I agree with the article. It points out the most critical flaws of the game. There are more pros than cons of course, but all of the criticisms are valid and well reasoned.

I don't get the problem everyone is making out of this, I think the writer actually makes some good points. And now the writer gets attacked just because he's with IGN? Pretty shallow if you ask me.

I think this game is absolutely brilliant, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. Some things are lacking, and the writer pointed that out. Good read.

FO:NV had an illusion of Scale, they pretended to have an open world that was in reality closed. If you explored, all you would find would be enemies that would kcick your ass and when you explored beyond them, there was nothing, those monsters were a curtain to hide the fact that Obsidian had a sparcer world than fallout 3. They don't even come close to the level of scale of Skyrim. It isn't a bad game, quite enjoyable when played like a Bioware game and go where they tell you but if you go the road less traveled, there's no fun there. But it doesn't have the strengths Skyrim has. I would love C&Cs if they didn't screw over the exploration, which they always tend to do.


what would you suppose they do in Elder Scrolls 6: Elsweyr! You are the Khajiit Fishmonger! Sell that fish!


I'm not meaning to imply that all criticism is bad, but simply put, I don't like destructive criticism, this article just seems like pandering to hipsters that hate something because it's popular and hoping for a flame war to increase their hits. Constructive criticsim is great but sadly we don't really do it on the net, just make destructive criticism and call it constructive.

Dull. It's an op piece, not a review. It's just regurgitating common complaints. I've seen hundreds of posts on this forum that would have made better op pieces. I would have loved to read a really detailed, insightful critique of the game.

It's more in terms of presentation, I think. When your story consists of dragons attacking populated cities, it's hard to ignore it when everyone else ignores you saving their butts. If the apocalypse was kept under wraps, though. Say, the blades and a few influential folks (wizards, jarls, etc) are the only ones aware of what's coming, then any of your actions are largely secret. When the population at large fails to acknowledge this, it's just them continuing on in ignorance. Then you can focus on having those few people who were aware of what you did and reacting to it.

Of course, you probably couldn't have dragons as prolific as they currently are, but whatevs.

Morrowind, Oblivion, and to a lesser extent Daggerfall, managed to make the guilds more low-key.

I actually prefer Skyrim's guilds more.(LOVE The radiant quests, LOVE THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Daggerfall was all Radiant quests.

There is absolutely nothing closed about NV. You can go anywhere you want as soon as you start. You can get to New Vegas at level 1 if you cared to. Are some areas more dangerous than others? Yep. Does that make it closed? Nope. And exploration? Exploration in NV actually had an effect on the main story. What you came across mattered because the world was tied together. Exploration in Skyrim amounts to going through linear dungeons over and over again with no surprises, no effects, no nothing. Not to mention you'd probably break a quest.

Excessive invisible walls = Closed

There most often were ways around those.

The town area outside the strip was awfully closed and small

Perhaps, but that's not really the point when we're discussing choices and consequences within the narrative, right? The argument was that the game world is too large to adequately implement a meaningful choice/consequence system because there's too many places/people/quests/etc to consider. New Vegas would seem to indicate that is not the case. How easy the world is to navigate is beside the point.

Even after you beat Alduin, the Dragons that have been brought back are still around and creating general chaos. You may have beaten the world eater but that doesn't end the dragon threat. Heck the only witnesses to the battle are you, maybe your companion and then long dead heroes. though it's odd that the guards know and who would commission the song about Alduin's Demise.

Although I think a smaller more personal scale would need choices and consequences even more, since the game is on a personal level, it would need to react more. I like Skyrim for exploration and really, when I see choices and consequences, exploration suffers, I like those games too, but TES is about exploration and I just havent seen a game where it doesn't suffer when Choices and consequences are foccussed on. New Vegas is a prime example of C&Cs messing with exploration, if you talking to people, the games great but when you explore the game's really terrible and if you don't have a quest to go to a place, it's not really worth visiting. Doing C&Cs right requires a really tight game and TES has so maony options and content that they can't be tight on a realistic budget.

Disagree. The only guild concerned with saving the world in Skyrim is the College. The others are more internalised, with stories focusing on furthering the Guilds and their members rather than the world. Oblivion's DB storyline seemed much more, hmm, widespread than Skyrim's.

I see this all the time, but in what way did New Vegas drop the ball on exploration? Because there wasn't an endless series of subway tunnels filled with repetitive zombie combat? New Vegas had plenty of opportunities for exploration. The idea that it's substantially lacking is weird to me. Or is it not exploration if there's a quest involved?

I rarely explore for it's own sake anymore in TES games because I know that the majority of the dungeons will be long and tedious and likely won't offer any payoff. I mean, my favorite TES dungeons tend to be the small, one or two room ones that might have a note and nothing much else.

Its more realistic, I like the companions more then the fighters guild because they focus more on getting paid and gold, then doing stuff for glory and the welfare of the world.

I liked the article. I agree wth most points.


This, so much this.

There were a couple of optional dungeons but there were only good if you got the quest to them and they wren't really all that fun, usually relying on bruisers with a mcguffin that allowed them to Ambush you. There were a lot of invisible walls and most places you found were boreded up houses with absolutely nothing, that building in the distance may have been a cardbored cut out. The dungeons that dot Skyrim were rewarding and fun to explore and often really unique. New Vegas is good in the bioware style but it fails in the Bethesda Style. But that's where obsidian's strength lies, when they care they can make a great story but they need to close the game to make that story great. I don't want Obsidian to try and be Bethesda and I don't want Bethesda to be obsidian, Fallout 3 tried to do the Black Isles style and they failed at it but salvaged it when they played to their strengths..

They aren't called IGNorant for nothing you know. But I have to admit, this article does point out a few obvious faults in Skyrim.

Impressive. An IGN article on Skyrim that isn't complete crap...

Interesting comment. If you take this literally, then Skyrim isn't an RPG, and has been mislabeled.

Not trying to argue, just following the implications. For example, is GTA or Rage an RPG if you role play that you're a different type of character than the story allows for?

Also, is it a problem when dialog or situation breaks the character you're trying to RP? For me, I sometimes find myself having to ignore/pretend something didn't just happen, in order to have a valid character. That seems to be a problem, to me, though I could see how others aren't concerned about it.

Comparing NV and a Bioware RPG is utterly ridiculous, I'm sorry. NV is completely open world. There is nothing "closed" about it as much as you keep saying there is. There is nowhere you cannot go from the start. And the dungeons that dot Skyrim are far from rewarding. They're long single paths with nothing in them aside from that one big complex. Every place you can visit in NV has a story attached to it. Stories rather than NPC x dropped y in dungeon z and needs you to go get it. Just the story behind Vault 11 is better than anything Skyrim produces including the main quest.

I agree with everything said. I'd also add that I am personally disappointed that Bethesda dropped the dynamic NPC conversations and the disposition system that Oblivion had. Don't get me wrong, those systems were not at all perfect. However, they had a lot of promise if worked on, improved, and if depth was added to them. Right now, I have to say that Skyrim really fails as far as interacting with NPCs goes. Granted this has never been a particular strength of Bethesda games, but Skyrim certainly isn't a step forward compared to Oblivion.

I just hope that Bethesda listens to criticism like this rather than just shrugs. I can't help but think that they are unlikely to really improve these elements dramatically until they make a game that sells poorly. Afterall, if the game sells well, then why bother with spending time and resources dramatically improving the systems? As a company, it is extremely tempting to look at the bottom line and go "well, the customers aren't really demanding that we change anything much, so we'll just stay the course". And, to be fair, they'd have a pretty good point if that's what the corporate thinking is.

Oddest to me, Bethesda seems a bit adverse to making complicated random content, which you think is exactly the sort of thing a large open world needs...it isn't like it is really feasible to craft it all by hand. However, they stepped back from random dungeon generation that was in Daggerfall, and they stepped back from dynamic NPC conversations in Oblivion, and they stepped back from dynamic/random quests that the Radiant Story promised (instead we have random quests that really amount to a joke, honestly). (Regarding the radiant story quests in the game, I don't see why they don't have a dozen random elements to each one -- grab any number of P&P RPG tables for random story generation...they wouldn't be that hard to adapt. For instance, a little VA work that quest out of Solitude where someone is being summoned back from the dead could be adapted to a large variety of possible entities with various phrases used during the ritual (and those phrases affecting the stats of what is summoned). Granted, the quest might not involve other dungeons, but that is already more interesting than what we have.

I will say I think they have the beginnings of a good combat system here. The "two-hands" thing is a really good basis to work off of. I think they could probably stand to adjust how they do power attacks though, as it feels clunky to me.

I think they could probably stand to split combat-levels and non-combat levels up. Certainly skills are really non-combat skills (speech, lock-picking), and definitely shouldn't have an effect on how good at combat the game judges you to be. Smithing is a little bit trickier, since it is so limited in its effect by the combat skills of the items it creates...it's in a middle ground here -- I think if it became non-combat, then its benefits should be purchasable from a master smith in the game (which just makes sense, honestly). Then it is just a money saver, largely.

I think he just played the game, svcked at it, and then decided to spew hate cause he knows it's too good.

O lookey there, he lives in Texas, Contract anyone?