I think some people think they are in the Dragon Age 2 forums

Now THATS a lack of content!

Lol, I didn't even play DA2.

It's just my opinion, I happen to get the same type of loot with every damn encounter (not always but often) and even worse is that everything seems to level with me (loot so to speak).

If that were to be fixed I'd be a happy player.

My gaming experience has been full of luster.Later hater.

So what are u then? Bethfanboy? Everybody has the right to an opinion.

My opinion is that OP is a hater.So Its ok for people to bash Bethesda,but not for people to defend them?The freedom to express ones opinion goes both ways.Besides,most of you haters are just fans of other games(many from Morrowind sadly),members of other gaming forums,and fans of other recently released games.Desperately trying to dump enough propaganda on the rest of us to change popular opinion of the game.You guys are just mad because the younger,hotter sister was invited to the dance.

You lost me there,

Instead of calling ppl haters when they try to prove a point, maybe you should come up with a reasonable argument to why it isn't the way the op describes.

That's my cup of tea

If I "lost you"then I have little else to say.What I wished to say was written in my post.

In addition to caves, Ive also seen quite a few ruins and forts and camps and so on. I dont know how much variety you were expecting in your dungeons or general structures to explore. Sure they could probaby come up with and add all kinds of silly crap. Lets see what the inside of a whales stomach looks like, lets map out the furthest reaches of the Keebler Elf tree. Lets recreate the Playboy Mansion, only its made of cookies and Hef is an orc with a magic wand thats only power is to expand your chest, sideways. As cool as all that stuff may sound, if they added it you'd just be here complaining that TES is getting too creative and fancy pants with their ideas and its killing your immersion and roleplay or some such horse crap. Im reminded of a thread that was just locked on this forum previously (while yours of course remains open besides not bringing anything new to the table) maybe try using your imagination. Maybe you take yourself too seriously. If I was a kid and I had 50 caves in my backyard, I'd have a story and reason for all of them. I'd be happy chappy exploring all of them discovering what secrets they may hold, even if entirely imaginary. Its a freakin VIDEO GAME. Maybe you should start ya know, playin it, instead of sitting back expecting it to spoon feed you heaping quanities of hollywood quality content on demand without end. Just a thought.

I could simply say the same about Morrowind, after 40 hours you can see everything alien that is there to be seen.

Environment Comparison:

Morrowind: Ash Desert, Swampy Coast, Mountain Rocks, Volcanic Rocks, Volcanic Swamp, Rocks Island, Fertile "Plains", Mushrooms. (8, Many Rocks, Variate)

Oblivion: Swampy Blackmarsh, Snowy North, Fertile Plains, Forest, Gold Coast. (5, Many Grass, Small Variety)

Skyrim: Volcanic Swamp, Swampy Lakes, Snowy North, Pine Forests, Fall Forests, Valley, Tundra. (7, Many Snow, Variate)


Dungeon Comparison:

Morrowind: Sewers, Dunmer Strongholds, Dwemer Ruins, Daedric Shrines, Ancestral Tombs, Velothi Towers, Mines, Caves, Grotto, Ships. (10, Many Variety)

Oblivion: Caves, Ayled Ruins, Mines, Forts, Sewers, Oblivion Realm. (8, Small Variety)

Skyrim: Borrows, Towers, Dwemer Ruins, Caves, Mines, Grotto, Ships, Forts, Sewers. (9, Variate)

I was about to post something similar, thanks.

Also I would add Sewers to all of them and ships and Oblivion realms to Oblivion...

It seems that people worship Morrowind "Variety" purely because of the Alien Feeling of the environment. While they bash Skyrim because of the "earthly" environment. But hey... That's how Skyrim is! Almost none place is as alien as Morrowind! Get used to it!

It's an interesting original post here. I agree to some extent. Some things I had as concerns like you (too many caves) I realized as I played more and more you don't know what to expect. More than a few "caves" will subvert your expectation of what you thought you were going to find there.

I do find some other things are a bit weird about the game though. The biggest for me is all NPC life feels more videogamey (in the JRPG one-dialogue-line per character sense) than ever. I mean it would be nice to have a reason to sit down in a tavern and talk to the people... hear a story or something just for fun. You'll be done with that in 10 seconds though. Unless they've got a quest nothing new ever happens.

I think "nothing happens" sums up the NPC problem overall. The bards don't update their songs, your spouse never talks to you, there's no local tiffs and politics (unless it's a questline per the pattern). Even your own follower has no big story! Bioware is laughing at that one. In Skyrim you can literally pluck a follower out of tavern for coin, just like Mount & Blade or something, and that pretty much sums up the game. It's a big toybox for your spells and your weapons, and shouts, a beautiful vast wilderness of a toybox at times. And here's the funkiest pill to swallow... the toybox they've made IS actually incredibly fun and addicting, while having barely a shred of responsive NPCs and no point to the world (the mines, mills, farms, and so forth that aren't really determining anything)

Now considering it's a shipped game, it is what it is. It just makes me curious where they're going to go in the future. I think Skyrim is the peak of fun in the series, but can they get more layers and depth in the next game? I hope so.

Hm. This post, despite the fact that I've seen TONS of quests that don't take place in "caves". Some out in the wilderness, and some within cities. What game did he play? Oh well, haters gonna hate, I guess.

Can't agree this is one of the best I've seen yet. I'm 56 and have seen a lot of games. Maybe you just like Guns and stuff.

TES games have always been pretty easy to get to god-like. Oddly enough,that is why I enjoy them. I role play my characters. They have flaws. They are not all powerful. Yet I can still get by. In some games you have to become god-like to keep playing.

Want to enjoy the game more? Take off the Daedric. Pick up some steel armor and a steel sword. It is so easy to role play an interesting character in this game and IMHO it's a lot more fun that way. Just limit yourself.

The OP, I think, got a lot right but was maybe a tad too cynical.

What Bethesda has realized is lots of people love playing these types of Deer Hunter games where there's a large number of sets filled with things to kill and who absolutely refuse to hear anything bad about that idea. Sadly, with each new release, there's less and less going on except "awesome" combat and over-the-top outfits and gear for the characters.

Then again, there is fully voiced dialog, animations enhanced to include hair blowing in the wind, and all that kind of stuff that the market has decided is essential, so it's got that going for it in spades.

I'm lvl 50.
I've done everything the bugged quests allow.
My inventory has 160lbs of misc quest Items I can't drop.
If skyrim was in my xbox, I'd tell you how many caves I explored (and I actually explored them)
But I got the achievement for 100 dungeons traveled.... at level 29.

I DID NOTICE THAT NO TWO CAVES WERE ALIKE. BRAVO.

However, I'm tired of caves.

Awaiting DLC. Might trade in.

One of the most important points made by the OP is undoubtedly true, in my experience: After a certain point in the game, it seems to punish exploration rather than encourage it.

I love skyrim, have played it over 100 hours...its a great game, but it is definitely lacking in some areas, most were addressed by the OP here.

There seems to be a serious lack of variation in many aspects of the game:
-Indoor Environments: are better designed than previous incarnations, but the tilesets don't change and there is nothing actually interesting in any of them. The experience in one of the Nordic tombs, for instance, is leagues above your typical Oblivion elvish ruin dungeon crawl, but whereas you usually got some sort of unique payoff at the end of Oblivion (and very often in Morrowind) dungeons, there's none of that here.
-Dearth of enemy types: every draugr, falmer, and bear looks the same. Gets pretty old pretty quickly. The dragonpriest thing was a great addition...if only there were 5 other "elite" groups of enemies like that, scattered sparcely through the dungeons, it would make the experience much better.
-Randomized gear: the randomized gear is almost always better than the extremely small amount of unique gear in the game, and is definitely better if you are a good armorer and create it yourself. That said, you hardly ever get a relevant piece after a certain point in the game, and the dungeon crawls get even more boring as a result. This seems to have been an intentional design decision, but in my opinion is a bad one. The fact that the actual number of equippable items has dropped so much also is a factor here, as there are less spots to equip new gear you get as well.
-Quests for the factions in the game are unsufferably repititious. Dark brotherhood mission: "kill this guy in this dwarven ruin", thieve's guild mission: find this object in this ruin, mage's guild mission "find this guy in this ruin". Stop sending me to the same-looking darned ruins! Perhaps if the ruins themselves had unique aspects related to the quest....but they don't...they are just like every other ruin in the game, and faction quests end up essentially becoming the same thing as every other random "task" in the game.

Its a testament to how what a great core experience this game provides that the repetitiveness of everything in this game doesn't overcome it. I enjoyed this game the entire time I played it, I do think it would have been better if everything didn't feel so dang repititious.

This made me nearly piss myself from laughing.

Whether or not you love or hate this game or any other doesn't matter to anyone but you. If you don't like it anymore then quietly move on to other more interesting endeavors. Good luck to you. You will not be missed.


Hilarious that a game you find so boring that you must tell others is played by you 2 hours/day. Guess how much time each day i set aside for unnecessary tasks I find boring?

I will say i prefer oscuro's oblivion overhaul to the vanilla skyrim experience. Dungeons were much funner and more unique than what is in skyrim, there were more tilesets and better balanced enemies/items.

cities were also bigger, there were more NPCs, cities felt more alive.

I don't like it when developers expect their unpaid modding community to fix the game for them

Skyrim is not RPG.

I don't think that Bethesda is expecting the modding community to fix their game, since the majority of people playing their game do not have access to mods.

Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul added more tilesets? Really? From where did you got that?

I think that some people need to revisited the vanilla version of Oblivion to compare it to vanilla Skyrim. After all, Modded Skyrim obviously will be better than Modded Oblivion anyway.

Thats probably my only problem about this game- having to go to caves all The time.... So boring!! Dwemer ruins Are awesome but everything else? Meh. And I wish it Would be more like ... Hmmmm... FALLOUT! In terms of quests a lot of quests in fallout Are outside... I wanna spend more time in The beautiful world!