That's because the demographers and surveyors don't know what a game constitutes. Seen playing a game on your smartphone? Gamer. Own a console? Gamer.

Have you ever tried to play the game without quest markers?

It's impossible because there's absolutely no dialogue giving you directions, and the quest log rarely tells you the location you're spposed to go. You'll end up wandering aimlessly unless you discovered it before by accident and remember where it is.

He's just being an apologist, or disagreeable. Anyone who has played Skyrim, or even Oblivion, knows you can't complete most quests without the compass/markers (can do without the floating markers, but that doesn't really solve the follow-the-arrow on the compass game.)

I didn't say it was easy. I said it was possible.

I'll say one word:
Clairvoyance.

In Skyrim there is no single, all-knowing journal any longer. The journal was broken down and made into items that you can find and pick up. As you go through the game will you find many of these journals. It is even possible to pick-pocket a journal from an NPC and thereby start a quest. Some quests or parts of quests then do not have pointers that you can follow, but you need to read these journals to get the whole story.

So please open your eyes. The game has not dumbed down, it is you who has been dumbed down by games with all-knowing journals and now you fail to see the bigger picture and the innovation, which is taking place here.

I'm in this group, 34 years old, have a professional career and I pay for the games I play rather then piracy them. But at the same time Gaming is a thing I do to "disconnect" from the real world with it's problems and stress. I wouldn't have mind if Skyrim was more hardcoe and more complex, but I would have mind if they made the game so complex that I had to spend hours on hours to do simple things. I like to be able to sit down and play an hour then log off, go outside meet friends and have fun and get back home and play 30 more minutes before hitting bed. This group of people don't mind complex games, but there is a balance needed. The game should be complex enough to be fun, and simple enough to be able to sit down and enjoy in small doses if needed. A lot of my friends who play games have girlfriends and families and as they say if they want to enjoy a game like skyrim it cannot be too complex and time consuming. They simply don't have the chance to sit and play the game for 5 hours each day, specially not when they have kids. A lot of the casual gamers that some people like to blame for destroying their complex games is this exact group. And they are casual simply because they cannot allow themselves to sit 5 hours each day play games if they want to keep their social life and family live up and running.

Yes...The lack of brain use bores me so much that I couldn't even play the game unmodded. I wouldn't have bought the game if it didn't have mod support.

I play without quest markers in my HUD all the time. Of course I need quest markers in my map. I check my map once and then head there without much need to recheck my map.

Edit: Of course my map is also modded to be a real map with roads, free panning, and no clouds blocking the view.

This is sort of my point, a lot of the 'casuals' are actually very experienced gamers, who has outgrown the concept of investing their entire time and life into a game, but who can still manage to deduct things and figure out a plot or story without too much obvious information. Just like you probably still prefer a well-written story over the twilight saga, and if catering to the wider audience with disposable income it would make no sense to simply 'dumb down' the game. Skyrim does a lot of things really good for this type of casual gamer, but the very simplfied puzzles and design of the quest plots is not one of them and it cannot be reduced to an argument that they designed it this way simply to make more money.

You can't look to the AAA industry for deep and complex games....they aren't there since they can sell more with a casual call of duty clone shooter. Bigger the market, more people's taste and intelligence level you have to account for, the more broad and undefined the game. This is what is happening to the Elder Scrolls games, they are trying to make sure as few people as possible get confused and frustrated when playing.

If you want true games, look to the indie games industry. No-one is ever going to accuse Minecraft or the first Portal of being dumbed down.

Of course.

IE. Kickstarter and indy projects started by driven developers that want to craft the same kind of title that you want to buy.

I feel the opposite. I could not complete the 15 because:

1) I had no idea that there was only the correct, usually "naughty" way to actually qualify as having completed the quest for the artifact to count. So I missed two that way.

2) Lod was dead. He died the very first time I went to falkreath, with a dragon pretty much plopping on his dumb head. I had no idea what he was for, noticing only 30 levels
later when I was trying to wrap some stuff up.

3) Even finding out about stuff before doing the "hunt" one, completing "two" on that one still only gave me 13 "completed." So I can't ever get that achievement.


The game did become quite challenging after 470 hours played at level 72, with 344 locations visited and 389 dungeons completed. At that point, the game decided to challenge
me by giving me 20 meg save files (xbox 360, latest patch and no xbox 360 problems) and:

1) no longer allowing me to enter the palaces in whiterun, or markarth.

2) no longer allowing me to enter my house in Markarth, where all my stuff is and my wife ysolda =/

3) no longer allowing me to exit the companions guild, since my save files got as a big as a minimum of 18 meg.

4) no longer allowing me to venture ANYWHERE remotely NEAR an outdoor nimroot, which by now resembled
the surface of the SUN.

5) no longer allowing me to enter the darkbrotherhood sanctuary, near dawnstar, to get assasination quests
(one of the last things I could do.)



6) Still pointing me to bandit leaders, as well as dragons, who never respawn.


7) As in #6, only allowing me to do 3 blades dragons, since after that it forever points me to bonestrewn crest
where the dragon NEVER respawns (the chest has respawned about 15 times, over the "years" but never the dragon.


8) I was excited to FINALLY finish blood on the ice, one of the last quests I had to do which I COULD do.
Then I was not so excited to see that the house in windhelm was not only still bloody floored,
but now was also missing all of the inner walls and the kitchen table (for some odd reason.)


So yes, 99 percent of the "challenge" is due to stupid bugs. I'd still say it was far from not challenging.
I've felt like I had to go tooth and nail on this game, to get pretty much anything done.


Even with the quest markers, it is often hard to tell where to go (I had to resort to clairvoyance a lot, even
THAT doesn't help sometimes.)

At this point I have given up on the game, with pretty much all the main quests and side quests done
anyway. I don't look forward to DLC content, since I've reached a point where the game is unplayable
until Blizzard fixes all of the "system lock up", large save game file, nimroot huge glow bugs (on the
xbox 360, if not on the other systems.)

I'm not going to start over a new character if they release and expansion, one that has done hardly nothing,
to be able to play at all in an expansion new area.

But anyway, the game is heavily spoiler intensive. You pretty much need to read spoilers to

1) not screw up the daedric quests, which will screw you out of an achievement. There is only ONE
correct way to do them, though some of them give you two options. Woe to you if some lady
wanting you to be a cannibal offends you, so you pick the "kill her" option; Oh, yeah, she was
the person you NEEDED to be able to complete that quest. Screw you if Lod died, as he OFTEN
does.

2) screw you if you encountered some main questline bug, you don't notice and you don't
reload a save until 30 levels later.

You pretty much have to read a spoiler FAQ for this game, then constantly check your progress
and make sure you are OK. On the Xbox 360, at least, you also have to become "EXTREME NIMROOT
HARVESTER!", or the game eventually becomes unplayable.

It doesnt have half the features Morrowind had.
You cant even decorate your house.

its on the edge if anything at all besides the compass and markers is removed in the next game then it will be to simplified.

come again? i can do it just fine.

No you cant.
Dont [censored] me.
You cannot and absolutely not place items on places they will stay at and there are zero movable lightsources.
nevermind Named Soul Gems!

No its only a feature the fans really really want.

Morrowind tricks the slow minded into thinking its ripe full of great weapons and artifacts because theres such an abundance of crap generic low damage weapons in shops and found on npcs. When you come across a good sword, it really makes a difference being that everything is so stat related in Morrowind.

I DONT miss running through a 2 level family crypt to find a decent perm enchant amulet, although i loved it years ago. Now i love the multi tiered quests in Skyrim that finally leads to a great item.. Like the gauldur amulet (or whatever name is). Theres also such a large selection of weapons, some very good at the start, that when you find a decent weapon it may not be a huge improvement to a skyforge weapon. I dont blame the developers, because alot of people wanted more poweful versions of 'steel' weapons being that they liked the look over some of the other over the top designs.

Im sorry, not to be overly critical but really?
You loved the Gauldur amulet.
You loved what it did, after all the lore and all the effort..
You were fine with it.

Ok.
No. Thats allright then.
:sigh:

You see, me, I when playing an adventure/ rpg, I really expected something unique. Something I couldnt make obsolete with anything I made myself/
Thats the big dissapointment for me in Skyrim.
Apart from that nothing what you do matters, nothing what you find is interesting.

But there you go.

Morrowind at least had gamechangers hidden around nooks and crannies.
Boy, I dont think Ill ever see a game made in such a superior fashion ever again, especially not with the crowd that goes: armour degradation is boring, as if hating RPG's makes your opinion valid.

It's dumbed down. It's casuals focused. Unfortunately Beth chose this path and they're not going back.

What?

Morrowind is more realistic......the world doesn't revolve around the player's level. The basic smith at Balmora never suddenly appears to be carrying super rare glass gear......and on the flip side, the specialty smith at ghostgate will always have Glass for you even at level 1. It is realistic, rare more powerful armour is hard to find as few can make them. I really enjoyed Skyrim up until I saw this.....the moment the riverwood smith that was selling only leather and stell suddenly had elven and dwarven. Immersion broken and I couldn't pick it up again.....a world that changes only on the player's level? I cant stand it.

And you can't comapre number of weapons to Morrowind, sorry, but in terms of content, Morrowind will always blow Skyrim out of the water.....that includes weapons. It has more Uniques, more types, more materials.


Basically the only reason people cant get into now is because it has poor combat (no worse then any other games of the time though), poor graphics (without mods) and lots of reading.

id say thats a pretty harsh and unfair generalization

Skyrim is dumbed down yes.

I agree with Merari above, decorating your house is now an absolute chore you have try to work around a stupid bug that sends your items spiralling everywhere in the room. Yes its annoying and ridiculous I would also like the named soul gems back again.

Morrowind rewarded you greatly for exploring and finding things for yourself. We should have the journal back, it needs to keep information in it a little neater sure but that journal is where our character charts places and events that we need to go to, our character writes down the directions he was given. We did not have an all knowing compass that directs you to your path.

Morrowind had more depth in content, especially the magic system.

Hey everyone, I have a crazy conspiricy theory. First, i'm going to do some pretending. I'm going to pretend that Bethesda is "dumbing down" for "the casual gamer" and that its all "the consoles fault." Stuff like that. But what if they're doing that as a small part in the grand scheme of things? Mabye they only were "dumbing down" to get a huge fanbase first, WAY bigger than previous TES. Skyrim made, what, 750$ million? So, once they get a large enough fanbase, i'd say they do now, they then slowly bring back everything that was lost to "dumbing down" and "consolization." Slowly reintroduce their now huge fanbase to more and more complex RPG elements. Then, after that reintroduction, we go back to the "Morrowind Golden Ages!" So we have an awesome and complex, hardcoe RPG BETTER than Morrowind but Bethesda still has their huge fanbase,and thus, profits! Huzzah! Then TES continues ever upward on the grand scale of epicness! But, of course, I had to do quite a lot of pretending to imagne that.

I don't know that I completely agree with this. I mean, it's true to some extent, but I think it's a bit of a superficial anolysis to argue a triple-A title is incapable of appealing to a hardcoe audience. The main complaint levied against Morrowind concerns the combat. Were Morrowind to be released today, with the combat, production values, and marketing budget of Skyrim, but everything else the same, is there any doubt that it would be a massive success? I mean, Morrowind already was a great success. It paved the way for Oblivion's bigger success and Skyrim's even bigger one.

The reason Elder Scrolls games have been doing increasingly better, I think, is because Bethesda has become such a household name. They sell on their industry cred alone. Would Skyrim have taken any hit in sales if it implemented equipment degradation? Or multi-path quests? Or additional skills? Or a spellcrafting system? If they completely removed map-based fast travel in favor of travel services or the magic compass, would even something like that have any substantial effect? Perhaps marginally. But I seriously doubt that Skyrim would be called anything less than a massive success.

Yeah, but if you're on PS3, if you get rid of the compass and quest markers, a lot of other stuff goes away too. Is there a way to specifically get rid of only the compass and quest markers?