I see some minor problems with the game, that maybe can be improved upon with some effort. Over all though, I think Bethesda improved what needed most improvement, like combat, third person, character animations... its all quite impressive.

Thank you for saying that because if anything, it's a very deep and detailed game, nothing casual about it. There are a lot of systems to learn from mixing potions to enchanting items and the best way to get the best out of that and making armor and then there's learning about the perks and choosing the right ones and learning the map and how to navigate the place and what weapons works the best against which enemy, the factions and so on and so on. I still have a lot to learn and I can see why some people almost feel overwhelmed by it...and then some don't even look deeply to see what's in it.

Yep, and I apoligized and deleted my post. After I re-read his post, I realized I misread his thread.

People who claim that Skyrim is a pure action RPG are off IMO. There are tons of things in Skyrim that are slower paced, and allow you to simply enjoy the scenery for a while. There are a bunch of new systems like cooking that weren't in the other Elderscrolls games, and the crafting system is also more extensive.

The one thing that's typically lamented is the lack of sweeping changes you can make to the world and the railroaded quests. The first criticism, well, it's damn near impossible to have a sandbox world that changes wildly depending on what the player does. The other thing, well, I do think that was lazy on Bethesda's part. Then again, you can wipe out the Dark Brotherhood instead of joining them via a quest - so even there it's not like they used single track questlines as a general mandate.

Cooking and crafting don't make an RPG.

First off Im not a Rabbid really devoted fan, and Skyrim is the first Bethesda game I have tried, never played fallout and I never played morrorwind or Oblivion.

Now to the point... You say you loged about 400 hours into the game ( I have about 200 hours myself, level 58 darkelf, dont like alts so I dabble in most everything). 400 hours... a full Work week in my country is 40 hours... That means you have loged about 2,5 half months full time, if you had been working at a Jobb. Do you understand that the avrage person, who works and has a family, goes to school full time and can maybe put in 10-20 hours a week. But for avrage sake lets say they can put in 20 hours.... That means it will take them 5 months to get were you are at now. That is a hell of alot of enternainment for the price...

I mean come on.. what other games out there give you this? I can count them on my five fingers, Rockstar have a few, but not many single player games these days offer what skyrim offers. Sure evrything could have been even better, there are some bugs etc... But you have to put [censored] into perspective. I got this game late November, and im home all day, but I still need to do other things also, so I have only manged 200 hours. My friends who have the game that got the game about the same time as me, but are working for a living are all around level 25-35, as they have families and other obligations.

We can put another spin on this also, if you had bought an mmo, lets say Star wars the old republic, with 400 hours loged in a game like that, you would now probably be bored to death. And they are charging a monthly subscription, So come on be Realistic.. if you compare the price tag vs how many hours we both spent playing this game ( and I havent even compleated the main quest haha, and have alot to finish before I do). Point is WE THE PLAYERS WIN..

If you work you sell your time.. that is what its about, if you spent as much time working as you had playing skyrim, that is the price tag on this game.. So if we compare it like that, This game is one cheap thrill for next to nothing.. So dont be Ungratefull mate, I do understand that you think that this game had so much more potential, but the fact is if they had added any more [censored] to this game, the avrage player would have to play it about 1 year to clear it.. as it is now many will take as much as 5-6 months to get bored of it..

I honestly think we need to suport good game designers like Bethesda, for lets face it developers like this are very few, Most try to stuff half done, [censored]y things down our throats and expect us to just nod our heads and dish out the money.. Relics space marine is a good example, I cleard it in one day... and it cost just as much as this game... Most gears of war games are fast cheap thrill games also, they do have PVP but you get bored of that eventually. And if we look to the ONLINE MASSAVIE MULTIPAYER market, its overflooded with [censored]y, underdeveloped games, and they charge you per month to play...

So I ask you take a good look around at whats out there, and I think you will agree with me, that if more people buy this game the chanses are that the next one will be even bigger and more badase.. Because they know it will sell out roof, so they get more time to polish and ad to it..

I'm sooooo tired of hearing about how bad everyone thinks Skyrim is & how mad they are at the dumb / casual gamers that are enjoying it !!!!

I am torn, i am having alot of fun playing this game, but i have alot of complaints about it. Im an openminded person and can even see where they were coming from in how they dealt with the guild quests line ...........actually im on pc and thsi si why im on pc beause a majority of the problems i will have with Bethesdas games, someone will have the same problem and have the knowhow of modding and fix it, but id have to say really im spoilt on the long questlines and journals giving actual information to complete quests without having to look at a mapmarker.

So id say the only problems i have is short guild questlines and short reg questlines and the lack of quest info in the journals....and maybe a fallout stat system to help costimize ur toon so that every one isnt an avg joe everytime u start up a game .

long story short, Skyrim isnt a perfect game far from it.....but i have played over 180 ours into it and have yet to do half and still having fun and i guess thats what matters. I guess the problem i have is that Oblivion and morrowind had enuf changeable features there that the games have lasted years after they were released and im guessing most of us PC "elites" are viewing this game as yes its fun now but a year from now will i still be playing? because what can i say bethesda spoilt us by creatign games that have lasted and played for years and as someoen stated seemed to pretty much satisfy everyone..granted now a majority of the Skyrim players have yet to ever play a TES game so they believe it is awesome and nothing needs to be changed and happy with the trimming of the fat..i dunno like i said im torn i love the game but even though it is flashyier and lots of improvements, it seemed they improved alot BUT the stuff that gave TES games long life and variety was striped away.


edit----i really HATE how the forum does all those weird stuff to writing now, i can barely read what i wrote,

also u gotta also factor in that the HUGE success and hype of this game was also from id say half if not a majority of the customers of the Bethesda Fallout games.

Or, they could see that their decisions on the changes they made from previous titles (like happened before going from Morrowind to Oblivion) went over well and push the elder scrolls further away from its sandbox RPG roots because it will still sell thru the roof.

Haha, actually the game hasn't been out for two and a half months yet, if the OP has spent more than 400 hours playing it he must have been playing 8 hours every single day assuming he bought it at release. So, yeaaa... *cough* No job.

My God man!! This is why you have grown tired of Skyrim, you have spent soo much time playing the damn game that you have burnt yourself out on it. 400 hrs on any game is shameful, especially one that hasn't even been out for 2 months yet. I'm sorry to sound rude, it just boggles my mind that one could immerse themselves in a video game for 400 hrs then complain that the game wasn't made for them. I am in NO way defending bethesda, it is apparent that the game has been simplified, but not in a bad way all together. This forum has some of the most annoying and whiny human beings on earth inhabiting it. Shameful

Life checks are quite stupid.

Well, considering I could get thousands upon thousands of hours out of previous vanilla ES games, 400 hours is nothing. That's just starting up an ES, actually.

I will say that with no Spell Creation, magic builds get old extremely fast. Where you could make dozens or even hundreds of unique magic based builds, in previous ES games, its been cut down to a handful in Skyrim.

I was just posting a response to the guy who said that you'd have to log 40 hours on the game for two and a half months to hit 400 hours. The reality simply adds up to: A person who plays that much has no real responsibilities in life whatsoever. What you make of that is up to you.

Again, you're making a life check. You're assuming they have no responsibilities. Thus, the life check.

Which as I said, is stupid.

The primary problem is that the "vocal minority" sound like a bunch of whiny nimrods who structure every post as "I really like Skyrim but here's why it svcks wah wah I want back the old system!" Strangely, you can find this same phenomenon in the Oblivion forums if you look back far enough. Huh. Weird.

Haven't seen much of that at all with Skyrim criticism, and Ive been coming here since 02. Actually that just seems to be a fallacy that people spout, that most or all criticism posts aren't well thought out or structured. Said fallacy is almost as bad as terms like "spreadsheety", "Magic back in Magic", or that stats required "spreadsheet excel, and advanced calculus".

The thing I tried to get across is, When most the Market S.U.K.S donky B.ALLs, we should not complain on the few Independent studios that are still around.. Rockstar, Bethesda and Blizzard are a few... Bioware is gone, they will never make another good game, now that they are under the EA banner...

Okey you wanted more? guess what so will the Millions of people who bought this game, when the next one comes out.. Dont you understand that its a Win Win situation for us all... What many of you complainers might not understand is that we the players are at War, we need to suport the good companies and we need to crush the bad once (EA im looking at you) and whining on a very good game serves nobody (accept the giants, that if they would have thier way, we would all be playing top Dollar for short crap games that they can spit out monthly..

Try to undestand the bigger Picture please or we will all be doomed to play [censored] for the rest of eternity, telling our gandchildren, you know back when I was young you could spend 400 hours playing a game... and not 1 hour and then have to downolad the expansion for 40 bucks more.. to get another 2 housrs and then another expansion for 30 bucks for 3 more hours ( EA would love this...)

Do your part buy Indy games, subscribe to EvE online, and suport developers that bring good games to the market, even if they are a little flawed, There is a bigger principle at stake..

The first ES game I played was Morrowind. I'd not played much computer games before. I'd done the p n p AD&D thing back in the 70s -- yep, just showed my age. Morrowind totally overwhelmed me. I actually put the game away for a year after playing for a couple days on it. Then I went back to it after Tribunal came out and loaded that up because I'd heard some good things and followed some of the forum about how to play the game. I'd been picking up every little piece of trash laying around and ran out of inventory space, got killed by a mudcrab because I couldn't figure out how to kill the thing, etc. Then I sat down and finished every single quest line in the game, found every single daedric item, explored every single dungeon and cave etc. Tried skooma. Let the floating guy Vivec survive. Did Bloodmoon. I was hooked. Oblivion? full completion on that as well.

Skyrim seems to me to be a bit more sparse, but then those other games with stuff like acrobatics had their own exploits: like jumping everywhere to get jump up to 100. Oblivion had the MQ exploit where enchantment? heck with learning all that stuff and coming up with anything fancy. Those high level sigil stones did enough, and I had like 50 of them. Yeah, I kind of waited on that for a while and exploited and collected sigil stones. Didn't need any soul stones. Well, maybe one or two., but not too many. They were fun games. I did two playthroughs of Oblivion, and two of Morrowind. I'll probably do two of Skyrim.

I can see how the guild have gotten shall we say shattered in Skyrim. The Empire went into disarray so the guild infrastructure also went into disarray. I don't expect things to get any better in ES6. It's going to be interesting.

Well, thats a statement given by one that devotes ones life to video games. You must understand... I bet a majority of the people on this forum have jobs, and are hard working individuals. I suggest seeing what its like for yourself, it may humble you.

Skyrim is amazing so yeah the game should get it's praise and rightly so.

Why is there a dislike of Skyrim? I think it's just that the series is moving to a different genre. All the older fans of the series, the more RPG oriented players, are obviously upset over this change. I know I am. If you look back, the series has gone from almost entirely RPG oriented to more action-RPG oriented. It's definitely more of a "pick up and play" title compared to Morrowind and even compared to Oblivion. I definitely think the game will fade much faster compared to the previous games as well. I know Oblivion was still very popular 3 years after it's release, but I don't know if I'll be able to say the same about Skyrim.

Also it's much easier to see faults in the game when comparing it to previous or other titles. "Why couldn't they have a reputation system or in depth quests like in Fallout: New Vegas?" "Why couldn't they have spellmaking like in Morrowind or Oblivion?" "Why aren't the factions larger, why don't they have more content/quests?"

I can guarantee when the next Elder Scrolls game is released, people will be upset because there will be a feature from Skyrim (that we don't appreciate right now) that will be removed and they will complain "why isn't this feature in there?". And only after this feature is removed will we realize it actually added to the game.

That's why I went ahead with Skyrim. But if I get similar news to the next Elder Scrolls and it goes further and further away from RPG I may not be so forgiving.

Uh? It's you who's bringing up the whole "no life" thing, I never said that in any way.
I just said in all likelyhood someone who plays that much has no job.
Like I said before, I'm just stating a reasonable conclusion based on the facts, how you interpret that is your own deal.

It's apparent those who are new to the Bethesda Elder Scrolls feel this game is quite a treat- as it is compared to what is out there. But much is lost. One poster started adding up my hours for me- (I'm a stay at home dad now and have been able to put time into the game that you lucky working dogs have not) for what reason, I do not know.

I always explore the entire map of a ES game. No, I haven't done that quite yet- but bet I've found 95 percent or higher of all landmarks. (you can tell on your minimap what is there and what is not) There is not much I haven't found. My opinion is not based upon not exploring the game. It is not based upon not doing the quests. My opinion is based upon Morrowind and Oblivion, and over 400 hours in Skyrim.

You wouldn't know what I'm talking about if you've never played Oblivion or Morrowind. And that is everything- the franchise has a tradition to live up to. The argument that Skyrim is great seems to be- Skyrim is great, how can anything be wrong?

for those who are new to ES, the criticism seems unjust.