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
The reason is that it is an ambitious game, it crafts a huge open world with a lot of stuff to do. You could get lost playing it. The problem is that it has a lot of glaring flaws, namely how the players interact with the game. The combat isn't bad because we're comparing it to Dark Souls, it's just straight up horrible. There is literally nothing redeeming about it. I spent 47 hours on the game, but I will freely admit I almost dropped it 20 minutes in due to the combat.
The reason it got so much hype because it dared to try and give us what we all always wanted, a huge open world with great graphics and a million things to do. They did that and we rejoiced. The problem is they spent no time working on how the player actually plays the game. So on one hand it's a great game, that shows what modern design can accomplish. On the other it's something out of the 1990's book of game design (and not the good one, the horribly boring one).
Basically everyone was blinded by hype and the scale of what they did, so hardly anyone noticed that they had spent absolutely no time on how we actually play the game. So once the hype wears off we all realized that it has no real staying power and isn't really as awesome as we thought it was.