The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Insight

[RejectedCamel]

Best game I have ever played so far, NOT overhyped at all. I find the UI perfect, other than the occasional cursor detection problems. My only minor annoyance is Steam, as it's very unstable on every PC I own, to the point where it will often crash when I try to log in, and I'll spend a good hour or so trying to get to my games.

[Plutoman101]

Most certainly the interface is the flaw. With the rest of the game? I've thought it was flat-out amazing. Heck, the fact that I'm playing it on a computer so far below minimum specs is pretty amazing too. I can't comment on textures, I've never played a game made within the last 8 years on anything higher than medium settings. Only the interface bugged me. Steam when I first saw it - because I was scared mods might not go well with it - but after seeing that's not true, I'm fine with it.

[Sjakies123]

I think it was overrated, well, overhyped really. Its a really great game but it certainly isn't perfect.

The textures could have been a bit sharper and i dont see any difference between ultra and high settings :s which is a shame. Plusside: it runs really smooth and still looks really nice aslong as you dont look at your own hands ingame.

Considering the scope of the game and the way it perfoms Bethesda did a marvelous job techwise for anybody with a less then high-end PC, unfortunatly that also means it still could have looked even better for the ones of us that do (like me) Better/more DirectX 11 support would have had this game looking perfect if combined with better textures (if you'd have the PC for it) I understand why they did it and i can agree with it since there will be mods for the textues :tongue:

 

No descent physics-engine for combat is my biggest gripe, after Oblivion i really wanted to see that upgraded. RAGE from ID software, for instance, was a crappy, buggy game in total for me but in this department it is much better. The way npc's move around, fight and most of all: die, in RAGE, is incredible compared to the ragdolls in Skyrim.

The interface is kinda crappy and buggy as is expected from a console port, still very workable though. bugs will get fixed and i allready found a way to have it run without that crappy Steam in the background which is responsible for a few of those bugs (CTD's anyone?)

 

to be fair Skyrim feels to me like someone telling me, I just won 100K and then finding out I have to pay 10K in taxes. I'll still celebrate getting that 90K and know that the coming mods are the interest which will make that 9 grow to even more in the near future.

The good in Skyrim outweighs the bad... by far.

[Koolaidmaker]

I think it does some things great while it fails at others. While it is a lot of fun, for the most part, I also find myself a bit disappointed.

After playing through the DB and a decent bit of both the mainquest and the mageguild I myself am annoyed how every single time I am "the one", here to save the universe and everything else there is. If it would only be the main-quest, that would be fine. But to me, the game loses authenticy when my charakter is so highly viewed after doing like 1-2 quests in a faction.

I might be the only one thinking that, but I really feel it would help immersion if the factionquests were either a lot (!) longer, so I would actually feel like I was working myself up the ladder or would b) not always end up with the charakter being the baddest motherbleeper in existence.

 

Furthermore, I think that the gps-like compass thingy is the greatest annoyance since, like, forever.

I just can't find myself immersed in the world when Im on a Quest to search something and the game tells me right from the beginning where exactly the item is.

Especially since -probably- there oftentimes isnt even any other way to find out about the location. In these cases, the game feels just like a singleplayer-wow. "Follow the giant arrow on your screen, kill 10 monsters and return to the questgiver to claim your reward"

It is of course nice that the walk inbetween can be shortened by fast-travel, but if a game that (to me) is 90% about exploring and being immersed in a huge, believable fantasy world needs things like gps and fast-travel theres something wrong.

 

I understand that it makes sense in a lot of ways, that the game is like that. Like the fact that the cost of hiring so many people for dialogue limits the dialogue available or that bethesda/zenimax -of couse- wants to make money and thus tries to make the game as accessible as possible.

But I just feel like these things don't go well in hand with a game like Skyrim.

To me, it feels like the developers were looking for the middle ground between both aspects, which I have never seen go well, neither in games nor anywhere else.

In any case, Id have appreciated it much more if they kept to written dialogue and all the other things that Morrowind had which kept so many from playing it but also understand why they didn't.

 

Anyway, the game is still great. So far Ive spent 27 hours on it since I bought it on saturday and I think that says a lot. In the first few hours I felt like playing a fantasy-themed cod4 without the tunnel-levels and with tons(!) of freedom to do whatever I want.

Its like the game gives you the freedom to choose what you do, but whatever you decide, its gonna be epic and just like your typical us-movie.

Which is great, but I didnt really want to play a movie like that,

[Raddra]

Interface is the worst part, but otherwise this game is nearly perfect.

[Merkvah]

The night before Skyrim launched, I was still playing Oblivion. I'm married with children, and I don't have a great job, so I'm one of those blasted "console" players... I know that if I buy the console version of a game, my hardware will play it. If I buy the PC version (my computer is 7 years old) it's likely to run badly if at all.

 

The upside of the console version is that the interface is stellar. it's fan-freaking-tastic. Very simple, very intuitive. Very easy to switch between spells (I'm playing as a mage) in the hotkey menu and quickly bind them to either trigger, or to bring up the primary inventory menu and easily see what I'm doing and quickly get to what I want.

 

I have run across some bugs in the game, though... some things that could have been fixed with more play-testing. I'm thinking there was a huge rush to get the game launched on 11-11-11, because of the binary significance of the date and also because of the nearness to the holiday season, but I wish the game had been delayed another three months for some of these fixes.

 

For instance... *** SPOILER ALERT *** I've finished the Mage Guild (College of Winterhold) quest-line. The robe reward is fantastic, but I also got a very cool staff, which is supposed to drain magicka, and then health, from the target, at a rate of 20 points per second. Sadly, the staff does nothing at all to anything after the completion of the quest line. It was used only once, to neutralize a big bad magical object. That was also bugged... I was supposed to use the staff to neutralize the object, then spend a few second fighting the big bad enemy wizard before he could get the object re-started... but due to a bug one of my allies was able to move during the sequence. So I used the staff to neutralize the object, but when I would turn to fight the enemy wizard, he would immediately become invulnerable again. If, however, I just kept the staff firing at the big bad object (The Eye of Magnus), my ally was able to easily dispatch him.

 

 

Don't get me wrong... the game is fantastic. I don't expect to be playing Oblivion again any time soon. But there's only so much dark fog and blowing snow you can take before you start to come down with a video gamer's version of Seasonal Affective Disorder. The storyline in the game is brilliant (The mage quest line did feel a little rushed... I went from being not allowed through the gate to being the Archmage in a VERY short amount of time, compared to Oblivion), but these are things which are more personal preference for me than anything else.

 

Oh.... one more thing... the dungeons. Random dungeons I've found (and, admittedly, I've only explored a few of them) are really really small, compared to the six or eight floor monstrosities in Oblivion. Some of the forts I've come across have no interior at all... no door to "zone" into them, they're just surface ruins. Some of them I've come across were very little more than one long hallway and 3 or 4 rooms. The last dungeon for the mage guild quest was great... dark and deep and engaging, with puzzles and multiple floors and all of that... but the other random dungeons I've encountered seem pretty small. =(

 

I hate to complain about a game I'm enjoying so much. I haven't so much as looked at another game since I brought Skyrim home, and don't intend to do so for quite a while... and hopefully that says a lot about my feelings about the game. I do wish it had been pushed back a few months, but maybe Bethesda will fix some of the problems through patching and updates. Beyond that, it's an amazing game.

[Rennn]

So far I've been lucky and have escaped almost every bug (besides the sound crash, and I fixed that). My only problem is Steam. I liked being able to backup my files and reinstall Oblivion whenever a mod messed it up. Now I'm not sure if Steam will let me, so I'll have to be very careful with mods. Edited November 15, 2011 by Rennn

[Yossarian22]

Story, Characters and Quests are crap, but Enviroment is awesome. Same like with all other Bethesda games, but with the difference, that the enviroment is much more awesome... I just wish they had assign obsidian to do all the writings and quests.

[Floppycat]

Aside from the buggy menus and some stability problems (the game have crashed a couple of times for me, without any obvious reason), I think the greatest flaw of this game is the quests.

 

Some of the questlines are great. Versatile, fun to do, nice story, nice rewards etc.

But then there's a huge load of quests that really are just repitive, boring as heck and not even rewarding in the end. What kind of quests am I talking about? Dungeon crawling quests. Cause let's face it, what's the point of having an open, huuuge world when 80% of the quests recieved takes place in boring dungeons?

 

In my opinion, dungeons are just an excuse to put loads of enemies in a small space.

 

And it really bores me to death. There's a huge world to explore! With awesome wild life, extremely good looking landscapes, things to see, a great feeling of freedom and loads of fun! And still, most of the quests I recieve is all the same.

 

"Go to this ancient cave and kill things, yo".

And then

"Go to this epic tomb-cave and kill more dudes, yo."

And then

"Go to these legendary ruins and kill even more dudes, yo."

and then

"Nicely done! Here's your reward for risking your life in those dungeons filled with zombies and other monsters."

*200 gold recieved*

 

It gets even more ridicilous when they don't even HAVE to put out a darn cave for the quest. As with those quests where you're supposed to kill of some bandits at a camp. Only to find a stupid cave entrance in the middle of the camp that you HAVE to enter and go through to complete the quest. I mean jesus christ, is everyone in Skyrim cavemen from the stone age or what?

 

I think most fantasy games suffer from the very same problem. It just tend to annoy me a lot more in elder scrolls games because of the open world. It simply ruins the point of the freedomish open world thing, when there isn't much to do outside. (Except searching for new caves to enter, of course..)

 

And caves doesn't give you any sense of freedom or options. They are linear and dull all the way through. And while there's loads of different types of enemys outside, it tends to be filled with only one kind in those darn caverns. Either it's a cave filled with nothing but zombies, or nothing but bandits. On rare occassions the cave might be filled with skeletons, witches OR those robot-thingys. But never any versatility as there's usually just one kind for each dungeon.

 

I'd love to see quests where you get to explore the outside. Why can't I climb a mountain for that epic artifact, or navigate through a huge forest? Why must I always, ALWAYS enter some boring cave, beat the crap out of 10-30 dudes inside, solve 3 puzzles on the way and then get out to get my "reward" consisting of 100-500 gold? I mean, there's not much to loot inside the caverns anyway. Urns with up to 12 gold and some crappy steel daggers and such. I have never found a random item that has actually come to some real use. I just get to disenchant or sell everything, and then there's not even much to do for the money.

 

That's the greatest flaw of this and many other games for me. I still love Skyrim, been playing for 39 hours now. It's just not that fun to skip half of the quests just because the whole quest log tend to get filled with "go to sum dungeon, bro" which makes me overfed with it. Without any versatility, I tend to get bored and just skip stuff that sounds too repitive. Which might make me miss out on many quest-lines that actually COULD have been fun and/or rewarding. And this happen way too often in TES games. And that's all I have to say.

 

TLDR; I DONT LIKE DUNGEON CRAWLING DANGIT