Why several people say Skyrim sucks

[Rennn]

In Two Worlds 2, I only was given access to a basement a couple times; most houses don't have them in that game. Likewise, you can't pick up the weapons lying around, or speak with most characters, but for some reason that game seemed pretty fun. (I know it wasn't reviewed very well though.)

 

In Dragon Age (a great game according to nearly everyone), you can't enter most buildings, you can interact with the environment much, it's only very loosely free roam, etc.

 

As I was playing Skyrim yesterday, I noticed two things:

1) Having the fov set below 80 is a great way to get annoyed with the game in general. Nothing feels fun with the fov set at 70.

2) When I was playing, I wasn't thinking of it as an RPG, I kept thinking of Skyrim like a world. I never got mad in Dragon Age for being unable to kill the merchant and steal the axe laying on the ground behind him. In general, it seems that simply because it's an ES game, people hold it to a different standard.

[Lyanheart]

Skyrim does not suck, not by a long shot. It does not, however, live up to all the wonderous expectations we had from all the interviews with Todd Howard talking about how this "new" engine was going to blow our minds and there were no limits to anything you could do in the game. We all learned pretty quick it wasn't as grand as we were told, and therefore thought it sucked.

 

And if it sucks so much, why can't anyone stop playing it? :thumbsup:

[Rennn]

Keep in mind, I never said it sucked. I was trying to explain why other people say it sucks, so that they don't scare off the people who are wondering whether to buy it, because it is a great game. It just doesn't fart lighting yet. It will, when the Construction Set releases.

[Roltak]

That is a good point, I once read an article about that problem, although it was specifically about NPCs. In essence the author came to the conclusion, that making things more realistic doesn't always make them less immersion breaking/more believeable. And I have to kinda agree, in many earlier games most of the NPCs around you were cardboard cutouts, they rarely moved, didn't talk to one another, just standing in that one spot 24/7 to give you a quest, a tip or just to say something. The shopowner wasn't the guy you meet at the pub after his store closes, he was a vending machine for potions, weapons, armor etc). Yes they sometimes had a personality through their dialogue but if you think about it they didn't behave human.

 

But because of that they were just part of the scenery and lifed solely based on their dialog and for their designated purpose, making them more like a book/story/machine and less like a person. But by giving them the ability to move around, to have a life etc. we start to see them as human and every failure they have is getting even more obvious and "in your face". The same for everything else, the more the world becomes like ours the more we expect things to work like they do in our world. In earlier games we just accepted that all that weapons the shop owner has laying around can't be picked up, that shop owners were not attackable or that certain characters can't be killed etc-, but the more realistic Skyrim becomes the more those borders begin to bug and annoy us. I don't think that is because we are greedy or spoiled it just is natural that when something looks like it could be real and offer all the possibilities of reality plus some more the more we get annoyed and ripped out of our experience when we realize that it isn't and doesn't.

 

I find such questions quite fascinating, how far can we drive games towards realism before our acceptance of borders fails to kick in. Or I am just interpreting too much into it and ramble nonsense.

Edited December 21, 2011 by Roltak

[sarnz]

That is a good point, I once read an article about that problem, although it was specifically about NPCs. In essence the author came to the conclusion, that making things more realistic doesn't always make them less immersion breaking/more believeable. And I have to kinda agree, in many earlier games most of the NPCs around you were cardboard cutouts, they rarely moved, didn't talk to one another, just standing in that one spot 24/7 to give you a quest, a tip or just to say something. The shopowner wasn't the guy you meet at the pub after his store closes, he was a vending machine for potions, weapons, armor etc). Yes they sometimes had a personality through their dialogue but if you think about it they didn't behave human.

 

But because of that they were just part of the scenery and lifed solely based on their dialog and for their designated purpose, making them more like a book/story/machine and less like a person. But by giving them the ability to move around, to have a life etc. we start to see them as human and every failure they have is getting even more obvious and "in your face". The same for everything else, the more the world becomes like ours the more we expect things to work like they do in our world. In earlier games we just accepted that all that weapons the shop owner has laying around can't be picked up, that shop owners were not attackable or that certain characters can't be killed etc-, but the more realistic Skyrim becomes the more those borders begin to bug and annoy us. I don't think that is because we are greedy or spoiled it just is natural that when something looks like it could be real and offer all the possibilities of reality plus some more the more we get annoyed and ripped out of our experience when we realize that it isn't and doesn't.

 

I find such questions quite fascinating, how far can we drive games towards realism before our acceptance of borders fails to kick in. Or I am just interpreting too much into it and ramble nonsense.

 

No it's not just you. I remember a similar speech when I was going to go towards 3d game design (which I probably should have stuck with..). They were talking about how so many people will say some SNES wayne gretzy hockey game was the greatest thing ever. But looking back now, look at the graphics and stuff. Horrible! At least in comparison to what games can do now.

 

The problem is similar to what you said - when there is very little to make it seem like the 'real world', we get absorbed in it, and our creative mind fills in all the spaces. IMO n64 was the perfect balance between graphics and leaving space for creativity. (But I am biased, I was born in 87 so n64 was the golden age of video games) But now that graphics are so advanced, if we see someone that looks like a person, they damn well better move exactly like a person.

 

I think this is another great thing about Blizzard - they maintain their style (even though they pushed wow a bit too far onto diablo 3...) they use handpainted textures, and still make sure that they give you room to be creative. Everyone say skyrim sucks because they have a game that 'looks real' (not really) and they wonder why it's not real. I love skyrim, but I'll be playing it up until diablo 3 comes out :biggrin:

[Rennn]

True; after a while people start to notice that the kiosks actually resemble people in ES games, and then if they're not very lifelike, you get the feeling that they're fake people. Ideally, every character would be as developed as DAO party members, but that's many, many years off from the mainstream. Mods will help, since they allow thousands of people to expand a game without worrying much about budgets, marketing, or consequences.

 

What's also surprsing is the importance of voice-acting. In Mass Effect 2, the voice acting and lines were natural enough where I found myself worrying if Tali or Mordin would die, as opposed to worrying if their mesh would fall down with recorded scream. I'm wondering if it would actually be helpful to scrap the voices from Skyrim (mute them), and rewrite the subtitles in a mod to make it more like natural dialogue, and to expand upon it.

 

As 'lame' as text supposedly is, when it's well-written, it's much better than forced-sounding dialogue. Once again, we come back to the point where games are just starting to be 'real', but now they're real enough for people to look at them and get disturbed because something just seems... off.

 

No offense Bethesda, but I've muted the voices in all of the ES games so far :)

(Morrowind's voice-acting was bad enough to make me flinch. I remember my parents walked by back then, and one of them actually mimicked a particularly comical wood-elf female voice 'I don't know if I can help, but I'll try'. That was embarrassing, but the text in that game seemed better because it was decently written, and nobody relied on the bad voice-acting to get the message across.)

 

But when you're in a battle, adrenaline and focus masks a game's shortcomings. I think this is probably a big reason why shooters are taking off now, when rpg's used to be king of games, back when imagination was a huge part and combat was a lame thing in between exploring.

Edited December 21, 2011 by Rennn

[Thoreai]

That is a good point, I once read an article about that problem, although it was specifically about NPCs. In essence the author came to the conclusion, that making things more realistic doesn't always make them less immersion breaking/more believeable. And I have to kinda agree, in many earlier games most of the NPCs around you were cardboard cutouts, they rarely moved, didn't talk to one another, just standing in that one spot 24/7 to give you a quest, a tip or just to say something. The shopowner wasn't the guy you meet at the pub after his store closes, he was a vending machine for potions, weapons, armor etc). Yes they sometimes had a personality through their dialogue but if you think about it they didn't behave human.

 

But because of that they were just part of the scenery and lifed solely based on their dialog and for their designated purpose, making them more like a book/story/machine and less like a person. But by giving them the ability to move around, to have a life etc. we start to see them as human and every failure they have is getting even more obvious and "in your face". The same for everything else, the more the world becomes like ours the more we expect things to work like they do in our world. In earlier games we just accepted that all that weapons the shop owner has laying around can't be picked up, that shop owners were not attackable or that certain characters can't be killed etc-, but the more realistic Skyrim becomes the more those borders begin to bug and annoy us. I don't think that is because we are greedy or spoiled it just is natural that when something looks like it could be real and offer all the possibilities of reality plus some more the more we get annoyed and ripped out of our experience when we realize that it isn't and doesn't.

 

I find such questions quite fascinating, how far can we drive games towards realism before our acceptance of borders fails to kick in. Or I am just interpreting too much into it and ramble nonsense.

I agree..for me, games that become more and more realistical arent really games anymore, they are just copies of reality, simulators.

Though ofcourse skyrim isnt anything of that, problem is that while it tried to be realistical, there is plenty of things that kill the realism .

For example, you have npcs reacting to what you do...like being naked etc, but on the other hand if you become someone, like a guildmaster or thane, they completely ignore it...and this is with many things in skyrim, but the game dont sucks, but as it has being said, it didnt lived up to the expectations.

[Rennn]

And the static dialogue, of course. This is why I've been pushing for a learning chatbot mod since Oblivion, and maybe now that Script Dragon supports c++, it might be possible.

[demonocus]

when i first played morrowind i played it for 6months then when the GOTY version came out i played it for another 3 months went back last week and just couldn't get into it again

 

when oblivion came out i played it for most of that year took a break went back and kept coming back and always finding something new to do then mods made the game new yet again and i still play it today

 

when skyrim came out (i pre ordered it for the cool map 5 months before it came out) i played it for 20 or so hours and in that time beat the thieves guild,dark brotherhood,most of the companions the main quest,a bunch of side stuff, and am already bored of it and have gone back to oblivion.

 

this is not only the shortest elder scrolls but also the most chopped down TES and is the one i played the least and had the least fun with.

 

why did they take stats out?

where did spell making go?

why are dragons so easy to kill?

why is the UI on pc so terrible and the map so bad?

and...

why are all these people getting shot in the knee with an arrow?

[sarnz]

True; after a while people start to notice that the kiosks actually resemble people in ES games, and then if they're not very lifelike, you get the feeling that they're fake people. Ideally, every character would be as developed as DAO party members, but that's many, many years off from the mainstream. Mods will help, since they allow thousands of people to expand a game without worrying much about budgets, marketing, or consequences.

 

 

 

Definitely, I found the voice acting in mass effect 2 to be incredible... had never heard anything like that in a game before. It was like playing out a movie. Everything was well written and the people they used sounded awesome.