Skyrim isn't dumbed down. Purists are.

[GoodfellowGoodspring]

The game is a let down admit it, the only thing which can save it now is mods to change everything which is terrible. Id rather explore the green hills of Cyrodil then empty tundra and mountains where i cant see where im going or fighting and half the map is inaccessible -_-

[hymhym]

What I seem to be reading is, "Oh they didn't include this!" or, "Oh they didn't fix this!" Learn some modding skills instead of complaining.

 

The real issue, with these kind of complainants, is that it's annoying that we have to do it all over again for Skyrim. Modders fixed, improved and expanded the base game of Oblivion to an extreme degree. Now that Skyrim is out, and has a better graphic engine and several other new cool features, many of us find it annoying that there are still so many thing, just as lame as they were in Oblivion. Even though modders have clearly proved that they did not have to be so. It's back to square number 1 on so many fronts it's maddening. I, and I believe many others, find it frustrating that this is the case. I wager people would have rather done new things with Skyrim, but instead, we find ourselves once again implementing stuff like survival mods.

 

And to add further insult to the injury, they axed several subsets of mechanics that gave modders the tools to do these improvements in the first place. Of course, we do not have the editor at our disposal yet, so we really do not know for sure what the base engine of Skyrim really looks like. Hopefully the functions are still there, and we can add to Skyrim all the stuff we added to Oblivion.

 

I'll be honest. I do like Skyrim, it's a much better base for mods than oblivion was and oblivion was a DAMN good launching pad. The rest of the game doesn't strike me as having much depth to it beyond looking like it does.

 

Also, while I'm complaining, I will say that I'm not a fan of the colour pallette. Granted, it's going after a nordic look but, it's always so damn cloudy and grey... Like Britain... ugh

 

I like it too, it's a good game, Not the best I ever played, not even in the top 10 of my list, but still a good game. But I am not sure about whether or not it is a better base for mods than Oblivion was. Oblivions strength as a modding platform was it's generic bland nature. It had the assets for all sort of things, but the game itself was fairly nondescript. As for Skyrim, it's not just the color palette that is restricted, it's everything else as well. From flora to fauna, to landscape textures and building meshes. At the same time the setting and narrative framing of the game is very distinct.

 

What if you wanted to make a mod where you are not the Dragonborn? Then what? The mechanics of the game are build on shouting. I hope I can somehow hijack the shouting mechanics for casting spells, since I want to be a spellsword type that uses a two handed blade and casts various debilitating spells on his foes. As the system is now, that is utterly impractical in combat.

Edited November 27, 2011 by hymhym

[Shantih]

What I seem to be reading is, "Oh they didn't include this!" or, "Oh they didn't fix this!" Learn some modding skills instead of complaining.

 

The real issue, with these kind of complainants, is that it's annoying that we have to do it all over again for Skyrim. Modders fixed, improved and expanded the base game of Oblivion to an extreme degree. Now that Skyrim is out, and has a better graphic engine and several other new cool features, many of us find it annoying that there are still so many thing, just as lame as they were in Oblivion. Even though modders have clearly proved that they did not have to be so. It's back to square number 1 on so many fronts it's maddening. I, and I believe many others, find it frustrating that this is the case. I wager people would have rather done new things with Skyrim, but instead, we find ourselves once again implementing stuff like survival mods.

 

And to add further insult to the injury, they axed several subsets of mechanics that gave modders the tools to do these improvements in the first place. Of course, we do not have the editor at our disposal yet, so we really do not know for sure what the base engine of Skyrim really looks like. Hopefully the functions are still there, and we can add to Skyrim all the stuff we added to Oblivion.

 

I'll be honest. I do like Skyrim, it's a much better base for mods than oblivion was and oblivion was a DAMN good launching pad. The rest of the game doesn't strike me as having much depth to it beyond looking like it does.

 

Also, while I'm complaining, I will say that I'm not a fan of the colour pallette. Granted, it's going after a nordic look but, it's always so damn cloudy and grey... Like Britain... ugh

 

I like it too, it's a good game, Not the best I ever played, not even in the top 10 of my list, but still a good game. But I am not sure about whether or not it is a better base for mods than Oblivion was. Oblivions strength as a modding platform was it's generic bland nature. It had the assets for all sort of things, but the game itself was fairly nondescript. As for Skyrim, it's not just the color palette that is restricted, it's everything else as well. From flora to fauna, to landscape textures and building meshes. At the same time the setting and narrative framing of the game is very distinct.

 

What if you wanted to make a mod where you are not the Dragonborn? Then what? The mechanics of the game are build on shouting. I hope I can somehow hijack the shouting mechanics for casting spells, since I want to be a spellsword type that uses a two handed blade and casts various debilitating spells on his foes. As the system is now, that is utterly impractical in combat.

 

It's a bit premature to be able to tell whether or not Skyrim is going to be as mod friendly as Oblivion. I assume it will provided we get the right tools (and a toolset that allows us to make lip files).

 

The generic blandness is exactly what I didn't like about Oblivion (especially after Morrowind and its wonderful setting). Shivering Isles was a breath of fresh air in comparison.

 

It's really a matter of taste but the snowy, icy landscape of Skyrim can be absolutely great if you like that sort of locations. I grew up in the mountains so I simply love it.

 

What we need is a mod to add a pair of skis in order to have some real fun. :happy:

[HaikenEdge]

I personally like urban cyberpunk environs, so, I wish Deus Ex: Human Revolution had a toolset, but that's seriously off-topic

 

Time will tell, regarding mods, but out of the box, Skyrim does feel like it's lost a good bit of crunch compared to Oblivion and replaced it with fluff; as a guy who cares almost entirely about crunch and less so about fluff, it does feel "dumbed down".

[stars2heaven]

Skyrim is not dumbed down. It doesn't have pointless stats. Or pointless numbers. It has a lot more depth than Morrowind or Obliion combined, but for the misguided fool it may seem that fewer pointless numbers or stats mean the game is dumbed down. It's actually much deeper and more time can be spent ENJOYING the game, not the most pointless thing and something that I simply couldn't give a sh it about: the levels. I don't know what level I am. I just immerse into the world and if you'd stop trying to play it like dungeons and dragons or world of warnerd you'd be able to play 100hrs and have just breached the surface of things to do. Not levels to complete, but adventures.

 

Classes are pointless too.

All it is is purist fever: the core fans hate change and if it ain't a reskin of the favorite it's not a true sequel or is "dumbed down" as many purists are saying about Skyrim.

 

Same problem in any game community. I played morrowind lots too...great...in that level never cared about my level, and there was so mug less depth than oblivion. If you stop caring about the useless: levels and numbers and text, you'll see Skyrim kicks the sh it out of morrowind.

 

I agree with your conclusion, but your argument isn't exactly the best. Whether or not someone enjoys the unnecessary stats does'nt have anything to do with whether or not the game is dumbed down. The question here is whether removing those things like stats and classes actually dumbs down the game. I think that it could dumb down a game, but in the case of Skyrim, it has not had this effect at all. Variability and uniqueness of the character can be achieved to quite a bit of depth via perks, so eliminating stats really didn't eliminate any depth as far as that goes at all. In my opinion, the game can achieve a much greater depth than what morrowind or oblivion could achieve.

[hymhym]

It's a bit premature to be able to tell whether or not Skyrim is going to be as mod friendly as Oblivion. I assume it will provided we get the right tools (and a toolset that allows us to make lip files).

 

The generic blandness is exactly what I didn't like about Oblivion (especially after Morrowind and its wonderful setting). Shivering Isles was a breath of fresh air in comparison.

 

It's really a matter of taste but the snowy, icy landscape of Skyrim can be absolutely great if you like that sort of locations. I grew up in the mountains so I simply love it.

 

What we need is a mod to add a pair of skis in order to have some real fun. :happy:

 

No need to quote my whole post, just so you can say exactly the same thing I said: It is still too early to say anything about the moddability of Skyrim. I hope it's there, and if not, I'll go back to Oblivion. At least there I already have survival mods, immersive interiors, better music system and tons of other things missing from Skyrim.

 

And I never said that I liked the blandness of Oblivion - hell, I never even played the blandness of Oblivion. I came late to Oblivion - real life took me elsewhere after Morrowind - and after the first week with Oblivion I already had 100 mods running. My latest Oblivion build has maxed out esp slots, several merged mods and mod compilations. My mod manager lists 560 install packages. I have never ever claimed that I liked vanilla Oblivion, or that it was better than Skyrim, which I do actually like as a game. Oblivion does certain things better, while Skyrim does others, and that's all there is to it.

 

Shivering isles was indeed far better with landscapes than vanilla Oblivion ever was - but it was exactly that blandness that gave birth to Unique Landscape mods. And there were plenty of snow covered mountain peaks in Oblivion, and subtropical swamps too. And you had the marble palaces of the Imperial City, and gothic stone houses of Skingrad and the warm feeling of the Gold coast. Oblivion had more variety, more assets more functions and based on this, it seems like Oblivion might have had more potential for modding than Skyrim.

 

But at this time, I can not say these things for certain. The engine of Skyrim might be prove to be superbly moddable, perhaps creating new worldspaces is a breeze this time, perhaps it's easy to port old assets in to Skyrim, perhaps the editor wont be as clunky piece of garbage as it is for Oblivion, who knows? If this proves to be the case, then perhaps the lack of variety in Skyrim's assets will not prove to be a big issue. But at this point, I find it really annoying. My own mod project for Skyrim is pretty much dead in the water, since I cannot figure out a way to make it happen with Skyrim's assets. I could totally do it with Oblivions, but then I would miss out on all the cool new things that are in Skyrim.

 

Another example is a friend of mine, he's thinking about a desert mod project - he'd like to do it with Skyrim since those snow particle effect would translate to cool sand particle effect, but the assets available are rather limited at the moment. Will modders improve on this lack of assets? I don't know. Perhaps, or perhaps the engine of Skyrim proves to be really annoying and most people will move to some other thing. Only time will tell. But at the moment, there is no point in denying that doing anything else but viking themed mods is gonna be pretty hard with Skyrim.

 

And yeah, I know what snow is. I know about winters that are -40 degree centigrade, been there done that. Doesn't in anyway affect what I want for my fantasy. I've enjoyed games set in icy tundra before, as well as tropical savannas and will do so again in the future. As such, I have nothing against Skyrims snowy landscape, if I had I wouldn't have about 600 landscape screenshots depicting the said landscapes. All I did was offer an observations that this might limit the moddability of the game to some extend, since it offers much tighter and limited palette on with which to paint, and on a clearly defined canvas. Oblivion had all sort of junk in it it and a completely blank canvas, and modders went and filled it with wondrous things. Will it happen to Skyrim? That question is my point.

[Goliath978]

To the environment comments: skyrim's environment seems nice to me. It's not the typical fantasy green lush environment but it's a nice barbarian/10000bc/iceage/dragons/nord feeling. And there's no shortage of variety.

 

And it's big. In my 20 hrs of play I've only seen Whiterun, markarth, and solitude.

[Dat1Guy]

Well, as for the moddability of Skyrim... only time will tell. If not, theres always Oblivion!

[macole]

As I said previously, Dragons aren't really a threat to anybody. During the first real encounter with a dragon, it got killed by NPCs, with minimal losses, while I hid out under some stairs to avoid damage.

 

If normal NPCs can kill dragons, why exactly should I feel threatened by them?

Dragons, what dragons? I see a lot of big wyverns but no true four-legged dragons. Maybe that's the problem, Skyrim has been invaded by the lesser two-legged cousin of the big n nasty four-legged wyrms. Could be a precursor of things to come? Perhaps, perhaps not. Anyway doesn't matter, had enough snow and ice for awhile and I'm heading down south for the winter.

Edited November 27, 2011 by macole

[JimboUK]

I like the environment, I thought it was going to get old fast but it hasn't. That said reaching places on top of mountains can be a pain in the rear end, oh what wouldn't I give for levitation.