I am surrounded by beauty in a mountain land full of wonder, and I must PLOD through it, or use a gimmick to climb a mountain. There is no earthly reason Acrobatics and chameleon and spell making are gone. And that's just the little stuff.

I haven't read through this entire thread, but I do have a few points to make.

(1) Most likely the biggest problem that fans have with a lot of the complaints is the extreme hyperbole and general tone. I myself have had some (to me, minor) complaints about this or that which I haven't often bothered to make, simply because I don't want to lend any weight to the chorus of OMG SKYRIM SUX BLAH BLAH CASUAL GAMES BLAH BLAH DUMBED DOWN BLAH WoW LOSERS BLAH BLAH BLAH CALL OF DUTY IN A FANTASY SETTING BLAH BLAH hardcoe RRRRRRAAAAAWRRRRR.

(2) Some people complain about the removal of spell creation, yet there are also people complaining about smithing and enchanting. Are there any people making both complaints, because it would seem to be a bit odd to complain about smithing and enchanting as being "game-breaking" when spell creation in Oblivion was every bit as game-breaking.

(3) Somebody made a comment that streamlining is not the same as dumbing down, and somebody else's response was "yes it is", on the grounds that the challenge of the game should be figuring out the game. I have to disagree. If there's one thing I hate having to do with games or with anything else, it's struggle needlessly to figure out just how to use the tool. The challenge should be in figuring out how to solve specific problems within the game, meaning quests and the like. It absolutely should not be challenging to grasp any game mechanic or concept. While I agree the game compass and pointers can be a bit too direct, and that perhaps Bethesda would have been better advised to give people enough information in-game to find where they needed to go, I'm not sure this would work for absolutely every location. Lots of people simply aren't going to enjoy having to scour the countryside to find a given cave without a pointer, especially given how some cave entrances can be difficult to find even in the daytime until you're right on top of them.

Daggerfall's character builder?!? No sane person would want to ruin the next TES game with that! It had depth . We don't want any of that in our action game.

Pleez stop trying taint our games with complexity, depth, or optional features. It detracts from the balance.

Balance.

hihi, I laughed

To be honest, I was expecting the dual wielding mechanic to function sort of like spell creation.

Fire & Lighting = Active Effect, stamina/magicka poison... something

Alteration & Shield = Active Effect, Turtle mode...

etc...

I really think the potential is there, and can't wait to see where they take the mechanic in the next game.

There was SO much potential and hype with this game, that no one was going to be able live up to those expectations.

Let us not forget that expansions/DLC are in the works, the ship has not quite sailed yet.

I always looked at Skyrim, even before it came out, as the end of a long running story. I've been waiting for Alduin to come back for years... YEARS... now I was a little annoyed with how difficult the battle was and all the trips leading to that eventual conflict... but god help me... I loved it.

The next Elder Scrolls is going to be radically different I'd assume, Skyrim wasn't so much about gameplay to me as it was finality. In all reality, its more of a stepping stone to hold us over for the next big conflict to come.

Hung up on the Spell-Creation thing arn't you? Ruined your whole Skyrim experience did it? What about the other things I mentioned, what is game-breaking for one person isn't for the next, if you can stand Morrowinds lack of anything regarding Intelligent A.I , NPC routines or movement, crappy graphics (good for the time though) or 'flying lizards' ; then I can stand not having Spell-Making.

I wasnt talking about struggling to figure out how things work, I was talking about the fact that a complex system takes time to learn the finesses of, and that is a major part of the fun.
A simple system that just lets you pick up and play cannot by definition be as rewarding, because there is no challenge or learning curve involved.
Its the difference between a dr. Zeus book and the Illiad, really.

What? No, leveling was ridiculous in Oblivion. I agree with how they've removed various ways to level by spamming stupid crap like repeatedly jumping or even pointing your character toward a wall, hitting the "constant forward" button and going off for a meal while your character drives his athletics score through the roof by running into a wall for an hour. Or simply casting the same spell over and over and over and over. Yes, practice makes perfect, but you can't continue to learn indefinitely by casting the same spell repeatedly any more than you'll get better at math by constantly going over the single-digit multiplication tables for six hours at a stretch.

I for one am looking forward to "TES VI: Look what we removed this time" And hopefully enough people state similar sentiments and Beth takes that into account so that we don't end up with that.


Or like i read in a book: "whipped cream on a pile of dog [censored] doesn't make it a wedding cake" (Though i would not describe Skyrim as "pile of dog [censored]" even when drunk and angry ). But that is exactly the problem, it's a pretty package, but there's nothing inside it

And really, we yell at it because we love it, but it has made some poor decisions

So the blind just want the one-eyed to leave? Eventually he will, after the lights of hope fades aways.

Pretty much ruined my experience, a third of my builds are gone from that cut mechanic alone. Yeah, because the AI now is so great, pfft. Oblivion had spell creation and everything you just mentioned. I'll take it you've never played an ES other than Skyrim though, since you didn't even know that.

But you can making Daggers


ZINGGAA

Thank you!

I also improved it slightly since you quoted it.

Ever played strategy games?? I can name tons of wargames that are really complex (mainly made by Avalon Hill), and then there′s chess...chess is extremely simple but guess what...it takes a lot more practice and skill to master chess than it does to master advanced squad leader. I don′t like chess that much, but I don′t see the need to sit and claim that everyone that likes chess are dumb noobs because they prefer a less complex game than I do, in fact I would probably have to admit that most devoted chess players are probably smarter than me.

And going into sneak mode and auto-walking into the corner of an inn. o.o;

I would love to see ads for the next Elder Scrolls game; Look what we took out! thanks to toljka


People who are critical of Oblivion's character build system as being unneccesarily complex and welcome Skyrim's missed something absolutely major; Oblivion made winners out of anything you wanted to try. YOu didn't have to compute it, add it up, think about it. So that's a absurd charge. You could put as much or as little into it as you wished.

We don't have to think much about Skyrim's build either- but the difference is in the freedom of choices and the depth of the build.

hmmm saying that the game is hard because your not good enough to play it on master without getting "owned", and stating that everyone else gets "owned" on master just because you do is pretty /fail logic. lol spend time crying, i think not. i spend my time [censored]ing on these forums because skyrim is unplayable on my ps3. but wait, that cant be true because it works fine on your computer right?

Apart from RPG's my favorite gaming genre is the strategy game.
Unfortunately there arent really that many good ones anymore. Most are 'realtime' instead of 'turn based' and that is just detrimental to any sort of strategy.
Its like playing chess hardcoe, with clocks.
I dont want that, I want to be able to take my time figuring out my move.
Ive probably played no other game more than Daggerfall and Morrowind apart from CIV 1.

Chess by the way has (seemingly) simple rules, but from those rules a lot of incredibly complex behaviour emerges.
It isnt a simple game by far.

AH games aren't that complicated.

I'm here, I'm still critical, and I'm not going anywhere.

I'm getting more and more critical of Skyrim with each passing day. While I am enjoying the game, I am not enjoying it as an RPG or even a TES game...because to me it doesn't feel like TES anymore. No sense in me describing why I feel this way since it's already been said multiple times here.

I'll finish playing Skyrim yes, but I have also gone as far as re installing Fallout 3 as well as New Vegas, even started Fallout 3 again. I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it, and New Vegas. Here I was thinking all this time that maybe I was just finally getting too old to be playing video games when I realized that it wasn't that I was too old, but instead it was Skyrim that's not keeping my attention. Too much action/adventure, not enough RPG...and that's ashame.

Sadly theres still a good amount of "Morrowind elitists" out there, I mean come on it was not even that good A game . I personally love skyrim, And just as a note i see more of the more "Older" Fourm members "criticising" Skyrim then the new ones.(Dont want to be offensive.)

And here′s a serious Morrowind/ old school TES gamer that I respect, because he can express his criticism and disappointment with Skyrim without offending everyone who likes it by insinuating that they are by default dumb idiots for liking it.

But it's okay for him to call them newbs???

I'm with Erandur in that I miss spell making too- and I almost never played as a strict mage. It was just one more fantastic feature. Loved it.

Bethesda used to give the player what he or she wanted.

But that was part of the problem in Oblivion. Look at it this way. Think back to pen-and-paper RPGs. If there was one thing budding DMs were warned about, it was "rule lawyers" and "min-maxers". I.e., people that were trying to sit down with a calculator and anolyze the game. While I think some people's "it breaks immersion" complaints are way too finicky and Princess-and-the-pea-ish, there is something to be said for having game mechanics that don't require you to sit and think about them to use them. Oblivion was pretty bad in that regard. For all the complaints about the UI, and the ones about how container-inventory lists are (dis)organized are valid, it is in fact far faster and visually cleaner than Oblivion's, and I spend far less time screwing around with the UI in Skryim than I did in Oblivion.

Similarly, spell creation in Oblivion just wasn't all that and a bag of chips like some people seem to think. I always had (1) a weakness to fire spell, (2) the best ranged and touch fire spells possible at my current level of skill (2) the best self-healing and healing-others spells possible at the time (3) the most potent summons I could get hold of, (4) the best unlock spell possible, (5) a feather spell and (6) a shield spell. All the other spells I came up with, all the fortify spells and the like, they were at best toys. I'd create two spells to fortify speed and athletics by 100 each (usually for like six seconds at most) just so I could ZZZZZOOOOOOOOMMMMM for those six seconds. Or a charm spell to get better prices, so I could accumulate a bunch of money I didn't have any more use for. In short, I just didn't get some huge kick out of spell creation in Oblivion. I think it likely that when I make a mage character in Slkyrim, I'll have just as much fun with the magic as I did with Oblivion's, despite not being able to tinker with the numbers the way I could in Oblivion.