I'm the same way -- it's wasn't so much that the quests were similar, but they were too darn lazy to hide that they were similar. I literally facepalmed when I discovered that in both questlines, you'd just so happen to be chasing a supply wagon that just so happens to be stuck in the mud and you just so happen to have the element of surprise. The wording of the people giving those quests is almost identical. The order of quests is the only difference. It's one thing to rush a faction, it's another to have the exact same quests for two factions that fight each other, and make it obvious. When both sides have the same broken down wagon and the same fake orders and the same "pin bad stuff on a jarl" quests, it's just plain lazy. It's nothing more than rearranging the order and using the search/replace function in MS Word to rewrite the quest orders. Unless "short on time" means that one faction or the other had to have been completed within an hour, there's not much excuse for that.

Well I can't complain too much for what Skyrim offered. I think we were just spoiled by MW and OB.

I'm overall content with what Skyrim offered. Could things have been done differently and better? Sure, but thatr's true for every game. Skyrim delivers interesting lore and an outstanding open world to explore, and I feel like I got much more than my moneys worth out of it.

Making excuses doesn't fix things.
They had the largest development team ever....with a huge addition of level/dungeon designers. So that isn't a reason.

They =did= break quite a few rules of writing, starting with #1; Show, don't tell.
Not once did they show Alduin as a menace worthy of a sideplot, never mind the main questline.
Not once did they show one bloody reason why you jumped over a college full of senior staffers to be Archmage. You found a big ball and a stick and boom!
The Companions quest line was just as weak; particularly since you were supposedly dealing with characters that would challenge you to prove yourself their better. Repeatedly.
See the pattern there? Most of the quests told you things.....but almost never showed.

Another rule they broke; make the reader/viewer -care- about the story.
The whole main questline was a joke. There was almost no tension whatsoever.....and this was supposed to be The End Of The World. And not just for you; how many NPC's showed any significant emotion, regardless of the questline? You could become a Nightingale and nobody seemed to care. Or the Listener. Or Archmage. Or Harbinger.

Another rule; choices have consequences.
You should not be able to join all factions. Choosing to accept Daedric artifacts should have had consequences if you had alliances with the Divines already. Or blocked you from them if you didn't. There should have been a 'recognition' variable, so if you joined one side or the other of the civil war, it impacted what occurred in cities held by opposing forces. And weigh it more towards armor recognition; create a reason to wear a what would amount to a disguise to enter Windhelm if you had sided with the Imperials, for example. You found the Sybil of Dibella. And what does the squirt do? Nada. The perfect mouthpiece for quests from that Divine, and she sits on her polygonal tushie and says 'Hello!'. No real rewards for finding this religious iconic figure, no penalty elsewhere. No consequences.

It takes good initial design, but it is quite possible to implement these things. It does not take 'millions of lines of code', as the story scripting is almost if not the simplest thing to code. Not the script compiler, but the actual story scripting that turns audio on and off, turns animation pre-records on and off. That gives you a reason to be at point X and do something. Or hits you over the head with the fact that doing that thing complicated your life down the road, not made it simpler. A coherent, consistent storyline would not have affected the open world nature of the game in the least; that scripting is probably about 5% of the actual game content, if that. And simple, 'Do This Quest And You Must Go Forward on this Questine, or it will Go Forward Without You', so that those who want to explore aren't caught in a questline.

This is I, clapping to Dale B's post, no venom no vitriol no argumentative tone, just a guy giving his two cents plain and simple WITH examples and evidence, and to the point.

The only thing I do not like too much about Skyrim is that the main character is a Dovahkiin; Dragonborn. In many ways, he/she is "superior" to others and it is hard for me to demote myself into becoming some lesser abomination such as vampires and werewolves.

As for being able to join any faction or do everything. Well, that is the tradition of TES. I mean in you could always be the Arch-Mage even if you were primarily a warrior, head of a Drow house even if you were an Orc. Someone already mentioned it, the game does not put shackles on you or hold your hand, you are responsible for your own experience and have to RP your character to get the best experience. Why in Oblivion would an Orc berserker go join the mages - then complain about it??

And on the "Mages Guild" and "College of Magic"... Skyrim did no worse than Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion. I never try to complete those quest fully and would stay at being a Wizard or Master Wizard because it really make no sense for me to umm... just take over as Arch-Mage. Heck I dont even know or want to run such a huge organization!

I agree with everything you said and more but I still love the game too death.

Skyrim is a great game, but it does suffer from missed potential, particular with the civil war questline.

Agreed, all of it. The only NPCs that comment on your achievment are just the guards.And even then it's not implemented succesfully.

The guard says, "You're the Harbinger of the companions, I'm honored to stand with you", yet the next moment he says, " Now I remember you're the new member of the companions, What'd you do? Fetch the mead?".

Ridiculous, it's a great game, but it can be done better.

I would say that even though I love Skyrim and still find it quite enjoyable (after taking a break to run through Dragon Age and the Witcher2). I have to agree with the OP here, I would have liked to see the Civil War run differently from both sides instead of duplicate quests on each side. The Storm Cloaks are a band of rebels, and I would think should employ different strategies instead of attacking forts head-on as the empire does, but there are several tweaks I would make if I could in Skyrim. There are a lot of quest lines that are really disappointing, including the comanions, the mage's college. I haven't been through the Thieves Guild yet but so far there have been some fun twists in that quest line. Even the main quest is somewhat lack luster at the end, but hey in Skyrim life goes on. My big fear is that now with some details of Dawnguard being released and seeing that both sides can be played from the Vampre or Vampire Hunter, are they going to do the same thing?? I hope not or all the bragging they have done about making these huge DLCs will seem like a let down.

To add to that, my favorite that i'll never shut up about (along with the UI ). Meridia, the Daedric Prince who supposedly absolutely hates the undead, such as vampires, does not react at all if the player is a vampire

I stand by my earlier statement:

I'm at a loss here. Did you actually stop reading part way through his post and only realize later that he very directly states what he's talking about eliminating all need for assumptions of any kind?

And who implies that Skyrim is worse than Oblivion? Hell, who implies that any game of this genre ever created is worse than Oblivion? Hellen Keller is probably the only person to ever have existed that could have any logical excuse for thinking something like that.

I certainly hope not it'll be major let down

I do like the game, but a lot of it could of been so much better. The quest lines seem shorter than ever, and it seems like there aren't many options on how to tackle them. It's very linear. I'm Thane in a couple of towns and yet the guards still make fun of me sometimes. I just don't get that. Also, I realize that there were like 70 voice actors, but, many of those only voiced one or two NPC's while there were a few actors who would voice MANY NPC's. You hear the same voices too often.

I'm tired of hearing the excuse that the game is huge.. when you have a staff as big as Bethesda, make hundreds of milliions of dollars on Morrowind, Oblivion, and now Skyrim, that just doesn't cut it as an excuse. Not to mention the bugs.. always the bugs with Bethesda. They don't seem to take much pride in polishing their work, only in pumping out more broken content for the masses to buy.

I love their vision, and while I do enjoy their games, it's really time for them to step it up a notch. Look at how a simple thing like being able to get out of RAIN while outdoors has been a problem since Morrowind (maybe even longer I only started the series with MW) and yet they STILL haven't figured out how to make the rain and snow stop passing through objects that you stand under. And supposedly they built a new engine for this game? If so, it's time to hire some new developers.

Oh and as far as the Civil War quest line.. I could only play it to a certain point and then it started breaking just about every other quest or action in the game.. really? Bugthesda.

I think the direction that they are taking the series is fine.

I think they set up a release date that was WAY too early for what they were trying to do, and that screwed them up a lot
There were also a lot of bad design decisions, such as the decision to make skills basically irrelevant and replace them with perks, when the perks should have been a supplement to skills.

The lack of incentive to do any quests, and the horrendous rewards and lack of recognition of anything you do, is also horrendous. What's the point to doing anything if your rewards are crap and nobody gives that crap about what you've done? Saving the world-who cares? fetch my mead, dragonborn

Perfect example-the rewards for becoming a thane, or completing quests in the civil war. You get random weapons, random armor, and gold that doesn't have a use anymore. What the [censored] is the point?
If I play through the civil war on the empire's side, I want stuff unique to the empire. A unique set of imperial armor and weapons would be nice, as an example.

If Bethesda had not revealed Skyrim's release date so early (or even come up with one prior to the fall of 2011) they may have made Skyrim a much better game. I think they spent a little too much time making sure the game was 'pretty' enough to be mainstream and profitable.

Dale B's post sums it up incredibly well.

While it could of course be better, I still it's still amazing how it is. You have to think of a lot of this as quality vs quantity. They could have cut the games size in half and everything would have been done more thoroughly, but then it would have felt limited and lacked the expansive epicness to the sheer size of the world and amount of content.

I think they've found a great balance. It's not bad quality, but it's not a small game world either.

I've never even touched the Civil War quests, and I am certainly let down by the generic quests. Not even the Radiant (MIsc) ones... some NAMED side quests are not only retreads of quests that are used in every RPG under the sun*, but because Bethesda basically annihilated the journal, and because they wanted to fit the game on 1 disc, we don't even get much more of a story than "Oh, I need this for my research". Not a hint WHAT they research, nor why they're asking a guy they JUST MET. No reason to even care if a dragon comes along and eats the NPC.

* It only seems this way.

Skyrim massively wasted potential. And it can't be blamed on lack of anything. They CHOSE 11/11/11 and "were very confident they could deliver the game they wanted to". Either they managed to, or not... but they made a choice for the deadline.

Didn't have time my ass. They should have released the game later.
PS3 players wouldn't have issues as well.

I think it's pretty obvious that when the game is released is not the developers decision.

The publishers basically decide that

Every game is "Missed Potential", it's a natural occurance of working in the technology field. Every day brings a new innovation that can improve something.

Still, if you think Skyrim is anything less than the best quality gaming has to offer in its breed (Adventure/RPG), you're absolutely insane. There's seriously one of these "Let me try to hit the post count limit by saying semi-truths about Skyrim's obvious shortcomings" threads every other day. Skyrim is immensely popular, one of the few games on Metacritic with Universal Acclaim by the critical press (Xbox360, PC), and while I don't necessarily think Skyrim's direction is the best direction it can go now, it's still easily the best Adventure/RPG Hybrid since its predecessor, Oblivion.

Haha not to mention that the weapons and rewards you get aren't near as good as the stuff you are already using. So you get money, which is useless because you have a ton of it with nothing to spend it on, you get weapons that probably go straight into your storage crate because compared to what you are using they are rubbish, and you get no recognition from anyone for anything. I can save the town, kill dragons, etc, and the guards are still making fun of me for losing my sweet roll or whatever. It's pretty dang laughable really.