King of the Sandbox said:
The characters, I can understand, but the bugs thing... seriously? Name 1 AAA game in the past 5 years that hasn't shipped with bugs. I dare you.
No software (except the absolutely simplest of simplest like a 'Hello World' program) is shipped without bugs. What matters is whether or not the bugs stand out, and in Bethesda games, they just happen to do.
Mind you, i applaud Skyrim for it's bugs not messing up the gameplay despite being so apparent, but by contrast, i only found very few bugs in say, Modern Warfare 3, and those were really hard to spot in the first place.
Skyrim is a huge improvement on Morrowind and Oblivion, but they still have a while to go.
Now, take into account the sheer GIRTH of content in Skyrim, weigh it against the bugs, and you'll barely see the scales tip at all.
Skyrim doesn't have as much content as people applaud it for. It has a lot of exploration with the chance of random encounters (who aren't particularly interesting in the first place, fight one pack of wolves or bandits, fought them all). That's it.
Mind you, I'm not saying it has little or average content. Skyrim does have a lot of content, but not even close to as much as people credit it for.
In fact, even Baldur's Gate 2 had at least as much content. Unlike Skyrim, they just didn't pad it out with exploration and traveling. There is a reason the game takes up less than 6 gigs of space in the first place compared to the 12-14 GB you find in games like Modern Warfare and BF3.
Most problems I do hear about are from the PC side of things, (PS3 Slowdown and backwards dragons excepted) but that's to be expected with any game of this magnitude on a platform that's as variable as snowflakes.
Now you are just making lousy excuses. Those are actually the kind of bugs you would have expected them to solve DURING the testing phase since they are much more easy to reproduce.
The Xbox 360 saves disappearing is excusable because they seem to have real problems tracking them down. The slowdowns, not so much.
But the point is, should bugs rule it out as a great game?
No, because they improved a lot upon it.
They shouldn't, however, be 'ignored' or 'dismissed' to the point that you're doing it.
It's a great game, and i won't say the praise it gets is undeserved, but i wouldn't call it a benchmark as long as they have so many things to fix. Baldur's Gate is still the benchmark for which i hold up RPG's, because unlike Skyrim it still manages to do quite a few things better, most apparently having proper PACING with little to no gameplay-padding and an inventory-system that didn't make me want to puke. I feel it's appropriate to quote Yahtzee here when he said that his biggest problem in Skyrim was finding vendors who still had money left so he could sell to them, because ironically that was also one of my biggest problems.