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[Glowcat]

Skyrim was actually a rare, true RPG. You actually do save the world, and when you do, people actually recognize you. Not only that, but they went a bit further and gave recognition for other little deeds too.

Was there another version of Skyrim that I'm missing? Because after completing the main quest and civil war quests with hardly any mention and plenty of dialogue pretending my victories never happened, I'm pretty sure we played different Skyrims.

[Cecilff2]

I found Morrowind boring. I thought Oblivion was a complete waste of money. I thought Fallout 3 was the exact opposite of what Fallout 2 was - it was made to be huge and shallow, unlike FO2 which was in a small world, but very detailed. In Bethesda games, you don't play a hero, you play a tourist.

So, I had no expectations of Skyrim, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

TBH, I don't feel like RPGs these days are RPGs anymore.. they're just for people who like playing with stats, and games which try to sell a story without any gameplay. Skyrim was actually a rare, true RPG. You actually do save the world, and when you do, people actually recognize you. Not only that, but they went a bit further and gave recognition for other little deeds too.

From start to finish, it provides an ideal RPG experience... do what you like, be a hero, destroy the world or save it, get legendary artifacts, etc. There's the good old cliches like innkeepers giving quests, guilds for all the major playstyles of the game, etc. So, heck, I give it a 5/5, definitely RPG of the year, and a good benchmark for the whole decade (even with the game killing bugs).


Right now, I'm having fun making a naked autistic Nord with a pickaxe, specializing in sneak attacks

(To the harbinger): I heard about you, the new member of the companions right?  So you what, fetch the mead?

[forsaken1111]

I found Morrowind boring. I thought Oblivion was a complete waste of money. I thought Fallout 3 was the exact opposite of what Fallout 2 was - it was made to be huge and shallow, unlike FO2 which was in a small world, but very detailed. In Bethesda games, you don't play a hero, you play a tourist.

So, I had no expectations of Skyrim, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

TBH, I don't feel like RPGs these days are RPGs anymore.. they're just for people who like playing with stats, and games which try to sell a story without any gameplay. Skyrim was actually a rare, true RPG. You actually do save the world, and when you do, people actually recognize you. Not only that, but they went a bit further and gave recognition for other little deeds too.

From start to finish, it provides an ideal RPG experience... do what you like, be a hero, destroy the world or save it, get legendary artifacts, etc. There's the good old cliches like innkeepers giving quests, guilds for all the major playstyles of the game, etc. So, heck, I give it a 5/5, definitely RPG of the year, and a good benchmark for the whole decade (even with the game killing bugs).


Right now, I'm having fun making a naked autistic Nord with a pickaxe, specializing in sneak attacks

(To the harbinger): I heard about you, the new member of the companions right?  So you what, fetch the mead?

So he's not current on his companions news... or he's an asshole.

[Cecilff2]

So he's not current on his companions news... or he's an asshole.

Is that fur?  Growing out of your ears?

[Tarran]

So he's not current on his companions news... or he's an asshole.

Is that fur?  Growing out of your ears?

They also say that even if you've cured yourself. Which is annoying.

[forsaken1111]

So he's not current on his companions news... or he's an asshole.

Is that fur?  Growing out of your ears?

They also say that even if you've cured yourself. Which is annoying.

They're just commenting on the aftereffects of having been a werewolf.

I'm sure your pubic area is a mess as well.

[nenjin]

From start to finish, it provides an ideal RPG experience... do what you like, be a hero, destroy the world or save it, get legendary artifacts, etc. There's the good old cliches like innkeepers giving quests, guilds for all the major playstyles of the game, etc. So, heck, I give it a 5/5, definitely RPG of the year, and a good benchmark for the whole decade (even with the game killing bugs).

Taken out of context, that could easily be said about Oblivion. The more I've played of Skyrim, the fewer differences I honestly see between it and Oblivion.

Skyrim has a setting that wasn't generic the instant your feet hit the ground. That's its strongest and most enduring feature. Beyond that? It's chalk full of the exact same tropes, experiences and methods that Bethesda has been polishing since Oblivion. It's better textured, more varied and the map has a more artisanal quality to it. But it's exactly the same kind of content you got in Oblivion.

Skyrim is going to get game of the year for Mountains and Dragons. If people think it deserves GotY for more than that, I think their brown-tinted glasses could use a good polishing. Because the guts of Skyrim are the exact same as Oblivion, FO3 and FO:NV.

[Putnam]

From start to finish, it provides an ideal RPG experience... do what you like, be a hero, destroy the world or save it, get legendary artifacts, etc. There's the good old cliches like innkeepers giving quests, guilds for all the major playstyles of the game, etc. So, heck, I give it a 5/5, definitely RPG of the year, and a good benchmark for the whole decade (even with the game killing bugs).

Taken out of context, that could easily be said about Oblivion. The more I've played of Skyrim, the fewer differences I honestly see between it and Oblivion.

Skyrim has a setting that wasn't generic the instant your feet hit the ground. That's its strongest and most enduring feature. Beyond that? It's chalk full of the exact same tropes, experiences and methods that Bethesda has been polishing since Oblivion. It's better textured, more varied and the map has a more artisanal quality to it. But it's exactly the same kind of content you got in Oblivion.

Skyrim is going to get game of the year for Mountains and Dragons. If people think it deserves GotY for more than that, I think their brown-tinted glasses could use a good polishing. Because the guts of Skyrim are the exact same as Oblivion, FO3 and FO:NV.

You're ignoring a single aspect there:

The game.

You look at the plot, the setting, the characters--all important, of course, but nowhere near as important as the gameplay, and it's the gameplay that is great.

[nenjin]

it's the gameplay that is great.

Er, why? It's the same game play from the other games. The systems mechanically break down just like other Bethesda game system. Skyrim got just as much play time from me as Oblivion did the first time through, around 35 hours. And then I hit the "fuck it" point, just like with Oblivion, just like with Fallout 3, and just like Fallout: New Vegas. Because the game has become too easy, lacks any survival mechanics what so ever and the numerics are pretty well done and broke by that point. Moreso in Skyrim, where you can unintentionally smith the difficulty of the game to obsolescence. And then you're just wading through crap hoping to find something challenging or an item you haven't yet acquired.

Bethesda didn't even learn their lesson about encumbrance, which modders have been making painfully obvious to them since Morrowind. When ammo had actual weight in Fallout 3, you suddenly had to make decisions and think about what you were doing and what you chose to take with you. Ammo, or food? Extra weapons, or extra armors? How many stimpaks can you afford to carry? How much Rad-Away?

Considerations like this never get addressed by Bethesda, when I think it's part and parcel of having a believable open world game. And they're just nerfing it further, by making health regenerate so fast you don't need potions or spells half the time, you never have to rest and sleeping in bed needs a "rested bonus" just so the player has a reason to do it.

I've been a devotee for many, many titles now. And I honestly think that sans the visual glory, Skyrim is just as predictable as Oblivion et. al and did very little to up the bar on game play. It even lowered it by removing a lot of the customization depth from previous games. Combat feels a little meatier while not actually being any different than what was happening in Oblivion.

It just galls me to watch people come down on the older titles and then laud Skyrim so much. It makes me question how much of the other games people actually played. Because I put well over 100 hours into Oblivion over several play throughs. And much of what Skyrim changed or did differently is on the surface. In some places, like the dungeons, that was enough. In most other places, it wasn't.

[Duke 2.0]

 I lean more on the side of games crafting experiences rather than being a game because I'm super arty and whooo look at this pretentiousness right here.

 I think he did address the base mechanics a bit there by saying that under the gloss of little details the framework is the same as Oblivion. It doesn't mean anything as core idea and execution are two very different things. Let's say Skyrim and Oblivion were made under the same basic idea, Skyrim did pull it off and Oblivion kinda did a mediocre job at it. Just because Oblivion didn't pull through doesn't mean the core is bad, it means a lot of little things were sloppy or missing. The fact that a ton of people really enjoyed Oblivion shows that something pulled them in despite the sloppy handling.

[nenjin]

And I'll always give Bethesda credit where it's due, their games always get 30 hours from me and I enjoy those 30 hours at least passably.

I've just always wanted something deeper from them and it never materializes. The best time in a Bethesda game is that first 10 hours where you're weak, you don't really know anything and every dungeon is a surprise. By the 30 hour mark, it just doesn't hold up. It's the lack of all the key note things modders add that's always frustrated me with Bethesda. A simple food/water system, even poorly balanced, would add that little something that makes the end game feel like it still means something.

So I can't help but look at Skyrim and see ONLY the surface details they added, because there's simply nothing else worth looking at. Enchanting and alchemy are simplified more or less. I spent more time trying to "optimize" smithing than I did thinking about what I wanted to make. And by optimize I mean "Do I have black smith potions and my black smithing gear on? Do I have all the materials to do it in 30 seconds?" Rinse and repeat for both Enchanting and Alchemy.

If Bethesda had put even half the effort into making the underlying system more interesting.....as they did into dragons and snowy peaks, I might have actually "finished" a Bethesda game for once. But this makes the....5th "epic" game of theirs that I can't muster the interest to play through on vanilla. Especially once things like the Civil War are broken down into their essential, and totally uninteresting, bits. After this many titles I think I'm justified in feeling: "can you guys meet my expectations with at least one of these things?" Especially with thousands of quality examples from modders that demonstrate what people feel the games have always lacked.

I mean, the makers of FO:NV put in a hardcore mode. Why can't Bethesda muster the gaming testicles to do the same?

[Lord Dullard]

it's the gameplay that is great.

Er, why? It's the same game play from the other games. The systems mechanically break down just like other Bethesda game system. Skyrim got just as much play time from me as Oblivion did the first time through, around 35 hours. And then I hit the "fuck it" point, just like with Oblivion, just like with Fallout 3, and just like Fallout: New Vegas. Because the game has become too easy, lacks any survival mechanics what so ever and the numerics are pretty well done and broke by that point. Moreso in Skyrim, where you can unintentionally smith the difficulty of the game to obsolesce. And then you're just wading through crap hoping to find something challenging or an item you haven't yet acquired.

Agreed. I've just about hit that point in Skyrim now. I'm on 'Master' difficulty and not only is there no longer any real challenge, but... there's no reason for me to fight anything even if there WAS a challenge, because there's no reward to speak of for doing so (any gear I could find would only be good for selling, and why bother with that when I've got gold up the wazoo?).

I had to install a crapton of difficulty mods to make Oblivion interesting. Seems Skyrim will be the same. Pity... the first several hours of the game, especially on 'Master', were REALLY engrossing.

Unfortunately Bethesda codes their games for initial 'wow's, not sustained enjoyable gaming.

[kcwong]

It really annoys me that you can't

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

turn Calixto in on Blood on the Ice.

You can gather clues, steal Calixto's Key, and open the chest in his museum that has the butcher journal that he even put his own name in.  But you can't turn him in to Jorleif.  Nor can you kill Calixto himself, he's essential until the very last murder, and for some reason setessential 0001414A 0 doesn't seem to work on him.

Wow, that's lazy design.

Silly adventurer, you can't turn in the killer early and save someone from murder! You have to wait out the entire series of scripted events!

Actually you can, if you react quickly. I Fus'ed and then killed him, the woman still lives.

[nenjin]

That quest pissed me off because I found, in the normal course of how I play Bethesda games, all the info I needed to decide how I personally wanted to deal with the situation. But nuuuuu, have to do the questline, she says.

I'd have traded the whole quest line for knowing that I, a foreigner breezing through town and rifling through people's personal belongings, managed to solve it. I couldn't even bring myself to start the quest, knowing the how it was going to end.

[Cecilff2]

It really annoys me that you can't

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

turn Calixto in on Blood on the Ice.

You can gather clues, steal Calixto's Key, and open the chest in his museum that has the butcher journal that he even put his own name in.  But you can't turn him in to Jorleif.  Nor can you kill Calixto himself, he's essential until the very last murder, and for some reason setessential 0001414A 0 doesn't seem to work on him.

Wow, that's lazy design.

Silly adventurer, you can't turn in the killer early and save someone from murder! You have to wait out the entire series of scripted events!

Actually you can, if you react quickly. I Fus'ed and then killed him, the woman still lives.

If you're clever enough to confront Wuunferth instead of talking to Jorlief, you can save Arivanye too.  Susanna always has to die though.