Yup. I have a lot of other games that I've played to compare it against as well, and while it is indeed one of the prettiest games I've ever played, there is far more to a perfect '10' game than just pretties. I rate it high for that, but much lower on other grounds, which are equally important to the overall gameplay experience. The shallow, mediocre quests and writing, and the low-grade RPG elements- like having to use your imagination to a very large extent to get any roleplaying goodness out of a game, is a failure of the game. More of the 'RPG' should to be built-in to it out of the box, not mostly dumped uncerimoniously into the player's lap to create from whole cloth. If I wanted that, i'd just go get a D&D dice game. And the atrocious PC interface and controls... ugh. Frankly, if it weren't for the great graphics and big gameworld to explore, it would have been lucky to get a '6' from me, overall. 10? No way in hell. It's no where near that good by any honest, realistic measure. It got an 8.5 from me purely on the strength of the pretties and gameworld though, which is a pretty high rating for me.

Turn it up to Eleven!!!! I'm having a blast with my new build tonight. I just finished Hillgrund's tomb and this time Lydia wasn't with me and my level was much lower. It was a real challenge but we did it!

I rate games "against' the current gaming climate. To elaborate - I believe that games deteriorate in quality when better games are released. That's not to say that I am "for" everything that modern games are doing and call of duty is everything that is great in the world.

However being simplistic and saying that games are 'bad in general' because we live in a post call of duty world, is similar to saying the press gave skyrim high scores because they where all paid off. - It's naive. And I am pretty naive, --- it trumps my Nativity. And that's amazing. Games have, for the most part, progressed. Yes, traditionalists will need elaboration so they can justify them own viewpoint vs mine. I won't give it, because that's not the point of this post.

When morrowind was first released, I would have given it a 10/10. Which does not mean 'perfect' to me personally - it just means that I enjoyed it enough to warrant the highest score. Today, even with hundreds of mods and the morrowind graphics extender (don't worry, I still have enough ingame-fog to keep the mystery) morrowind is less than it was. I would rate it a 7/10.

Oblivion, I would have originally given it a 9/10. It did some things right, it exposed it's advancements with gaps in game design as well. Oblivion in it's vanilla form, would also get a 7/10 from me now. However, the mods for oblivion specifically - or at least the mods that I used - Raised it up to a 9.5/10. Yeah, that's how much of a difference a fully modded oblivion made.And in case you are not a mod user, no - I am not talking about those 'silly mods' - I am talking, serious content evolutions 'working together' that have not been even remotely matched by any game's modding ability since. Skyrim has that kind of modding potential - but we simply don't know if it will match oblivion this close to release. I genuinely hope that it surpasses oblivion.

Then then there is skyrim, and for it's respective time in gaming history. I would give it a 10/10. Much the same way that I did morrowind. And yes, skyrim will decline in quality as time passes. Does that mean that skyrim is 'better' or 'worse' than morrowind? No. It just means that it's another open world game that I enjoyed on a 10/10 level - at the time of release. Both games had - and have - countless faults.

However they have countless faults while striving for something similar games cannot match. If you take a section of skyrim, and compare it to another game that did not have the 'world creating ambition' however it did have time to 'polish everything' - that does not automatically make the game that made it's individual parts more polished - better. And that's why I agree with the critical positivity skyrim received. People, or rather - critics, looked at what the entire machine presented, rather than the smaller cogs.I would call anything less, a flawed anolytical ability.

So, as time passes, and games continue to evolve. Skyrim may - or may not - become less in my mind. However having seen how oblivion was improved beyond it's original state to such a degree that I would still give the modded version of the game a 9.5. All modders need to do, is match it. If they go beyond their previous work - skyrim could remain a 10/10 game by the time the next elder scrolls game comes out.

And that - would be a first.

Skyrim threw nostalgia in my face...It was great

Graphics: 9 What can I say its Skyrim.
Captivation: 8 I lost myself to this game for the first few days. I truly felt apart of it. I really wish they had more music/sounds though what they had was nice and it wasn't forced on you..Just wish it was more apparent
Character Creation: 9 Best I've seen in any game thus far.
Gameplay: 8 block swing block swing block swing( I dont play like that just sayin).
Story: 6 Original story I suppose. Introduced to you in a decent way. Kept me entertained.
Quests: 6 Some funny, serious, dramatic, rewarding, long, short ,interesting and awesome but only a few really did it for me. Dont get my wrong I enjoyed every quest but something was lacking.
Factions/Guilds: 6 DarkB-4 Companions-6 ThievesG-8.5 College- 7 Blades-5 Bards College- 7(Simple but I enjoyed it) Legion- 4 Stormcloaks-4.
Modding Community: 9 Everyone is constantly trying to allow you to enjoy the game the way you want to.

Everything that matters to me says its a 7.625 It might sound bad, but thats a really good score. Top five games of all time fo sho

TES Score= 7 basically the same..Morrowind is RPG benchmark

After all that Skyrim is definitely my favorite game

First let me mention that I don't want to make it seem like I'm sitting here just trying to jump on scores that I don't agree with, but I am interested in hearing players elaborate on why they gave Skyrim the grade they did. At best I missed something and at worst I've challenged you to defend your score and give more thought to your opinion.


I would've rated Skyrim's character creation very low actually. This is because that while the character's look much prettier, I feel that from a purely aesthetic standpoint Oblivion offered you much more freedom with how you wanted to shape your character's face, skin tones, etc. With Skyrim I find that it's a little harder to change the 'base' structure of your character's face, aside from playing Mr. Potato with noses and lips, and moving cheekbones a little.

But then again I consider the aesthetic aspect of character creation a small, even minor part of the Character Creation category and maybe you would disagree. In Skyrim you pick a race and an appearance and off you go. In Morrowind you pick a race, an appearance, then you customize your class including the ability to give it its own name which characters in-game will refer to you as "Hello [Custom Class Name], you look pretty spiffy!", and you even have a space where you can write a paragraph or two for your 'class description'. Now admittedly the choice of faces in vanilla Morrowind was pretty limited, but it had more than Kotor, its contemporary.

So I would consider Morrowind's character creation far superior to Skyrim's on that basis alone, which means that Skyrim could hardly qualify as a '9', let alone the best seen in any game thus far. Which isn't to say that there aren't character creation processes even better than Morrowind's, its just an easy example most of us identify with. But what do you think?

I'd give it an 8. Too many bugs and poor writing to go higher.

4.5
Skyrim feels like it's in early Alpha stage in development.

5.0

Not a bad game, just very mediocre. Graphics are great though.

I understand where you're coming from with the "base" structure argument. I agree with you for the most part just because Skyrim's graphical appearance is better it made it seem as though the character creation process was also better but, it was simply not the case. I just went back and played with Morrowind's character creation and it does seem as though you make a point. That Morrowind allows you to take it to the next level of "Role Playing" to become your character, that Skyrim does not provide. So yea I agree that the actually appearance of your character is a small factor in an RPG. I want to be able to delve into the world as what I want to be.

I'm glad I was able to make a persuasive argument and you had an open enough mind to listen to it then. =D

A 7 or an 8. A year from now will make it better than modded Oblivion for me.

This is half because of speech options being severely limited, the other half being the streamlining of things that didn't need to be streamlined.

I've invested about 150 hours and I'm still not bored with the game. I'm still on my first build and I have plans for at least two more builds. I'm guessing I won't stop playing this game until around 500 hours. To me, that means this game is a 10. There are personal gripes here and there, but no game is going to hit every single button to perfection. And judging by how much I play and love this game now, and my plans to play it in the future, I have no reason to give it a lesser score (that would be disingenuous).

5. I really wanted to like it, but I see it as something filled with wasted potential and design issues due to casualization, unfocused design vision, poor writing quality, poor gameplay and mechanical balance, and fear of allowing the player to fail, or have to start over again if they made a critical error.

Overall, I'd rate it as a poor rpg, and a mdiocre action adventure game/hiking simulator.

8 on my xbox

9.9 on my pc when modded

I would give Skyrim a 7.2 out of 10.

Doesn't mean much without some perspective, so here's my scores for other games. Yes, I am behind the times on playing most games. I have only recently finished Demon's Souls, Arkham: Asylum, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect II. I'd rate them 9.1, 8.2, 5.8, and 6.7, respectively.

Morrowind a 9.4, Oblivion a 9.0, Fallout 3 a 9.3, and New Vegas a 9.1.

Considering Daggerfall is the measure by which all first person, single player RPGs should be judged, Skyrim fails in every regard with the exception of walking from one place to the other.

I don't believe there is any such thing as "perfection." And furthermore if such a thing as "perfection" did exist I don't believe human beings would be capable of recognizing it when it did appear. My opinion is that "perfection" is an abstract concept and, as such, should not be a factor in any serious attempt to rate or evaluate anything.

Pre-DLC, 7.5. A year from now, who knows?

If my shadows worked correctly, I'd probably give it 8.5 - 9. Because Gauldur and Potoma are awesome, and the dungeons are amazing.

Well one thing that i would like to say is that u can't compare games distant 20 years...
My opinion:

Morrowind: 9
Oblivion: 9
Skyrim: 9

I will not compare them cause they are too unique for me and i'm really sentimental with the TES serie.
Cause in every single period those games were the best for me out there in terms of gameplay, story, atmosphere but the most important was the feeling that i had in particulars moment during every game a kind of " wow " where am i.
Skyrim is a jewel can't write otherwise.The High Hrothgar is a moment of beauty if you take the time to walk the 7.000 steps and this is what i call a " wow " moment.

You take 100 different gamers out of the blue, you'll get 100 different opinions on that subject. Some are happy to take the first orgismic gushes of blind pupply love for a new game and splatter an "OMG, 10!" all over it... while others are more anolytical and try to do a little more checking under the hood, so to speak, to try to make a more holistic and less emo evaluation of the entire game, and all of it's functioning (and malfunctioning) parts. And everybody else in between.

I'm in the camp who thinks pretty much every part of a game should be pretty damn good, well made, and functioning near-perfectly, to rate anything even close to a 10. And that sure as heck is not the case with Skyrim, good as it may be.

Those who rate it a 10 are happy to overlook many of the parts that aren't up to par yet, because the parts they care about are in place and making them happy. Is that a truly thoughtful, anolytical rating that carefully looks at all aspects and elements of the game and then asks themselves if all of those elements are indeed as good as they should be? Are all of those things really deserving of a '10'? Or is it an emo rating based purely on your own personal prefences and likes? Before I give any game a 10, I want to see it in 99.5% excellent working order and firing smoothly on all cylinders, with no mufflers dragging or fenders hanging loose. Anything less, simply is not a 10. To try to tack a 10 on this game, cheapens the whole idea of rating games. In my humble opinion, of course

Skyrim gets a 10* but a 10 with an Asteriks. If you can deal with the issues that Skyrim has, then it's an incredibly game. If you can't then you'll want to rate it a lot lower, closer to an 8-8.5.

Given that reality has never been able to compete with fantasy, I give Skyrim a 10 when the comparison is with reality (as in other games that I am currently playing on a regular basis). As compared with fantasy (as in comparison to games I played 10+ years ago), I have no idea, since my mood and how I remember things keeps changing.

11. Best video game ever created.

7.5: it's better than most games, but Skyrim falls short of exceptional. My sticking points should be well-known by now.