This is a heavily edited version of http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1283479-skyrim-v11-an-attempt-at-a-review/. It is updated to reflect the mainquest and the changes in patch 1.3. The conclusion is still very similar; there are new sections on Story and Patching, and the old sections have also been reworked. Also, thanks to everyone who commented on the previous topic.

TL;DR version:

begin with 6/10;
add 2 if you have no problems with levelscaling and/or a mod comes out that removes levelscaling;
add 1 if a mod improves balancing (apart from levelscaling);
add 1 if some of the most pressing bugs and annoyances are fixed.

Levelscaling: way better than Oblivion, but still very annoying
Quests: high quality, with surprisingly few bugs; radiant quests feel boring after a while
Lore, immersion and realism: good job, although lore still fades in comparison with Morrowind
Story: good for a 2011 game, mediocre in comparison to Morrowind
Balancing: not good, but not Oblivion-style bad
Bugs and design flaws: few serious bugs; lack of player-owned containers at the beginning of the game
Patching: wish this could be handled more reasonably (not to say professionally)

--

First let me say that the claims of Skyrim being linear or being small are somewhat exaggerated, to say the least. I have spent 130 hours in Skyrim (on one character) before finishing the mainquest, and it were not exactly 130 hours of boring grind. While the radiant quests tend to get tiresome after the first five or so, there is still much to do in the land of snow and dragonfire. This is not Fallout 3.

Levelscaling

The first section of this review is about levelscaling. If you are comfortable with the idea that roughly 80% of your ingame enemies are levelscaled, and not in the Morrowind way of levelscaling, then you can just skip this section - most likely, you will not consider any of the points I make interesting.

I didn't have much hope that Bethesda would abandon levelscaling to begin with - "never change a running system" is too much of a dogma in software development. I had hopes that it would end up better than Oblivion's and maybe even better than Fallout 3's levelscaling. It did end up better than Oblivion's one: there are no literal bandits in daedric armor, and there is no sudden onslaught of enemies immune to normal weapons (in fact, there are no enemies immunte to normal weapons anymore - this is, I think, an improvement over Oblivion and Morrowind). Still, most of Skyrim is levelscaled, and you will notice it even if you don't look for it. Some places in Skyrim don't seem to spawn enemies at all when the player is really low-level. It happened to me at least once that I was forced to go to an already discovered place using Fast Travel, because the only way to it suddenly started spawning witches. These witches became cannon fodder on higher levels, but the very fact that at some level I couldn't reach a point by foot but could fast travel to it is rather immersion-breaking (fast travel isn't supposed to be a teleportation spell - it is supposed to be an abstraction for travelling by foot!). More importantly, the very idea that you don't gain an advantage by levelling up took a lot of excitement from my game. Why train skills if it will benefit my enemies just as much as me? Leveling up felt like running on the spot, and sometimes even falling back. It did get better around level 25, when I finally was able to handle most of the enemies the game threw at me in the wilderness (not in caves). It got better as I leveled further, since most leveled lists end at a certain point (I think only bosses level beyound player level 50) and since smithing and alchemy are two very useful skills to have at 100 (smithing for dragon armor; alchemy for resistance potions). But if I ever feel like replaying Skyrim with a new character, I might just as well get it to level 20 by console at first, because the game isn't fun if one is not making progress.

Due to levelscaling, Skyrim neither has any real comfort zones (regions where you are pretty much safe unless you are a level-3 character or walk into caves; the Ascadian Isles were such a zone in Morrowind) nor real danger zones (regions one should avoid unless well-skilled and well-prepared; "you don't just walk into Mordor"). While the snowy regions of Skyrim seem to be slightly more dangerous than the Whiterun-Helgen-Falkreath area, and the Reach is harder than both of these (due to being a war zone), it is hard to notice the differences, and all of these zones gradually become harder as you level. On higher levels you will confront frost trolls on the way from Riverwood to Bleak Falls Barrow. Whether you are seeking adventure in the mountains around Winterhold, or trying to have a relaxing walk in the vicinity of Riverwood, the game will often throw the same kind of enemies at you, as if monsters could fast travel. This makes the different geographical regions of Skyrim feel more equal than they should. In Morrowind, I could rather reliably guess a region by the first 10 leveled monsters that I would encounter there. In Skyrim, I can't; instead, I can roughly guess the level of the player character.

This said, Bethesda did avoid the one big mistake they made in Oblivion: the attribute multipliers. They took the Alexandrian solution: drop the attributes. I am not missing them at all. Some claim that without attributes, Skyrim isn't a real RPG, but I prefer this solution to Oblivion's contra-intuitive and immersion-breaking hunt for +5 multipliers. Of course, abolishing levelscaling would be a better fix to this (the only reason to hunt for those +5's is to get stronger faster than your enemies; if the enemies don't level, it doesn't really matter how fast you improve).

Sidenote: If someone is planning a mod that removes levelscaling (like OOO for Oblivion), I am available for comments, testing and/or enemy placing.

Quests

I haven't finished all major questlines, but I have done the mainquest and the Winterhold college. What I have seen so far speaks for Bethesda: They have learnt to make quests interesting, complex (lots of interaction, complex decision trees, nontrivial AI) and relatively bugfree at the same time. Yes, I am aware of https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs, but only a few serious plotstoppers that are not easy to avoid or to fix by the console.

The lack of consequences of "The Forsworn Conspiracy" and "No One Escapes Cidhna Mine" was somewhat disappointing, but then again I have no idea what kind of consequences these quests could reasonably have without ruining the player's gameplay comfort. After all, a burned-down Markarth and half the shopekeepers murdered would make most players just reload an earlier save. The two quests themselves are well-done and build up tension very well.

The randomized "radiant" quests felt nice for a while, but quickly became boring. But one should keep in mind that Morrowind had a lot of handmade fed-ex quests that were no less trivial than these randomized ones. This is a case of "don't want it, don't do it"; there are enough other quests in Skyrim.

Lore, immersion and realism

Where not spoiled by levelscaling and poor balancing, Skyrim's world feels rather immersive - certainly more so than Oblivion's. Several places show the developers' care for realism. In contrast to Morrowind, where Dwemer machinery felt like an affront to physics and conservation of energy, this time we see where these Dwemer constructs come out from and how they are are powered by soul gems. Wolves hunt in packs and show actual flock behaviour. Bandits don't let themselves get killed off one by one. While Morrowind felt immersive in part because the player's fantasy was forced to interpolate many things that the game failed to give, Skyrim feels immersive because the developers actually built in all of these things. Skyrim is as concrete as Morrowind was abstract.

There are several things, though, that keep Skyrim from reaching Morrowind's level of immersion. Most importantly, Skyrim might have 10 times as much new lore as Oblivion had, but this is still 1/10th of Morrowind's lore. There are also too many Nordic clichées for this new lore to be actually that new. Then, there are a few failures that somehow slipped under the QA radar:

- The lore and tradition of the Forsworn is hinted at, but completely undetailed. You get an "Armor of the Old Gods", but you aren't even told the names of these gods, let alone how they are worshipped. They live in neat huts and use badass necromancy to keep their briarhearts alive, but other than that, you have no idea who they are.

- There is some confusion about the Nordic barrows: part of the game seems to consider them remnants of an ancient past (there is a loadscreen saying that Draugr are former dragon servants), another part considers them recent burials (there are two quests involving somebody trying to clear a burial of his own family from monsters).

Also, Sovngarde could be bigger and the people there could have something more meaningful to say.

Still, it is a giant step forward from Oblivion and provides for an immersive game experience.

Story

If you compare the Oblivion main quest with Skyrim's one, you will notice that both follow a similar pattern:


Both games follow this formal plotline without too many twists. However, Skyrim is much better at "filling the blanks" with reasonable content, whereas Oblivion filled lots of them with kitsch (Martin's speeches, but not only them) and tedium (just think of the Oblivion gates, all looking the same and having the same enemies). Storywise, Skyrim is much like Oblivion done right.

The Winterhold College is nothing extraordinary either, but again done without the mistakes of Oblivion's Mages Guild (endless dungeoneering before the final anticlimactic confrontation).

I probably would not enjoy reading any part (or the whole) of the Skyrim story as a book. But I did enjoy playing it as a game: it is a good video game story. We had better ones back in the early 2000's (Morrowind comes into my mind, or rather says Hi from the depths of it), but it doesn't fall behind the game narratives we have in the early 2010's (as far as I can see).

Balancing

Balancing a levelscaled game is extremely difficult. I pity the developers who had to do it. In a non-levelscaled game, you basically decide how strong a character must be to survive in a certain place, and place monsters accordingly (of course, deciding is the hard part); in a levelscaled one, you have to take into account all possible levels of the player. I wasn't surprised to find some oversights on Bethesda's part here. Fortunately there are not that many of them.

https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/208614 is the most glaring oversight - nothing beats being trapped in a dungeon that can only be exited by beating the final boss, and finding out that you can make basically no damage against the final boss while he takes you out in 2-3 shots. Is this intentional? Doubt so. Sigdis is one of 3 brothers, and the 2 remaining ones are very doable with the appropriate tactics.

Destruction magic has the funny property of being too strong when cast by enemies and way too weak when used by the player himself. If you want to survive a fight against spellcasters, you have to either spam health and resistance potions, or buy resistance-enchanted items (armor/amulets/rings). On high levels, you will have to do both. Casting spells seems useless, since destruction damage doesn't scale well (but your enemies do) and the useful spells take an eternity to power up, and particularly in the presence of shock-casting mages depleting your magicka. I would expect these difficulties when fighting a boss in a necromancer dungeon, but it turns out that random radiant vampires (alone, not in packs) I meet on the road on level 48 are in no way easier. Be they Volkihar, they are not supposed to be harder than Alduin in Sovngarde, are they?

Bugs and design flaws

If you belong to the "not buying Bethesda products until the second patch" faction, rest assured: Skyrim in version 1.1 (that's the day-one patch) was't as buggy as Morrowind with its latest official patch. And it got slightly better in 1.3, although they haven't even started to patch the ESM file (the source of most problems). And that despite the complexity of Skyrim's quests and AI would allow for 10 times as many bugs. Yes, Bethesda has learnt a lot since Oblivion. Besides many minor bugs that didn't seriously hurt my game experience, I had a https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/209221 and occasionally https://unofficialskyrimpatch.16bugs.com/projects/7078/bugs/208442. Both of these were averted by saving and reloading. I know of very few bugs that aren't immediately obvious when encountered. Save often and you will be mostly safe.

Now for the other kind of bugs - the ones that are not bugs but features. Obviously this is a very subjective category. My favorite issue of this kind is levelscaling, as detailed above. The second design flaw, in my opinion, is the absence of a container where the player can put his stuff in at the beginning of the game, before one has bought the Whiterun house (or any other house, which isn't much easier). This forces the player to collect his stuff on some corpse and return to it regularly so as to make sure it doesn't respawn. Not a particularly well-documented method (I just knew it from Oblivion) and not quite immersive either, but necessary, since on level 5 you have no idea which of the items in your pockets are important, which are replaceable, and which are useless vendor trash. As a dev who knows exactly what kind of stuff is needed where, you might not understand a level-5 player's troubles deciding between a mace and a greatsword; but I don't think the game would become significantly less challenging simply by giving the player some places to store stuff in. Why not give Gerdur or Alvor (depending on which side the player takes during the tutorial) a chest in their house for the player to put items in? The chest might be limited to a weight of 600, to still make buying a house lucrative.

Patching

Everybody knows this well-enough, so I'll be brief.

(1) The ninja DRM patch was pointless. People downloading a pirated Skyrim don't get any problems from that; the unprotected EXE is already in the wild. Cracker teams get a pair of EXE files: protected and unprotected; this makes for a nice research objective. Legitimate players can no longer use the LAA patch (now officially done - good, but late). The only piracy it prevents is the kind of piracy where somebody just copies over his game folder to somebody else. But this isn't much of a problem either, since the unprotected EXE is everywhere on the net. And why it is everywhere on the net brings us to...

(2) The 1.2 patch. I understand that whenever you patch software, some new bugs are introduced and not found in QA. That's normal. But a week is too long a time to react. You could have just offered the 1.1 version as a downgrade to annoyed players. Think of it this way: Each day means more people downgrading, sharing the old EXE file on the internet (often even the one before the DRM patch), and writing bad reviews. Add to this the fact that not many of the issues fixed in 1.2 were genuinely relevant to PC players, so it was more of a service to console players, and the outcome is evident. Achievement Unlocked: Major [censored]storm.

It seems that patching has changed course to a more reasonable one since 1.3, so I am not letting this lower the review score. That said, I am now backupping my EXE file...

Conclusion

Skyrim is a high-quality game. While levelscaling and flawed balancing are marring my personal experience of it, it has still a lot to offer, particularly to someone not as sensitive to balancing matters as myself. Skyrim is in no way a Morrowind 2.0, but a worthy successor.

Discussing pirating is going to get you ousted.

Heres my Review.


Best game ever.

Morrowind was an adventure game. Skyrim is an action game. IMO. God that feels good to say that.

Anyway this is your review and has turned into things that you don't like / would like to see. I have my own list, as does everyone else.

I will say, I think levelscaling is fine. The game gives you the tools to run away if something is too strong for you. Also, look at New Vegas. They removed much of the levelscaling to my knowledge and that left us with crappy random encounters...wait there weren't any random encounters. (Hated faction assassins don't count) Levelscaling makes random encounters work. And random encounters is what really makes this game shine for me.

There never will be a Morrowind 2.0 and I dare say for the majority of us, that's a good thing.

@bcurdragonborn: You are certainly right about Morrowind being quite an adventure game, but both games are marketed as RPGs, so the comparison suggests itself. Anyway, I hope I haven't made this review too much of a comparison with Morrowind.

Most of what I wrote about levelscaling is rather subjective, but I think the arguments make sense not just for me. In contrast to you I don't think random encounters are well-implemented in Skyrim, but this is way more subjective. To me most of them look artificial. The foreigner and the hunter are a particularly striking example. I could discuss this if you wish, but better in another thread.

Moan all you like, but Levelscaling is integral and exceptionally important to ANY RPG of this kind. It's getting the balance right, which sorts it. Ideally there should be shelf points, where a user's character climbs to, and finds they are able to kick the ass of any enemy for a fair few levels, before the next batch of tougher enemies is introduced.

But without levelscaling games are just... dull. I don't want to become godlike and NEVER have any kind of challenge presented from a game. Without Levelscaling that is ALL you get. Pointless. And exceptionally dull........

Actually I want to clarify.

Morrowind had an amazing atmosphere and I was disappointed with Oblivion. I too had wanted that strange / foreign land to be more prevalent in Oblivion. They had some awesome idea's in Morrowind and I too wanted to see those ideas fleshed out more. They played it safe and went with high medieval / tolkienish fantasy world. Todd Howard even commented on how Lord of the Rings helped fantasy genres go mainstream. I hope that in the next game they create their own world again. Blackmarsh, Elswyer and Summerset Isle look to be fascinating places and hopefully Beth doesn't draw too much from medieval fantasy to create their next game.

With Skyrim, I knew what I was getting. Still would love to see some of that wonder from Morrowind, but I'm seeing the forest from the trees. Two months have gone by almost and I'm still playing Skyrim like a mad man. They have done a lot of things right. Would like to see the next game with less cues taken from mainstream fantasy and real world history.

I`m waiting for a new OOO to fix the crap level scaling.

Some random encounters are meh. Coming of dust man's cairn and seeing a dragon overhead is awesome. Seeing the dragon start a fight with a giant is even better. Being able to have a chance to fight the winner or both at level 15 is just freakin amazing. Better than running away looking for that "safe" territory because they're higher level than I am.

Also, seeing a Super Mutant Master fighting a Deathclaw in the dead of night in Fallout 3 was another WOW moment. (Again, having the option to finish off the winner or tangle with them both at levels lower than them adds to the fun) We could go on, true. I just think without levelscaling those fight would have turned into a spectator fest with me running for safety and hoping I could join the fight in a dozen levels or so.

This, completely this, we need some form of a levelscaling system otherwise yeah the game gets boring and dull. It's one of the reasons why I got bored with Dark Souls (Besides it being too hard ) and it also annoys me with New Vegas to a degree.

I am sorry, but that is mostly rubbish.

Enemies don't scale with you forever. Highest non-Chief Bandit is level 25. Highest enemy in the game, the Vampire Master, is level 53. Some enemies have fixed levels that don't change through the game, like Giants, which gives the player a real sense of accomplishment when you finally can stand up to them after eyeing them for so long knowing that you'll get owned.

Just by playing "normally" you're expected to reach level ~50, which will make you go toe-to-toe with the toughest enemies in the game and will make most baddies in the game fodder. The spawning alghorithm always mixes things up a bit so even at level 80 you will never encounter a Bandit dungeon full of Bandit Highwaymen; there'll always be some Thugs and even generic Bandits.

So no, level scaling does not diminish a sense of progress or accomplishment in Skyrim.

Think I'll read that one when I'm in bed tonight.

With Skyrim there really was pretty much only one way they COULD go. I was expecting a landscape akin to that which I found on Cyrodil side of the Jerall Mountains in Oblivion. And that's pretty much what I got. But with a pleasing return of Dwemer Ruins...

Morrowind was immense in terms of lore, but it DID have it's flaws. The ugliness of it's meshes and textures, which seem like they're from a whole other era of videogaming now. The combat was pretty terrible, the lack of a compass bewildering, and in many ways it was down to the User to juxtapose levels of immersion on to the game, rather than what the game actually offered.

Neither Oblivion or Morrowind were perfect games. Both flawed in their own unique ways. Skyrim is too. But I have enjoyed all three in their own ways, with their own unique strengths.

dont think bethesda is really that stupid to ban somebody who does a review of their game.

@Nordski

I agree 100%. I think this is a very niche fantasy game but I'll bring it in anyway. Magic the Gathering. This is not a mainstream game. It does however have its own fantasy background that is very unique. All I'm saying is I don't want a Morrowind 2.0 but I would like to see a future game that has a unique atmosphere that isn't drawn heavily from a medieval genre. I'm not asking for this in Skyrim. I would like to see it in the next game though. A setting that is bolder, a setting that is only found in an Elder Scrolls game.

OT

They could have fleshed out factions better.

Good review, I agree with most

I would add to the radiant quest thing: Although boring, it is nice that you won't run out of quests to do, and that at least makes up for some of the dullness, in Morrowind there were a lot of dull quests that were the exact same every time, this is slightly better

Levelscaling could probably be better if you allowed higher level monsters to spawn at lower levels but as a rarity, and the witch thing really is stupid - they let giants spawn and they are higher level (always)! Additionally Alduin would have benefited from having the minimum stats of an Ancient Dragon, scaled from there (he's a god in his element - you're nothing, even if you are level 81)

Also on the Forsworn - we know they're natives of the Reach, and that they are similar to Bretons, possibly even are Bretons. Their gods are either non-existant or just the eight Aedra under different names, like most religions. Still would've been nice to talk to a shaman. (They may also be Daedra worshippers of some kind)

Well, tey might if they suspect they had a pirated copy of the game... One way or the other.

I'm getting your point, I think, but not with this example: Aren't both the Super Mutant Master and the Deathclaw already the hardest opponents in their respective leveled lists (not counting Broken Steel)? Without levelscaling they couldn't be harder; only easier.) Giants in Skyrim also don't level, and this kind of has a reason if you think about it...

To make stuff clearer: The Hired Thugs encounter isn't scaled; still I dislike it. It's not just about levelscaling, it's also about realism/soundness. Apparently everybody in Skyrim, from a cave-dwelling alchemist to a jarl (including even dead bodies), hires the same lowlifes to "teach a lesson" (with the same choice of words) over any stolen item.


Wondering what you mean by shelf points. Do you want a mechanic which counts (for example) how many dragons I have slain, and if it is more than 10 introduces frost dragons? I agree this would be better than the levelscaling currently used in Skyrim.

And yes, levelscaling improves a lot when the balancing is right. Alas, balancing is also much harder to do right when levelscaling is used, and I haven't seen it done right in an RPG. (Dragon Age also levelscales and I wouldn't exactly call Uldred balanced.)


We are entering personal-experience territory now, but let me say that I enjoyed exploring Morrowind long past level 25 (which is normally considered the level at which the player character becomes godlike on Vvardenfell). And many popular mods don't add any challenge either; indeed many popular mods even remove challenge from the already existing game. RPG's are not all about combat, and combat isn't all about challenge. You can make an RPG artificially challenging at level 50, but it doesn't help the atmosphere if you implement this by means of overpowered mages on main roads which are harder than each named boss or dragon.


As long as one can flee (not that easy if there are frost-casting mages among them) and they aren't blocking roads, that could be a nice thing.


I thought they were definitely Bretons, but now I am not sure where I got this from. What I mean is... they have a culture, obviously, but I haven't seen any of this culture detailed in the game. It's a Potemkin village of a culture.

Also, after the mainquest, are you really sure that most religions have gods which really are just "the eight Aedra under different names"?

I dont even know why they are stupid enough to ban people if they talk about piracy in a neutral way.. as long as you aint promoting piracy on the forums i think it should be allowed to talk about it

... or you could tweek the notion of levels a bit. For instance, the HP/Magicka/Stamina gain could be removed, and perks could be nerfed so that they were no longer superhuman. This would make low level characters comparably stronger and high level characters comparably weaker. While NPCs should follow the same levelling scheme as the PC, monsters could follow their own to get more HP and resistance.

...Fair point, I suppose their gods could just be powerful beings of another kind, they could mean various Hagravens, they seem to revere them.

But if they do worship gods who are genuinely divine in some way then they probably worship daedra. Hircine might be a good one.

This works fine on the "characters are lower than you" but doesn't work on the "characters are higher than you" because generally characters aren't higher than you. If you play WOW or Morrowind, there are certain areas that are "off limits" until you reach a certain level. Not so with Skyrim and Oblivion.

Bearing in mind I haven't taken a character past level 30 something yet, I think the level scaling is better than Fallout 3 but still can be immersion breaking. Like I took a level 25-ish character to see the Greybeards for the first time and after being warned about wolves faced a set of higher tier enemies on the way up - there was no way those pilgrims could have coped. I appreciate level scaling helps keep the challenge, but for me it breaks the immersion if the world keeps blatantly changing just to suit you. One thing Fallout New Vegas did really well was having high tier enemies in specific zones right from the start and having the roads as fairly safe (which made sense). They had Deathclaws in packs with alpha male, mother and babies which gave a much better sense that these are creatures with some kind of social group in some kind of believable world. They didn't just materialise for no reason other than to give you something to fight. And you do not mess with them until you are ready. As well as, say, random trolls, I'd have loved to have seen 'troll zone' with badass uber daddy troll and troll babies. Where you could face off against 20 trolls at level 1 if that was what you wanted. You need some level scaling, but I think they should mix it up even more. But they've gone in the right direction - having the giants and mammoths as an optional foe that don't mess with you if you leave them alone is a good idea and makes the gameworld more believable.

I'm sort of frightened if I take a character to level 50 and beyond it will be like Fallout 3 and the lanscape becomes a catalogue of horrors no ordinary mortal could possibly survive. I really hope wolves and skeevers don't disappear just because the world is moulded solely to combat your uber powers. Does this happen?

Some dungeons in Morrowind yes, or rather about 5 monsters in the dungeons. Morrowind's wilderness scaled similarly to Skyrim's, which is why you could complete the first temple quest so early despite having to go to red mountain. Most dungeon monsters were also scaled, albiet still less so than either of the later games, but the odd one, or a boss, would be hand placed.

Levelled items and monsters are most definitely in Morrowind - you can see them in the editor, the monsters are all ninja monkeys

Can agree with this at all. Especially what you said about winterholds, it just cut's out seemingly right in the middle and then some guy walks up to you and says yeah your the Archmage now. then all the guys that have been there decades or maybe centuries just go ok, I guess this guy who just walked in here a few days ago that we know nothing about and don't even know how well he is at magic is now our leader. I have atleast 5 broken quests in my journal now and 2 broken radiant AI quests. I have 6 items marked as quest Items that are permanently stuck in my inventory now thanks to broken quests and or broken scripting. Really all the quest I've done so far are extremely shallow in regard to information, back story and effect on the world.