Great review, however the thing to consider is that the game industry's criticisms are based on some other factors as well.
For one, you have to ask how much Skyrim took to develop compared to some of those big shooter games, and how many copies it needed to move before it became profitable in comparison to some of these other games raking in the dough.
What's more the gaming industry is all about maximizing profits, not just making a profit, but the biggest profit possible, hence why they decide to strangle people for every possible thing they can, and focus on relatively easy and cheap multiplayer modes to sustain the game, multiplayer is the future not so much because it's actually what players want, but because it's cheaper than creating tons of single player content with a lot of voice acting, innovation, and scripted events.
Skyrim is doubtlessly a success, but I'd imagine a lot of people are going to look at it and decide that they could make more money by investing in other types of games than to try and emulate what it did. At the end of the day is Bethesda going to wind up making more profit off of this game than someone who invested a similar budget accross a couple of shooter games?
I think the issue is simply that Bethesda might be selling out to an extent by aiming their games at an increasingly casual audience by reducting their complexity, but at the same time they are still interested in making the games they want to make, and the fans want, rather than immediatly running after whatever is making the most money right at the moment.
That said, it remains to be seen what is going to happen with Bethesda. You'll notice they have started publishing shooters... like Rage. While Rage seemed to get a very mixed response it remains to be seen if that's a trend that is going to continue and if Bethesda decides it's better to try and publish or create shooters rather than work on new products.
As far as "Saint's Row 3" goes, I have been playing it due to getting irritated in Skyrim due to some bugged quests... namely Velehk Sain's treasure, I found the island for it but have literally spent hours wandering around trying to get the thing to spawn before deciding "F@ck this" and taking a break for the last few days before I put my fist through
my monitor. I'm hoping a patch will fix it soon, as something like this makes me concerned about proceeding due to what else might be glitched, etc.
I do tend to agree that SR3 is small in scope compared to the previous games, and seems to largely be recycling a lot of the basic material from SR2 without adding in anything new. I was hoping it would be as much of an improvement on SR2 as SR2 was from SR1, but really it's nothing that impressive. It's fun, but to be honest I've become wary of purchusing SR4 should they release one.
At any rate, I plan to return to Skyrim shortly, and so far it's definatly my nominee for game of the year. It's the ONLY game that didn't fall short of it's promises. I don't care for some of the simplification and specific design choices, but I knew about most of that beforehand, and otherwise it's actually exceeded a lot of my expectations. Fix some glitched quests, maybe beef of Destruction Magic a bit (easpecially at early levels) and rebalance a few of the monsters (ie I don't think a couple of high end bears should be tougher than a Dragon if they fight. The Dragons are fine as they are, but some of the monsters need to be nerfed a bit).
Also, very nice Plushie Skyrim Hat, I have no idea where that came from.
