I feel like Skyrim does not value my time.

i'm a little baffled by skyrim hate sometimes. when it came out nobody could shut up about it for about 8 months like it was some life changing event, and now all i hear about is how lame it is despite having spent 100+ hours on it. i understand its not for everybody but it seems weird anybody would spend that much time on something so allegedly shallow...

maybe its because i was new to open world wrpgs, or because i pretty much sat the gen out until 2011, but it was a mystifying experience for me... probably in my top 5 gaming experiences of all time. i think people hate on the combat because it had the misfortune of coming out the same time as Dark Souls, though that doesn't excuse its jankiness. and yeah virtually every quest is a dungeon dive but i'm not really sure how there can be a way around that... pretty much every ES was like that before.

but even to this day i'm discovering new things, and i haven't even touch DLC yet. i understand different strokes for different folks but i find it odd the game has so much backlash two years later
 
I played Skyrim entirely as a thief, stealing everything I could. The only real main questline I put a lot of time into was the Thieve's Guild, which of course, you cannot complete without doing TONS of super tedious fetch/deliver quests. Walk to a house, place an item in a chest, walk back to the guild, repeat ad nauseum. It was like a test of patience, mainly in loading screens that last forever when transitioning to each area (360). Which I failed, I couldn't bother playing the game anymore.

The only game that comes anywhere near as close to awful tedium with its quests was Saints Row the Third's cellphone missions, which were more tolerable due to it's open world with no loading screens.
 
loved it personally. did all the guilds and a shitton of quests then finished the main story. total addiction of a game. 200+ hours spent on it. same with morrowind and oblivion.
 
My problem with Skyrim is that once you realize how effective Enchantment is, you'll never want to ignore it, and you'll be doomed forever to enchant dozens of iron daggers. And then around that time the already less-than-nuanced combat also wears thin.
 
I could't really get into the game to be honest. I tried playing it first on 360. I just recently got a solid PC though so I may try again and play around with all the mods out there.
 
260 hours and 100 mods never beat the main quest :P <3 Skyrim, the first 2 weeks or so I was fucking HOOKED..
This video basically says what I think about Skyrim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JweTAhyR4o0

Skip to about 7:11 for main arguments. For those who don't wanna watch, his main arguments are:


  1. You can't fail
  2. No consequences for faction membership
  3. Little to no impact on the world
  4. Quest structure and journal system
  5. NPC conversation being heavily reduced
  6. Massively oversimplified puzzles
  7. The value of items being reduced

I agree with all of them but especially points 1-4. They make Skyrim a very shallow rpg because these things exist in the game and this is coming from someone with 150 hours in Skyrim.
meeeh feel really sorry for anyone that bought this on consoles everyone of those can be fixed with a mod... I even played Oblivion on 360 was my first ES game and I LOOOOVED it but this type of game NEEDS mods.
 
I threw up in my mouth every time he showed a picture of the kids.

Arguments that use words like "dumbing down" always feel so pretentious and holier-than-thou and it's even worse when they're this blatant.
It's sad because he has a faint idea that these changes are bad, but fails to realize why they are bad or why they are implemented. By using a blanket buzzword like casual, he loses any opportunity to accept compromise.
 
I can kind of appreciate what Bethesda is trying to do but man they need to hire like, people who can design combat in video games or something.

Yeah. Combat in Elder Scrolls is a joke. Completely turns the games into PC tech demos for me, they're not even legitimate games as far as I'm concerned. Even "movie" games like MGS4 have better gameplay. Even super easy turn based games are better. It's just pathetic.
 
OP, you know, with Elder Scrolls, that just because you can do everything with one character, doesn't mean you have to.

It's a classic RPG in that, if your character sees no reason to take up side quests, join the warriors guild, hunt vampires or be an assassin, you don't have to. You can ignore 80% of the game and there's still enough content for a 20-hour campaign of the main quest, or you can completely ignore the main quest and just play a guilds missions. Or just play Dragonborn.

The problem a lot of players have with Skyrim is the perceived need to optimise, to hand in quests and level up efficiently and keep the quest log clean. This wont work with Skyrim. It isn't necessary. There is just too much content, and a lot of it, particularly dungeon designs, duplicate, as its either a draugr crypt, a dwarf ruin etc.

What I like to do is turn the quest log and markers off, so that you aren't being led by the game to endless end-points. Just play the character and do what they would do. There's enough content for at least 3 characters, and once you get to a certain level pretty much all challenge disappears anyway.

This requires discipline to not spam what you know works. I know, I know, you want to be skill 100 in enchanting and smithing to make optimum magic items. But look at it as an RPG with a far-too-lenient GM. When you created Skard the dragon hunter, did you really decide that he was the best assassin, warrior, mage, bard, thief, smith and bowyer in the realm, all at the same time? That sounds like a terrible character to me. Maybe Skard likes swimming and starting fights in pubs when he isn't hunting dragons, with a bit of light mercenary work on the side. When he arrives at a town, maybe he checks the pub, looking for work rather than crafting 300 Iron daggers before bedtime.

I've had 3 runs through it, with a total of over 200 hours play with that approach, and loved it. I agree with all criticism about simple puzzles etc, but as a functional game world to wander around, creating your own story and exploring rather than submitting to being its delivery boy, it's awesome.
 
Yeah. Combat in Elder Scrolls is a joke. Completely turns the games into PC tech demos for me, they're not even legitimate games as far as I'm concerned. Even "movie" games like MGS4 have better gameplay.
The random miss system in Morrowind makes me sad.

"Oh, but it's just like a pen and paper RPG!" No, it's not. A pen and paper RPG is usually a game played with other people, it is a game where the combat is only limited by my imagination and the combat system, it is a game with a combat system more complex than "hit the button again and again", and it is a game that won't throw five million cliff racers at me unless the GM is a massive tool like Bethesda apparently were.

Fuck cliff racers.
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Skyrim values your time about as much as it values your actions in the world, and it has plenty of problems. I still had a lot of fun with it playing as a sneaky thief-mage and a fair bit of mods. I do hope they find out how to make a good melee combat system for the next game though. Maybe someone should tell Bethesda about Dark Messiah. Just get Arkane to do the melee combat for them
so they can include a new major skill: Bootkickin'
.
 
Played Oblivion and Skyrim for 60ish hours each.

Probably the last time i buy a game in that franchise unless it's radically different. It's a time sink, and when you finish and look back on that, the only thing you remember is tedium. With Oblivion, those demon tower worlds and caves. In Skyrim, bad loot drops from dragons that weighted a ton.
 
I threw up in my mouth every time he showed a picture of the kids.

Arguments that use words like "dumbing down" always feel so pretentious and holier-than-thou and it's even worse when they're this blatant.

Yeah I can see how you could get that impression but I think his point still stands regardless of how its presented.
 
Redcrayon, your approach is absolutely how I played the game, but even then it ran really thin for me once I got tired of playing with mods. Even a lenient GM would still have some reactive aspects to your roleplaying; Skyrim has almost none. Towards the beginning of the game there are all these hints of factions, and of course the classic guilds, yet you go from flag A to B to C to... Z, and then you're done. Nothing really happens. The story wasn't particularly amusing (for the most part). You leave no mark upon the world beyond the usual videogame handjobs every NPC gives you after you've completed the one or two major plot points that lead to everybody worshipping you as the instantly recognizable savior of the known universe that you are.

I enjoy picking this game apart because I like to talk about RPGs and this one comes up more than any other on this site except maybe squabbling about Final Fantasy... and because it's a bit bewildering even to me. I have a bit of an attraction to it, even though when I play it I usually get fed up and quit in the middle of some quest line.

It's likely because the best games in the genre are all fairly old at this point. Divinity: Original Sin can't come soon enough...
Yeah, fair enough, I felt Fallout New Vegas was far more reactive and with a much better 'faction' system that didn't allow you to be a leader in every single settlement!

Skyrim is flawed, no doubt about that, it carries a lot of baggage from previous games. One development I liked was the evolution from the cliched 'fighters guild' to the more evocative 'Companions' with their own internal troubles. Also, I grew to really feel 'at home' in Whiterun, I liked that, it meant I had places I visited often, but a few more changes in dialogue from the people I spoke to every couple of hours would be good.

'I had you figured for a mage'
'Was that when I bought 20 soul gems last month after setting fire to your office last Autumn perhaps?'

'Ah, so you're an alchemist then!'
'Alduin's breath, woman, I've been selling you my home-made rubbish potions for weeks!'

(I decided Skaard the dragon hunter was a sarcastic bastard)

As a functional, medieval fantasy world it's cool, but sure, it needs work on making your actions mean something, it's certainly something they could do rather than adding another 20 near-identical dungeons.
 
260 hours and 100 mods never beat the main quest :P <3 Skyrim, the first 2 weeks or so I was fucking HOOKED..

meeeh feel really sorry for anyone that bought this on consoles everyone of those can be fixed with a mod... I even played Oblivion on 360 was my first ES game and I LOOOOVED it but this type of game NEEDS mods.

I don't think you can fix the quest structure of vanilla skyrim. Its always the same. Go into dungeon, kill draugrs, bring back item, end of quest. It just gets tiresome after a while. The mod quests are great but I think he's referencing vanilla skyrim ( ie no mods to clean up all the stuff that's wrong with skyrim).
 
This video basically says what I think about Skyrim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JweTAhyR4o0

This is one of the worst composed arguments I have ever listened to and I'm only three minutes in.

He's discussing the franchise becoming more casual friendly, he states, "I don't want to get into a pointless PC gamer vs console war..." Then immediately follows up with, "But lets not delude ourselves there are no consoles in existence that come close to the processing power of a modern PC. And when I want to get into some serious gaming there is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard and 20 times the processing power..."

So, you're telling me that processing power is directly correlated to the depth of a game/franchise? Okay guy. Horrible, biased argument right off the bat. Valid complaint with menus and what not, but his argument can be summed up with, "wahhhh why wasn't this a PC exclusive?"
 
This is one of the worst composed arguments I have ever listened to and I'm only three minutes in.

He's discussing the franchise becoming more casual friendly, he states, "I don't want to get into a pointless PC gamer vs console war..." Then immediately follows up with, "But lets not delude ourselves there are no consoles in existence that come close to the processing power of a modern PC. And when I want to get into some serious gaming there is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard and 20 times the processing power..."

So, you're telling me that processing power is directly correlated to the depth of a game/franchise? Okay guy. Horrible, biased argument right off the bat. Valid complaint with menus and what not, but his argument can be summed up with, "wahhhh why wasn't this a PC exclusive?"

I agree the first part of the video is a little off putting. Go to 7:11 where he actually makes his argument.
 
Anyone who plays Bethesda games on consoles is getting a bad game. They have to be modded extensively before they become good. At which point you can turn the game into almost anything.
 
This is one of the worst composed arguments I have ever listened to and I'm only three minutes in.

He's discussing the franchise becoming more casual friendly, he states, "I don't want to get into a pointless PC gamer vs console war..." Then immediately follows up with, "But lets not delude ourselves there are no consoles in existence that come close to the processing power of a modern PC. And when I want to get into some serious gaming there is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard and 20 times the processing power..."

So, you're telling me that processing power is directly correlated to the depth of a game/franchise? Okay guy. Horrible, biased argument right off the bat. Valid complaint with menus and what not, but his argument can be summed up with, "wahhhh why wasn't this a PC exclusive?"
It is bizarre. "Why didn't the developers want to settle for a tiny fraction of the sales after five years spent making a huge RPG?'.
 
'I had you figured for a mage'
'Was that when I bought 20 soul gems last month after setting fire to your office last Autumn perhaps?'

'Ah, so you're an alchemist then!'
'Alduin's breath, woman, I've been selling you my home-made rubbish potions for weeks!'

YES MY THANE

DO YOU NEED SOMETHING FROM ME THANE, OR CAN I CARRY SOMETHING FOR YOU

THANETHANETHANETHANETHANE
 
Anyone who plays Bethesda games on consoles is getting a bad game. They have to be modded extensively before they become good. At which point you can turn the game into almost anything.
I don't know, got 200 hours out of it, I was happy enough. It's not a bad game, it's just flawed.
 
This is the Bethesda way. "I played that game for 100 hours and had a shit ton of fun, but in retrospect the combat is lame!"
This.... so much....

It's riddiculus. Every other person complaining about Skyrim is saying that shit. Is it just me going...

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Hello? You just put in 100+ hours into a game. It can't be THAT bad, right?

I have around 200 hours on my playthrough and also have a hard time getting into the game again and notice the stuff I don't like about it much more now. BUT that doesn't change the fact that I friggin loved this game for 150+ hours - and that makes it game of the gen for me.
 
I enjoyed the game..Played it everyday for like a month and it got stale..I took a pretty long break from it and got back into it but it eventually got stale again. I sold it before any of the DLC was made available on the PS3 though.
 
I still play it only because I have over 150 mods in my game. Vanilla skyrim is only fun for so long.

Edit: you got 120 hours out a game I'd say you got your 60 dollars worth.
Yeah this is pretty much spot on. Skyrim becomes 200 times better when you start adding mods to it.
 
This is one of the worst composed arguments I have ever listened to and I'm only three minutes in.

He's discussing the franchise becoming more casual friendly, he states, "I don't want to get into a pointless PC gamer vs console war..." Then immediately follows up with, "But lets not delude ourselves there are no consoles in existence that come close to the processing power of a modern PC. And when I want to get into some serious gaming there is no substitute for a mouse and keyboard and 20 times the processing power..."

So, you're telling me that processing power is directly correlated to the depth of a game/franchise? Okay guy. Horrible, biased argument right off the bat. Valid complaint with menus and what not, but his argument can be summed up with, "wahhhh why wasn't this a PC exclusive?"

If it was a PC exclusive, I can almost guarantee you wouldn't see a map devoid of people and so many individual cells instead of one cohesive world. The game was built for consoles in mind. Granted, the lack of people is also the fault of the 'new engine', which is still Gamebryo at it's core.
 
That is kind of my feeling about RPGs in general. I used to love them. But now they just seem like time sinks. I'd rather play shorter games that give me a more experience instead of just walking around in an admittedly beautiful world doing fetch-quests.
 
Skyrim, and most games, don't respect your time. They're 85% filler and repetition (scientifically calculated!). I don't have the personal justification to play games like that anymore - hours and hours of something that teaches me nothing and introduces nothing novel outside of very few things like story (usually generic chum) or set pieces.

Which is probably why I've really started getting more into the bite-sized games on Steam lately. They do value your time, or are at least designed in a way that values it as a byproduct.
 
Hello? You just put in 100+ hours into a game. It can't be THAT bad, right?

I have around 200 hours on my playthrough and also have a hard time getting into the game again and notice the stuff I don't like about it much more now. BUT that doesn't change the fact that I friggin loved this game for 150+ hours - and that makes it game of the gen for me.


I'm sure a lot of people love heroin for their first 20 times. Doesn't make it any better. The idea here is that you can easily make a compelling game, without it being a good game. Maybe a lot of people wake up from that haze, much like people do after having played hours and hours of Tiny Tower, only to realize it does not have any content, it's just pressing some places to advance.

There's nothing wrong with coming to this realization, and if many people do this after 100+ hours, you can't say "that invalidates your point", you rather have to acknowledge that this game can be compelling for a long time without it actually enriching the person's lives. People have these realizations after having played tens of days of WoW, so it's easy to see why this is an actual problem, and not just people whining in retrospect.
 
Sidequests are just that: SIDEQUESTS. You can do them or skip them however you like.

The only quest lines which are ever genuinely worth doing in The Elder Scrolls are the Dark Brotherhood (Assassin's Guild) and Thieves' Guild sidequests. Even the main quest is frequently a shit sandwich, especially the one seen in Oblivion.

In Skyrim though, the Civil War storyline is definitely worth completing, and I had a lot of fun with a few of the other Guilds. The College of Winterhold (Mage's Guild) is a quest line worth doing, even if you aren't interested in magecraft on your character.

And yeah, there are a ton of mods which dramatically improve the PC experience. SkyUI is a mandatory mod on PC which dramatically revamps the rather shitty console-focused base UI.
 
You played it for 120 hours and only now you complain about those mechanics?

It took me about 50 before it really hit me :p
I've now played about 70 after the 2 DLC, can't see me going back tbh.

Note: in that time I finished the main quest, 2 DLC a bunch of side quests but didn't do any of the guild quest trees.
 
It doesn't seem like Bethesda was very interested in making sure that all of the elements that make up the game are interesting and polished. Just stuff the game as full to the brim with content as possible and people will overlook everything else.
That's exactly the point, there is so much content, that it can't all be prime quality. You can't have best of both worlds.
 
That's exactly the point, there is so much content, that it can't all be prime quality. You can't have best of both worlds.

I hope this is not a prevalent thought among gamers. Abundance of content is never an apology for lack of quality. If I make a generic quest generator, do you hail me for producing a heap of content, despite its lack of quality or impact?

If your game studio can't churn out as much content as they'd like without sacrificing quality, they have to make less content, so it is good content. If they don't, they're hurting the game, like in the case of Skyrim. If we're gonna sit around and jerk off to the amount of content, I feel we've all missed the point of games terribly.
 
I'm sure a lot of people love heroin for their first 20 times. Doesn't make it any better. The idea here is that you can easily make a compelling game, without it being a good game. Maybe a lot of people wake up from that haze, much like people do after having played hours and hours of Tiny Tower, only to realize it does not have any content, it's just pressing some places to advance.

There's nothing wrong with coming to this realization, and if many people do this after 100+ hours, you can't say "that invalidates your point", you rather have to acknowledge that this game can be compelling for a long time without it actually enriching the person's lives. People have these realizations after having played tens of days of WoW, so it's easy to see why this is an actual problem, and not just people whining in retrospect.
Not me for me. I simply can't take people seriously who sink that much time into a game and then claim it to be bland, boring or whatever. In 20 years of gaming I couldn't name one game as bad that I sunk so much time in. I may not be able to get into them again for various reason but complaining that much about these game after so much time invested would make me, I think, look like a complete idiot.
 
I've honestly only played a few hours of it. Maybe four or five. The game has not given me a speck of anything to look forward to. I was also going to say it feels soulless before the OP said it. The combat is dull and awful. It is quite possibly the least tactile arpg combat I've ever experienced. The writing, for how much of it there is, is painfully uninteresting. The characters feel like cutouts of each other. The dungeons and overworld have almost no variation. I'm not the kind of guy who likes overly flashy shit everywhere, but it doesn't matter that your world is huge when you just cut and paste the same objects and textures everywhere.

Note that I'm the kind of person who can spend hours exploring a roguelike game like Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, or leveling unique characters in Disgaea. These are things that some would describe as the dullest, most tedious activities in gaming, yet to me they offer a world of incentive over a game like Skyrim. I just don't quite get what is there to make me want to play it.
 
i dunno... Elder Scrolls is pretty much about open endedness in and of itself. Arena and Daggerfall were literally randomly generated for the most part. i don't really see what people expect going in... you get a few cool quest storylines like the mages college or whatever and the other ~80% is pretty much exploring

though i will say Skyrim (and to the same extent, Oblivion) kind of ruined this by having a Great Impending Evil, which sort of contradicts the nature of the series... kind of silly to have a game about going about the world and doing what you want - when the world is about to end.

i'm aware of the games flaws, i'm especially down with the gripe that you're choices don't really effect the world. its no New Vegas.. but for an open world game skyrim delivers in spades IMO
 
Not me for me. I simply can't take people seriously who sink that much time into a game and then claim it to be bland, boring or whatever. In 20 years of gaming I couldn't name one game as bad that I sunk so much time in. I may not be able to get into them again for various reason but complaining that much about these game after so much time invested would make me I think look an complete idiot.

That makes you a part of the problem. The advent of tablet and phone games have herald the long line of compelling games that are far from good. Suddenly people realize that chasing 3 stars in their 5th Angry Birds game is just a waste of time. If you stand there and call them idiots for 'falling for it' in the first place, it just makes you more arrogant than an observer of an actual emerging problem with the gaming industry. Whether you justify your time usage by cognitive dissonance or other fun cognitive bias, or have managed to stay clear of games that are compelling without being good, or simply just don't know compelling from good, is something I can't comment on. But when you in the face of this problem say "not my problem, so you can't have a problem with it", it's just a lack of empathy and understanding.

The thing is that games can lure us into spending more time with it, by promising us another level if we just game a bit more. Or an achievement if we just do this or that. That's making a compelling game. It does not make a good game. Humans are easily addicted, and if you let publishers abuse that by saying compelling games are games you can't complain about, is not a good thing for gamers or gaming.

EDIT: Here's an Extra Credits episode that talks about the problem with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWtvrPTbQ_c
 
elder scrolls is a bit like crack
first in the gate its awesome you hear those bells ringing and youre blown away by the scale of everything
and then after 20 hours or so......youre just playing it to feel normal
 
Playing 1-1 in Demon's Souls after playing Skyrim is one of the most jarring experiences imaginable because their approaches to level design are so different. Demon's Souls has tiny worlds, and yet I remember more about one area in Demon's Souls than I remember about all the dungeons I traversed in Skyrim. Same with a lot of other linear, small games; by sacrificing some of that open-world freedom, you can create a more focused and memorable experience.

There should be some kind of Godwin's Law for video games about how long it takes to start drawing comparisons to Demon's/Dark Souls. It's really predictable.

Anyway, here is evidence of how much I love TES games, and this is the second time I bought Oblivion because I lost my original disc ages ago (don't have Morrowind on Steam):

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It's been said before, but Skyrim will be well-liked by The Internet again once TES6 comes out. People will talk about how much depth the world had and how neat all of the little stories that are tucked away in the environments are, and about how compelling it was to play a role in a civil war, and how TES6 doesn't even begin to live up to how great Skyrim was. Rinse and repeat for TES6 vs TES7.
 
There is a lot of fluff in TES games but what I've always derived the most pleasure out of in these games is the ability to Role Play and create a story for your self. I get immersed in my own created fiction within the lore. It makes the games much more engaging for me.

However, I do wish they'd take cues from GTA and add more things to do in the world besides fighting. Fishing, Horse racing with tracks and times as well as point to point races, i.e. Whiterun to Windhelm, Horse breeding (think chocobo raising in FF7), archery contests, and generally more "mini games". All the things I mentioned are lore friendly and could even have guilds associated with them. Not all guilds have to be combat related. It'd be great to join a fishing guild or horse racing guild and have things to do within that make the game more immersive.

If they want the world to come alive that have to allow us to do things besides just fight.


Also, improvements to the combat system and a "hardcore/simulation" mode should be added for those that want it. 1 death, the need to eat and sleep, ect.


please note, I know there are mods for some of these things but I'd like for Bethesda to make these an official part of the game.
 
But isn't that how many of these RPG's work? Fluff everywhere. The bad kind too. The fluff that's just not really meaningful.

I got about 20 hours of enjoyment out of it before it became obvious how it worked. It almost feels soulless to me now. It's a very cut and dry experience.

I'm quite envious you got that many hours into it before the illusion broke. I was not that lucky.
 
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