Skyrim rated lower than expected.

[JDGameArt]

Metacritic

 

First off I love Skyrim, I've already played it almost 30 hours since release. But I headed over to metacritic to see how other gamers like it and to my surprise it sits at only an 8.5. After reading through some of these people's complaints I think some of them are pretty legitimate, and people who have complaints they are all saying the same thing.

 

Overall

 

Was this rely a console-port? It seems like the PC users are having an awful allot of issues with crashing, texture problems, and all sorts of anomalies. I have as well, but the game has been pretty stable overall. One thing that stood out for me was the UI. After playing the game for less than 15 minuets someone could tell Skyrims UI is set up for a console. We have absolutely no way to bind spells, weapons, and other commands across the keyboard as one would expect. This makes the game-play on a PC very choppy. We don't need endless menus when we have 70+ keys. Even Oblivion had a spell wheel hot key that would be nice to have here.

 

Graphics

 

The graphics are both beautiful, and ugly at the same time. Already we had numerous mods to help clean up some of the body textures and bugs. For me I'm lucky enough to have a decent rig, and I can say with certainty my machine is barely awake while running Skyrim (every thing's maxed). My graphics card sits just off idle temps, and Ive yet to see it use more than 950 MB of memory on the VGA. In comparison Witcher2, and Crysis 2 use above 1.5G and the video card works much harder.

 

As for me, I've had an absolute blast so far, and aside from the glitches I've been impressed on many levels. I just hope Bethesda Game Studios doesn't leave us PC users out in the cold when it comes to these critical gaps we seem to have. I feel this goes beyond the modding community, and the foundation should be poured a little thicker. (if you know what I mean) Being a huge Elder Scrolls fan it was hard to write this. I don't like to see people bad taking Bethesda or TES, but these are just some cold hard facts that can't be brushed under the rug.

[Aluminumfoil]

User Score is even more useless than reviewer score. People will rate "6" games "10" if they happened to enjoy it or they think it deserves a higher score than the average it's receiving, even though they're aware that it's only an average game, and they'll rate "9" games "0" if there's some design decision that makes them angry, or the game turns out not to be the messiah like a certain subset of people always thinks an unreleased game is going to be, or their computer can't run it, or they don't like Steam, or they don't think it deserves as high of a score as other people are giving it.

[KDStudios]

Was this rely a console-port?

 

Yep.

The UI has made the game unplayable for me.

I've used my mouse for it since Morrowind, through Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas.

However now I have to faff around with keyboard buttons and clicking on the thing it highlights... What the heck?

Also dropping items has become even more of a pain since you had to press like ctrl and click in oblivion? Then simply right click in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Now it's just a keyboard binding.

 

I'm glad I wasn't looking forward to this game, now I see lots of people on PC complaining about it.

Don't get me wrong, it has a lot of content but they had plenty of time to work on the game to optimise the controls for PC users...

I don't like being forced into feeling like a bad person for not using a controller...

 

I'm going back to playing other -better- games until some delightful modder fixes it.

[minngarm]

You can add items to the quick keys 1 to 8 iirc in this game. add them to favorites, open fav menu highlight and press desired number. Only works for single hand use with the exception of spells, tapping the key 2x will put the same spell in both hands. tapping 1 for flames and 2 for sparks will replace the main hand with sparks, without adding either to the 2nd hand. Same with weapons.

[FoolyFooly]

whine whine whine whine whine convincing myself I don't need to play it whine whine whine whine

[JimboUK]

8.5 seems pretty fair to me, the UI alone is enough to knock a point or two off the score.

[XunAmarox]

I found Skyrim to be really disappointing, both the UI controls and how the main quest just ends with no acknowledgment that you beat the game whatsoever, just puts you right back into the game like no big deal. Super short too... normally takes me a few days to beat the game. I beat this one in less than a day. And there's a god awful amount of senseless running.

 

Even the character creation was very very poor. Those lips... Good god! It was like rolling around on hot coals trying to make a pretty character.

[DyingAtheist]

I found Skyrim to be really disappointing, both the UI controls and how the main quest just ends with no acknowledgment that you beat the game whatsoever, just puts you right back into the game like no big deal. Super short too... normally takes me a few days to beat the game. I beat this one in less than a day. And there's a god awful amount of senseless running.

 

Even the character creation was very very poor. Those lips... Good god! It was like rolling around on hot coals trying to make a pretty character.

 

Oblivion was beatable in a day as well.

However, if you play Skyrim how it's actually meant to be played it's not even close to "Super Short". I'm 20 hours into Skyrim and I've done nothing but the very first story line quest.

NONE of the Elder Scroll games have been about the main story, they're about the side-quests and the exploration, what Skyrim does in terms of its main story is nothing new.

[Lyanheart]

I'm over the GUI issues. I still don't like it, but I've at least mastered its finicky use. Graphics are overall very beautiful even if they are not using the full potential of the PC. I am running everything maxed/ultra/whatever turned up to 11 and enjoying silky smooth performance. The main story isn't bad, about as entertaining as Oblivion with a few surprises here and there. Nowhere near as good as I felt Morrowind's main quest was, though. The "side quests," especially the major ones, make up for it. Combat still feels repetative, and I have found it is not as easy to mix magic with other fighting skills as it was in the other games. Aside from a couple CTDs in the many many hours I have played, I have had no buggy issues. I consider the "new" engine more of an "upgrade" to the old one, and definatly see a lot of Fallout influences in gameplay. I dont know what number out of 10 Skyrim deserves, but I feel it is at least as enjoyable as Oblivion plus a few extras and upgrades. Oblivion with mods and all the DLC, IMHO, is still currently a more satisfying game, but Skyrim will improve and surpass it.

[StormTemplar]

whine whine whine whine whine convincing myself I don't need to play it whine whine whine whine

Best review of the reviewers so far.

 

The game may be more difficult to master than Oblivion because of it's sad UI but the sounds, graphics, the overall atmosphere of the game is nearly as good as Battlefield 3.

 

Only thing I hate is how demanding it is on the graphics card. "My graphics card sits just off idle temps, and Ive yet to see it use more than 950 MB of memory on the VGA", why thank you sir for being so biased, you're probably on a gaming PC. I'm on a brand new, non-gaming PC which runs Battlefield BC2, BF3, Starcraft II and a few other games on high detail, but yet I have to be running Skyrim on medium graphics if I want good performance. High detail runs at a low 17-20 FPS for me.