Skyrim: I think it's overrated. Or am I totally missing the point?

[Itchi_da_killa]

First of all, I'm not trying to step on peoples toes here so please don't get too upset at me.

I will be honest; I'm not into the "Tolkien'ish" fantasy RPG thing too much.
-but
My friends, and other people I know have been trying to get me to play Skyrim for a while now. So I finally tore myself away from Dark Souls, and made the plunge. I now have over 100 hrs in the game, but I'm too tired and worn out with this system, that I can't go on. I have forced myself to play through at least 30 of those hrs, because I'm not a quitter and I really wanted to experience a fraction of the time my friends have put into this game.

So here is what I "think": I kind of liked it, but...
This game is way too long and tedious. The dungeons are samey and go on and on. The encounters are easy, even on master. I witnessed town guards kill dragons, so what the hell is so special about the dragon born...really? Shouts are weak, so who cares? Speaking of dragons; I have killed so many that I am annoyed every time I hear one up in the sky, or when I see a shadow move past me on the ground. The combat is so clumsy, that I feel like many boss fights are won by accident. The game has crashed on me too many times to be considered a "complete" product. I fall asleep periodically while playing, (no lie, I really fall asleep). I have killed Alduin and I seriously don't want to do another thing in this game, despite having a tone of active quests.

-How ever
It's a damn beautiful game, with great music and lore.

Does anyone else feel that Skyrim is overrated?

---------------------------------updated stuff based on some user comments--------------

First of all let me just state; I applaud Bethesda's vision for Skyrim, and I haven't played any of the other Elder Scrolls games.

What "I" meant by "over rated" was that I don't think the game deserves all of the stars and numbers from game scores and such. Like it has a 9/10 from Gamespot, 96 on meticritic, et cetera. I think the game deserves a 7 at the most.

Yes I do have a little more than 100hrs on the game. I did have fun at first, but then it started feeling like a chore. I have a personality that doesn't allow me to quit things "easily", so it was hard to just stop playing this game because I felt like I "had" to finish it.

Mods make lots of things great'er, but if you "have" to mod a game to make it great, ...then something is wrong with it. Again, just my "opinion".

 

[Tanis]

Overrated?
No.

I've gotten over 200 hours over two different versions, PS3 & glorious PC with mods, which is more than I can say for most games I've dropped 60USD on.

 

[Itchi_da_killa]

Overrated?
No.

I've gotten over 200 hours over two different versions, PS3 & glorious PC with mods, which is more than I can say for most games I've dropped 60USD on.

I actually started with the PS3 version, but those loading screens were killing me. So I played the rest on PC. Much better if I do say so myself. The snow amazed the hell out of me by the way.

 

[Tanis]

@Itchi_da_killa:
As did I, but then I got a powerful enough PC that could run it.
-My previous PC couldn't even run TES3: Morrowind.

I hope you're using mods with it, because playing vanilla Skyrim on PC is like a crime against nature.

 

[Fireaxe]

The idea of Skyrim is to just wander out in the world and get lost, you can quest a bit and just end up on the other side of the map fighting various enemies and discovering the landscape. Skyrim is more sandbox than any actual sandbox tbh.

 

[Zhukov]

My God, I have come to despite the word "overrated" so very much.

But no, I do not think highly of Skyrim.

I actually enjoyed it for a while. The exploration element managed to draw me in.

However, the combat is woeful. You either mash mouse1 (for melee) or hold down mouse1+mouse2 (for casting). Or play FPS: Barebones Medieval Edition with a bow I suppose. The looting rapidly became completely pointless since the game fucking buries you in supplies and money and crafting gets you better items anyway.
The story elements are, well... regular video game quality. Which is to say, garbage by any other standard.
The world looks very pretty from a distance. But the illusion is paper thin. Once you get a bit closer and see the robotic, personality-decicient NPCs stiffly marching about repeating the same six lines of dialogue in the same dozen or so voices it all just falls apart.

Once I hit the level cap and the basic satisfaction of Get XP, Become More Powerful was taken away, I suddenly realised I had absolutely no reason to continue playing and promtly dropped the game like a hot rock.

 

[XzarTheMad]

It's probably just not the game for you. "Overrated" is a meaningless word when it comes to personal taste anyway. You don't see the point in Skyrim's gameplay, I don't see the point in Zelda/Sonic/Mario/Metroid/what have you. It's all good. There's nothing saying you have to conform to what a majority, or even a minority, thinks. If a game isn't your cup of tea, just stop playing it, and pick up something you'll like. Props for giving it a fair try, but there's no shame in not being wowed by what other people are. I will disagree with you on the whole crashing issue, though; I've played probably upwards of 400 hours in Skyrim now, and I can count the amounts of crashes on one hand, most of them caused by poor mods I've installed. Naturally my experience isn't the gospel truth, but I think calling it an unfinished product is more flamebait than honesty. It comes off that way, anyhow.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Point of it is exploration, TES is the best in the market for that and honestly if anyone came close Bethesda would quickly be shelving the IP because everything else in it is pretty poor or rather stretched too thin.

Obviously if you aren't into exploration or the setting then all the game has to offer will be lost on you.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Skyrim has a lot of problems and whether or not you consider those problems big or small decides if you think the game is overrated or not.

The biggest problem is the combat. It's just not very good. All of it is rather samey and other video games do it much much better. Bethesda's RPGs just generally don't have very interesting or satisfying combat. For some people combat is the reason they play a video game and in that case Skyrim will bore them, but if combat isn't a huge deal to you and you can overlook it in favor of other elements then there's a lot to like about the game.

The game is absolutely massive, giving you a lot of things to do and time to waste for the money that you've spent, and the world is really interesting to explore and learn the lore of (even if the writing can be sub-par for some quest lines). There are also a lot of options and different ways to play the game which appeals to a wide variety of people and there's a lot of potential for actual role play and emergent gaming and storytelling. Bethesda games are also very heavily supported by mods on the PC which improve or get rid of certain problems like stiff animations and bad character models and can provide a lot of extra flavor and playtime to the game.

So yeah, if you're interested in exploring and making your own fun then Skyrim is a blast. If you're just in it for diablo style looting and dungeon crawling then it's less than spectacular.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

If you play a game for 100 hours, enjoying 70 of those, I'd say it is probably a pretty good game. As it stands, others have already expressed my sentiment in more depth so I'll just re-cap: If you like exploration, Skyrim is a game for you. If you don't, Skyrim will likely hold less appeal as the novelty of the quests and the loot wears off.

 

[Rutabaga_swe]

I fully agree that skyrim is very overrated. The combat is shit, the leveling system is boring, character interaction is minimal, the quests are shit and so forth. The game is too big imo, that is the #1 problem. It's full of inane fetch-quests while the main story line takes a few hours to complete, and even then the main quest is very bland and uninspired.

People say it's about exploration, but to me the world is far too limited for that to be an interesting aspect. you know that every dungeon you go in to will have one of three looks, the enemies and loot scaled and fitted. As you say, the dragons are a joke too, despite being drummed up as this horrible destructive goddamn force of nature.

Nah, the best TES game is still morrowind imo. It might be old and look/play like it, but the fundamentals of that game just wipe the floor with skyrim. That was the last TES game in which Bethesda trusted the players not to be complete idiots in dire need of blinking quest markers, scaled dungeons and safe handholding through out the game. You could actually stumble upon something unique and cool in terms of enemies and loot, or just something bizarre in general.

 

[Waffle_Man]

I now have over 100 hrs in the game, but I'm too tired and worn out with this system, that I can't go on.

I have forced myself to play through at least 30 of those hrs, because I'm not a quitter and I really wanted to experience a fraction of the time my friends have put into this game.

If you got over 70 hours of game time that you didn't have to force yourself through, I'd say it's doing something right. I've enjoyed most of the elder scrolls game for the time that I've played them, but I've never completed one. Likewise, I've played through fallout 3 and New Vegas, but somehow I've failed to ever hit the level cap. Sure, I haven't put the 100 hours into a single character as some of the people I know have, but it's been blast to play.

See, there isn't just divergence in what people like, but why and how they like it. The difference is sort of like people who enjoy going to museums vs. people who like to read textbooks. I can generally tend to browse through museums rather than stopping to look a the minutia of every exibit because I often feel like I don't have enough context on the displays to get invested, but I absolutely love reading in depth articles and books on history. With that said, I still like going to a museum every now and again simply for the shear vastness of the experience.

Does anyone else feel that Skyrim is overrated?

I think the whole "over-rated" and "under-rated" labels are terrible. Why? Because it's most often used to be critical of a subjective opinion of something. If people claimed that the game contained 74 dungeons when it only contained 32, I'd see the need to call it "over-rated." Now, I would say there is value in recognizing how your experience differs from others, and there is also value in analyzing what opinions of the game can tell us of cultural attitudes, simply pointing out that you didn't like something is neither profound or arguable.

Don't mistake this as a call for your silence though. I'd love to hear actual discussion of the why and how of what you didn't like. What did you find lacking? What games did you think did a certain thing better? What things did you think the game had a solid foundation of but a poor execution of? How did the mechanical elements function? How did the contextual elements function? Did they tie in at all? What ideas would you have used to tie them in? Perhaps this is too academic for your tastes, but if you want to spur actual discussion, wouldn't it be better to ask these questions?

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

This game is way too long and tedious.

The game is as long as you want it to be. The main quest can be beaten inside of 6 hours. Any of the individual quest chains are can be done in four hours.

The dungeons are samey and go on and on.

Depends on what you mean by "Samey". Any of the dungeons you visit as part of a quest chain are fairly varied. The rest is more repetitive but layout and NPC composition vary dramatically.

The encounters are easy, even on master.

Skyrim, like all the Elder Scrolls games, is full of ways to "break" combat. It's trivial to make combat a non-challenge. If you want challenge, you simply need to play the game in such a way that it remains challenging. There are a few abilities that easily destroy any challenge, some quicker than others. For example, stealth breaks Elder Scrolls games if combined with any weapon skill. It simply becomes trivial to land an instantly lethal blow. Using daggers makes it interesting longer than archery but you'll end up instantly killing everything with no repercussions regardless. Armorer and Enchanting break everything and it is easy to produce weapons and armor such that you have maximum damage resistance to everything while simultaneously being able to kill anything in the game with a single stroke.

All you have to do to find "challenge" is play accordingly. If you want to go stealthy, use alchemy by itself to get your kills. Even at maxed levels of stealth, you're still required to reverse pick pocket poison into inventories and escape retribution while it does it's work. If you like magic, simply stay away from the destruction school - the other schools give plenty of combat power anyhow. If you like melee, stay away from heavily enchanted and modified equipment. And just plain avoid archery - without stealth it's all but useless and with stealth it's utterly ruinous to the mere idea of difficulty.

I witnessed town guards kill dragons, so what the hell is so special about the dragon born...really?

You can learn shouts by reading some garbage from a wall and then killing a dragon for it's soul.

Shouts are weak, so who cares?

Depends on your definition of weak. Compared to simply breaking the game with any of a variety of skills, sure. But compared to other sources of magic? Shouts are ungodly powerful in comparison. You can stop time (there is no equivalent spell), cast the widest ranging most powerful lightning spell in the game (there are powerful AOE spells but none compare to the shout in question), become immune to damage (the best alteration can do is give 80% physical damage reduction), mark an enemy so they take far more damage then they normally would (no equivalent), run so fast you effectively teleport (no equivalent) and even summon your own dragon to ride around on. Shouts are tremendously powerful all told and considering they are simply as powerful as they will ever be the minute you unlock them, it's even more potent. At level 10, there is simply no way you'll cast a better fireball than the equivalent shout.

Really, the only downside to shouting is that they are bound to a cooldown that you can only reduce by a small margin (20 or so percent if memory serves). Were it not for that, shouts would be the quickest way to breaking a game.

The combat is so clumsy, that I feel like many boss fights are won by accident.

I'm not sure how you can make the claim that you only win by "accident" in the same breath as claiming the game is devoid of challenge.

The game has crashed on me too many times to be considered a "complete" product.

Crashing mileage will vary. If you have the PS3 version, it's far more prone to crashing than the Xbox version or PC version. Of course, the PC version also has a hugely active modding community that went in and fixed a slew of bugs.

I have killed Alduin and I seriously don't want to do another thing in this game, despite having a tone of active quests.

My own experience was that the only quests worth doing were the designed ones. The radiant generated quests were all dull.

Does anyone else feel that Skyrim is overrated?

No.

 

[Qvar]

Judging by the hordes of revisionists claiming that Skyrim is overrated, while being one of the (non-online) games with more hours logged-in ever, I would say it's UNDERrated instead.

 

[Auberon]

Skyrim is a good game with some replay value if you don't do everything possible (mostly related to factions), and competent builds have some variation.

After that, there are of course mods and roleplaying value. It's still dumbed down when compared to Morrowind (hard-coded limits and all that jazz) but great for a console RPG.

 

[Magix]

I think people need to stop using the term overrated and underrated, since everybody has their own interpretation of what those words mean, and some people don't even TRY to interpret what they mean and just sort of use them as a synonym for whatever other opinion they have (bad, etc)

Looking at it objectively, of course people are going to have different opinions and tastes. Not everybody is going to like the same things. It just means you don't like it personally.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

I completely agree with you.


'It's a damn beautiful game, with great music and lore.'

That's the real problem with Skyrim. People look at the graphics and listen to the sounds and totally forget that the levelling system is broken, the combat is weak at best and the story is barely there. Add to that the lack of any real reason to go dungeon hunting and you have a recipe for boredom. I knew how to beat the game before i had even played it and my friend tried to pull the old 'you don't know shit, you haven't played it' card so i proved myself right and destroyed the game in 75 hours...75 hours of tedium to prove a point *sigh* What a sad bastard i am

 

[lord.jeff]

You know I game is good the moment someone describes it with overrated. I enjoyed Skyrim quite a bit but it's not for everyone.