The main thing I feel is dumbed down is the dialogue. It is built around the vocabulary of a five year old.

TES fan here since Morrowind.

Skyrim is giving me more of what I want from an Elder Scrolls game, not less.

Gentleman...Lets not get rude and Mean at each other...

don't forget people that voice overs cost money while text costs way less

I guess that's one thing MW still has in its favor, which is more "complex" or more "explained" quests, but MW also left a LOT of things to the player's imagination, since NPCs could not do more than stand around.

And dont forgot All the amazing random encounters Bethesda added...

No, this is win.

Ofc it's not an MMO... but ofc you've never heard of it, it's only the best RPG and Game of the Year of 2006 after all ...

Seriously, do look it up if you still have a PS2 lying around, you're missing a lot...

You are wrong. The developers need to know what people like as well so they don't cut those from future games.

So people should be praising what they like and criticizing what they don't like to provide truly balanced feedback. Those who only complain are usually dismissed as chronic whingers. If complaints are mellowed with some positive feedback as well it has more impact.

1.) Removal isn't "dumbing down". Sometimes, features from past games don't work with the mechanics of newer games. Levitation for example. That's not "dumbing down". Levitation wouldn't work with the world design of the game.

2.)
Removed: Spellmaking
Replaced With: Improved / Enchanced spell casting gameplay mechanics that allow for new magic styles, and casting styles that weren't possible before.

Removed: Armorer / Equipment Degradation
Replaced With: Smithing, a fully implemented, more complex and in depth crafting system, allowing players to acquire materials to create every piece of equipment.

Removed: Mysticism, Armorer, Athletics, Acrobatics, Mercantile, Hand to Hand
Replaced With: Mysticism, and Mercantile weren't "removed" - they were merged with other skills. Hand to Hand has perks that allow for specialization in that playstyle. Armorer was replaced with a more in depth Smithing skill. Athletics and Acrobatics - the "run" and "jump" skill, were replaced with fully in depth and complex skills like Enchanting and Pickpocketing. The lower number of skills (18, compared to 21, or even 27) was replaced with more in depth individual skills that allow for various paths of specialization, that actually offers -more- choice than even Morrowind (at least 36 different specialization choices [2 paths for each skill, many skills have more than 2 paths] compared to 27 for Morrowind)

Doesn't sound like "dumbing down" to me.

Auto health regen counts as dumbed down no?

never owned a console

but seems like a cool game, maybe i will check it out on gamespot.

You never wanted the guilds then?

Because Morrowind had 10 guilds each having about 30 quests (300 total), Oblivion had 4 guilds with each having about 20 quests (80 total) and now Skyrim has 4 guilds with each having about 8 quests (32 quests).

Instead Skyrim offers tons of random quests with no personality to them, just bland objectives with poor motivation behind them, or worse: no motivation. Quests have been dumbed down and I'm not saying Skyrim is worse on all fronts but it certainly has beem dumbed down in some ways. Saying otherwise apears to me as if you're ignoring figures (hard facts).

Yes we lost attributes, I too want them back. But the leveling system was awful. It made people do "unroleplaying" things like leveling skills which we didn't need just for the damn attribute multiplier. And we did it because health, stamina and magic were passive skills reliant on main attribute scores. In that sense Skyrim is a huge improvement in the TES series.
Birthsigns were largely irrelevant and we didn't lose them, they're can now be interchanged ingame which is another improvement.
Weapon skills were all interchangeble and copy-pasted, so that really brings down the number of skills considerably. I really don't consider the loss of athletics such a huge loss. I never took it as a major skill for fear I would level too fast and I really like to run around to get to places a bit faster.
Again you had to do "unroleplaying" things just to get the right attribute multiplier to make your intended skill useful. Like standing in Morrowind around a mudcrab for an hour taking hits so you could get not only your heavy armour rating up but also your endurance. Again Skyrim is an improvement in that respect.
TES combat was never tactical. Dragging your mouse in a particular direction while making the same clicking doesn't represent tactics. What would've been tactics was making weilding heavy two-handed weapons substantially different to light one-handed weapons, making flanking truely worthwhile (enemies and you are more vulnerable in the flank/bank), a real difference between heavy and light armours etc. No previous TES game was substantially better in combat then Skyrim's combat.
I rarely read manuels. And 26 pages is nothing compared to the REAL manuals games had when they still came in boxes. This is a general complaint for ALL games since the '90s.
The journal is woefully lacking indeed. Not that I recall other TES games having fantastic journals as say, old Bioware games, but this is true.
At least there's a minigame I don't recall one in the previous TES titles.
The hotkey setting is indeed rather...questionable. But most RPGs and other genres (most long dead) did allow you to pause (god mode) and THINK about your next options. Such as Baldur's Gate. Or turn-based games like Fallout or Jagged Alliance. It's really not so bad a thing to pause a game and think about what you're going to do next, I wish more games return to the "thinking man's game".
I don't recall TES games to have many puzzles. While I found the random generated dungeons of Arena and Daggerfall massively confusing it wasn't because much thought was put into it. It was more slugging your way through endless dungeon halls in the hope of finding anything at all.
Again I don't understand why people have such high opinions of guild quests in previous games. Most of those quests were indeed fed-ex/kill quests.
They did make a remarkable design decision by not having your skills governing how far you got in a guild. That I don't understand. Nor do I appreciate the lack of interaction between guilds, and the total number of factions to join is disappointing.

A lot of your points is, like mine, a matter of opinion. Not proof that Beth radically dumbed down the game.
The only real proof I can see is the lack of Spellmaking (when you can craft anything else). That I don't understand at all.

But most evidence brought here is simply matter of opnion and personal taste.

I was browsing through the latest rpgs I've been playing lately and, funny thing, found back Gothic 4: Arcania, a game considered to be the worst Gothic game ever made and yet, it plays like Skyrim with a difference: the combat is better.

It plays like Skyrim?

It is set in a liniear game world with new areas opening up as you progress the story.

There are a handful of objectes beside the main quests but basically you just hack your way through area upon area. It doesn't play like Skyrim at all.

The combat being ''better'' is subjective and I completely disagree with it. Combat is also uncomparable as Arcania has a more arcade system which allows you to quickly jump left and right (look up Reckoning, it might be a RPG for you).

I don't thing skyrim was dumbed down.
i just think some of the features we lost should not have been cut and the quest lines are too short and the cities to small.. its not dumbed down its almost as if oblivion in many ways was better.
i liked how they streamlined it, removed annoying crap like repair hammers.
but face it, fighters guild> companions the arena was awsome, the mages guild in oblivion was long and saw going to each city,
honestly i would say every guild and guild quest in oblivion was better than skyrim. oblivion cities felt bigger and were awsome.

Kingdoms of Amalur? already preordered that game.

TES fan since Daggerfall. It's no doubt dumbed down to make it easier - just look at the quest arrows and POI markers - we don't even have options to turn them off because everything is built around it (GUI opacity doesn't count, as it hides information we DO want, such as compass direction and status bars). Story has become less and less inspired, only to suit the guys who want to rush through the game seeing all the fancy graphics.

That being said, overall I still enjoy the game A LOT, despite its many flaws. There are few games that provide me with the same amount of game time where I may do some things I never did before. And there are tons of NEW mechanics and features that are never mentioned in these discussions at all.

I am going to address your individual points and express my point of view on each one. A lot of the things you cited are areas that I also feel Bethesda could have done a much better job in.


Attribute functions have been redistributed into the skill perks, but there is a certain roleplaying charm they have that you simply cannot make up for with them gone. It feels more "into it" to have a clear-cut indication of how strong or smart your character is, and it gives you a bit more to work with when figuring out how to roleplay that character. Without attributes, you can only ad-lib those traits, which is a lot more difficult.

What could be done instead is simply have Attributes be computed from your character's overall skill levels and perk choices. A very popular Morrowind and Oblivion mod did just that (Galciah's Character Development and not Galciah's Character Development). By simply having attributes reflect your skills and just letting the player concentrate on building his skills instead of grinding for attribute multipliers (the mods removed those from the game entirely), all the baggage is gone.

This is one of those things that I can see why Bethesda removed them, but I feel that was taking it too far.


What the new system succeeded in doing was delaying when your character gets "locked in" to his class. Once you reach a certain point in the game, you have taken so many perks in a particular specialization that it is now essentially your Class. The game doesn't label it, but there is still a class system in place. Whether intentionally or unintentionally is not for me to judge, but there does come that point in the game where you have taken so many perks in one particular specialization that switching to another would result in a character that is only "OK" in two specializations instead of master of one.

Not that that is a bad thing, of course.

In short, the "no class" argument is invalid, because classes still exist. You don't need an arbitrary label telling you "this is your class" to tell you what your character is and is not good at, like in the real world, that is something you figure out for yourself.


The removal of some features (most often brought up is the Unlock spell) makes it harder to use certain playstyles because in order to be successful in this game, you really have to use skills from all three specializations. I'm not a big fan of encouraging or enforcing jack-of-all-trades gameplay, I am someone who would prefer as many actions available in the game as possible be available to the player in three ways: one for the Warrior, one for the Mage, one for the Rogue. This way, every archetype has their own way of doing things, and the player is still allowed to decide which he prefers

Take bypassing that lock, for example: Warriors can bash the lock open, but since they can do this to any level lock at any time, it runs the risk of destroying or damaging some of the gear inside to balance until they improve their skills with whatever weapon they are using (the higher the skill, the less chance of breaking something). Higher level locks would require more force, so the risk of destroying things inside a Master locked chest will be much higher than for a Novice locked chest. Mages get a spell to bypass the lock which would require sufficient skill to cast, and Rogues can pick the lock so long as they have sufficient skill to pick that particular level lock. Three ways, all equal, instead of just one.

If you want to help the player improve character diversity, you need to ADD new features to help differentiate the archetypes from one another, in this case, for bypassing locks. Skyrim, on the other hand, took the opposite approach and subtracted the number of means available to bypass that lock. If you want to open locks magically, your only option now is to visit a Standing Stone and get a once-per-day power, which is obviously not designed to be relied on. I can't really see how that is in any way a step forwards for character diversity.

Skyrim only went halfway. The major meat of the game (combat) has three unique archetypes to approach it from and the player can combine them together in whatever way he sees fit. But the smaller things, like bypassing locks and persuasion, only have one option available to them now. And when I can compare to previous titles in the series and see that they had more than one option, then I can see no way to justify Skyrim being a step forward in allowing for a truly unique character.


Agreed. My only real gripe is in the limited selection of quests that contain choices with consequences and that those choices often require me to choose between "Dumb or Dumber" from my perspective (Forsworn Conspiracy, for example, has me choosing which of two factions, both of whom I utterly despise, should win control of a settlement). But quest depth compared to previous games has not regressed at all, it's stayed put.

Not bad, but not necessarily good either. While it means the game has not regressed in quest depth and variety, it hasn't progressed, either.



Here I must disagree. Cutting content from the game is the absolute final option a developer should consider, because removing content from the game makes people unhappy (case-in-point right here).

Instead, the developer should look at what made the system flawed, address those flaws, and integrate the feature into the game a different way. If the fundamental system itself was flawed, then yes, it should be cut. But if only a portion is flawed, you remove the portion that was and look for a new way to return the feature to the game in a more meaningful and less contrived way before you consider cutting it out. If you can find no way to return the revamped feature to the game, then you cut it.

Armorer, for example, is an unecessary cut. It would not have taken much effort for the system of equipment maintenance to be piggybacked onto the new upgrades system: upgrades would not last forever, instead the equipment would gradually return to its base stats the longer it went without the player taking initiative to maintain the upgrade. In this case, not only does it re-implement Armorer's featureset in a more believable way, but it also solves a few problems in the game's Smithing skill, too:

1. Removes the need to grind for Smithing experience, as now the player can get his skill up just by using and maintaining his equipment. In short, it provides a natural means of progression, whereas grinding is forced progression. Both are meaningful, especially in Elder Scrolls.
2. It is possible to exploit the Smithing skill to heavily reduce the effectiveness of the Arcane Blacksmith perk to the point of irrelevancy by simply upgrading your equipment before enchanting it. Add in a periodic need to maintain the upgrade, and Arcane Blacksmith is needed again, and the exploit disappears.
3. It provides a money-sink for players who don't want to go out and search for ore to mine. Instead, they can buy it from merchants, providing a constant expense to avoid money becoming worthless to the player.

All of the removal and extra hand holding is the definition of the videogame nuevo term 'dumbed down'.

And how is this exactly different from Oblivion and Morrorwind?

A lot of skills arent worth much without perks...
Onehanded without perks as an example only increases damage by 50 percent...
Illusion is completly worthless without perks.


Then why my conjured dremoras decapitate enemies all the time?? Just one example...

Belrand is another:
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Belrand

I actually thought that was quite a clever quest. Having to choose between two evils does make you stop and think. Black and white, good versus evil quests are much simpler if your character is good-aligned because your choice is always obvious. When its all shades of gray and two unpalatable choices then you need to really think about which is the least worst outcome and the nature and motivations of the groups involved.

There were a few other ambiguous quests like this which I enjoyed like the Redguard woman in Whiterun, and the Gildergreen quest both of which give you difficult choices. I've still been unable to decide what to do about the civil war.

Paarthurnax: you couldn't really decide not to kill Paarthurnax, the game just decided that you hadn't gotten around to it yet (no option to refuse, Esber'ns quests stuck in your inventory with no qay of completeting the quest(s) since he won't speak to you

Escape from Chidna Mine: choice has no consequnce, gimmick choice; forsworn are still hostile
In My Time Of Need: no consequnce whatssoever, seriously disappointing
don't recognize the title of that other quest

I have far fewer options than I did in Morrowind. I can kill of the DB but I can't kill off the Thieves guild because half of them are essential. So even if i have no intention of ever doing any quests for the TG and I want to play as some overzealous bounty hunter or paladin who smites evil.......I can't because some of them are essential. Morrowind still had the best system to date. If its someone important the game would pop up a message telling you that if you continue on you are hosed for the main quest. Let that be up to me, especially considering that many of my character never even did the main quest.

Bethesda missed a huge opportunity with the repair system. There are smithing anvils and billows all over the game world and this would have been a great opportunity for them to replace the stupid hammer system with something similar to how alchemy is how (which is much better than previous games) where you had to actually repair you gear at a smithing station.

Im glad they brought perks in and I am glad that you are now forced to specialize and you can no longer have an end game character that is good at everything. However, the perks were horribly implemented. I have to pick perks i dont even want like the light step perk in order to get to other perks. Other perks are rendered useless because they aren't even needed. Why they didn't require that you have the relevant perk before you can pick locks is beyond me. They would have been much better off with letting you choose your own perks as long as you had the prerequisite skill level.

As for "dumbing down" which i hate saying but that is what this topic is about.......even Todd admitted it publicly. Doesn't everyone remember when Todd said that the previous games were too spreadsheety? How he wanted the game to be accessible to the average gamer. He basically just said that the average casual gamer was dumber than my nine year old nephew who played Oblivion on his xbox.

Attributes in and ot themselves don't mean much but, yet again, bethesda had a great idea from a previous game of theirs which were the dialogue skill/attribute checks. Instead of the current speech options which are utterly meaningless since you can bribe everyone (except for the College destruction mage) they could have implemented a system like F03 and FNV where you could bypass certain missions or get access to better rewards or even just continue with a different direction in a conversation to find some hidden info about an npc. You can no longer do that anymore because there is nothing to measure it against. How do you pass an intelligence test if there is no longer any metric for intelligence. Magicka is supposed to willpower and intelligence and some other stuff all lumped together.

I weep for F04. If they remove the the SPECIAL system cause they figure that the casual gamer is too stupid to figure it out........

There is too much MMO getting into this game. Why can't I pay someone to enchant my stuff if i want to play a big, dumb orc warrior Please explain to me how I am supposed to RP a magic hating nord who runs around enchanting stuff because no one else will?

FO3 is a far better and enjoyable game than skyrim is with the exception of "prettiness". I had just as much fun randomly exploring in FO3 as i did in skyrim, which is one area that skyrim excels at. And on top of that FO3 had better quests, dialogue, npcs and far better followers. Even though FNV gameworld isn't nearly as good, I had even more playthroughs in that game than i did with FO3 simply because there are far more choices to make with even minor quests. Skyrim is a step backwards from F03.

Everything you mentioned as bad are things that people who hate RPG's mention. Thanks for proving the point the game is "Dumbed Down"