If spellmaking being gone doesn't bother you then you don't give a flying toss about spells. Opinions aren't facts but this one is pretty close. Skyrim magic is crap. It svcks. It's mindless garbage that doesn't even entertain the casuals all that well, and while I don't think gamesas care for people to play this game for the next decade (which would actually hamper gamesas in the future), I do think they want people to not grow bored as hell within the first 40-50 hours, if only for PR reasons.

You're absolutely right. We who want a coherent world with any kind of depth are a tiny minority. We're vocal on this forum but if you look around the Internet, you'll see hordes of sheeple that don't mind details making less sense than Rick Perry talking about which government departments he wants to dump. That's just how it is. Doesn't mean we can't complain about the incoherent world until our faces turn blue, though.

I agree, and I actually share some of your criticisms..but I think they apply to the whole series of TES games, and i'm mystified as to how someone could consider a game like Morrowind a 'in depth RPG', or thnk that Skyrim is somehow degraded from Oblivion, they seem to share the same set of flaws, to a degree where I do not expect it to change with new TES games. In fact I think a reasonable argument can be made that Skyrim is the same formula with some improvements..so i am dumbfounded as to why anyone would claim the series 'is a shell of it's former self'..it's more of the same!

If ya don't like it, what were ya doing there in the first place?

I seriously wonder if some of you guys are recalling and mixing up the modded versions of these games with vanilla, because that is the ONLY way I have ever played a TES game that had the kind of content and play that this thread claims existed in the past.

Carrying capacity being determined by your character's strength rather than for how long your character can sprint? Weapon base damage being strictly a question of the weapon used, the strength of the character swinging it, and how the weapon was used rather than through a ton of oddball perks that represent something which doesn't actually exist in real life? Yeah, such details are definitely meaningless.

Yes you do. You do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows if you cannot step outside yourself. That entire saying is based in the idea that you don't need someone to tell you what you can see by yourself... which cannot be applied here because guess what: you have no way of knowing the ratio of satisfied vs disapointed customers without those formal surveys.

Now you can tell us all day about how you consider unsubstanciated information to be a valid opinion, but at the end of the day, you seem completely unable to discuss the actual subject. The OP and the rest of us are telling you in painfull details what parts of the game we take issue with and why. You, however, are unable to tell us why we are wrong. Instead, all you do is pull made-up numbers on how most people agree with you that we are.

Could it be that you simply dont have an argument to present us? Are you even able to articulate why you think the game is fine, or are you only able to play the broken reccord?

I'm puzzled over why this guy isn't banned yet, I thought troll accounts were shown the door?

It's not that they are meaningless, it's that YOU care about that stuff, I don't think most TES players do.

Most people don't give a )(*& about what's under the hood. The series has never been about what's under the hood, it's just a few die hard fans like that, so you think it's 'missing' something, because that was the kind of stuff YOU cared about when you played. I feel fairly confident that most players don't miss that stuff, even if you do.

Face it, Bethesda is never going to make the game you want, only modders will do that.

Two whole threads of this stuff.

I remember a lot of similar posts of doom and gloom about Bethesda's future after Oblivion. How did that work out?

You're not wrong. But what you experience isn't what some other people experience, amazingly.

with each elderscrolls series they improve on 1000 things and make 10 things worse. a good trade off.
im hoping for next gen to bring forth a new game engine for TES

I think honestly what we are going to see is a rebound to more serious Elder Scrolls from Competition. Bethesda is going to have to please the hard core gamers or risk having them flock to Dragon's Dogma (can't wait) Two Worlds 3, Risen 2. With this genre on the rise simplification is going to make the next ES came a joke if they don't watch it. Skyrim is my favorite game though Morrorwind was the best.

Loot Scaling is honestly the lowest point I've ever seen a game reach. How much further can you possibly dumb a game down than to deny epic loot. Honestly now.

Man, you are terrible with logic.

No, I don't have any data to prove it empirically, that it not the same as saying it is not likely or probable.

It's quite probable that people who feel as the OP do are a small minority for the reasons already mentioned, there are certain things you must make assumptions about because the data simply isn't available, so you must make inferences. if you don't understand that, go back to your intro logic and crit class from college or whatever it is you think gives you debating skills far greater than those you actually possess.

I've been making arguments the whole time, the problem is most of the people i'm arguing with have not the wit to grasp that data isn't need to prove the blindingly obvious.

You guys can spend as much time lamenting the mythical past (where Morrowind and Oblivion were apparently different games than they actually are), crying over the loss of meaningless stats etc..but all you look like to most players is a bunch of whiny turds posting on a board because you were one of the few who doesn't like the game. Hear that? ONE OF THE FEW WHO DIDN'T LIKE THE GAME.

How do I figure this? Well, because I made an educated guess based on the data available to draw a probable conclusion in the absence of empirical data, crazy stuff huh?

Seriously, you accomplish NOTHING with these kinds of threads, because 90% of you seem to exist in this murky world where you opinion on a stat or mechanic is a "fact" while the other sides opinion on a stat or mechanic is clearly flawed because we don't care as much about being able to have one glass and one chitin pauldron (though I do miss that a bit), or whether or not we have luck as a stat.

The 1,000 things they make better have nothing to do with role-playing. The 10 things they make worse are staples of the RPG genre. So yeah, not a very good trade off.

Is that a joke? How does not having epic loot dumb a game down? it's the opposite in fact, since the most dumb games rely on epic loot crawling as their main mechanic, Warcraft, Diablo, Borderlands. No offense to these games, they are fun games, but they are dumb games.

He is talking about reasons to go exploring.
In Morrowind, you had the tiny chance of finding a really nifty item somewhere in a corner or way up on a ledge or whatever.
This not only gave a sense of reward, it also made exploring interesting. You never knew in what dungeon you would find the next piece of your incomplete daedric armour set. Or a ring of phynaster, or an Eleidon's ward.
In Skyrim, you largely find things scaled to you, tailored specifically to your level.
That is an RPG killer.

Well that's more about replayability or balance than dumbing a game down.

Edit: also Skyrim has way less loot scaling than Oblivion did, very little aside from the random loot you find actually scales.

Morrowind is ten years old and actually suffered somewhat from hardware limitations. The depth it didn't provide was forgiven due to the huge world it did provide. And while it wasn't the most in depth game or RPG, it was more in depth than Skyrim or Oblivion.

Morrowind made the best of what it could with the hardware it had to work with. Oblivion took away details without adding anything other than graphics in return. Now Skyrim is doing the same thing one more time. While there are improvements, the concept of skill levels mixed with hit and miss perks just isn't one of them. If each weapon had it's own weapon style and you'd need perks to unlock more than basic swings and blocks then it might be interesting. If spells could be designed by the player but you'd need perks to move beyond certain thresholds then it might be interesting.

As it is, they've taken away some statistics that actually describe your character and replaced it with a garbled mess of a perk system that doesn't describe anything.

Daedric quest loot has always been fixed.
Dont talk to me about this silly mmo notion of 'balance' in a single player game.

Can you explain how exactly? I've played both Morrowind and Oblivion unmodded and modded to death, and I have no idea where you exactly you think either game has more depth, with the possible exception of the story and art in Morrowind. I'm replaying Morrowind right now in fact (many mods of course) and i'm finding it very, very flat in comparison to Skyrim. this is with the best possible graphics mods for the game, so it ain't that. Compared to Morrowinds fed ex etc. some of the quests in Skyrim are amazing.. even linear and one-track as they are.

As far as hardware limitations, I disagree, much of what's wrong with the game is simply lazy or bad deisgn, for instance lack of NPC schedules. There are games from 1996 with NPC schedules. And there were definitely games from Morrowind's time that did a much better job of 'living' NPC..albeit on a smaller scale, Gothic for instance.

i'm not the one talking about balance HE is. I'm saying that the game is not dumbed down for excluding epic loot, it's the wrong term to use. Since cutting out epic loot is a balance OR replayability aspect, not a mass appeal dumbing down aspect.

And no Daedric quest loot has not always been fixed? Off the top of my head Mehrune's Razor in Oblivion was scaled loot.

I dont know what kind of la-la-land you live in, but in the real world, when you propose a fact, you have to back it up. You say its blindingly obvious. You say its highly probable. Based on what? Oh, right... based on your imagination. Just thinking something does not make it true.

Sorry man, but a fact is a fact, or its not. You cannot infer a fact, just a theory. And you cannot present a theory as a fact. As a school teacher, if a kid tried to give in a paper without justifying what he proposes in it, its a big zero. Its not a matter of logic.

Also, we are comparing a system with another. Stop arguing about wether we are a minority or a majority, that is not the debate here. You are just trying to derail the conversation. If you have given us arguments, I would love it if you would be so kind to repeat them, because they have been lost amongst your factual pretentions.

Oh lordy.

Do you need me to post the definition of inference for you? I try avoid obnoxious postings of word definitions, but apparently you still don't understand that it is in some cases possible to draw logical conclusions in the absence of empirical data. You also don't have the vocabulary you think you do.

You aren't even worth talking to about this if you don't understand my previous post about inferences, i'll save my energy for people who actually can comprehend the stuff i'm talking about

If you don't like the game, don't play it. Do research before you buy something. This thread is idiotic and unnecessary.

Ten million copies sold in the first month must mean this is a terrible game and people are terrible for liking it.

/sarcasm

The game was made to appeal to a wider audience. We aren't saying it's a bad game, just that it's a bad TES game. It's not an RPG as much as it's an action-adventure game, and we all know how well Uncharted has done.