There is so much negativity towards this game, especially from these forums. Bethesda has clearly made some mistakes in the quality control of this game, but many who are complaining about this don't actually hate this game. They love it.

Face it, there are similar games but none that match Skryim's scope. People love to play this game, and all they want to do is play it. When they can't it upsets them. It's perfectly understandable. Unfortunately many people are incapable of looking at something objectively.

In a perfect world there would be no bugs, no glitches. Take all of the bugs out of a game that is bad...and it will still be a bad game. Take all the bugs out of a game that's great...and it will be greater.

When it comes to the complaints about the story lines.This is the most perfect example of immersion in a video game that I can think of. Everyone has an opinion of how good or bad a faction quest line is, or how a certain quest should proceed or end. In everyone's mind they are experiencing something different, and in turn they have different expectations based on their personal preferences. You become deeply invested in the plot in Skyrim because it was YOU that progressed that story line in your own way. It's the journey that counts, not the destination.

If they are flaws in a game they should be addressed, even if the game in question is great.

Aside from bugs, most "complaints" stem from comparison with previous TES titles, not other recent games.
It's not unreasonable to ask for things we already had.

The complaints are mostly about things in previous titles that are not in this one, and a few odd bugs.

A lot of people seem to overlook all the great new features and improvements that have been added and only focus on the negative.

When it comes to offering feedback on something, it's more constructive to offer ways to improve upon aspects you found lacking than it is to endlessly praise what you liked.

Basically it comes down to missed potential. Many of the mistakes are so easily avoidable that it's astounding.

There's a difference between criticism and hate. You're always going to get haters... and some go to great lengths to ruin a game company (Flagship). They plague forums like this because it gets them attention. They don't represent the norm.

They also don't matter!

So bad writing is immersion? Got it.

No they don't hate Skyrim, but the attitudes of alot of Forumers towards "Complainers" would have you believe otherwise. anyway the less threads their are about "people" than -Skyrim- in general the better. this only serves as a ground to start up more needless bickering imo.

I have many complaints about Skyrim, and there is a lot of WTF-driven design behind it, IMO. Regardless, I love it and think in most ways it's better than Oblivion. I agree that many of the things I'd like to see "fixed" are easily avoidable, but there are a couple of problems with that perspective. The first is the heavily influence from mods. After loading hundreds of mods to the point where the amount of installed mod data takes up more disk space than the game itself, it's easy to forget what the vanilla games were like, and what was wrong with them by design. The second issue is the producer/developer perspective. FO:NV, for example, proved that you can have much deeper NPCs in the game, and that even a small studio is capable of pulling that off. FO:NV also introduced consequences into the game. And they cared about internal game balance--they continued to tweak weapons stats through multiple patches.

But I don't think that BGS is incapable of doing a deep story, or deep NPCs, or incapable of doing any of the other missing features well. I just think that these issues aren't important to them, they're not the areas the producers want to focus on. They do broad brushstrokes in terms of game balance, NPCs, story, etc., because that's what they want to do.

I agree it would be more satisfying if they would pay more attention to other areas, but I think they do a great job on the issues they care about.

There is no such thing as bad writting. That is my point. We each have our own opinion of the writing, and the experience of it.

I'll wager that most of the players criticising aspects of Skyrim love playing it. But that's ignored by many, as it's much easier to just put 'em into the "haters" or "whiners" box.
And i'm sure the same is true the other way around.
Go onto any game forum, and ya know you'll need a flame and acid proof mindset to have any sort of useful interaction.

...But there is bad writing. Whether or not you enjoy bad writing or not is fine--I'm not going to get buttfrustrated at your opinion, but there is such a thing as bad writing.

Edit: I feel bad making an argument with no proof to back it up. Let's take, for example, the story of John Stalvern. (Doom: Repercussions of Evil). This is bad writing. No, wait, it's absolutely terrible writing. And I love it to death. It makes me roll on the floor laughing every time I read it. Does the fact I enjoy it make it good? No.

Again, B movie slasher flicks (I hate to generalize but I'm going to anyways) tend to have terrible dialogue and acting, and they are bad movies for it. Does that keep me from enjoying them? No. Does my enjoying them make them good? No.

Third and final, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. Jordan's great, he has an awesome story that I love to death, but he has no concept of pacing and his characters are at best okay. His writing is bad, definitely, but his story is great. Just because I enjoy his work does not make it good.

Writing is something that is very much formulaic as to it being "good" or not, very unlike art which is completely subjective (but the only opinions which matter in art are the opinions of big name critics).

If people's opinions of the writing generally equal "It's bad" then that's bad writing, and it's NOT a positive feature. The fact that people have an opinion of something and the fact that something is good are not even slightly related, as people have opinions on almost everything ever.

now this is new to me. No such thing as bad writing? Well all u have to do is play skyrim for the first 15 min to know that's not true.

But ur just using the same old cockamamie reasoning to defend anything u hold dear: it doesn't have faults because in reality those faults don't exist

I guess there is no such thing as bad melée combat either

or bad animations

skyrim is a good game but it has serious flaws that exist and are observable

Why are you assuming that people became invested in the storylines? When they complain about the storylines, usually lack of feeling invested is a particularly major complaint. And you can't always do it "in your own way" either, since many are pretty linear. This whole post makes little sense, I would call it bad logic, but since I have an opinion about how good or bad the logic of this thread is, it must be good logic, and there's actually no such thing as bad logic.

What I can do is to talk about what I love about the game here in the General forum, go to the Spoilers forum to talk about details in the game that some may not have experienced yet and ignore the worst complainers. I stopped listening to them a long time ago and some have made it onto my Ignore list. It's better for stress. I'm having a great time with the game. I've posted anything buggy in the Bugs forum to help the QA team and after the holidays, I know they'll be sending out more patches. I'm no rookie and I knew there would be some bugs on release. I also knew I could handle it.

So anyway, happy holidays everyone. I have a word wall to find thanks to the Greybeards.

Out of curiosity, does that keep you from seeing their posts?

...Sorry for off topic.

It is not to much at all to ask for what we have already had. It makes sense to add instead of taking away: its also good to address issues with this game and give feedback to Bethesda so they can fix the issues that plague the game such as bugs. Constructive criticism is a good thing.

There are people that complain about important issues in a constructive manner, and then there are people that complain just for attention (as you stated). However, people commonly lump the two into one group, known as "haters." I'm not stating that you do this, but many posters here do, which is ridiculous.

I actually think the people that endlessly praise the game are worse than the "haters," for the simple fact that those types of people tend to plug their ears and close their eyes when confronted with problems in Skyrim. There's no problem with people enjoying Skyrim and discussing that, but there's definitely something wrong when people choose to ignore the problems. I think Skyrim is a good game, but I think it could have been so much better.

it kind of is too much to ask for what we already had there is so much content in the ES game there would be no way they could just add stuff from title to title
you see each time they dont just take the previous game and go from there (except fallout) they start at square one and build the whole damn thing over again

Yes, I haven't seen anyone yet today but the previous forum a few days ago would tell me so and so posted on a separate line, do I want to see their post? I didn't and moved on. If they are quoted by someone, I can see the name and just not read it. I'm not that curious. I think it helps to control your own experience here more. I know what I like...I know what problems I have in my own games...and I know where to post about them...in the bugs forum. I don't need to see some users just trying to make everyone else miserable...and it's not most people; they are a small and very vocal minority. Good luck!

I absolutely agree with the OP and most of the first few posts. I'm guilty of being excessively negative towards Skyrim, usually while I'm alt-tabbed out of the actual game. I do think we should be vocal against technical and design flaws - but you won't catch me calling Skyrim an objectively bad game.