i like this thread; people actually got some discussions going in the last one in between the flaming.

ill just put my 2 cents out here:

skyrim is, to me, the worst of the series, but think of it in relative terms: how do other games today compare to games out in morrowinds time? most modern games are call of halo #155623 ripoffs, cheesy shallow motion control games, and just generally underwhelming cash-in sequels. the VGAs are hosted on spikeTV ffs... not exaclty a gamer's first choice of viewing material. in morrowinds time, developers had to work hard to make a good game because gaming wasnt as popular and your average gamer demanded more from their entertainment than "something to do for the brief moments im not texting".

think of morrowind like the golden age of comics: its when games where just starting out and makers could experiment however they wanted and appealed to a much more focused market. think of modern games like the silver age: the time where businessmen saw that games could make money, and now its THEIR turn to experiment with how much they can get away with before people stop wasting their money on cheap crap. this is the age where batman fights aliens, superman pulls a new power out of ass every other issue to solve the conflict at hand, and squirrel girl curbstomps iron man... the age where batman was popular enough to have a TV show, and that show was campy and awful. my point is.... gaming in general svcks right now...hell, the whole entertainment industry kind of svcks right now, but this is a natural and unavoidable phase... relatively speaking, games havent decayed all that much considering how much the whole damn world is decaying atm. i believe skyrim is the best it could have been given the current position of the industry, which is no where near as good as games of the golden age, but that is to be expected.

BUT its not all bad. for one, the gaming industry is evolving at an alarmingly fast pace, which means that although we must suffer through the "dark times" so soon after the golden age, we will also pass through it faster. ill tell you whats going to happen... games are going to get increasingly simpler, DLC is going to rip us off more and more, and things will get worse and worse until eventually people FINALLY get fed up with it and the publishers cant understand why they arent making as much money anymore. then, someone with an actual sense of artistry will come by and make a genuinely good game that sells well. publishers will have their narrow little minds blown and worship this guy for making money. he will gain influence and respect for his success, and the age of developers actually being respected will begin. they will have more pull in their projects because publishers are desperate and stupid and forgot how to make money. critics and reviewers will now have a standard and become snooty and demanding because people now expect them to critique the artistic merits of a game and not just how long it will keep their kids quiet. every medium has gone through phases like this; comics, movies, music, books (pulp fiction anyone?).... hell, im sure theatre and oral tradition had their moments. gaming wont be any different.

and secondly, the popularity of skyrim has really put a dent in the philosophy that every game must have multiplayer and basically be call of duty to succeed. skyrim may be a bad RPG in its own right, but its success just might be the start of a turn around, where single player starts to make a comeback and publishers start to remember how games sold in the first place. at any rate, skyrim may end up helping the RPG genre despite not appealing to it all that much. when devs start to get respect, more focused, niche products can be made with AAA budgets. the next great RPG might not be from bethesda, but bethesda will have been instrumental in its creation nonetheless.

well there. my 2 cents. i could pick apart the game for hours, but i feel it best to cut the BS and get to the heart of the issue. hope this sparks some discusiion and not more flaming .

How is progression achieved in the Skyrim Theives guild? I have yet to even join the Theives guild however is progression achieved the same way it was in Oblivion or is it through raidiant quests like the Companions? Personally I feel that the guilds should be more than just a quest line and there should be a few side activities for the player to engage in, for instance a good one for the theives guild would be a list of specific items that certain parties wish you to aquire for them such as a diamond or some cyrodiilic brandy, however you aquire these items is totally up to you.

There's a fairly straight main questline, but you'll have to do 20some radiant quests before you're officially "done" with it.

No fencing quests, it's basically a straight shot through to the end. But they do have a few optional quests like you said. Like stealing a specific item or from a specific person.

The original post was just some smarmy, unqualified remarks. But now people can't come and do the same in your thread? Gimme a break, don't post half-troll threads if you don't want people to come bicker in them, that's what threads like this are all about and you know it.

I still think the obsession with what really amounts to more time staring at menus and stats is odd, and I don't get why people think that makes a better RPG.

That said, Frotality's post a few back is awesome and makes the thread.

Nice frotality, But I think a lot of younger people think this is the golden age now, it may well be, we and our longing for past greats. Everything changes, look at football, it's all tika tika football, none of this pump it down long and hope for the best camper. sometimes change is good. Problem is the game ibdustry has stagnated a bit and like you say, it's mostly about the green.
I do agree though, fallout and skyrim will become the new staple for rpg now and we could see some clones, though in reality, all they have done is copy console action/adventure games (rpg's) anyway.
Crusader king II will be out next year, time to go strategy for a while methinks.

You do realize this is a video game right? - it's for fun.....


and yes this is the best ES game (or any game) that I have played! I dont see how it has been made "dumber", less numbers yes (good thing!!) but not dumber.

Although maybe the first wing commander privateer would be on the top for me too (if it was still 1994).

Nope, sorry, It really isn't.

Look guys, there isn't going to be a Morrowind 2.0
So stop looking for it.

EDIT:I think I'm done with these forums until a new TES game comes out, I just can't understand why people who hate the game so much still sit here in the Skyrim forums.

Go to the other forums like Oblivion, Morrowind or the past TES games.

I think this is the best TES game to date, IMO it's the best game I have played ever.
Except for the fact that it has Dragonz. So Bethesda just got a taste of the money they will get if they bring in Dragonz and killing innocents with your blackknight dragonslaying mammoth-hunting giant enslaving paladin assassin.

I agree.
The game is a mere hollow shell of its former glory.
Except that it looks pretty.
But you know, if somone is the prettiest girl in the world, if they are shallow as a person I still wont like em.
I dont care about looks as much as I care about being engaged, and in this Skyrim falls woefully short.

The quests are mostly lackluster, in a large part due to the incredibly cardboard NPC's
No disposition and very poor dialogue are the blame for that.

The magic is simply inexcusable.
The quest log is the worst I have seen since Daggerfall.
The character customisation compared to previous games is nigh unexistant.

This game will likely end my 15 year long love affair with TES.
If TES 6 does not have spellmaking, attributes, more skills, interaction with the world, Im simply not buying it. Ever. Not even from the bargain bin.

I like how the phase "dumbing it down" seems to be a catch-all for anything that is occurring a historic fan doesnt like.

Broaden your vocabulary and use words that truly infer your issues than use it, because its freaking painful to read it.

I'm an older player, and have been playing RPG's since before many of the forum members grew their first curly hairs, and before a great number of them were even a glint in the postmans eye, and it is indeed the golden age for RPGs. I think back to the days of yore, and wow... just wow. Pretty much unlimited freedom, so many options.

Whilst I do feel that TES has lost a lot of things (yes spellmaking), there is no denying that we, here and now, have so much awesomeness at our fingertips. More than I ever could have dreamed of when I first picked up that copy of The Bard's Tale. More than I could have ever dreamed of whilst sitting around a table rolling funny shaped dice.

Yeah, people all love to say "the good old days", but really, we had diddley squat.

Words like "accessible", "dumbing down", "streamlining" etc. may be used a LOT, but there is one obvious reason for that. It's an accurate description of most of our issues with the game. There's only so many synonyms available.

I really do enjoy some of the new things they have added and expanded on like
crafting armors and weapons,
the new types of alchemy ingredients like the fish, insects, etc,
the huge variety of towns and villages with a more lively economy including markets, farms, mills and so on,
more small side quests separated from the main guild quests so that even though I finished the main Mages quest line some time ago I've still got half a dozen minor quests I'm working on the for the guild,
the dungeons are beautifully crafted and fun to explore,
the landscape is gorgeous and varied and full of surprises,
the place and quests include a lot of interesting lore, many locations have quite detailed back-stories, and I love how they tied so much to books from previous games like the Solitude quests with Potema,
a return to politics with the Thalmor, civil war, etc. which was lost in the TESIV,
collecting the dragon shouts,
etc.

I think a lot of people have just played so many games they have lost any sense of wonder and cannot recapture the magic of their first games.

You should listen to your elders. More seriously, though, I agree with this person. It seems like most people think the greatest games have already come and gone, they haven't, not even close. There has been some tripe over the years.


No. It fits the description of someone saying it fits the description on any popular gaming website. It's not dumbed down, in the slightest. It's different, that's all.

dumbing down, less character customization, less spells, less diseases/illnesses, less alchemy ingredients, leveling to easy, equipment overbalanced to suplement bad perks or choices of perks, no stzr signs but a stone you can go to anytime if you want, no consequences of choice and no spell making to speak of.

If it weren't for the fact that many people have, countless times, concisely explained the various ways in which it is dumbed down, simplified etc. I would agree with you that those are just buzzwords. But you can see in this thread, and many others explanations of the simplification and removal of features and systems, and the effect this has on the experiences of gamers, so yes, I think they are entirely applicable words.

This game is absolutely wonderful, a masterpiece just like Morrowind. Please keep doing what you are doing Bethesda, because it's great!

Agreed...

When something gets simpler and requires less thought, than it's fair to describe it as "dumbed down".

So your last thread is locked for basically being a troll, why make more? Troll somewhere else.

It was locked for passing the post limit. If the OP was accused of being a troll, a moderator would have come in and said so.

I doubt even the percentages on these forums favour the, "The games dumbing down", argument. Let alone the actual percentage of people who play Skyrim but don't use these forums. They're in the minority, whether that enforces an argument against dumbing down is irrelevant, as it doesn't. What it does show is that people don't care about certain things being removed. I'd agree with this dumbing down argument if it actually held weight, as in Skyrim turned out to be a game filled with quick-time events instead of interesting quests.

We have the same basic thing we've had in most Elder Scrolls games, some things are removed, some are added. Change doesn't mean dumbing down, otherwise every single franchise out there would be dumbing down. Just look at the hysteria with a small percentage of Mass Effect fans when ME2 came out. You get this with every game. They're trying to evolve the series, you can't do that by making it the same as every game in the series.

We could do with a much more evolved language when it comes to this issue. This rhetoric is tiresome and does a disservice to the valid arguments that can and should be made. Not least it makes people that joined up with Ob or Skyrim almost instantly defensive and as such harder to turn to your cause.

There are plenty of valid and interesting arguments but they are swamped by these throw away lines from people who are clearly frustrated but latch onto a buzz word they think consolidates their gripe.

To me, Skyrim is an awesome game. Probably the best one I've played in ages.
However, I haven't really been role playing since Daggerfall and even better games before that (despite lacking compared to todays standards of course). It's fairly big (Daggerfall was outright massively humongous), and very detailed in its world - I love that, can't deny it. Despite being pretty open ended, do what you want sandbox style, it just fails to portray itself as a role playing system. I'm gaming Skyrim, I'm not role playing it, because I often get the sense there is only one way to do things (dungeons are pretty much on rails), without proper cause and effect being felt other than in combat.