Why is Skyrim so bad?

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Hello everyone. I am a long time RPG player and fan. I have played nearly all famous RPGs for the PC. So finally i played Skyrim and after Morrowind & Oblivion I was very dissapointed for the following reasons

- GUI is made for consoles, not for computer mouse. Same like Oblivion but even more
- Textures are blurry and low res. And I play this game at ultra setting in FullHD. Nature landscapes are nice at high setting but generally textures look 2-3 years older than they are.
- The gameplay is awfully linear and streamlined. MQ, guilds, side quests etc. with very few exceptions.
- Countless bugs and glitches. The game was very unpolished at release, same like Mw and Ob, but way more. Even obvious graphical glitches like flickery shadows remained unfixed because they wanted to meet the 11.11.11 release.
- No style or original concept. But I understand this because the Nord setting is supposed to be very traditional looking so its not a big deal
- No details and secrets. I kept looking in corners and caves for hidden stuff and ledges and containers but I found nothing. Everything is just infront of you, very hard to miss
- Very low replay potential
- The programming code itself is very poorly written i.e. countless redundant lines of code
- The plot is cliche and unoriginal
- When playing for the first time I completed all guilds , quests and locations because they're so shallow and short. so there is no replay value because you can be EVEYTHING like Todd Howard said
- Everything in this game is super easy. Even at start most human enemies die from 1 or 2 hits at level one. Im doing Master mode killing ancient dragons with a pick axe.
.... and so on


And this game sells 7 million copies? The only reason this game sells is superficial graphics, dragons and muscled viking warriors. Its so easy to please "gamers" these days, they will accept anything thrown their way. Whos fault is this? What do you think?

 

What game from recent years is better?

 

Legend of Grimrock?

 

What?

 

I wanna know what the OP is drinking...He is more or less dead wrong on all points.

 

But Legends of Grimrock IS a good game.

 

I've finished Skyrim and I believe everything I said is about right. But I want to hear other opinions too so maybe you could give me some examples where I'm wrong? And I dont drink often but I like whiskey.

 

You are right on many points, wrong on others and I still had a great time when I played Skyrim and I play to replay it for a fourth time. My third game was probably the most fun. Constantly found new stuff.

 

I bought the game about two months ago, and it has occupied most of my gaming time since. I consider it one of the better RPGs to come out in recent years. While Skyrim will not make my game pantheon, I still consider it very good. On a scale of 1-10, I'd give it around a 7, maybe an 8. It's "very good" although not quite "great".

 

Dont get me wrong, Skyrim must be a fantastic game for 12yo console owners and other easy to please audience, or gamers new to the genre. But any one who has played role playing games for a long time will be dissapointed. So I'll say it simply again.

- Typical console UI
- Outdated textures at launch
- Streamlined gameplay
- Abundance of bugs and glitches of all types
- Low ammount of optional content
- Low replay potential
- Shallow questing
- Poorly written (redundant) code
- Cliche plot
- Child difficulty level

This company managed to pass trash as GOTY and sell 7 million copies only because of marketing and low gamer appetite.

 

Well, some of that is to be expected - the console UI is because I'd imagine they sold way more of those 7 million copies to Xbox 360 and PS3 users than they did to PC users.

I'm surprised that you are upset at the number of glitches in the game, because you bought the game well after release and after a number of patches came through. I will be the first to concede that at launch the game was virtually unplayable. There was a glitch on the 360 version (so I am told) in the main quest line at release, making the game literally unplayable. So even though the release date was back in November, it took until the 3rd patch (came out in January) for most of them to be taken care of. I didn't purchase the game until March, and the number of bugs and glitches I've run into have been rather small - certainly nothing game breaking at any rate.

I don't agree with the low amount of optional content. I think the optional content is immense. (In fact, with the radiant quests available, one could argue that it's unlimited.) If you stick to the main story line (which I concede is rather short), you'll likely only see about 5% of what the game has to offer. Nor do I agree with the questing being shallow. I thought the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, and Companions quests were excellent. Not so much with joining the Imperial Legion or the Stormcloaks. After finding the crown, the various battles are simply variations of the same thing. Different layout, but same objective. Storm the fort, bust down the barricades, kill everyone inside.

I did not play earlier versions of the Skyrim series, so if the plot involved varying elements from the earlier games, perhaps it was cliche. But since I didn't play those versions, it was at least new to me. I don't look at the code for the games I play, so I'll take your word that it was poorly written and redundant. That matters zilch to me though.

Which leaves me with two items that I will agree with. First, I absolutely agree that unless you crank up the difficulty to master, any noob can breeze through the game, utilizing only the items you find in the first couple of hours of the game. I have never played on novice difficulty, because I found the standard difficulty so easy I couldn't imagine making it easier. And even on master difficulty, it doesn't make the battles much more difficult, it just makes you use a bit of strategy beyond charging in swinging.

The other aspect I'll agree with is that the replay value of the game is only present if you want to play different builds. The main quest is always the same. The major side quests are also always the same. So if you define replay value as the ability to have a fundamentally different experience not based on game play but actually new stuff, then I agree. But a different class will give a different experience. Although... I'm on my 4th playthrough, and there are still a ton of things I haven't done. For example I have not:

1. Unlocked all shouts
2. Completed all daedric quests
3. Found all the stones of barenziah (not even close - I don't think I've even hit 20)
4. Found all the dragon masks

If you've done all the major side quests and the four things I listed above, and you STILL don't think you got your $60 worth out of the game... I don't know what to tell you.

 

In vanilla form Skyrim is just a bad console port, buggy as hell although a good hiking simulator with RPG elements I guess. If my Skyrim is patched and properly modded it'd score high in my book. But I'd still look at it as a stand alone game, not ES game.

 

All the ES games are stand alone. If they relied on each other, they'd have a hard time bringing in new players. (And given the marketing involved in this game, they certainly had bringing in new players as a major focal point.) And given that Skyrim takes place what - 200 years after the previous game - there shouldn't be really any connection.

 

You haven't played many RPGs, have you?

 

Since this is a forum dedicated to RPGs, I would suggest that most people here have far more than average experience in playing RPGs. And I'm pretty sure Aldeth has a ton of RPG game experience. Perhaps not in the Elder Scroll series, but argueably that is more of a sandbox game than an actual RPG.

As for Skyrim, I haven't played it and will not play it. I had a lot of fun in Morrowind, but Oblivion was a massive let down. Morrowind was a great game that could be made even more fun with mods, Oblivion needed mods to be playable. IMHO, naturally. The UI was just a bunch of huge icons that I just can't look at for a long time and the level scaling took any sense of progress of the PC out of the game.

From what I've seen of Skyrim, the UI is... different, but the layout and size is still mostly geared towards console users - there's no overview at all. It would probably be one of the first things I'd mod.

As for most of your gripes with the game, they're nothing new. Morrowind and Oblivion also had very linear quests and plot. You could go anywhere and do most anything you'd want, but all the quests were linear without any choice for the player. I wouldn't say there was little of them, though.

The bugs were there in all TES games too. I've always thought it was rather disappointing that they never managed or bothered to fix the huge amount of clipping issues in their games. In Morrowind, sometimes NPCs could just disappear as they clipped through the world geometry. I haven't noticed the same happening Oblivion, but other stuff can and will still fall through the world geometry with alarming regularity. While I haven't played any newer games on the same engine (Fallout 3, New Vegas and now Skyrim - and no, no matter what Bethesda says, they still use largely the same engine with the same glitches), from what I've heard, these bugs still exist even in Skyrim.

 

Maybe you are stuck with the idea that Skyrim COULD have been much better. It could have been but as I have said before the game itself is a lot of fun and very engrossing despite many many things that could be improved. If those things were improved I think it would have been the best game ever made.

I am not sure which other rpgs you are talking about. I play most and Skyrim is vastly better than any of the other big releases in the last decade. It pisses on the Dragon Age games and laughs at Mass Effect. I haven't had time or energy to really delve into what the smaller studios publish but the few times I have given small studios a shot I have ended up with buggy and unplayable games. Often before I even got stared. I can give you something though, every time I play an Elder Scroll game I keep thinking that it could have been so much better. There is the seed in all of them of something completely awesome but just because a game does not live up to its potential doesn't mean it isn't good.

 

There's a scant handful of games EVER made, no matter the genre, that make it past a hundred hours of actual enjoyment, all replays combined. Skyrim started going stale just a bit past 150 hours mark for me, but I put most of the blame on my powergamer's disease of spoiling it for myself by exploiting stuff. In that regard, Skyrim is already squarely in epic status.

A few well designed mods and/or overhauls later, once the navmesh issue is hopefully solved, I see no real obstacle why Skyrim couldn't extend well past thousand hours of enjoyment mark. And that, my friends, is LEGENDARY.

I can understand the critique if you only consider the base game as it is. But you'd be a fool to dismiss the potential within.

 

My RPG experiences date back to the likes of Might and Magic, Bard's Tale, and the TSR Forgotten Realms games that were around in the 80s and 90s. I loved the BG series (that one is in the Pantheon), IWD, PS:T, the Diablo series (not a classic RPG, although I guess it's in the genre). I played the Dragon Age games, and did not love them, although that's probably the closest comparable game in terms of character development - although not nearly as open - as you see in Skyrim. I didn't get into Kingdom of Amalur although I tried it, and I've played a lot of other RPG that were not fantasy based.

But other than that - yeah - I have hardly played any.

 

That's only true if you bought it on the PC. On a console the potential might still be there, but it will never come out as you can't use mods there.

 

A lot of things are exaggerated.

-If you think the PC GUI is bad, then considering how complex the game is you should know that the console GUI must be worse. Unless you have that voice recognition add-on. The PC version actually has it easy, you have more options and you can just use the console to deal with bugs/glitches.
-If you're indeed a longtime RPG player and fan then you know TES games have always been more the hack-and-slash type. If the developers had promised that their games were headed on a new direction and they were implementing deep, compelling storylines then we'd have reason to complain that Skyrim was a huge mess. But that's not the case.
-There are few secrets because Skyrim went for quantity over quality - there is a ridiculous amount of content in the game. It's not a game you can just claim to have thoroughly explored in one or two playthroughs without a guide (version 2 of the official one, no less - version 1 was missing a few things).
-You can't actually be everything. Ideally you can, except when you factor in time. Now if your character can shoot a bow while swinging a weapon and casting a spell even as you manipulate your summoned minions into formation...
-The game is not easy if you actually go looking for a challenge.

While I'd agree that Skyrim is definitely not worth comparing to games like BG2 or even DA:O as far as story goes, you'd be outright wrong to say that it's a bad game. It's actually a very good hack-and-slash, character builds RPG. Some consider it close to epic. Just only, sadly, because it does have its issues.