I've said this in the past but yeah Beth relied way to much on Radiant Story. Hopefully they don't even think about adding radiant quests in the next Elder Scrolls game until they are finished with ALL of the handwritten quests that their writers actually create.

sorry but most people buy Elder Scroll Games because of the huge Open World and the fact that you can just walk right off doing your own thing after the first tutorial dungeon.

alot don't even touch the Mainquest

Hardly. The problem is it becomes a slippery slope of trying to rationalize who you can ignore or marginalize next. A minority of a game's playerbase is still a section of it, the more you rationalize ignoring one section, the bolder you become in rationalizing away the concerns of other sections...eventually dividing the base with attrition.

All too often have developers gone off, and jumped the shark, ignoring their fanbase, absolutely certain that they know best.

The "loyal fanbase" is called that for a reason. They generally know what to expect of the company, they would know what they are buying, and are in most cases, a guaranteed sell, but also tend to be the harshest critics.

The unspoken for broader audience may pull in a new fan or two, but it will also inevitably pull in lots of "passerbys", someone who is not likely to stick with the company or the game for long. By pandering to that second group exclusively, to the exclusion of everything else, all for the sake of a quick buck sees a decline in quality, as standards and expectations are warped by trying to appease the passerby whose wants and expectations may not even be relevant or good for the game or future titles, as they lack any form of long-term investment or interest.

I'm not even really upset that it is a poor excuse for an Elder Scrolls game in comparison to past titles, so much as I am irritated that it can hardly even call itself an rpg, and is more like some bastard hybrid of action/adventure, and rpg lite, while failing to truly satisfy in either category. Skyrim is the first high profile "rpg" I have ever quit due to boredom.

That's a pretty lame excuse to have awful quests in a singleplayer RPG game. Whether you touch the MQ or not.

sorry but you can't have everything
its called limited resources. thats how the world works.

the quests are ok (if you really want to see awful quests try ME3, hint most quests involve nothing more than planetscanning).

as i said most people play the Elder Scroll Series not because of the storyline or the quests, if you do then im sorry for you.

It's hardly a rationalization, it's a prioritization. Games have a finite resource pool they can draw upon. Technical resources, Monetary resources, and time. The perfect game would never be released, it comes down to making what is felt to be the best compromise possible given the restrictions. That's not even counting that a lot of things "Fringe" Groups like, a larger majority absolutely hate (Lack of Fast Travel, or quest markers for example). Frankly, your argument comes off as quite selfish, and patently ludicrous. It could be TL;DR'd to "Pander to me, not someone else".

And mind you, I say this as a person who agrees that Elder Scrolls is evolving in a way I'm not particularly fond of a great deal of the time.

Honestly, to say that Elder Scrolls isn't Elder Scrolls anymore is to completely miss the point of the entire series. Each game has been so vastly different, their one common thread is creating as open ended an experience as possible. When you consider the contemporary market, they've never done anything but succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations.

Anyone can think Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Daggerfall or Arena are better or worse than whatever game they want, but to mire any argument in such ignorance and selfishness really invalidates their position in a discussion.

Oh. I see your avatar is an image from none other than New Vegas... and you're complaining about followers in Skyrim as if it's the first time you've experienced these problems. By now, perhaps you should have come to realize that the technology simply isn't available to make your followers as intelligent as real human beings. I have yet to play a game where I'm totally impressed by how followers react. I go into every game expecting quirky behavior from followers. As IBM will tell you about any number of thier crappy software products, it's "industry standard".

Sorry to hear that. I play on a 360 and I've only had the game crash once. Must be your hardware?

HI supremacy! How's your weekemd turning out to be? Good, I hope.

I've seen this point brought up many times. Frankly speaking, it's contrived. To say one is required to use one's imagination to make up for any of the game's shortcomings and add that such is the essence of roleplaying is to beg the question: Why play a videogame in the first place and not leave it all up to one's imagination? It's flawed rhetoric. This is especially true when it comes to the narrative. No ammount of daydreaming could ever replace or in this case fix the Swiss cheese holes in some of the questlines.

First of all, can you explain how pandering to this "someone else" is somehow better than me? Can you even divine a reason...do you even know me well enough to say that it would be any better or worse? For starters, I'll say right here that I do not fall into the "immersion" or "no fast travel, no markers" camp. As the consumer, they are trying to attain my money, and other people's money, so they are clearly going to have to pander to someone. What makes this "someone else" so much better, so much more "worthy"?

The hype surrounding the game pre-release was at a very high point, I figure that regardless of how the game actually turned out, it would have been successful. Indeed, it comes off as very mediocre to me, it's a "good" game, but not a great one, and certainly not what it was hyped up to be, nor do I feel it deserving of all the accolades it has apparently swept up in the midst of the hype.

And second of all, drop that argument. Really. I already said I don't care that it is a "poor TES" game to some people.

Despite its claims at freedom, it fails to even truly deliver in that respect beyond being able to walk wherever you want. Your character is largely rail-roaded, the world is soul-less and feels artificial outside of its beauty, the stories are at times nonsensical, others poorly written and acted, the rpg statistics gone, mechanics as broken and exploitable as ever, and the combat lackluster, and archaic. The game simply isn't greater than the sum of its parts..its actually less, as it is clear they did not treat every part of the game with the same care, despite the reliance upon how they interact to deliver the whole game experience.

Like I've said, it is a game with an identity crisis, which hurts itself by lacking a truly focused vision by trying to be too many things, some of which it never was and never needed to be.

+1

agreed.

Hi Criminal_Scum! How's it going?

I do see your point. However, please consider that the fact that any game development process involves setting up priorites, indisputable, does not mean that every single decision made along the process was right. It's very possible for alternatives to take an equal toll on resources, thus meaning that a different route could have been taken. And we don't need to speculate too far off. We have a concrete example right here avaiable to us: Todd said they could have easily added inventory space to horses in SKyrim but chose not to because felt it would make them too important. Bad call. Had they chosen differently, no extra time and no extra personnel would have been spent on development and, arguably, we would have ended up with a better game.

Questlines for factions were two short, the companions accept you into the circle after doing a single radient quest. The civil war which is the second biggest thing in skyrim after the pretty *yawn* dragon invasion crisis didnt have much effect once you completed it. Nobody in the legion/new management considers my status as legate/top rebel and treat me as a civilian.
On the main quests ending i just hated that after all that im now standing in the snow thinking 'well... what now'. Nobody even gives a flying horker that ive saved everyone from the end of the world.

Hi all, I have played through every one of the Elder Scrolls Games. I have seen the thunderstorms in the swamps of Black Marsh, I have battled the Ice Golems if the Ice Fortress in Skyrim, I have had to rush across Hammerfell and High Rock to rescue a kid, I have treaded carefully and backstabbed / soul trapped the Ascendend Sleepers of Morrowind, I have enjoyed the endless battle with the Black Bow Bandits outside of Leyawiin.

Each game has had a Main Story and asked you the protagonist with the "sleeper power" to fight against great odds and nasty guys to beat some final battle. You did not have to undertake this battle, you could be an explorer, a trader of wolf pelts, a collector of Black Bows, the bane of Cliff Racers.

As an Elder Games consumer, I found the bugginess of Daggerfall almost inexcusable. Skyrim may have had a few bugs, but it was never unplayable out of the box. The updates and patches fix little things, not game breaking crashes.

The ideas and execution of each of the main story lines were fantastic. The Legend that is and has been the Elder Scroll games likely has brought in a bunch of FPS and fighter/action RPG type players. Are they disappointed with the lack of story fighting or story action? From these threads here, it seems so.

One can only say that each player should find their way or play Something Else 2 (or any other game that they like). I will continue to walk across the country side, fighting Dragons, or Wizards, or Bandits, or Forsworn or, more increasingly enjoyably, fighting Vampires.

Find your own way. Bethesda has asked just that of us since 1995. IMHO Skyrim holds up the qualities of the Elder Scroll series.

If you don't like something, do something else. It is just a game in the end, but it is a great game for one who has played all the others. I still have all the games, and are installed and playable when I am at home. When you see the indicator line "The Lich is regenerating" and you are less than level 5, run like crazy to the exit, the 750 points of shock damage is a cookery lesson your character never forgets.

Awesome, thank you... and, the thunderstorms in the Black Marsh were memorable.

That's nice. Thanks Bethesda! Just give us the tools, next time.

For these people who are anti-imagination, I wonder, do you people read at all?

Because, that is often times one of the biggest factors when people say they prefer the book over the movie, because the book allows you to use your imagination to fill in the blanks, instead of having the movie spoon feed it to you.

A game that encourages the use of one's imagination and creativity is not a bad thing!

You mean like Daggerfall?

Some were amazing like the small implied story of the forgotten prision, Oh and the one with necormancer and his undead "milk-maids".

So, building on the movie/book anologue, is a blank sheet of paper and a pen more inspiring than a good book? I mean, think of the potential. My brain's uninhibited to imagine whatever story I want! I don't even need to write. I can just make a paper airplane and fling the pen at a girl I have a crush on. Serious consequences, for serious imaginations.

My point is, Skyrim has no inherent meat. The story truly svcks.

Also, Tamriel's best worldbuilding exists outside accepted canon. What happened?

Hi there Nell2ThaIzzay! Good you dropped by.

"People who are anti-im agination" is stretching it a tad, wouldn't you agree? Borrowing from your anology, would an imgiinative person be able to, in his mind, turn a poorly written book into a master novel? If so, are there any bad books in the world at all, or just unimaginative readers? Do better graphics, better storylines and better gameplay discourage the use o one's imagination? And why not fgive full use and freedom to my imagination and discard the game altogether? Thanks in advance.

Sure, just give all the imagination and creativity to the PC users only. Not like you could add it to consoles. Pfft... that's silly.

In case you didn't know, that was sarcasm. I study in a Multimedia class in college, and I even know that they can implement this to consoles. Will they do it? No, because according to the evidence, no one at bethesda has been to college.

You mean how there's no modding available to consoles? If so, Bethesda wanted to make that possible, but Microsoft & Sony would have none of that.

Well, I'll just leave this, for whatever it's worth.

I have dropped Skyrim faster than any other Bethesda game I have ever played (and I am lumping New Vegas into that, since Bethesda did publish it). It simply failed to hold my attention. It simply failed to hold my attention. And that saddens me.

I think this is probably why. The main quest and guild quests were really short compared to previous games, heck we don't even have a Fighters Guild quest line anymore. One of my biggest disappointments with Skyrim.