle borns.

But I still love it

Sounds like old used vajayjay to me.

1.You can't fly a dragon.

2. You can't become a Jarl/dictator.

3. You can't use magic to control time.

4. There is no Cooking Lvl. (imagine the possibilities... Become rich from killing, cooking, and selling food.)

5. No six scenes... (-,_- )

If we had more dialogue options... It would be like a whole new game...
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1376874-skyrims-dlcs-need-to-have-more-emotional-context-than-vanilla-skyrim/

Im not defending Bethesda, but guys make it constructive. If they do happen to see this, it might just make them upset or something. idk.

Mine are:

1) NPCs running in front of you while you're attacking an enemy, causing you to get a bounty, and them to continue attacking you so you have no choice but to murder them and/or reload.

2) The rather sub-par dialogue, voice acting and facial expressions.

3) The terrible UI, lack of a sortable inventory, and the game never correctly acknowledging which dialogue option I choose.

4) Magic doesn't scale, making destruction magic utterly worthless.

5) The fact that nothing you do has a real and tangible effect upon the world, save for guards mentioning various things via set dialogue responses to your presence near them.

Just reading this thread they could make the greatest RPG ever created. That's pretty constructive.

I can't see any logical way for this to work.

Quests in skyrim all together. We will see how Dawnguard turns out, but vanilla skyrim quests were pretty bad.

One other thing that bothered me and I just thought of now since i'm playing skyrim at this moment is the fact that Archery is not in the Sneak (Rogue) standing stone skills. It really shouldn't be in the warrior class of skills.

there are female imperials, they just "serve" the empire in a different way.....legate rikke is the exception because she's a strong nord woman and can rock with any man on a battlefield