By a few things, overall I think the game is great though. One thing coming off the top of my head now is the smaller holds, seemed like riverwood was actually bigger than some of them.

Yup. I never said there wouldn't be any consequences for action. All I said is that players should be able to play any kind of character they like and go and do whatever they want. That doesn't mean that the world shouldn't react to their choices. I probably impose much harsher standards on my characters than most people. I'd build it right into the game, if I could, but most people would find it too much work to RP under those conditions.

Well, by that definition, PnP games are no good then, either. Just because it doesn't meet your standards doesn't mean that it isn't meeting other, equally valid standards held by other people. The game is fine on its own without mods or having to RP over top of things. It's not perfect, but I've yet to play a perfect CRPG.

Hardly. They might both be roleplaying games, but they're very different mediums. Most PnPs that I've played rely on verbal naration and are very abstract. I'd say that the use of imagination is required make sense of it. Video games are very different. cRPGs, on the other hand, are a much more concrete experience. It's like the difference between a book and a movie.

I'm guessing, though, that we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this matter.

I wasn't disappointed, I was pleasantly surprised.

I expected (and got) a lot of poor writing (some of it's better than expected though) and no real consequences to decisions.

I expected it to be buggy and (on my PC at least) it's nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.

I expected to be irritated by the level scaling and it's not as bad as I expected - they've definitely shifted in the right direction

The artistic design is wonderful - just standing in the landscape listening to the soundtrack can be pleasurable. The graphics may be technically lacking in some areas, but it looks and sounds gorgeous.

I like the character system - I like the flexibilty and not being pinned by choices made at the start of the game. And I find the combat fun.

It's massive, full of little surprises and on a money paid/time got out of ratio I cannot complain

I'm waiting to be disappointed by Fallout 4 though as IMO Obsidian would be far better for that particular franchise.

Nope.

I don't think there's even much of a disagreement. I think we both agree that more rules and consequences and better narratives make for better RPGs. I just happen to think that Skyrim has enough of all that to be enjoyable and you don't. It's more a matter of quantity than anything else. What can I say, I'm I cheap date.

Was I disappointed? Absolutely. Why, because I didn't think there was much of a story to prop up this whole game. If the story lines were great, I could overlook the changes in the attributes/perks/magic whatever systems. To me the game, short of the wonderful visuals, is lacking in just too many other areas. We can't expect to have it all, but i have yet to find one thing that really makes this game "great" for me.

That comes at the end of January; (at least it will for me ~hopefully... and hopefully for others as well).

It's not a mechanic that binds you it's a mechanic that keeps track of your actions so the world can realistically respond to you. Nothing stops you from playing how you want but there should be consequences for playing how you want. Skyrim has zero consequences unless you consider paying a fine a valid consequence for murdering members of a faction. In a cRPG the game is the equivalent of the DM in PnP RPG. I DM a 2nd Edition D&D game once a month. If my players, say, killed a shop keeper's daughter in front of her and my idea of how to deal with that was to have the city guard make them pay some gold and then have the shop keeper act like nothing happened they'd rightfully not want me to DM anymore.

I agree, and it seems that most people are getting way more than 80 hours (myself included) out of it. I was directing this at OP, who found this game boring. I was simply saying that less than a dollar an hour for entertainment is a pretty nice success, especially for someone who allegedly doesn't like the game.

Sorry to be a bit off topic, but I was looking at your character build, particularly the pic. Aren't arrows out of character for a cleric?

WAY out of character, but I had no clue how to take on a Dragon on Expert difficulty without a few of them-- also I won't buy crafting mats from vendors, I use what I can get through hunting. It's hard to charge an elk with a mace. But yeah, I have cheated a little with the arrows.

As an rpg, yes, it was extremely disappointing. I don't understand why they would butcher attributes and stats, something that was the core of all of their other games and the core of most rpgs. Being a mage in Morrowind was FUN AS HELL. There were so many spells at your disposal that you actually felt like a mage. Now you just have the most basic spells and the option of picking x perk that decreases your spells mana cost.

As an action/adventure game, Skyrim is pretty good. You spam your right trigger to kill bad guys, occasionally seeing a cool killing animation. There's no companion interaction and the interface took 5 steps back from Oblivion, so if you just ignore everything else and play Skyrim like you'd play Arkham city you'd find it's a damn good game. Otherwise, Morrowind has this beat in all aspects.

My typical solution has been to hide behind a rock until it lands, then rush it.

Skyrim is definitely NOT the best game ever, as for the best Elder Scrolls game? I honestly don't know considering I never played Daggerfall or Arena, I wasn't really a fan of Morrowind, but I loved Oblivion and I love Skyrim.

The writing of TES has never been that great, Bethesda really know how to establish a fictional world with novels worth of interesting backstory and lore, but when it comes to actual story-telling or character development they really have never been on par with studios like BioWare. Jade Empire, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age Origins and Mass Effect 2 were brilliant at making you, the player, care about the characters within the world as well as giving you a lot of flexability with developing your own character as you see fit. Bethesda have only ever made a handful of memorable characters such as M'aiq, Lucien Lachance and Sheogorath, but their writing has always been very sub-par. The majority Morrowind's quests were chores to get through and Oblivion's main quest was just a glorified fetch quest. Skyrim's quests are somewhat an improvement but still lack in terms of diversity, granted there are a few fun quests like Sanguine's quest and the Gourmet quest for the Dark Brotherhood.

As for the combat I am totally in agreement, it's fun to watch your character decapitate or impale enemies for a few hours but it gets stale fast, on a basic level it is identical to Oblivion's combat with a couple of extra moves and fatalities thrown in, but the same lack of strategy is still there. The only enemies I still take genuine pleasure in fighting are the Frost Trolls because of the fact that they provide an actual challenge at low to medium levels, even Dragons are starting to piss me off because of their frequent spawning whenever I fast travel somewhere.

On the whole I still freakin love Skyrim, but it has a lot of flaws and the only thing that holds me back from denying its status as GOTY is the fact that the only other fantastic game I played this year was Portal 2 which was awesome, but not worth the full ￡40.

Easily pleased i see one can only explore so much until that becomes tedious, Blackreach was the only real place worth finding everything else was average at best.I have said it before the open world is let down by what is wrong with the game it subtracts from everything that was right.It is nice having a huge open world but when you fill it with wooden one dimensional MMO type characters is makes the world feel empty that is just my take on mind you.

I think Skyrim is far from perfect, and you make some valid points. I also think the devs haven't put the game to market the way they initially wanted it to be. I hope they take some of the remarks in this forum to heart and apply them in the DLC.

OP, I agree with you, and it makes me sad. I'm really, really freaked out about Fallout 4 and TES 6 now. If they cut SPECIAL....

If they destroy FO I will cry. The only thing they need to change from FO3 to FO4 is to include even more branching storylines, factions and impactful choices. Oh, and follow the actual lore a little bit too. The whole BoS being knights in white armor and the Enclave being the black knights was far too black and white for a FO game. And add back the mechanics they stripped out. Essentially make a bigger budget FO:NV on east coast.

Hmm, well, for some of us, we find that Skyrim is a rich environment for our imagination, and that is why we enjoy it. A good, even great, story with equally good narrative does not equal nor necessitate much imagination. That's not a knock on story and narrative, just an emphasis that they're different from imagination -- one does not require the other to exist.

As other's have said, TES has always been more about creating an environment for imagination than great narrative stories. Some people (again, not knocking, just pointing out) require more hooks or hand-holding in order to get spurts of imagination. And of those, some find the graphics of the world enough of a hook, while others need more narrative or deeper stories. Those of the latter category are the most likely to find TES disappointing.

I think the ones who enjoy TES the most are those who tend to find hooks a limitation, a limitation that keeps their imagination from soaring. And even those of us who fall into that category don't think Skyrim is perfect, and sometimes quite harsh in our criticism, but for the most part we find it a more than worthy vehicle (or launching pad, as the case may be).

What I dont understand after reading all these new and older posts in this thread is the amount of complaints about bugs and errors. What modern game has not had a bug or an error in the last few years that consisted of an enormous sized world with at least 50 major features for the character to do?

As for Modifications, all I can say to the people who think a game should be made perfect without the help of mods is kidding themselves. I mean I have this really good idea when the Tes V construction set comes out, and adding little quests and features
to the game makes it all the more fun. Its also one of the reasons why elder scrolls provides you with a massive landscape. Look if you want to complain about bugs or errors I can name my favourite which was Empire Total War naval invasions bug. Basic on the campaign map countries such as England in particular would not send armies from their ships to invade other countries so you end up with England just full of armies because it did not understand how to invade France for example. That is a bug, not some shaky clipping issues. Also I have not ever seen a single elder scrolls game that has not crashed on me yet I kind of expect this to happen. Empire total war was woeful at best and modifications saved this game for me and made it one of the top 20 games for myself.

Skyrim is just one of the plethora of games that will need time to develop a decent community just like before with oblivion to make it a better place. There were only 2 disappointing things I will mention

1. What I will agree on is the spell-casting which has not taken a step backwards but has lost a lot of its mojo in not being able to creature your own spells.
2. Secondly when I create my character I can not make a rounder looking face, for instance I wanted to make Cassius cosades (and then realised there was no hand to hand which svcked even more)

You think that makes for a valid excuse? That just means the industry's standards have fallen. And they'll never go back up again as long as consumers are so willing to accept it.

I have to say I'm sort of on the same page as this guy.

Im not in anyway trying to boast or anything but I'm pretty surprised you (talking to OP) only have 80 hours put in across three characters. Im still on my first character in the thirties and I'm reaching 100 hours played. This game is literally so dense, I can't help but feel you have barely scratched the surface. Heck, I probably have at least 10-15 hours of just reading books lol.

But, hey, to each his own. I realize it doesn't take that long to form an opinion of the game, but just sayin.

I'll make things a bit more clear.

I wasn't bored at all for the time I played. There was lots to do, quests to get through, places to go, people to see... But after a while, when I finished all the guilds and the main quest, there just didn't seem to be anything else worth doing. Exploring is cool and all, but to be honest, the world looks the same almost everywhere. You can tell if you're in northern or southern Skyrim, but that's about it. There's no variation unlike in Morrowind or Oblivion. There's only so much exploring I can do, but I guess that's just me.


I'll put it into a bit more perspective for you; in Read Dead Redemption, I have 90 hours clocked in and I haven't even completed the game. In fact, I haven't even gotten to the last area yet. In Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, I have 70 hours on my main playthrough. In Morrowind, I have (well, had. The disc broke ) well over 800 hours across probably 4 characters that I played regularily.

I made the mistake of buying Empire total war when it first came out the game was a unplayable mess.To this day it was the most broken game i ever played 5 patches later it came right and turned out to be a pretty good RTS.Skyrims problems go beyond bugs for me not a flash story most part terrible quests and the worst part for me was a real lack in good side characters.