I don't really like SKYRIM, anybody else?

[Puckett]

I normally hate sword and sorcery games (I grew up on Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, SSI's old D&D games, etc.) because I've had enough for more than one lifetime. Exactly two games have managed to get past my burnout - Dark Souls and Skyrim. I love them both, but for very different reasons. Dark Souls is brutal and challenging, but fair and also gorgeous. It's a game that expects a lot from players.

Skyrim is something like the opposite - it gives a lot to players and lets them decide what to do with it. You can pursue the main quest and figure out what dragons returned. You can do the Civil War quest. You can do guild quests. You can do the Daedric quests. You can do other little random things that pop up here and here.

Or you can do none of it.

I think I've done pretty much every major quest (except for procedurally generated ones), and yet I still spend time buying arrows and hunting and forging and generally embarrassing all the alchemists and smiths in the world because my products are SO much better than theirs.

And at the same time, one of the most enjoyable parts of it - for me - was running around and seeing the world, and finding where certain plants grow. It was going nuts with Hearthfire and building houses pretty much instantly.

Skyrim, unlike a lot of games, doesn't usually force you to do anything. I remember reading an article about it in which the writer treated Skyrim like the most accommodating person you've ever met - "You need to clear out this dungeon because beasts are menacing the townspeople! Except, y'know, only if you feel like it. And when you get around to it. If you do. If not, it's okay. I'm sure they'll still be menacing us when you remember it."

So that meant I could run alongside foxes and bunnies through forests while blizzards raged. Until I got bored with it and fast-traveled to the house I used for smithing. Or the one where all my alchemical junk is stashed. Or headed to the College at Winterhold because I was sick of how snotty Farengar sounded EVERY TIME he said "Winterhold" and I needed to see if Enthir had any Daedric hearts handy because, y'know, smithing.

I like Skyrim more than any other fantasy game I've played in easily the last decade (and granted, there haven't been many - I think Oblivion is the only other one I tried besides Dark Souls in that time frame). It's a story of a dominant culture forcing its religious beliefs on a fiercely independent and smaller culture. It's a story about what happens when legends suddenly aren't legends anymore. And it's nuanced.

For me, Skyrim actually has TOO MUCH back story (seriously, all those books you can read make my head hurt), but it's there for people who want it, and all I have to do to avoid it is not pick everything up. That seems fair. However, it is a VERY open world game, it's about as non-linear as you can get, and that lack of structure isn't always appealing.

 

[ajacks13]

When I first got Skyrim I played it hard core, like every day... i bet i have about 25 hours in that game and then for some reason, i am still not sure why... i just have no desire to play it ever again... same thing happened to me with Dragon Age and Oblivion... I just hit a wall and dont care to play it anymore. Its not the genre cause i have finished other RPG's since.

 

[slaychandim]

I need to give it another shot one of these days

 

[35g700]

The biggest issue I had with Skyrim is that the game got too easy. It was loads of fun until I leveled my enchanting and made armor that made destruction spells free. I'm currently playing through the game on master difficulty, and it's a lot more interesting than it was before.

 

[PP Mguire]

While I put in a lot of hours myself, I can't say I went anywhere near as far as you, just got bored after a while quite frankly.
And when I speak of a good story, I don't look at games like CoD or BF3, seeing as they don't even really bother in that regard. I tend to compare it to other RPGs or games that you'd expect a good story driven experience from. Mass Effect I loved! But let's not go into that abysmal ending that EA butchered indeed Deus Ex – Human Revolution was another. The Witcher 2. Even DA2 had a far more interesting story & characters.
Skyrim however… not sure. Well it's certainly an interesting game… Is it beautiful? Yes. Vast? Yes. Interesting? Some times. But ultimately it felt very wooden to me.
Why wooden? Perhaps because the characters you come across have very little personality beyond the tacked on personality they're given & they do little more than fulfil their role as cardboard cut-out style quest givers or the like. They just don't strike me as living breathing people. Ultimately, I guess a large part of it comes does come down to the NPC's that fill the world, & if they're not all that deep, I guess it leaves the world feeling just as shallow. Hence the story comes across as shallow & meaningless - at least to me anyway.
I realize other feel differently & love this game, like yourself, but as you say, it's not everyone's cup of tea.

Forgot I even posted in this thread.

I think I have mentioned I have played every single TES game. I think I find it a vast improvement simply because gameplay and NPCs are so much better than even Oblivion which shares the same basic styling.
Dragon Age was interesting to me, then I think they blew it with DA2.
Mass Effect was excellent, I was let down a tad with 2, and 3 I was simply playing it because I had played the other 2 and I didn't want to get that feeling that I didn't "finish" it. If that makes any sense.
Never got into the Witcher games, and haven't played Deus Ex HR yet. I played the first 2 and Invisible War left a seriously sour taste in my mouth. Turrable.

I agree NPCs make a large portion of the game, and inevitably can make or break a game. The thing with Skyrim is even though it's an RPG, much like the others you are kind of "alone". That is why there are so many other things you can do, and they even went to the lengths of full fledged stories and books in the game. I just finished the game with another Level 55 character and deleted the 14GB folder off my SSD. In about 6 months or so I will probably play again. As it stands, I have 6 different profiles all over level 40 saved on my server. I believe my biggest deal now is I replay with even better texture mods than before and I don't want to miss seeing something look even prettier than before. It is how I played Oblivion so many times.
I think to reword what you mean is the level of immersion isn't what you expect from a game of the caliber. Not exactly story in itself.

 

[slaychandim]

Forgot I even posted in this thread.

I think I have mentioned I have played every single TES game. I think I find it a vast improvement simply because gameplay and NPCs are so much better than even Oblivion which shares the same basic styling.
Dragon Age was interesting to me, then I think they blew it with DA2.
Mass Effect was excellent, I was let down a tad with 2, and 3 I was simply playing it because I had played the other 2 and I didn't want to get that feeling that I didn't "finish" it. If that makes any sense.
Never got into the Witcher games, and haven't played Deus Ex HR yet. I played the first 2 and Invisible War left a seriously sour taste in my mouth. Turrable.

I agree NPCs make a large portion of the game, and inevitably can make or break a game. The thing with Skyrim is even though it's an RPG, much like the others you are kind of "alone". That is why there are so many other things you can do, and they even went to the lengths of full fledged stories and books in the game. I just finished the game with another Level 55 character and deleted the 14GB folder off my SSD. In about 6 months or so I will probably play again. As it stands,

I have 6 different profiles all over level 40 saved on my server

. I believe my biggest deal now is I replay with even better texture mods than before and I don't want to miss seeing something look even prettier than before. It is how I played Oblivion so many times.
I think to reword what you mean is the level of immersion isn't what you expect from a game of the caliber. Not exactly story in itself.

Wow thats a ton of time into 1 game I dont think I could play any game that much and I love rpgs

 

[PP Mguire]

I have done the same for Morrowind and Oblivion. As I explained in a previous post, I love The Elder Scroll series. Skyrim was the only game I was actually excited for in the past 7 years and is the only midnight release I have ever gone to.
Not to mention the 40 or so hours I put on the Xbox before the actual game was released so I could get it on PC. I was around level 15 or so and had to start from scratch on the PC. I was glad I did this because I learned different things and did many things different in my first character.

 

[slaychandim]

That sucks there have actually been a few games that have had me super exited the last few years. Dark souls probably the most then Borderlands 2 and Dragon Age 2 and with the exception of the last one they were really really good games

 

[PP Mguire]

The problem for me is some things sounded like a good concept and I would meh it off because usually the developers wind up screwing it up some how. TES is probably the only series that I have expected greatness from as everything else for me has died off. FF, Zelda, Mario, Mechwarrior, Descent to name a few.

 

[xIx EDGE xIx]

The problem for me is some things sounded like a good concept and I would meh it off because usually the developers wind up screwing it up some how. TES is probably the only series that I have expected greatness from as everything else for me has died off. FF, Zelda, Mario, Mechwarrior, Descent to name a few.

One of the reasons TES gets the praise that it gets is because they spend so much time in development in-between games to craft a really good game, rather than ship out the same, rehashed product every year or every other year to make a quick buck.

Everyone harks on it for all of the bugs but when you spend almost seven years developing a game that gives you over 200+ hours of content (even more with radiant quests) there's bound to be something that was overlooked. It's impossible to go over a game like Skyrim with a fine tooth and comb, scope out area, every bit of content, etc, to weed out the bugs...and then do it again multiple times over because some glitches are random and don't automatically occur.