if you haven't done the mages guild, create a new character, DONT go to whiterun, or do the quest for the jarl that unlocks dragons.

Play the game w/o dragons until level 50 and leave the MQ alone. Do the factions you didn't do yet, travel on foot instead if you fast travel often, there's so many random encounters you miss out on if you don't do this.

I'd say they were quaint. And I liked that. The best dungeons I've come across in Skyrim have been the small ones.

Long ones are just filler corridors and the occassional large room with baddies. There's little variance, nothing especially interesting. I've found one (I think) dungeon that actually had an alternative route, but it only let you skip about 30 feet and one enemy. They've got nothing on the monstrosities in Daggerfall or the big ones in Morrowind, both of which had multiple pathways, branching corridors, and areas only reachable by those with certain skill sets (meaningful lockpicking and levitation).

That's the problem with Skyrim's dungeons. The developers are treating the open world merely as a hub through which you pick and choose highly linear adventures. The strength of an open world is in the options it presents to the player. These options should not be abandoned as soon as I step into a cave.

Hey, thats interesting, i came along with maniq, he just said couple funnily-weird sentences, and didnt even opened a conversation window, whats the deal with him O.O?

And seriously about that orc,


Damn, weird game is weird game^^

M'aiq is an easter egg from Morrowind and Oblivion. He has a number of one-liners that are usually responses to the complaints you run into on these forums.

As for the Orc: I'd join the Dark Brotherhood on a character if you want to find out who he is.

It's always been about the journey for TES. They just haven't gotten good enough yet to where they could make the destination more rewarding. That's where the modders come in. If it weren't for them, I don't believe TES would be as successful.

Skyrim is a failure compared to the rest of the series.

Bravo, a most thought out and well written response. I may never be able to respond to this...

yeah there's a real lack of content in this game questing wise. There are only very few unique quest, the rest are really repetitive. Then the dungeons get even more repetitive then oblivion dungeons, lol ok not that repetitive but it does get really boring. Imo i liked oblivion more because there were more unique quest.

I spent 600+ hours on one character, got him up to level 67, and then semi-retired him. The very first thing that happened with my second character was that I found two new locations and a quest that I didn't know about.

In some cases, "the game lacks content" = 'player doesn't look hard enough'.

I have ~300 hours on one character... I go back into dungeons and hardly recognize them. I wonder if you made 300 completely different dungeons, they'd all start to look a little bit the same...

I've provided examples plenty of times. So have numerous people in this thread. So much has been gutted, streamlined and merged. Instead of developing new methods to update older mechanics they just gut it instead. Definition of lazy.

Then why do you bother posting in the Skyrim forums? Wouldn't you be happier in the Oblivion threads?

If you want repetitive dungeons go play dragon age 2. If so many of y'all hate Skyrim then go sell the game and stop playing it.

My Nord fighter sided with Stormcloaks, joined Companions, found most Daedric items and ignored DB and Thieves. After 200+ hours climbed the 7000 steps. Did you find Blackreach?

I agree, we were promised 300+ hours to do everything and i'v been in pretty much every ruin/ done all quests multiple times and on about 3 characters. I do have around 500 hors playtime between all my characters, but 80% of that is repeating the same things multiple times on 3 playthroughs. I don't fast travel and I try to take my time but this just doesn't seem like 300 hours of content is there unless you replay quite a few times.

I doubt it will be soem expansion pack for this game. i mean they can't even fix the tons of bugs that are, and making a single player game without enough quest to last to endlvl is just stupid. So i'm done with this game.

The game isn't about getting to end level (not that there really is an "end level" anyway). And since there's an infinite number of quests, your point is moot.

But if you're done with the game, you may find it more productive to post in forums that aren't for discussing the game.

eh lack of content? my 400+ hours says otherwise and im not near finished with the game. i am taking a break from it though

I think constructive criticism is fine - well a good thing - but I also think people get carried away with moaning for the sake of it.

Like I see Fallout 3 on that list. I played that game to death, I knew pretty much every inch of that map and have done pretty much everything it's possible to do - and there is no way it has more content. The map is smaller, there are fewer locations, there's a fraction of the quests (and some of those are tiny) and it suffers from the same Bethesda trademark of lack of meaningful choice and less than great writing. Whatever way you look at it, it's a smaller game. Ok some people might want to play it for longer than Skyrim, they might simply find it more engaging, but saying it's a 200 hour+ game and Skyrim falls far short is simply ridiculous.

Absolutely agree with this. Fallout 3 had that 'certain something' that dragged people back.

But Skyrim has far more content, you just have to look for it. If you fast travel, if you run or sprint everywhere, if you race through dungeons and quests, in other words, if you play it like a linear fps, then you will have a fast shallow game. If you go the other way, and take your time, and ride from point a to point b, or even jog/walk, then you will rack up hours, and you will have more encounters, overhear more conversations, find more places and things to do. And that is exactly what makes Skryim an RPG...the fact that the game is structured in such a way that it encourages role-playing so that you can maximise your entertainment and fun.

Oblivion had 5.9 gigs of content, this game had 3.8, so I agree there definately could have been MucH more content and meat in the game, especially in the guild quest lines and the civil war, but i think there is still quite a bit non the less, but seriously, 3.8 gigs? I will never understand that pathetic amount of content. Some arcade games have more. And its not even the graphics or the engine or the draw distance that needs to be better, they could have had that extra 2.1 gigs used for more random encounters, more enemies filling those HUGE empty spots in the game with no enemies....and generally adding more depth to characters and followers....

M'aiq knows much, says little.

Is this your first TES game?

This.

Did you miss how the biggest SP on the market nowadays are good for maybe 40 hours?

I'll admit that TES games can run out of quests and exploration after 100 hours (!) or so.

Then you need one of two things:
imagination and/or roleplaying
mods

This is about Bethesda's obsession with compression, not content levels.

I have played games that have half the content of TES that run over 12GB. It's all a matter of how you pack it, and Skyrim's vastly greater amount of voice-acting is probably the size of Oblivion, uncompressed. (Sound files are half of the Oblivion DVD)

I like how you really think you did everything there is to do.