Avnger said:
The second is the modding aspect of both Skyrim and the previous ES titles.
I'd imagine there's plenty of people - including myself - that would count the modding community as a positive aspect of Skyrim rather than a negative. To be fair, Bethesda is trying to fuck that over with their new paid mods scheme....ahem...."Creator's Club" or whatever the fuck it's called.
Point is that Skyrim is a big ol' sandbox that - at the moment - you're free to bring all the toys you want to play with in it. I don't think you can say "Well without mods, Skyrim is crap" considering that without Skyrim itself, those fun mods that make the game good wouldn't even exist.
I'll grant you that Vanilla Skyrim is pretty "meh", I remember a lot of people not liking the progression system in particular. The first time I got Skyrim was on the 360. I enjoyed it well enough to make it through one playthrough...but then I had no desire to play through it again. Finally got myself a gaming computer, picked up Skyrim again because I had heard it's amazing on PC (thanks to mods), and sure enough: mods breathed new life into the game. Now I rarely even finish a full playthrough before wanting to start a new game with a plethora of new mods that I want to play with. Wouldn't be able to enjoy the creativity of the modders and appreciate all the hard work they put into making fun mods without the base game to actually play them with, though.
OT: From what I recall, and I mentioned an aspect of this in the previous section of my post, most people that criticized the game when it came out didn't like how the systems had been watered down. Again, look at the lvling system...no longer were you to specialize in a class you picked or designed (that was one of my favorite things about Oblivion: being about to just make your own class by picking what skills you wanted), instead you're just a jack of all trades, fully capable of becoming whatever you wanted and - if you were willing to put in the hours grinding - become a master of literally everything. Combat was too easy and simplified except on the hardest difficulties, the epicness of a dragon fight quickly lost its majesty as you'd soon become too OP for them to be a threat (which made them more akin to troublesome pests rather than fearsome monsters), and yeah: as other's have pointed out the game was just watered down and too easy in general.
In terms of why it gets hate these days, the above reasons still hold true, but people are getting annoyed that it's become the new Doom. For those of us that grew up in the 90's, there was a running joke of "Can it run Doom?" Because Doom had been ported onto damn near everything. No joke: in high school I had Doom on my frickin' calculator. These days you can replace Doom with Skyrim, because Skyrim has been released on damn near everything. A few months ago when they confirmed that Skyrim was going to be coming to the Switch, Total Biscuit described a way that he could literally run Skyrim on his refrigerator (stream it from PC to tablet that has a blue tooth connection to a high tech fridge). It just keeps coming out over and over and over again...and as pointed out in a recent Jimquisition: despite the fact that Skyrim has been rereleased a billion times, Bethesda has done jack shit to fix the damn thing.
There's still game breaking bugs in Skyrim that have been around since it's launch, and Bethesda has done nothing about them. When they port Skyrim, they effectively just highlight all the files, hit ctrl+c, open up the Port To Switch folder, then hit ctrl+v.
For a game that's been rereleased, remastered, ported, and rereleased again...you'd think they could take another look at some of the crap still lingering in the game and polish it out. But they don't. Why? Because fuck it, that's why! They're still gonna get their $60 for a 6 year old game, so why bother?