What? How does that make sense? It's supposed to be "padded out" by too much fighting and exploring (or travelling), because that's kind of what the game is all about. By that logic you could claim that all first person shooters are actually 5 minutes long, but they're "artificially padded out" by making you shoot a hundred bad guys every time you want to complete an objective.Athinira said:Skyrim IMO isn't the Game of the Year material (although I'd pass it a nomination at the very least).
People say it has a sh*tloads of content, but that is actually a clever illusion. Skyrim has an above-average amount of content (for a game in it's genre), but it makes it feel more bloated by wasting your time. You have to travel way more in Skyrim than other games in it's genre (even with the fast-travel system), and it uses the Dragon Age route of making you fight sh*tloads of enemies to complete even simple quests (but it cloaks it a lot better, where Dragon Age instantly gives you the feeling that it's padding out the game with too much combat). Therefore each quest takes longer to complete.
In addition there are several sections that are artificially designed to bore the hell out of you and drag out gametime. One example that stood out to me was when i (as a mage) joined the mage college as an apprentice. When you join the college you get a place to sleep, but where most other games would just mention where your room is located, Skyrim pulled the trick of having the lead mage show you to your room.... walking very slowly, wasting a few minutes of my time, and generally making me feel like I'm participating in an old-folks marathon with a speed limit.
This might fool other people, but it didn't fool me. I will give Bethesda that Skyrim is HUGE, but again, much of the gametime is artificially padded. They cloak it better than other games in most cases, but it doesn't mean you spend it doing anything useful.
As for forcing you to follow people, I guess that could be annoying. It's never eaten more than a few seconds of my time personally, but then I haven't even started any of the Winterhold quests, so perhaps it's different there.
OT: I prefer Skyrim by a wide margin, but Minecraft has a lot of extremely devoted fans around here, so it wouldn't surprise me too much if it still came out on top.