I'm not poking at your exaggeration mind you, I'm poking at the fact that Bethesda really lessened the quality of choice and weight in this game, not to mention options, so thus things are more limited in terms of what is actually given to us and thus we have to "imagine" even more.

Well, yeah, but I can do that with a couple of sock puppets and a half-rack of beer. When I buy I game, I'm assuming I'm paying them to create a lot of those interesting scenarios and possibilities, without me having to employ my own mental sock puppets just to get any satisfaction out of it. Boy was I assuming...

The problem is that the active imaginations for some only extend to how much they can act like Chandler in forum threads when they want to pat each other on the back for how witty their cynicism can get... and gamers have become too lazy to use imagination when it comes to actual video games. I think it's time to return to books.

As with many things regarding Skyrim, Beth seems to have tried to like Oblivion make it appeal to as Many people as they possibly can to maximize Profitz rather than deepening it for fear of scaring folks away in fact its so simple that the only people it probably confuses are the people who actually read it. for those who don't give a hoot they wont notice the inconsistencies , nothing sound of an Innovation or renewal to me anyway HOWEVER


Hold your Rumps for DLC, I know I know DLC. but guise, it will Blow you the F away

By trying to appeal to this "mythical" broader audience, in doing so they spurn or otherwise upset and marginalize the worth of those that got them to where they are now.

The developers need to decide what they want their games to be and apply to them that focused vision, instead of constantly trying to shift it into something it is not, in attempting to snag an audience that never cared for their games in the first place. Skyrim should have been an RPG, what it is now however is essentially a mediocre action game with poor RPG elements.

There is a serious problem in my opinion, if your long time fans can take a step back, and look at the newest game you made, and begin to think for even one second, that the type of game that is being made, no longer resembles what initially interested and drew them to the company in the first place.

It's kind of why us designers design games. When I design a game, while you free ballin' it and making stuff up as you go is fine, I do kind of want to give you a proper direction since y'know... without my design you don't really have a game.

I'm not going to create God of War with the intent for you to pretend that you're Captain Planet the entire time you're playing the game. If I want you to be Captain Planet, I'm going to make a Captain Planet game.

The problem with only catering to your long time fans is that they continually expect more and more from the series, if you're not convincing new customer to buy the product, then you would be hemorhaging money because, guess what you just spent a massive amount of money on making the game but there's still only the same number of people buying it as back when they were making daggerfall for a fraction of the cost.

The point is that "old games that didn't need patches" were very basic, very simple game engines. Like Tetris (which had bugs!).

Complex games require complex code, and no matter how hard you wish complex code would be released bug free, it never is. Even extremely high dollar professional software is released with bugs and requires regular, routine updates. Check with your local university about how often Blackboard educational system is updated. It's flat out irritating. Ask a tech support guy if they ever require bug assistance with their main database software, usually Oracle. Ha.

Point is, you are incorrect that there was some golden age where extremely complicated game engines came out bug free. There wasn't. There never will be.

I'm not saying that some of the bugs in Skyrim weren't fairly ridiculous, even by relatively light testing standards. I think Skyrim was released as a buggy mess, I do. However, I never expect them to be bug free. Never. Nor should anyone.

Of course, some concessions need to be made, but a developer can't simply go forward and automatically assume their already loyal base will eat it all up regardless. And there is also the fact, that even should they bend over backwards to accommodate new blood, there is no guarantee these people will buy it anyways, because they had no interest in the first place even after they were catered to.

If you want to play a TES game with good story/lore background, play Morrowind. It didn't have any kind of super amazing story, and it's rather slowly paced as a whole, but everything fits/makes sense, is belivable and has depth to the writing and lore of the game, and the writing goes beyond the surface-level-only linear questing that Skyrim and Oblivion entirely focused on. Morrowind also had a strong focus on the world itself versus the actual quests, which ended up making the quests feel much more meaningful, because the world you were in was meaningful. Even though the actual quest design was pretty basic.

Skyrim's quests on the otherhand are a lot more flashy and thought out presentation wise. But the writing is bad/childish, and because the entire game focuses around (bad) quests instead of the world, the player doesn't actually have any connection to the world (unlike in Morrowind) so the quests feel lifeless, or they feel like disposable tastey snacks.

Honestly, why should they care about their old fans? For every one they lose, they can gain 5 more by changing up their m.o. That makes sense from any perspective. I'm looking for logic in your post, but all I see is heartfelt loyalty issues. There's a reason loyalty and honor-based feudal systems collapsed all over the world. They don't grow.

The broader audience isn't mythical. It's there. Look at the wii. Not a single hard core gamer bought one, but it's one of the best selling consoles of all time. Why? Casual gamers, family types, children. That broad audience is not a myth.

There's no point in pining over what Skyrim should be. It should be whatever Bethesda thinks will sell. If you don't think it's what you want, then don't buy it, regardless of how much you liked the former games. The problem lies in your expectations, not in those of the developers. If there's a hole in the market for a certain type of RPG and Bethesda doesn't fill it, someone else will. If they don't, then it's not big enough for anyone to care about.

At that point, sadly, you belong to nobody's target audience. You can either change your expectations and join an audience that is targeted, or you can simply long for something that won't come.


There is no reasonable expectation that the entirety of their loyal fanbase will eat up any new game that they release. In fact, most developers expect to lose a certain percentage of their former fans each generation, simply because the new game is not a carbon clones of the old game with updated graphics. But at the same time, they don't care. Their effort is not to drive away loyal fans, it's to attract new ones. So long as that works, then developers will continue to do it, "loyal base" be damned. If anything, this "loyal base" is more mythical than the broader audience they would like to appeal to every generation.

Skyrim is the most sucessful TES game to date. If it had been Morrowind 2.0 with new graphics, it probably would have only been a bit more successful than Morrowind was. Why would a game company want that? That doesn't make sense from any perspective.

A lot of content was cut so they could meet the deadline. (I presume a shovey marketing ploy that someone was too eager to meet, not the dev's themselves) However there are signs that they will be adding this stuff in later for free, as much of it remains in the CK. I'm talking extended mages guild, thieves guild, companions questlines, along with an arena like in Oblivion. Civil war quests got cut. A huge amount of stuff did.

If they wanted to make an entirely new type of game, catering to the widespread, lowest common denominator, they should not have called it an Elder Scrolls game, and made it an entirely new IP or spinoff. There is no point having a game share the title of previous entries, if it cannot be called an actual improvement or continuation of itself unless deliberately declared as a spinoff, rather than a true successor.

Nobody buys a Mario game for fps gameplay, after all. Buying an Elder Scrolls game and having it be a mediocre action adventure, with lite rpg elements, is disingenuous at best.

There is a lot of evidence pointing to the DLC giving us better storylines. Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Knights of the Nine, Shivering Isles, The Pitt, and Point Lookout all had storylines stronger equal too or better than ones found in the vanilla Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. In some cases, vastly superior to the vanilla game (Bloodmoon, Shivering Isles, and Point Lookout would fall in this category, imo).

History says that the chances are good that the DLC will follow suit.

Making new IPs are exceptionally difficult these days, and their earlier ES spinoffs didn't go that well.
It is the duty of any company to make their products as appealing as possible to a wide an audience as possible, or the owners or stockholders would have a thing or two to say.
That's not the same as making it appeal to the lowest common denominator in my book, but that's something that can easily happen as a consequence

I understand that you think this, but I disagree that it's true at all. You don't rebrand yourself every time you want to adjust your strategy. Then you have no credentials to sell your new game on, no history, no former glory.

The former glory of an old title isn't used to re-attract the old audience. It's used to lend credibility to marketing to the new one. They could have made it a puzzle game if they wanted, and called it Elder Scrolls. That's up to them.

It's up to the consumer to decide whether they like what has changed. Besides, Skyrim is not so far removed from the basic concept of Arena, Daggerfall, or Morrowind that it would have been worth rebranding. It's an exlplorable, quest-driven open world. That's what TES has always been, and it's what Skyrim still is.

Your personal opinion of how many spreadsheets are needed to make a game an RPG is irrelevant.

LOL, "spreadsheets." What are you, Todd Howard?

I don't need a spreadsheet for an rpg. It's the fact that everything else is terrible, along with the missing spreadsheet. They could not find a focused vision, and tried to do many different things, making the game mediocre in the process by spreading things too thin. Skyrim in my opinion is a game with an identity crisis, it tries to be too many things at once, and doesn't do any of those things it tries to be, particularly well...muddying whatever potential it had for greatness in the process.

I could have tolerated the reduced rpg mechanisms, if it at least told a good story, but it doesn't.
I could have tolerated its poor story, if its combat and mechanics were good, but they are not.

The first 10 or so hours of the game were great, but after that? It just kept going downhill as I realized I was wading in an ocean, only a few inches deep.

I understand your disappointment, and I even share most of it. However, I don't think the game company has any sort of obligation not to let you down like this. That's all I'm really trying to say. They made a ton of money, and if they drove you away from their games by doing so, they are more than happy to accept the 5 or 10 more that have already replaced you.

It's the sad truth of things, yes, but that doesn't mean we have to like it.

Do you know something we don't? because I want to know

We can only hope that with the metric [censored]-ton of money they've made off Skyrim, they'll have a big enough warchest to do a better, more in-depth job of it, the next go.

now why would I know something? I'm just a Arm chair Forumer with Mountain dew.


Also Its not Making it accessible to the widest Audience possible thats a problem in of itself, by all means NO. Its how you do it.

They're not done with this go, so you might want to wait on that

You cryptic jerk I just got out my party hat for whatever you know. or apparently don't know

That's a real cute "i got a secret, and you can't have it!" grin ya got there, dude. Whatever. I'm not getting any hopes up until the horse comes out of the gate and we get to see what she can do.