Oh, come on. Neither of those games were any harder than Skyrim. In Morrowind you could kill an entire dungeon in one cast of a spell the moment you entered on the highest difficulty setting. In Oblivion that ability was greatly reduced, but you still had tremendous destructive capabilities and could do close to the same. In Skyrim people are complaining that spells are too weak to kill mudcrabs effectively!

Well I do thing Bethesda did a good job on Skyrim. So there a few bugs but its nothing that can't be fixed in a few patches. Love The Elder Scrolls games thats why I got the Collecters Edditon of Skyrim.

Yep, I gave them 60 bucks and there's more coming should they surprise me with a big fat expansion like SHivering Isles.

I give Bethesda credit, personally I love their company. I started to doubt them after the console glitches on Skyrim; but ever since I switched over to PC gaming I am proud to say that i'm experiencing my favorite Bethesda game in sheer enjoyment: Skyrim. Definitely the best game to come out in what seems like a long time.

Bethesda produced a good game.

Unfortunately, with content they removed, was not given enough attention, or badly balanced, the good game could have been great.

Bethesda did an incredible job with Skyrim! The graphics are great and the map is vast and ripe with dungeons. I feel like I'm in another world when I play Skyrim. Combat has improved from previous TES games as well as the way characters look. My character doesn't look like a cartoon anymore.

But the guild quests could've been longer and more substantial, the writing could've been better too. But hey Skyrim is still awesome!

I will give them credit for a beautiful huge open world with detailed dungeons but as for the rest of the game well its a let down.<__has gone back to playing The Witcher 2 a game with a story line.

Well they've regained some of my respect for their support with the latest patch.

Yep is a Great game ( bugs aside ) I've spent prolly a total of 600 hrs in Skyrim so far... I really like the way the perk system lets you specialize your character to enhance role-play.

And just think... it's not over... I've heard Tod Howard say they want to add more to the existing game as well as new areas in the form of DLC.

Lets keep bucking fo guild ad-ons... and a return to Cyridill and Morrowind.... Mabey even Highrock and Hammerfell.

Pirates of the carribean was freeking awesome!!!!!!!11111111!

This is because game balancing is effectively Bethesda's Achilles Heel. They just can't do it.

Morrowind had big problems with the game becoming too easy at high levels, so Bethesda addressed this in Oblivion with an extremely aggressive level-scaling scheme that played a big part in the community's scathing outlook on the game, because not only was it way too pervasive (EVERYTHING was scaled) it also *cringe* dumbed the game down *end cringe* (I hate using that phrase, but it is warranted here) by making it so you would always be able to handle anything thrown at you. No extreme danger to flee from and try again for at a different time, and no breezing through those small-time bandits later on to make you feel like you really did get better.

Fallout 3 fixed the most glaring issues, but after seeing Skyrim, I have come to believe that Bethesda is relying on the level scaling too much to do the balancing for them. They thought spellcrafting was unbalanced, so they "fixed" it by destroying it, gutting the magic system in the process. But it is pretty clear they learned nothing from previously given how badly you can unbalance this game with Smithing and Enchanting (which also made mages an inferior class crafting-wise as they are now the only class who cannot create their respective weapons). Outside of the level scaling, there is literally no balancing at all.

It's become a crutch, and no attempts were made to try for more creative balancing solutions (set level dungeons, for instance). The only thing different from Skyrim's scaling to Oblivion's is that Skyrim still allows low-level equipment and creatures to show up for high level characters, but that's kinda transparent, as you cannot hide from the player that the gear gets better and the enemies get tougher as they get stronger everywhere they go.

The reason I'm not to keen to labour them with praise is that they've given us a good open world, but not much in the way of good writing or questing. Don't get me wrong, it takes a lot of work to make an open world and they are undeniably the masters of it, but it is far more challenging to develop good quests and writing (speaking from personal experience). Which leaves the feeling that they've skipped out on the harder part and focused on the open world, where its fairly difficult to go wrong.

Agree. Though I think the vast majority of criticasters is being constructive about it. Most are fans of Bethesda / TES anyhow and they want it to be as good as it can be, from their viewpoint.

The other people who just rant, rave and troll about their disapproval are mostly ignored anyhow.

Cheers Bethesda Quite a game to spent hours playing... and fixing bugs xD Still the world is good, gears and gameplay are awesome.

An expansion please? :">

Oh boo-hoo.. You wouldn't be saying that if you're playing Skyrim on the PS3!!

The Witcher 2 is pretty linear when compared to Skyrim or any TES game for that matter. It's a lot easier to make a better story driven game when that game is all about the story.

I think it's come to the point where games designed for PC will just be better than console games. Consoles are slower than my cell phone and have a much younger playerbase. A game like the Witcher 2 can appeal to more mature audiences and not be limited by the parameters of a console. Just look at how short the questlines in Skyrim were, improving the graphics really made them take a hit.

I can't entirely fault Bethesda for the problems I have with the game. Bugs, poorly balanced combat that's all breadth and no depth, and that sort of thing? Well...it isn't like it hurt there sales. It isn't like its hurt them in the past. I can't say I blame them for producing a product that people clearly indicate they want even if it does have non-trivial problems like that.

Same is true of the bad dialogue (even though that could be better on the same budget in theory). I'm a bit more annoyed at how they started some good ideas in Oblivion like dynamic conversations in the street and the disposition system, and rather than expand and refine those things, they just drop them and replace them with much worse mechanics. Seems to me the games would benefit a lot from continuing to add complexity and automated depth to such systems. On the other hand, the market doesn't seem to care that much...so...blargh.


No. The story in the Witcher 2 is far, far less linear than what you see in Skyrim. TES games never have complex stories, they are all extremely linear with at most one branch in any story and some of those are pretty trivial in terms of the difference that makes in gameplay. I think the real problem here is they waste waaaay too much time scripting every little quest -- the radiant story stuff is pretty much a joke in terms of what it does. If they made a decent system to handle that sort of thing for the little quests, then they could do a lot more with the story. That said, even what resources they do spend on it isn't that great...I mean most of the dialogue is pretty bad, and it wouldn't take that many resources to flesh things out with a few main characters and the main quests in Skyrim.

That said, it would be interesting to compare things between games. I'm not actually sure that Skyrim really does spend a huge amount of resources doing the quests compared to other RPGs. I mean, the vast majority of the quests are simple fetch this or kill that quests. They are almost all extremely simple. I'm far from certain they actually spend as much time on the quests as a game like Dragon Age: Origins. Doubly so when you consider how linear all the questing is in comparison.

Credit for creating such a unique gaming experience? Sure, I love them for it.

Credit as in comparison to the previous titles? Not allot

No question, it's an excellent game...but it still has bugs that appeared in Fallout 3, among other things.