Huh. I've never noticed that in my embarrassingly many gameplay hours. And only one of my characters does alchemy, or picks up nirnroots in other words

Sorry, none english here, so I have a even harder time understanding what exactly your reply was aimed at?!

Basically you told me, instead of exploiting crafting skills, you just found other means exploiting other perks to build up your "all powerful hybrid char". Still, you need a fairly high level and understanding of the perks. It's not like most players had this approach playing Skyrim back in 11/11/11. Me neither. If you have to study internet, wiki, message boards and gather experience by having multiple playthroughs and try out different builds to form your all powerful hybrid, thats not exactly easy, its exploiting, and too much time at your disposal for that matter.

2. Guild Quest Chains are waaaaayyyyy too Short
In the 100 hours I've played I completed the Companion, Mage, and Thieve's Guild quest chains. I do agree that the Mage and Thieve's guild quest chains are in fact shorter than their Oblivion counterparts, but some of the commentary on these boards relating to the length of guild quest chains is a disservice to those who might come here to learn more about the game.

I also can add that while their may be overall fewer sub-quests to finish a guild chain compared with Oblivion, what there is in Skyrim is a lot more interesting and satisfying. In Oblivion I began growing tired of both the Fighter's Guild and Mage Guild quest chains because they just weren't all that intersting. In Skyrim, I was sad that the guild quest chains came to their conclusions, because they were interesting and fun. But I don't think they're too short, especially given that there are so many other quests available in the game.

i exploited the game so i could experiment with different builds. after restarting, i did not have to exploit the game to create the hybrid build.

i did this after spending hours already playing different narrow archetypes and experiencing boredom to the point of a readiness to stop playing completely.

by making this all-powerful, all-purpose, hybrid character i extended the life of the game for me and it instantly brought back some fun. otherwise, i'd be restarting a fallout3 or oblivion game.

as well, i always like to create power characters for EVERY rpg i play. i create such characters after spending 100's of hours playing the game. i enjoy it.

btw, what i studied most was the perk screen and contemplated my previous experiences. it only took a short amount of 'online research' and the communication i had with other people was interesting and worthwhile.

it wasn't hard at all and was time well-spent.

regardless, i was rebutting your incorrect post.

You being a power gamer makes your opinion on Skyrim's difficulty worthless.

You being a power gamer makes your opinion on Skyrim's difficulty worthless.

You being a power gamer makes your opinion on Skyrim's difficulty worthless.

Artificially extending guild questlines by picking up unrelated sidequests along the way does not make the guild questline any less shallow.

@Abrinth


Precisely. The Thieves Guild Questline is a perfect example of the ridiculous example Bethesda has made.


Step #1: Loading Screen, go through tunnel, Loading Screen, go through hallway, talk to person, sit around for 3 statements of stuff you already know.

Step #2: Repeat step #1, excluding the chat, and hallway.

Step #3: Go do quest.

(Optional #3): May have to fast travel, saving time; Warning: may require loading screen.

Step #4: Repeat step #1, tell person you're done with quest.

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Let's evaluate. For console users, that's roughly a 20 minute sequence from a SINGLE quest. There are more than a DOZEN quests in every guild questline.

Bethesda has gone down the poop shoot.

No, trying to shoehorn a big, system-intensive modern game onto aging console hardware, is what makes your experience so poor. And I don't know if your horrible experience with loading times is the same with everybody else running it on a console, but if it is, that's pretty sad. Obviously, in a huge world like Skyrim, you have to have loading screens any time you transition from any indoor or underground area to the outside world... as I doubt your console memory can hold 7GB worth of gameworld at the ready for instant loading, all at the same time. The only way you'd get any relief from that kind of problem, is if they always placed the quest target in the same immediate location as the questgiver... and that just wouldn't make for a very good or interesting game.

While I can empathize with your predicament, I can't see any easy way to get past it, short of greatly shrinking the size of the game, or coming out with new console hardware that isn't svcking wind from old age.

Sorry, but that's some fail game design philosophy, and I seriously hope that is not a part of Bethesda's logic. You should always balance for potential. You don't ignore something Just because not everyone can do it, the fact that anyone even can needs to be accounted for.

Which is why, in games where the designers take such reasonable considerations into account, they create their hardest mode, their 'Hell', 'Nightmare', or 'Master' mode, to be really_hard, and challenging for anyone, especially those intrepid souls who push the envelope of what their characters can do within the doable limits of the game mechanics. The fact that wasn't done, and instead they included multiple features into the standard gameplay that readily allows players to blow the entire game balance out of the water, was indeed a fail. Apologists will say "Oh, they've never done that in TES, you shouldn't expect it to be balanced". But intelligent people will ask- "Why the hell not?"

To be fair, most of the bugs mentioned in this thread (e.g. Nirnroot glows) were fixed months ago on the PC (thanks to modders). If you haven't already, take a look at the unofficial Skyrim patch and see how many bugs it fixes (nearly a thousand!). This frustrated me so much because I played Skyrim on the 360 and I had to spend a fair amount of cash to buy a PC that plays Skyrim decently. If you haven't played Skyrim on consoles, play it (especially on a PS3). The game has SO many issues that it's impossible for Bethesda to fix them all and that's precisely why they depend on the modding community to fix them. PC is the only sensible way to play Skyrim and anyone playing it on console isn't experiencing the game as how it should've been in the first place.

That's not a hyperbole, that's a fact. The Companions one expecially was clichedand rushed.

The Companions is the worst guild in the history of The Elder Scrolls. The Fighter's Guild in Oblivion is infinitely better.

It appears a lot less lately - I wonder if one of the patches fixed it...
It did seem to appear a fair bit - now most people comment on what a good (insert skill here) I am.

I hit the 100 hour mark of my first Skyrim character and first playthrough of Skyrim. I started playing the day that patch 1.4 was released. Now that I have played the game myself, I am able to separate hyperbole found on this board from actual gameplay experience.

The mods I have installed are http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=8122, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=10944, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=14782, http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=10771 and the official hi-rez texture packs from Bethesda (both esms eneabled). I have Skyrim installed on a machine with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with 4GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 580 video card with 1.5GB of RAM.

1. "... and then I took an arrow to the knee."
Reading these boards one might think that you hear this phrase every second you play the game as well as in your sleep, in the shower, and on the radio in your car. In 100 hours of gameplay, I have heard this 3 times. Yes, I kept count from the start.

2. Guild Quest Chains are waaaaayyyyy too Short
In the 100 hours I've played I completed the Companion, Mage, and Thieve's Guild quest chains. I do agree that the Mage and Thieve's guild quest chains are in fact shorter than their Oblivion counterparts, but some of the commentary on these boards relating to the length of guild quest chains is a disservice to those who might come here to learn more about the game.

I also can add that while their may be overall fewer sub-quests to finish a guild chain compared with Oblivion, what there is in Skyrim is a lot more interesting and satisfying. In Oblivion I began growing tired of both the Fighter's Guild and Mage Guild quest chains because they just weren't all that intersting. In Skyrim, I was sad that the guild quest chains came to their conclusions, because they were interesting and fun. But I don't think they're too short, especially given that there are so many other quests available in the game.

3. The Game is a Complete Bug-Fest - All Hail To 'Bugthesda!'
Yes, Skyrim has bugs. Yes, I CTD's a few times in my 100 hours. And for those of you struggling with persistent bugs - YES I believe you, I don't think you're crazy. But in my 100 hours of playing here are the bugs I've encounterd (yes, I kept notes and kept track of frequencies).

• 3 CTDs (all when Quicksaving)
  
• 1 Corrupted Quicksave file (thank god I'm OCD with manually saving - I was able to load a manual save losing only a couple of minutes)
  
• 1 Quest that didn't clear out my quest log when I finished it
  
• 3 Quest related items for quests I completed but are still in my inventory

That's it for me. In the months before I started playing Skyrim I had mentally prepared myself to be frustrated with bugs because of all the bugs being posted on these boards. But in my own gameplay, my actual experience is well within what I'd consider 'par for the course' for a PC game of this nature.

4. The Game is waaaaayyyyy too Easy
My background is CRPGs. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that I was graphing Wizardy 1 dungeon levels before a lot of you were alive. On the flip side, I do have a family and a job now, so I'm not as saavy a RPGer as I once was. I do not 'powergame' at all. In fact, I know little about the inner-workings of Skyrim and play the game organically - I learn through experience.

My character is a Mage, using Destruction and Conjuration. My first 25 hours I played on Master level difficulty and many encounters were brutallly difficult for me. I have spent upward of 30 minutes trying to beat a bear, troll, and other various wildlife. I have spent upwards of an hour trying to beat the first dragon enounters. I have spent similar amounts of time trying to beat bosses of one type or another. I have many times had to leave boss encounters to come back later.

After 25 hours of play, I reduced the difficuly to 'Expert' and even on Expert, I have to leave some boss encounters and come back later. Dragons are still a pain to beat. The game is not too easy for me - not even close. It may be easy for those with a lot of game-time on their hands (and I do not say that disparagingly - I had more time when I was younger too).

5. Dungeons are Copy-Paste
These assertions really make me go, 'hmmmmm.' The dungeons of Skyrim are MUCH better than those from prior iterations of the series. I find them interesting places to explore and unlike Oblivion, when I am sent to a dungeon for a quest I'm not bummed out about it.

It's easy to monday-morning quaterback and there's a list I could easily come up with to make them even more interesting. But considering the scope of the game and how much better dungeons are in Skyrim, I find myself quite content with what they offer in the game.

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So there you have it. My impression of Skyrim after 100 hours and what I consider the top 5 hyperboles about the game found on these very boards. I suppose I should run and hide now.

You know the ONE thing Bethesda did absolutely 100% right with Skyrim? Building the world. It's so packed with details that I actually can't believe a game like this runs on 5 year old consoles (no offense).

That's not a hyperbole, that's a fact. The Companions one expecially was clichedand rushed.