who? you? by yourself? haha!!!! After the 15 years you spend developing it hope its worth claiming you can.

I think some of the top modders, working together with Bethesda's resources could maybe make a better game. As for me? Not with an army of genetically engineered super monkeys at my side.

Does not compute. To say that if you could possibly do something, you already would've done it makes no sense. The only way it makes sense is if everything that is going to happen has already happened.

Give me the same resources Bethesda has and I`d MAKE a better game- easily.

But think of all the fun you could have with an army of genetically engineered super monkeys. [censored] making games, fly my pretties, flyyyyy!

who? you? by yourself? haha!!!! After the 15 years you spend developing it hope its worth claiming you can.

I'd set them to fight with brooms till they realized they couldn't cut with them, and then shoot them, but then they'd woke up because I hadn't used real bullets. To make It more interesting, I would have brought them to Malta, the Antartica or Amsterdam (Not sure which, is the moon a viable option?) and erased their memories, so they'd have to retrace their stories till they found I killed their mother. To make It more interesting, I'd spray them with an anti-long-term-memory something, so they would have to take annotations on photos like in that movie. God I love that movie (was it "Memento"?).

As an actual game production student heading into the game industry (which I've worked in before) I'll say this...

I won't ever say I can, or will, outdo someone else's IP if I am given a chance to work on it, re~boot it, or what have you.

What I will say is that I will try to do my best at what I do, and that's make games. I will look at what has been made before me and what has been made around me and try to find what I believe (and what hopefully my fan base will believe) works well and what doesn't work well.

Skyrim gets alot of hard criticism and in some cases just flat out hate from [mainly] its hardcoe community. I don't how long it's been like this though, I wasn't a forum user when I played Oblivion.

Anyway, there are alot of things to be considered when complaining about TES/BGS. First, let's take a look at the size of the game. Skyrim is massive, and offers a plethora of content to the player(as do all TES). I'm suprised it was even possible to fit it all on an Xbox 360. This is one of the right directions that The Elder Scrolls series is going in, and there are few other games who do this. For example, let's look at Call of Duty. Do you know how much time the average Call of Duty player spends online? 51 minutes, according to Activision as of sometime last year. Do you know which was the most played game of 2011? Skyrim, even though it sold not nearly as much as Modern Warfare 3 did. I don't think Skyrim has been 'dumbed down' for 'casual gamers'. Does it cater to a broader audience? Yes. Has it been simpler? Yes, but it has also been made alot smoother. Complexity isn't always a good thing. And the game is still rich with Elder Scrolls Lore, etc. High sales aren't a bad thing either. High sales mean that the next game will be more immersive and hopefully an overall even better experience since BGS now has a higher budget. 'Dumbed Down' is an extremely crass and blatant term to label the game(especially as a whole).

This brings me to my another point. Are you a game developer? I doubt many(if any at all) of the forum users are game developers. I further doubt that anyone other than maybe certain administrators influenced the making of this game. That means that you don't know how the decision-making process of this game went. You don't know why Bethesda decided to scrap this mechanic or that weapon, why they decided to simplify this and implement this to replace that, or the sacrafices and benefits from these choice. Making a game is hard, paticularly when it comes to Innovation. If you try to innovate, there is a good chance it might not work out, because you are taking a risk from a development standpoint, and people will complain about it. Fans don't always like change, especially some hardcoe ones. However, if you take a more conservative approach, people will complain that the series is becoming stale(Call of Duty being another great example). Also, when you innovate, you are also most likely experimenting, seeing what works and what doesn't. A perfect example of this in Skyrim: The Perk System.

One final small issue: Graphics. A common complaint is that graphics/appealing visuals are another attempt at svcking in more gamers. Maybe they do, but this is not true. A game development studio has an interesting group of people called 'Artists'. These 'Artists' are responsible for creating the visuals and artwork of Skyrim. If you're an artist, working on a game like Morrowind or Fallout 3 may not be the most accomplishing experience. They made a game as beautiful as Skyrim because they had the ability to, and they wanted to test their new technology to its fullest, not to svck in newcomers for the purpose of sales'.

I feel that Bethesda and Skyrim receive alot more hate, harsh criticism, or whatever you want to call it, than they deserve. In my opinion, Bethesda are one of the best developers out there, few can rival the time they put in, the detail they create, and the passion they have for their games. I think it's because we can forget the game developers are people too, not genies who exist solely to grant our every wish and make the perfect game. People don't realize that making a game is alot harder than it seems. No game ever is or will be perfect. Skyrim isn't perfect but I think it's an amazing game, I think it's the best in the Elder Scrolls series yet(disputable of course). It's one of the best games I've ever played and I look forward to future titles by Bethesda.

Memento is bloody awesome - but in that case you'd also have to tattoo them with key moments of their their life and send Joe Pantoliano as their guide to retrace their steps for an indefinite period of time.

Overall, a good use of genetically engineered super monkeys (and Joe Pantoliano) I think. Video game development is wasted on them really.

As an actual game production student heading into the game industry (which I've worked in before) I'll say this...

I won't ever say I can, or will, outdo someone else's IP if I am given a chance to work on it, re~boot it, or what have you.

What I will say is that I will try to do my best at what I do, and that's make games. I will look at what has been made before me and what has been made around me and try to find what I believe (and what hopefully my fan base will believe) works well and what doesn't work well.

Insight: Genetically enhanced Joe Pantoliano. M I N D B L O W N

I do plan on making a game at some point in time. I put well over a thousand hours into a TC for Oblivion. Most of the people here who say they can make a better game really don't understand how difficult it is. Most of them would give up in a month or two. (Or, not start at all.) Finding faults in someone else's work is trivial. Any idiot can do it. Coming up with an entire game that doesn't self-destruct under its own weight is much much harder. Most of the solutions I've seen proposed on these forums to "fix" the game are just as bad if not worse than the original design. (Some of them are better, though.) I like the enthusiasm, but honestly, there's a lot more to game design than finding a better way to implement one little feature in a huge piece of software.

The whole "modders could make a better game" is also completely fallacious. Yes: a good team of modders with the right resources could make a game like Skyrim. Those people are called a development team, and BGS happens to be one of them. Amateur modders have the luxury of fixating on trivial elements and elaborating them into great features. I know that, because I'm a modder. It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to worry about putting food on anyone's table. Incidentally, you should be aware of the double-standard most people employ to criticize a game studio for being concerned about money: there isn't a person on this forum who wouldn't be worried about making back the enormous financial debt they're incurring while working on the game. Are companies sometimes more fixated on returns than they should be? Probably, but calling the devs lazy and greedy is patently naive if not consciously vicious. I don't happen to suffer from paranoid delusions, so I'm comfortable with believing that Todd Howard and the rest of the devs are human like myself and not cardboard villains in a adolescent fantasy of rebellion.

As to the whole "critics don't have to be developers" argument goes, I agree. You don't have to know a thing about game design to be a good game critic. Of course, the corollary of that is: if you're criticizing the game but don't understand game development, what makes you think you could make a better game? The blade cuts both ways.