Skyrim vs Elder Scrolls 2, 3, 4 and FO3(+NV).

[dragonalumni]

Skyrim vs Elder Scrolls 2, 3, 4 and FO3(+NV).

 

Edit: After finishing my “review” I realized it was a huge rant. Your warned. I needed to vent.. :whistling:

 

Before I get to it, let me say I have completed the main quest for each of these six games and have hundreds of hours invested in playtime that could have been spent doing something more productive, but games are for enjoyment, not productivity.

 

I’m trying to get interested in a second play though of Skyrim, but I simply cannot get motivated. I get a character to about level 20 and started to get fairly bored. This is something I’ve more or less encountered while playing all the other games, it seems some things never change.

 

So where to begin. I suppose I would like to start with my favorite of all these games, Daggerfall. In Daggerfall, there was dozens of cities and the imperial city took 10 minutes to walk across and every second you would pass another NPC. It had several weapons and armor shops, jewelry shops and banks, the world had had hundreds of dungeons, and some dungeons were sometimes ten levels deep and took a guidebook for me to navigate.

 

And then there was the heroic PC. In creation you could pick your race, add major and minor skills, add bonuses like magic resistance or magic weakness that would adjust your experience scale, it had about 35 skills and the PC could wear armor for 9 spots and after that you could also wear shirt, pants, cloak, ring and an amulet. So something like 16 items could be worn with weapon and shield. Besides gear, you could join something like 4 guilds, 4 knightly orders, 4 temples and I’m sure I’m forgetting some things. Of course it had a fully functional spell maker and enchanted item maker. It also had “radiant” quests, that is NPCs from every faction would ask you do some random task for reputation and reward.

 

Speaking of radiant, lets get to Skyrim. I heard this word a lot, “radian AI”, like it’s some new magic trick just invented for this game. In reality, Skyrim has a watered down quest system. It also has 8 or so item slots including weapons (half of Daggerfalls). It also features no spell maker and a seriously broken enchanting method, that only becomes good (compared to random loot) at 100 skill. Other direct comparisons include it’s 18 skills (half of Daggerfall) and total lack of any attributes such as strength. The main quest can be done in a single night if that’s all your doing without much strain, where Daggerfall and another game Morrowind took night after night of progress.

 

Looking at Skyrims other features, it lacks interesting joinable factions, except a cheesy werewolf clan that is somehow despised (WW is KOS) and revered at the same time. The guards are like Daggerfall somewhat too good at detective work, in Skyrim they have a telepathic link that is able to know and comment on every single skill, ability and action you do anywhere in the game. (Silentcity NPC mod request, yes please). Unfortunely other NPCS want to tell my archmage to join the mage college and two-bit rogues and wolves do not recognize that I’m not to be toyed with. (Ofcourse that is the same with all of these games)

 

Like Oblivion magic does not scale with higher difficulty making pure mages suffer effective caps, while in any other game mages become truly excellent at those peak levels. Lastly, the higher level destruction skills just are not efficient or useful enough to be using. Other magic schools have lost almost all usefulness, no more carry, no more decent lighting, no more night sight, no open doors (ES2/3) or locks (ES2/3/4). God forbid levitate or regeneration (ES2/3)

 

About the perk system, I will offer a comparison to Fallout3. Fallout 3 had useful perks that gave things like damage resistance, extra carry, critical hit improvement, stat improvement and lots of other useful things that made developing a character a lot of fun. Fallout 3 perk system is the dam bomb, I would have imported it directly into Skyrim, changing things like radition resist to magic. and Guns to bows. Dam. it's done.. but no...

 

Skyrim magic perks should have scaled damage (and mana) and not just mana cost and contains far too many useless perks. Destruction mages are gimps at high levels. The blacksmith tree that tries to force you to use either light or heavy armor. Why? The player already has to make a huge investment into either light or heavy armor, why do trade skills need as many perks as combat abilities? (I wanted to make armor for my followers) Also, if you’re a heavy armor user and find that perfect enchanted magic glass sword, forget it, you are forced to sell it because you can’t improve it. Enchanting and Alchemy has a built in abuse and make stupid items that should have been caught by the developers before it was even given a second thought. Enchanting until 100 is a really sub par, blah skill, alchemy requires hours and hours of picking stuff and an investment of a lot of perks to make it even able to level. The Speech tree is a joke, all in all the whole perk system is total crap. You cannot be a good melee unless you blacksmith yourself because if you don’t improve your gear your going to be doing really subpar damage. Oh, and all artifacts in Skyrim are more or less crap and you won’t be able to improve them until you unlock daedric, at which point your going to be finding stuff that is better. In short, too many Skyrim perks are useless, or available at the wrong time in the game to be useful.

 

I was really looking forward to playing a dual wield character in Skyrim, but the hotkey code is so half assed and broken that I had to give it up. Infact Skyrims whole UI is a game breaking immersion sucking prostitute.

 

Ok, into gameplay immersion. When I played Daggerfall, I nearly crapped myself a dozen times (arch liches), same with Morrowind (those Ash guys), and Fallout (ghouls are just badass, the most baddass of any of these games). There only seems to be 3 dungeon enemies in Skyrim, some sort of magic user robe guy, some bandit guys and some draeger guys. And what’s the deal with being able to 1 hit skeletons at any level in Skyrim? Also, why don’t my followers level up? Why do they carry invisibile gear that clones itself every time I invited them to adventure? How does a multimillion dollar company make so many mistakes with a game engine that had been used for 3 other games already? I’m completely in the dark.

 

Final note, at least it doesn’t suck as much as Dragonage 2.

 

So, in review, Skyrim has not improved on anything, and everything I can quanitify is worse. Except for graphics, but after 15 years, I’m going to have to assume the graphics are going to be better than Daggerfall, or 10 years after Morrowind. In fact these graphics don’t look any different to me than FO3 or ES4, and obviously it’s the same code rehashed for each game.

 

 

Finally note, I got more than 50 hours out of Skyrim, because quite frankly I haven’t seen anyone else making decent RPG games and I was hungry to play one. I’m just sorry that the one RPG that could have been an amazing product is so god dam broken on so many levels that it can only be rated as a “decent time-killer” instead of amazing. But it's better than DA2, which sucked so badly, I couldn't finish.

 

Basically patch 1.2 forever sums up the skill of whoever has the reigns at Bethesda.

Edited January 6, 2012 by dragonalumni

[MonsoonWave]

Don't forget the economy. Wish I could donate it all to some beggar, who would go buy some fancy clothes and stuff and rub it in the face of the Jarl.

 

All in all, I am enjoying this game immensely.

[gahnzz]

I understand the cathartic aspect of posting your thoughts... but honestly, I don't see what you expect the community to do either than applaud you because they agree or come to Skyrim's defence and take apart your arguments.

 

If you aren't happy with the product and have no interest in modding to make it better - well, play a different game.

 

Or mod (there are tons of jobs that modders can do so "i can't code" is not really an excuse.

 

That's all I've got.

[dragonalumni]

i wasn't expecting the community to do anything. however, perhaps you could link me a creation kit for es5... oh wait, it doesn't exist. lol

[Matth85]

i wasn't expecting the community to do anything. however, perhaps you could link me a creation kit for es5... oh wait, it doesn't exist. lol

It's out soon, and you don't need it to mod. You are slightly limited, but not by too muchm

[dragonalumni]

I think modding is a great way to add something to the game or fix it up. So is being a wiki editor. I'm active in both, but admittedly in the "getting feet wet" bit of it. The thing is a game shouldn't have to be modded to work right and has nothing really to do with the comparison of these games or original topic. :)

 

At several points I said Es5 isn't "worthless", it's just way below what it should be. If anyone wants to say I'm wrong go for it.

[abaris]

I understand the cathartic aspect of posting your thoughts... but honestly, I don't see what you expect the community to do either than applaud you because they agree or come to Skyrim's defence and take apart your arguments.

 

 

And that's what a discussion board is for - discussion.

 

I partly share the OPs views, but the main problem won't go away anytime soon. Back in the days game companies were actually run by people, who made the games they wanted to play. Nowadays it's shareholder companies run by suits, who probably haven't played a game in their lives and employ pollsters to look for the perfect game for the masses. That has to lead to a decrease in quality.

 

That goes for the whole entertainment business.

[Matth85]

I partly share the OPs views, but the main problem won't go away anytime soon. Back in the days game companies were actually run by people, who made the games they wanted to play. Nowadays it's shareholder companies run by suits, who probably haven't played a game in their lives and employ pollsters to look for the perfect game for the masses. That has to lead to a decrease in quality.

 

That goes for the whole entertainment business.

 

Is it suprising? A game cost multi-millions and 5-6 years to produce. Now add the fact the game industry got some economic problems, which they blame to piracy. They can't be bothered to make games "they" want, or make a game that would be "awesome". They need to make the game they think most people will buy. It's all about survival. Only companies such as Blizzard can make games "for fun" today, and not even they do it.

 

Game industry is a very hard industry, and can't be run by "fun" anymore. Now it needs to run on money. Recently this shows very clearly: Every good franchise is being slaughtered to press out enough money so the company can survive another 5 years to make a new game.

 

That said,

The thing is a game shouldn't have to be modded to work right and has nothing really to do with the comparison of these games or original topic.

There have yet to be a TES game that runs smoothly without at least 4 patches and 5 mods. Arena and Daggerfall was known to be more bugs than gameplay, and it gave the game a charm. Morrowind was horrid at release, at least for me. Oblivion was quite bad as well. Skyrim is so-so on bugs for me, but it lacks a lot of RPGish elements, and it misses the powergaming feature every TES game have had.

 

So, for your statement: a TES game has always, and will always, be "unfinished" untill modded. The games are simply too huge to be polished by Bethesda. I don't mind that though, it gives me more to do.

[supafuzz]

^ right.

the butthurtedness comes from the serious 11-11-11 hype and the promises (or maybe just implications) of how much more expansive and creative the game would be when in reality it is less open ended than its predecessors. it seems that the real hard work was done and it was just simple stuff that was looked over in the interest of shifting more product (this is not a stab at Bethesda - they gotta do what they gotta do and i congratulate them on their success with this game.)

in some ways i preferred New Vegas to Fallout 3 so if a third party company were to do something similar for Skyrim, use the seamless gameplay and beautiful environments in a more non-linear story, we'd all be in for a serious treat!

[abaris]

 

Is it suprising?

 

 

I don't find it the least bit surprising.

 

But I think the reasons for the current development are different. Shareholder companies don't go out and buy a company just because it's there. They buy to either eliminate competition (which has happened pretty often) or to get their hands on some very successful franchise. Everything else is just hot PR air.

 

I don't think it's a good development from the customer's point of view, since todays market is flooded with second rate merchandise with eye candy dressing. The only difference being the expected stupidity level of the target audience.

 

^ right.

the butthurtedness comes from the serious 11-11-11 hype and the promises (or maybe just implications) of how much more expansive and creative the game would be when in reality it is less open ended than its predecessors.

 

The question is, why do you let yourself get hyped? I always warned the hypsters against skyhigh expectations.

Edited January 6, 2012 by abaris