I think this was a great article. Its not representing itself as fact, or a definitive truth, its just one guy's opinion on his personal GOTY. Agree or disagree, your choice.

Personally, I agree with pretty much everything he said. He was even handed enough to highlight the astoundingly beautiful and detailed gameworld, and the many positives that Skyrim has. I've enjoyed Skyrim a lot, but after the narrative of New Vegas I found myself wanting (even expecting) something more. Wandering around the map 'roleplaying' can only hold so much appeal if the world doesn't really respond to your actions.

And the quests....becoming the Archmage of Winterhold College without casting a single spell is a good example. This should not be possible. And the conclusion of the main quest, where its unclear what the threat even was, and that nothing actually changes at the end of it (dragons still attack you). The world wouldn't have been any different if you hadn't completed the main quest at all. These are all valid objections, to me at least.

You can't even get in to the college without casting a spell.

The rest of it depends on whether you're a roleplayer or if you're all about being led around by the hand and/or cheating game systems. This guy is obviously not a roleplayer. I don't go to finance magazines to learn about games, and I don't care what puzzle gamers think about RPGs. My biggest problem with this article is the obvious attempt to cash in on Skyrim's popularity by making the headline about Skyrim, when the whole substance of the article is "I liked Deus Ex." No one would click on him if that was his headline.

What the game is lacking, and I agree with the reporter, is the result of your actions.

A 150+ hour critique of the game:

Town people and farmers have a standard AI script package. They defend themselves. The player, the almighty dovahkiin, the oh-so-prophesised, is useless. The only cool stuff is in the daedric quests, some reward that is written somewhere in some game book. That is a nice thing because - AT LEAST - it allowed you to imagine some kind of story for the model and unique textured item you see.

Other than that, like someone else already said, you can kill every NPC but one and the game turns no better than playing in a land of automatons. The game glitches and the glitches in quests ruin the game for a character you want to imagine "living" in Skyrim. Yeah, let's just load before I "got pulled into" this quest, when I also visited a bunch of places, and also finished that other one. Oh, maybe better re-roll?

The glitches favour this mentaly-challenged way of playing because, inevitably, something will ruin the effort to imagine your character living in a believable world. The world is broken off the bat.

About the competition:

The only "competitors" to Bethesda are the modders. Skyrim is:

- CLS crafty bits/NPC with jobs/NPC have children
- Oblivion deadly reflex
- mix Oblivion XP with nGCD's you-are-what-you-play style of leveling
- better bodies
- some unique landscapes
- better NPC faces replacements.
And finally:
- a marketing engine, do a video with some toon killing a dragon and some human voice chant and you are set.

That's Skyrim right there. I explored it throughly. I was somewhat fan of Oblivion. Never played Morrowind, though it caught my eye. Was sincerely hoping for more in Skyrim.

The developer tools is what keeps TES selling. A very nice case study for those other game companies that want to profit and get media attention.

I'm playing a game about badass Viking dragonslayers, and you people are talking about something written in Forbes. For the love of Talos, close the thread.

I have to say, that article is very well written and I agree with every bit of it. I hope the "devoted fans" can take it for what it is.

Quoting the following from the article because Bethesda needs to see it.

P.s. Portal 2 is my GotY, although I haven't played many new games this year. For me, story > all else in gaming.

True, you do have to cast a spell to get past the high elf guard. But if you don't already have it, you can buy it from her, so literally anyone can do that, mage or not.

I don't agree with him trying to cash in on Skyrim's popularity. He makes very valid points, ones that have been expressed on this very forum many times over. Sure, different people see different things in the game, and like it for different reasons. Some people like creating a character and exploring the world, that's fine. Some, on the other hand, would like the world to respond to their actions...and I think this is the main gripe. Each quest (even the main one) is a self-contained pocket of storyline that never escapes its own gamespace. Like blowing up Megaton, noone really cares.

You can create as many different characters as you like, but if they all play out the same way in terms of how the world reacts to you, then the difference is purely cosmetic. And isn't that the point of an RPG, to make the game world react to you, to recognise that your character is unique?

THIS was a great article. Very well articulated. He makes valid points throughout. Just because a game has a million and 1.5 quests does not necessarliy make it the game of the year. Not for nothing, I myself am having a good time playing the game and traveling the world of Skyrim. In all honesty, I have no idea what the H-E-Double hockey sticks I am doing all these quests for. The author of the article is right. What difference does a bunch of quests make if there is no COMPELLING story to accompany the massive amount of quests? Once again, while I do enjoy(for the moment) exploring and discovering new places, there is just no substitute for a game with great story to accompany.

As stated in other posts quite liberally, I feel that Deus EX HR is one of the most compelling games of this year along with The Witcher 2. Both of these titles are no where near as long as Skyrim, and do not demand such vast investments of time. What the two games lack in size, they more than make up for with story line.

For example, in TW2, you can start the game by loading the last save game from the previous episode. This really gives you a chance to see the results of your alignment. I was in shock at what happened resulting from me siding with the rebels in the previous game. And also, the game was long, but not long enough to take 100+ hours to complete.

With all of that said, the author is right, and plenty of KNOW it...

I have to agree with the article. For anyone who disagrees, please, I challenge you to find a thread of contrary evidence and site where the compelling story is. I Also, I feel as though the company is at this point just pushing out games.

Who cares if one agrees or disagrees. If you like it, you like it. If you don't, you don't.

The article was actually spot on...at least about skyrim. Haven't played Deus Ex. Don't mistake "this game is great, but with these problems..." with "this game svcks." Some of you are doing that.

I definitely feel you on the GTFO with these psycho weirdos on this forum.

Yeah..I get the impression the author simply isn't huge fan of more 'traditional' RPG fare. His complaints about repetitiveness were indicative of someone who simply doesn't spend much time with RPG's...I would expect someone who feels this wouldn't pick am open world RPG as GOTY period, because by nature RPG's tend to be somewhat repetitive. His comments about playing a straight warrior were especially odd "I only used my sword and shield"..well durr brainiac, you picked a pure warrior, what were you expecting?

Anyway, wth did the OP find it necessary to post this saying "look see, not everyone loves it". No sh*t man, you are just making yourself look like a twit creating a thread on it though, you think you're going to somehow show Bethesda the error of their ways with your whiny thread, gimme a break.

You act like you posted this as 'reasoned criticism', but I don't think you did..if you did you would post YOUR OWN OPINION with actual you know, reasoned thoughts of your own, instead of an attempt to use a Forbes article (of all things) as an entitled whine to stick it to Bethesda.

And if they only marketed to PC players, they'd be 100% of the population. So what's your point?

He's backing up his opinion with a link to a respected news source which shares his general sentiments.

So we expect people to back up what they say, or we don't. Which is it?

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

This is a particularly bizarre statement. PC gamers make up a small fraction of the people playing any of Bethesda's recent titles yet you assert that Bethesda game studios deliberately releases incomplete content solely because they believe the modding community is going to finish the game for them. Absurd!

As for the lack of deep writing and improbable advancement in the guilds, I agree. Is this thing worthy of game of the year? Who cares? I like what they've done. I'm disappointed in the nerfing they did in many areas of the game that would have added the variety and diversity the author of that article believes to be lacking. I don't agree that the combat has to be filled with a hundred different special attacks, but the utter lack of variety in the spells available does bother me.

I guess if Bethesda could have delivered a 10 gig game most of these issues might never have surfaced. The writing being the one glaring exception. maybe instead of new junk in their DLCs they could instead give us a really deep and involved story, mystery or intrigue to satisfy the intellect as well as the trigger finger.

Sigh...this is one of many threads that obviously aren't actually about expressing valid criticism of the game, just throwing out a sensational topic and causing havoc. Anyone who's an advlt can see the difference quite easily.

Open world > being force to stay on the rails. I got 10 or 20 hours out of Deus Ex, but got 200 or more hours with Skyrim.

I guess you didn't read the article...because it DID express valid criticism. You on the other hand, are simply implying that you are an advlt, and anyone who disagrees with you is not.

Skyrim gets GOTY from me. Generally it's better than all the other games i've played. It's beats portal 2 simply because P2 is too short, and is pretty much a rehash of Portal, Skyrim has a lot of "wow", "cool", stuff that p2 doesn't. Deus Ex i've played half way through and I'm not finding it fun. Best fps single player game out this year but it doesn't do much to excite me. There hasn't been many fps like Deus Ex in the last 5 years, but it reminds me of a lot of older fps tps game 10 years ago.

Just "no" to BF3 and DA2. Both should have been a lot better.

I couldn't disagree more !

No, what i'm implying is that people who make threads like this aren't doing it to promote debate on the specifics of the game, but to create divisive, bickering threads and to say "see i'm right not everyone likes it SO THERE" like a ten year old.

Yeah but the thing people tend to forget is that it was easier to tell a detailed elaborate story/history with a text based dialoge system.

Don't conflate the bickering of posters with the intentions of the OP. It's not his fault if people don't know how to form arguments that promote discussion.

Personally, I would consider Skyrim my GotY(with much reservation though), and I've put wayyyy more time into it than Portal 2 and Dues Ex combined.

That said, I agree with the points made in the article. The game might very well be a much better product if they cut down on the amount of content a little bit, and focused on making the content in the game more diverse and enjoyable. It's cool that the game can offer infinite quests... but when the quests are all the same thing, over and over again, who cares? I thought the Dark Brotherhood questline was ok. The Mage's Guild was kind of bleh, I mean, I enjoyed it, but it was to short and didn't really feel all that fulfilling at the end. I thought the main quest was ok, but still quite short. They really could have cut the number of side quests in half and just improved the main ones.

This is all in addition to the horribly buggy state the game was released in. Some might not consider that important for GotY consideration, but I certainly do, and this game was more akin to a Beta that cost $60 than a fully polished game.

At the end of the day, selecting a GOTY is a purely subjective endeavor. No game, regardless how great it is, can be all things to all people. Skyrim really struck a chord for me so it's been my favorite game this year. Is it the best game of the year? Maybe not, (this Forbes article makes good points, and I also had a blast with Batman: Arkham City) but Skyrim is just what I've been looking for in a game and that's enough for me.

It happens that I am a huge Deus Ex fan and HR was indeed a surprisingly good successor of DX1 for these days, but I still think Skyrim is overall the best game I've played this year.