Grievances, grievances, where art thou? I'm serious, I'm having a hard time coming up with them. I'm not saying the game is perfect; it obviously isn't, but coming up with something sufficiently detrimental to the enjoyment of the game to be worthy of the term grievance has proven to be difficult. Of course, there were the occasional low level launches into the stratosphere by an ornery giant's attack to allow my sense of immersion to escape me like my character escaped Nirn's magnetic field.
Granted, I did have a few grievances right after buying the game, namely some noticeable FX bugs that made non-static and particle effects such as fire, webbing, flowing water and the like invisible, and some item models not showing up in the item interface. However, a third party patch I downloaded fixed 99% of those problems, leaving me with nothing but my enjoyment of the game, which despite its heavy system requirements ran more smoothly on High settings by a mile that Oblivion ever did with all the stops pulled out. Playing this long-anticipated game made me feel like I was in Sovngarde, swimming in mead. And there are no hangovers in the afterlife. If anything, the biggest grievance I can name is that by the time I get tired of Skyrim, my friends will probably have declared me legally dead.
All kidding aside, I feel I shouldn't cheat the thread topic and at least list a bunch of issues and nitpicks I have encountered.
1) Guards piss me off.
While it is nice that they have stock phrases to tell you depending on your affiliation, accomplishments and gear, you get mighty tired after a while for example of being addressed with "Oh, I remember now. You're that new member of the Companions. So you what, fetch the mead?" while I have finished the Yorvangr quest line long ago and he should be offering condoleances for my predecessor's death instead. Furthermore, the guards still have the same problem as in Oblivion, of drawing from an aggressively small pool of voice actors, although at least there are more than two this time. I like that guards may offer tidbits of information and directions to interesting landmarks in the surrounding area, though.
2) Helmets.
Hands up everyone who takes careful consideration in creating their character's face. Hands up if you don't want helmets to fuck up your look. The problem here is that for certain builds, helmets are quite mandatory to get the most out of your character. For example, there are two Heavy Armor perks that give you a 25% bonus to total armor rating each if you are wearing a complete set and a matching set respectively, of heavy armor (that is, head, chest, hands and feet). With all those perks in the bag, my level 30 waraxe and shield wielding Nord warrior in full Daedric armor goes from almost 600 armor to low 300's when you take his helmet off. The problem is thus; that daedric helm completely obscures the face you have painstakingly constructed for him. Gone is the squared, angular jawline, the embattled snarl, and the evocative war paint, replaced with an expressionless helmet that looks like it belongs in the same catalog Lord Sauron uses to mail-order his equipment. Since the face of your character is pretty much everything he or she has to set them apart from all the NPCs, this being a world-focused Bethesda RPG, you aren't left with much. You will want to parade that face around, held aloft in pride. Among the many helmets that completely conceal your head and face are the dwarven, ebony, and daedric variety. How will the dragonborn of legend distinguish himself without a face to inspire fear in his enemies?
Also, if your character has long hair (which, being a filth-encrusted Nord, should be a given), you will encounter clipping issues with certain unique and much more flavourful helmets, with hair sticking out of the meshes and all that. Also, I wish all the helmets in the game were as cool as some of the early ones like the horned iron and steel helmets, but sadly not. Which brings me directly to;
3) Tiered Armor Sets.
Having played a decent amount of time, you eventually come to categorize all that loot you find in an arbitrary list, somewhat like 'Leather/Iron < Studded Leather/Steel < Dwarven < Steel Plate < Elven/Orcish < Glass/Ebony < Daedric', and that's sort of... limiting. I don't hate the idea that certain armor types are inherently better than others, but I do sort of find the lack of variety a little disappointing. Instead of only focusing on the base armor value of an armor type, Bethesda missed the opportunity of putting in armors with unique benefits and disadvantages, or simply add much more varied equipment of every tier to the game in general. The game DVD was only like 5.1 gigabytes, so don't tell me there wasn't room for a little more content.
4) Chicken Factions and Crime and Punishment.
So who else tried to kill that chicken when they arrived in Riverwood, just to see what happens? Now I may be accused of taking chicken rights with too big a grain of salt, but I don't think one dead chicken warrants the entire village taking up arms to smite the evil Slayer of Chickens. Apparently the offense was so grievous that even putting away your weapon didn't alleviate the situation, or the continued and raucous hostilities to the address of yours truly. They wouldn't accept my yield and killed me over a dead chicken, then presumably roasted it over a fire for lunch a few minutes later while discussing how chicken punching had become a real social issue these days. In a strange contrast to this early-game excerpt, I murdered an imperial courier later in the game and yielded to the authorities, and got off with a show of stripes and a warning to my account. I guess the Empire should have hired chickens to deliver vital military documents.
And why was it called murder anyway, if the courier drew and struck first?
I'm sure there are plenty of other problems with the law and justice system in Skyrim than I have been able to find, but a useful fix would be to change the chickens' faction settings so they are no longer considered with the same reverence as the head of the family.
5) Disarming Shout
So, one day I was exploring a Nordic Ruin called Labyrinthian and came across my first Draugr Deathlord. Now, at level 15 on the Expert difficulty setting, that fight was slightly more difficult than licking your own elbow. They were one of the first enemies I encountered that had access to Shouts of their own, and there is one in particular that has invoked my ire. The Disarm shout, which rips weapons out of their wielder's hands and catapults them across the room, is quite nice to have when faced with a throng of threatening opponents, but it's not something that the player shrugs off too easily. Having your armaments torn from your hands is downright infuriating. With the limited customization points you have available, and usually carrying a main weapon that is much more powerful or valuable than the next best axe you carry, losing it is always a tense situation, especially in dark places where, if you survive the encounter, need to search for several moments to find it between all the clutter that covers the floors of most dungeons. What's more, losing an item scraps it from your favorite list, so you lose your goddamned hotkey. Dick move, Deathlord, dick move.
I may post my grievances about Skyrim 6 thru 10 some other time, but now I no longer feel like writing and would rather go back to playing the game
