Hello people,

It's been a while since I last posted, been busy with skyrim, dark souls and Gears of war 3.

I just wanted to know the opinion of the community about skyrim and how you appreciated the game or not.

Personally, I'm done with the game and I don't even finished the main quest but I had a great time at first, The game is just not what I expected ; for me, the mechanics and HUD kind of ruined it for me on the longer term.

Anyway, what are your thoughts?

I like Skyrim overall as a game, it improves in some aspects from Oblivion especially the Open World, the scaling and the combat but it leaves a lot to be desired as an RPG. Skyrim is very shallow as an RPG, hardly any choices at all and the ones that you do have won't really matter at all. I look at Skyrim and compare it to New Vegas and I'm just scratching my head in confusion.

Yeah excalty, I'm currently playing New vegas now and I mean, okay, I got a damage threshold of 23, so 23 points of damage are reduced when I get shot. In Skyrim; okay, i have 223 armor rating and I .....ewwwww.

Completly messed up rpg aspects. Exploration is fun, combat is better, Quests are okay. It really pissed me off when I competed liberation of skyrim. Only a few quests of ; take that fort in the woods, oh and take that other one. RPG elements are truly lacking saldy.

I would have expected that Bethesda would learn from their errors.

My thoughts echo those of a lot of long time TES fans I think - good game, but disappointingly shallow as an RPG with too many things stripped away from previous games.

Action is somewhat improved, but almost everything else seems worse than the last three games. And gameplay aside, it even seemed to have less charm to me. I'm not sure whether it was the setting, the UI, the soundtrack, NPCs, or what... but I just didn't fall in love with the game's overall vibe like I did with previous TES games.

I expect I may grow to appreciate the game more and more as great mods begin piling up... but for now, it's just 'good', not 'great' or 'amazing'.

Maybe they don't think those are errors.

Oblivion had more charm for sure. I doesn't feel appealed to any house in Skyrim. I remember the hours I spent in the Skingrad Manor placng my trinkets and odds.

The game atmosphere is really cold and the NPC's aren't really friendly or interesting with their one-liners. "Do you go to the cloud district very often& Of course you don't , what I'm I saying? PLEASE I get it....

I'm sure with better mechanics the game would have been a heck more enjoyable.

Well, for a lot of people oblivion and skyrim mechanics are a mess. Even Obsidian with New Vegas corrected "those errors" and the result is very pristine concerning the mechanics.

Good for you if they didn't bother you

This is more or less my opinion of Skyrim as well.

All of the ruleset/character building elements are incredibly game-y and as you say, shallow - to the extent where it basically doesn't have an RPG ruleset anymore. Morrowind's and Oblivion's were flawed; Skyrim's barely exists. Item descriptions like "Sneaking is 20% better," a hopelessly small and bland ability ... feat ... sorry, perk selection, a small skillset bloated with MMO-style crafting, and no attributes ... ways to define a unique character or interact with the world beyond the most elementary activities.

Quests and NPC dialogues vary from good but shortlived, to moronic, and the exploration, treasure-hunting and even monster-hunting gameplay elements are woefully uninspired and outright handicapped in some ways.

The gameworld as a visual experience is the best yet, but once its sense of wonder wears off -- rapidly, as in any game -- there's not much beneath the surface.

An excellent fantasy adventure video game - and a shallow, dumb, lazy and pretentious CRPG.

I look, and see vast vista's, Sky tearing mountains and get this tingling feeling that there is so much to do in this vast space. I jump in and am sorely dissappointed, Skyrim is a Tease in everyway. only a taste, doesn't even linger with you just ends abruptly. for me its not "satisfying" the Bones of what could have been exist, but obviously there is no use for the bones.

I personally adore Skyrim. There aren't many things that bother me mechanic wise in the game. I tend to disagree with your statement regarding the charm of Morrowind and Oblivion over Skyrim, that's a very easy statement to make, especially considering how long those games have been out and how much work has gone into them with regards to fan-made mods etc.

Which is why I feel SKyrim can continue to improve and that the fact you say "You're done with this game!" is kind of a blind-sided statement in iteself. What's more, I fail to see how much of the game you've actually played through if you didn't even manage to complete one of the shortest main plot-lines in TES history.

I love Skyrim, i'm being truthful when I say it's probably one of the most enjoyable games i've ever played and IMO the best game of 2011. Though I hate the city sizes and a few questlines (Companions, college of Winterhold, bards)

Well, the PS3 version (my version) is incredibly disappointing (inherently sub-standard, unwieldy, inconsistent fps indicating little actual optimization or care for my platform in Skyrim's development coupled with severe potential long-term issues and all the multiplatform bugs and scripting errors on top of it) and completely contradictory to lies claimed pre-release by Bethesda. For that reason alone, I'm severely disappointed in Skyrim and in Bethesda and I see it now... they can't be trusted with anything technical, especially if it's not on their designated lead platform, even after being buried so deeply in money and fame and so I'm extremely skeptical of any of their future releases. For this reason alone, never again will I purchase their games anywhere close to release day, if at all, unless they really get their act together. This is pathetic.

Moving on, ignoring the technical issues, it's an entertaining game, but a disappointingly shallow and rather empty-feeling one (certainly not something I really consider much beyond a shallow, barebones RPG if it may be called an RPG). They scrapped and/or cut back on several important RPG features (reputation system, any meaning or substance to factions practically whatsoever, several character customization options, whatever little choice and consequence this series might have had in the past, which admittedly was little yet certainly more than this... should have improved upon it, not cut it out almost entirely) and I'm really disappointed by this. In addition, Bethesda's skill to write compelling stories and quests still have not improved and the dungeons, toted for being unique, really are very limited in variety and lack proper incentive for exploration. The world, aside from the forced, drab color palette that's asserted its way deeply into the gaming industry for being "realistic" and "gritty" is well-designed in terms of geometry and terrain and the soundtrack is unsurprisingly beautiful, but that's really about it to the one-trick pony here, in my opinion. Skyrim's little more than a pretty sandbox dungeon-crawler and it doesn't take long to realize nothing you do matters and that you're given very few choices in regards to anything in the first place while stories are boring (even if there much), dungeons/quests are repetitive, and tying back into the technical issues, I can't even enjoy the pretty world as the framerate goes into varying degrees of sub-30 garbage on my platform when doing practically anything short of moving around inside my house or moving around in certain barren areas such as the glacial north of Skyrim and a select-few dungeons or rather parts of those dungeons. In the forests, the framerate is inconsistently in the 20-25 range. Particle effects almost assuredly drop framerate into a similar range. AI and towns do the same, and this is all while doing nothing except panning the camera about.

It's very much a disappointment not just on the technical front, but the gameplay front (still would have been much happier if the performance was simply smooth, however), as well and future Bethesda releases have, unfortunately, guaranteed themselves a highly skeptical and critical eye. The impression I get is this company is fraudulent, lying, and apathetic to the treatment of their consumers on the technical front (some of the worst self-called "cross-platform developers" I'm aware of... more like hasty, money-grubbing porters...) and just moving into a direction I found disdainful on the gameplay front. Though again, much of my newfound hatred for the company itself instead of just a pure distaste for the games themselves stems not from disappointing game design choices, but from their poorly-performing, lied-about product.

To OP, if you dont like the HUD, turn it off.. the game is so much better without the HUD.

Skyrim failing to meet some expectations I think has a lot to do with the fact that theres really nothing in the game we havent seen before. Morrowind for example was something completely out of the blue.. Oblivion expanded on that with the epic draw distance and the first truly immersive, mainstream fantasy world.

Along comes Skyrim, and it really cant throw anything at us to truly inspire awe the way the previous games did. Had there been a 10 year gap between morrowind, and Skyrim was the 4th in the series, then no doubt many would consider it one of the greatest games of all time. But sadly, the feeling I got was that I've kinda seen it all before. Bethesda's problem now is that theyre too afraid to take risks... ie same old guilds, same old daedric shrine quests... theres nothing really new or bold. Skyrim has played everything safe, and played everything by the book, and the game suffers because of it.

Great game...and will go a long way to pulling TES away from a niche market, which I think has been pretty much highlighted by the sales figures and later reviews. 10 million people aren't long-term TES fans, which makes me think that there will be more TES fans now, than there were before Skyrim's release. Plus the game has provided large opportunity for extended TES longevity by opening up a wide range of future storyline options, rather than simply being 'location specific' games, as we have seen in the past.

Sure, some people don't like it, and the deviance from previous titles and features has come as a shock to them, which I do empathise with, but if a company is going to be competitive in today's market place, and it does bring out major releases every couple of years as well as supporting its existing games, it must move forward...and I think that Skyrim has done this for Beth and the TES series.

As far as RPGing goes, I will be interested in seeing if Beth can continue the two streams/genres that it seems to have developed now...the Fallout path and TES path. Both are popular, and both have massive future potential. That's good for Beth, and what's good for Beth is good for us.

My final assessment? Good game, good product, good stepping stone for the future.

That's similar to what I went through. I started the game, tried a few characters. Loved the landscape, the exploration, some of the skill changes (compared to Oblivion, for me, anyway). Still disliked the combat mechanics, tho, which dampened my desire to quest/do a lot of things. Elder Scrolls games for me were never about story/quests, but more the action-explore-discovery. So not liking combat puts a big crimp in the desire to play. I thought perhaps if I had the editor I could mold the game into something I liked a bit more, but then the huge delay of the CK's release ....

...haven't played in a couple months, didn't finish the main quest either. But I do like the game, and admire quite a few things about it. I just don't love the game enough to become obsessed with it. At some point I mean to return to it, mess with the CK a bit, etc. Probably not too soon, tho.

I'm at ~150 hours with my character and I expect to spend a lot more before I'm done.

While the game isn't perfect, I've had fun with it. I just like my rpgs, especially when I can lose myself in the game be on a seemingly endless adventure.

What RPG, or any, video game have you played in recent years where you didn't have this feeling at least once?

post feeling is it is the best game on the market. Its such as shame it has bugs as without this it would be amazing.

I've just bought Kingdoms of Amular: The Reckoning. After Skyrim nothing seems to even closely compete.

Excellent game, much better than Oblivion IMO
I still prefer MW to it but given how heavily modded my MW is Skyrim may match or surpass MW 1 day

How does a HUD ruin a gaming experience.
I spend about 1 minute looking at the HUD for every 5 hours of gaming time.

But whatever....I'm loving the game. All parts of it.

everything i hoped it would be minus werebears spears crossbows and being glitch free.

Best game I've ever played. Hands down.

Overall, it was good. The individual quests were good fun, but the questlines were disappointingly short, and the PC UI is downright terrible. Loved the environments, the dungeons looked amazing.

First I was

Then I was

Now I am

Skyrim was disa-[censored]-ppointing.

I wanted to stop playing at 50 hours, but slogged through to about 90-100. The quests were simply not interesting, nor where the overall quest arcs (or lack thereof). The dialog was thoroughly disappointing, and seemed to be a step back from Oblivion/Shivering Isles/KotN and Fallout 3/DLC. Then, of course, there is the disappearance of spellmaking and many spells. The leveling system was overly-simple and uninspiring. Forcing my character to use a lockpick = C'mon man!

Perks were decent, but the actual stats behind them needed more. I still disagree with getting rid of the old attributes, birthsigns, and some of the skills. The whole smithing thing was pretty cool, albeit needing some small tweaks. I enjoyed the changes to alchemy and dialog system (being able to back out, not zooming in on the face). The combat felt more substantial. Excellently designed world, but missing the things that really matter (dialog, quests). Glad to see traps make a reappearance. EXCELLENT score, Jeremy Soules best yet.

There's plenty to like and hate. I may appear to be giving an overly critical review of the game, but it's because of the high expectations for Skyrim and high esteem that I hold TES and Bethesda in. I'd give it a 8.1/10, as 90 hours is still really good for a single player adventure. However, it is but a shadow of its predecessors.