Eternal-Chaplain said:
On Friday I got home and had a 90 minute discussion with my brother concerning Skyrim. The surprising part of it being that we did not just go back and forth, one supporting, one against. No we literally found enough things wrong with Skyrim to make a list that takes 90 minutes to read. Really the people who are meant to enjoy this game are those too stupid and easily amused to think for more than a few minutes, lest they peel away the veil of muddy lighting and blurry textures and see this game for what it really is, and that is a boring waste of lazy programming and piss poor design. It would be easier to stop trying to find a single good thing in the game and just start laughing at the developers and wondering how gullible do they think we are?
Nope. This game is intended for people who appreciate an open, realized world, extreme freedom and depth of choice, and great music, visuals and landscapes, organic, unscripted gameplay, and so on and so forth. Bethesda delivers an experience with scope, grandeur, and freedom that no one else even attempts. If you like a carefully crafted, on the rails, set-piece heavy
CoD experience then more power to you. If you are not enthralled as I am by the
Elder Scrolls concept, then there probably isn't a lot here you can't get done better somewhere else. I don't hold that against you. But it's crazy to talk like those of us who want
more out of our games and are willing to forgive a sloppy animation or a 90 minute long list of flaws to get it are bunch of gibbering magpies. Fuck that.
When someone else makes a game like
Skyrim and does it half as well, then you can call me whatever you want.
shrimpcel said:
They [mods] also remove the need to buy the DLC.
It depends. Usually official plugins are a much higher quality than mods. But even if you don't think so, the official plugins will be much better for compatibility. And you're going to want that DLC because modders will use the resources it offers to make cool new mods. So if you're all about the mods, you might be able to replace an official DLC with mods, but you still have to buy the DLC so you don't miss out on cool mods that use it's resources. You may need the DLC one way or the other lol.
Stavros Dimou said:
Once I decided to write a blog on another site comparing my experience with Skyrim and my experience with Oblivion.
I copy&paste my blog:
-snip-
Oblivion was a good game in the grand scheme of things. A great game really. But as an
Elder Scrolls title it was a bitter disappointment.
Skyrim by comparison feels like a triumphant return to form. OK, it's no
Morrowind, but I feel Bethesda appreciates some of the things that went wrong with
Oblivion and is trying to get back on track, with some success. While there are some things I regret like the reduced number of skills,
Skyrim is a triumph of streamlining a game in the best sense of the word, of making it more meaningfully sophisticated at the same time you cut out the pointless tedium.
Oblivion is a horseless carriage with a steam engine that only a pilot can operate that tends to explode.
Skyrim is a rocket ship that anyone can drive.
Attributes in
Oblivion were awful. I used to mod the game so that attributes would raise automatically along with my skills. They added very little to the game in the way of meaningful choice, and nothing that couldn't be accomplished better by other means. All they did was make leveling a grueling, frustrating, and broken experience. I was worried about getting rid of them entirely, but Bethesda filled the gap with player skills, expanding the perk system, and stats. We have more and more meaningful choices in
Skyrim than we ever did in
Oblivion by a mile. I certainly never agonized over which attributes to pick like I do with perks, only over how to survive the tedium of getting the multipliers I wanted. Or why I should bother with such a broken system in the first place instead of just going majors-is-minors. All or most of the stats are still in the game, they are just not tied to attributes now. Luck affected your skills primarily, as well as a few other random things that were neat but didn't amount to much. It did not affect loot or critical strikes. NPCs change how they interact with you based on your faction affiliation, skills, race, and other contextual things. It's all in there, it's just not tied to attributes now. And I don't miss the Persuasion games, either from
Morrowind or
Oblivion. Both were silly and meant an NPCs disposition toward you could be easily circumvented.
Oblivion's NPCs were much too malleable, though I confess they may have overcompensated in
Skyrim.
Oblivion had Standing Stones, too. They were called doom stones or birthsign stones. The only real difference there was that
Oblivion let you characterize yourself a little bit as you entered the world by picking a star-sign. I liked that system, but I also like the new one because it lets me enter as more of a blank slate. This is a good approach for the
Elder Scrolls because the subject matter is the world itself and the unfolding prophecy, not the player character. And it encourages exploration and progression.
I wish the races were a lot more distinct, too. The more distinct the better. But we don't want to tie race to class too much. Ideally race options should provide me with ten different thieves to try, not define what I look like when I play a thief. I think the passive stat bonuses, skill bonuses, and active abilities in
Skyrim provide a good balance.
Skyrim is a mix-and-match where I can pick elements from all over to make something interesting. That's real depth of choice. In
Oblivion you were quite a bit more railroaded. You just pick your class and the details aren't much of a choice, really. Back in
Morrowind before the dark days of excessive world-leveling, this wasn't really an issue. Your race has a big impact on how you play
Skyrim, especially early on. Your example for the Mages Guild quest is a good example of what I'm talking about. All that stuff is still in the game, it's just not tied to attributes any more. Races have different starting magicka, your pool and regen will be different depending on other factors, the racial abilities make a
big difference, and Argonians can still breath underwater. And kitty-cats get Night Eye, and Dark Elves resist fire, and all that good stuff.
None of the
Elder Scrolls games I've played have had very good journal/quest systems, but
Oblivion's was the best.
Skyrim's minimalist approach is just not appropriate for the experience they should be trying to convey to the player. It's one of the few areas where I throw my hands up and say, yea, they really are just dumbing this down. They probably thought they were trimming the fat and we would love them for it, but they were wrong.
To be fair, randomly generated quests was a very popular feature from
Daggerfall (which I have hardly played). It usually comes up when people are waxing nostalgic. I think it was implemented very well indeed in
Skyrim. The problem is they relied on it too much in the faction questlines, which just are not meaty enough even with the radiant quests.
I was disappointed when I heard about this "Dragonborn" stuff, and at first I didn't even know why. It's cool for what it is, but as I keep saying, everything has it's time and place. The
Elder Scrolls should be about fulfilling prophecy and the land itself. They emphasized the player character and power fantasy way too much in
Skyrim. It definitely brought them a new audience, because I have seen people tout
Skyrim over
Oblivion and
Morrowind on that basis alone. The problem is, it isn't
good. Imagine the look on my face when I'm trying to explain to someone why
Morrowind's story was better than
Skyrim's.
They do tend to get rid of things when they can't get them right like Acrobatics and Athletics. I'm conflicted about it. I want them to come back in some form, but I want them to be good for a change, too. I couldn't disagree more about smithing. It's really, really, really powerful. The other two crafting skills are strong too, and not just for min/maxers.
I want to see them do more with putting useful information on items like they did with the claws. That should happen all the time, not just for one item type.
Oblivion's world-leveling system was an abomination, there was nothing good about it. How dare you lol. You didn't mention how everyone ended up in glass and Daedric armor, how it made leveling your character not only pointless but harmful, how it encouraged bizarre player behavior like majors-is-minors and Level 1 builds, how it made gathering loot into a waiting game, how it stole the tension and mystery away from a game that is primarily about exploration, how it encouraged generic world-building over exposition, and how it murdered all the firstborns in Egypt.
Skyrim wins by knockout on that one.
But forgetting all that, here is the fatal flaw that really damns
Oblivion utterly.
Oblivion sucked because Cyrodiil sucked. That being true, everything else is just details.
I could list a lot more reasons
Skyrim is a way better
Elder Scrolls than
Oblivion was. I have listed some in this thread.
Oblivion was not well thought out, it was a jumbled mess where every system like player leveling and world leveling and the world building seemed to frustrate every other system and fly in the face of the advantages that come with
The Elder Scrolls' unique approach.
Oblivion was such a disappointing follow-up to
Morrowind. It's really weird for me to see it looked back on with nostalgia, especially when compared to
Skyrim.
hehehe.
