Question about skyrim to the real fans of Bethesda

[ElricOfGrans]

The Companions questline is worse than the Fighters Guild by a million miles but besides that, the factions are pretty good(but a bit short).

 

I would disagree on that one. The Fighters' Guild was awful and arguably the worst faction in Oblivion. It was a huge number of pointless `clear this dungeon' quests punctuated by the occasional almost-decent quest that hints at a plot. The Companions is a series of quests that actually feel like they mean something and have a very clear plot right from the beginning. The trouble with The Companions is that it is not The Fighters' Guild, but tries to sell itself as such. As anyone who has done it knows, the quests revolve around something entirely different. It handles that entirely different thing quite well, but you are guaranteed to be disappointed if you expect The Fighters' Guild.

[PsxMeUP]

I think most of us will agree that Oblivion at the time was better than Skyrim is now. Skyrim is a dumbed down version of Oblivion. It removed classes and attributes and added a very rudimentary crafting feature (also dumbed down compared to other games). It almost looks like they tried to add many small things but all of it is half-assed (the war, cooking, death animations, companions, etc.). Gameplay has slightly been improved, though. Oblivion's gameplay was akin to GTA's hand-to-hand combat system, i.e. painful. Skyrim feels more natural. Cities got nerfed compared to Oblivion. But it has dragons, so that's cool. :teehee:

 

So:

 

Positive:

Dragons

Better combat

 

Negative:

No more attributes

Crappier guilds

 

Half-assed:

Companions

Cities

The civil war

Cooking

Kill animations

Enchanting

Crafting

Dual-wield

Magic

Weapons (no spears, morning stars, staffs, cross-bows, halberds, throwing, etc.)

Edited April 14, 2012 by PsxMeUP

[masal57]

Hi, sorry for my english,.

My own opinion.

I love the games that give such a best loudibrius experience end immersion in plaing them.

By the way, the more complex, the more options end moddability the more chanche of bug they have.

Skyrim, even if implemented some feature of mods for oblivion, has for sure the best apparence and the worse bug probability; for a main reason: it load end save many scripts got by mods inside the saves, and this made it very fragile. I hope as soon beth whould get out a tool that can clean saves by bloated end fragments of scripts coming by deleted or upgraded mods.

Even if is very pleasant play with so many mods, isn't a good thing a game needs contributes of many and many modders to improve itself.

We also love so much, either beth games, Mass effect(all) for same immersive choice.

PS: pay attencion at fact that Oblivion round on same pc at 19-24 fps, when skyrim rise quite to 40...

Edited April 14, 2012 by masal57

[vertex23]

No.

 

I'm sure half the posts in this thread already described why it's not.

[ENDZYM3]

Is Skyrim, for the real Bethesda die-hards out there, more challenging, exciting, creative, innovative than what we've seen so-far ? Skyrim has great reviews but I'd prefer some opinions from real gamers.

 

Fans of Bethesda are more likely to enjoy their games, making their opinion less valuable than one who simply plays games that he/she enjoys.

I don't follow the logic here....

[shotgun188]

Is Skyrim, for the real Bethesda die-hards out there, more challenging, exciting, creative, innovative than what we've seen so-far ? Skyrim has great reviews but I'd prefer some opinions from real gamers.

 

Fans of Bethesda are more likely to enjoy their games, making their opinion less valuable than one who simply plays games that he/she enjoys.

I don't follow the logic here....

Well I think he's just trying to filter out the people who hate Bethesda and come onto these forums to say how much they hate them in almost every post they make.

[RedRavyn]

@ Elsarian: My comment regarding the fragility of Skyrim is based upon the atrocious quest programming. Almost every single primary quest (Main Quest and the various faction quests) can be permanently broken in the vanilla game by just doing what you're supposed to be doing in this game. Bethesda touts Skyrim as an "open world", encouraging exploration, but if you do much of that you WILL break a quest. It's not a matter of "if", but of "when".

 

Many of these bugs are well-documented. Most of them are the result of interactions with "radiant quests" and the fact that various questlines are interwoven so that they can interfere with each other if you don't do them in the specific order the developers want you do them. Unfortunately, there's no official guide out there telling you the preferred quest order. Continue that with quests which have programming bugs that can render them incompletable, through no fault of the player. Top that off with quest items that are placed in-game from the beginning and if picked up without having the related quests, will bug those quests (some of them so that they can't even be finished).

 

The only other ES game I've ever played is Oblivion. I thought that was buggy, but compared to Skyrim it's a well-oiled machine. Sneeze in the wrong way while you're playing Skyrim and you're likely to break something. I suggest that you've been incredibly lucky if, in playing this game for 800 hours, you've never encountered a bug. More likely, you've just playing the game linearly, letting Bethesda hold your hand from quest to quest like they really did, even though the hype was about "open world" where you can do whatever you want. I can do that, too. However, I don't like like to play the game the same way each time. I was a nice little robot the first time through -- and still managed to break several important quests just by doing what I was supposed to do (and no mods installed).

 

I've played this game without mods (four playthroughs without, so far), and I've encountered many of the documented bugs. In eleven playthroughs I've had to abandon many of them because of quest, and even game-breaking bugs, most of which could not be fixed from the console and none of which were even remotely mod-related.

 

@ shotgun188: No, my comments aren't exaggerations. They're based upon personal experience and frustration, as well as documentation on these bugs. There's a reason we have an Unofficial Skyrim Patch, now. Bethesda is NOT fixing all the major bugs, and some of their patches are breaking other things. Search the wiki for various quest articles and actually read the Notes and Bugs sections. Most of the bugs are easily reproducible, and most of them have not been addressed by patches.

 

No, I don't have the latest patch. I put Steam in offline mode as soon as I read the horror stories of the first 1.5 patch, and it's been offline ever since. It will remain offline until Bethesda quits releasing half-baked patches that require additional patches to fix the previous ones. I don't own a pair of rose-colored glasses. I see things for what they are, evaluate them rationally, and call it like I see it. Like a lot of the people who are saying Skyrim is God's gift to gamers, I got taken in by the hype. Fool me once, Bethesda, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I'm not going to get fooled twice. Eye-candy does not make up for the reduction in features, although I'm sure it wows the kids who play their games. I still like Skyrim. It has potential, but it's going to be up to the modding community to make this happen -- to say nothing of fixing things that Bethesda will never get around to fixing.

 

How about the next game in the series, assuming I'm still alive when it gets released (I'm actually an old guy -- 63)? There will likely be hype. If so, I won't get taken in by it. Maybe Bethesda will have learned from the backlash they've gotten from their users about Skyrim. Maybe they'll just say what's true about the game. Maybe they'll release a game that does their company justice, rather than continuing down the road of dumbing it down episode-by-episode. If so, my faith in this company will be restored. I'm not a die-hard fan of Bethesda. I'm a die-hard user of Bethesda games since I first lit off Oblivion. That's not quite the same thing. I won't buy a new Bethesda release just because Bethesda released it, although I'm sure a lot of their fans will. I'll buy it if it's a good game -- "good" in the various ways that someone who has been gaming since the late 60s considers "good".

[ElricOfGrans]

The only other ES game I've ever played is Oblivion. I thought that was buggy, but compared to Skyrim it's a well-oiled machine. Sneeze in the wrong way while you're playing Skyrim and you're likely to break something.

 

 

Seriously? Unless you ran Oblivion with with the final patch and the Unofficial Patch, every single quest could be broken by (a) doing another quest, or (b) randomly interacting with the world. Some quests were liable to break on their own for no reasonable explanation. If you *did* play it with those patches, you are comparing a fixed game with an unpatched/no-unofficial-fixes game which is going to obviously create an unfair bias in your opinion. While this does exist in Skyrim, it is nowhere near as prevalent nor as easy to do as in Oblivion. Just check the quest section in UESP to see hard documentary proof of what I am saying.

[Elsarian]

The only other ES game I've ever played is Oblivion. I thought that was buggy, but compared to Skyrim it's a well-oiled machine. Sneeze in the wrong way while you're playing Skyrim and you're likely to break something. I suggest that you've been incredibly lucky if, in playing this game for 800 hours, you've never encountered a bug. More likely, you've just playing the game linearly, letting Bethesda hold your hand from quest to quest like they really did, even though the hype was about "open world" where you can do whatever you want. I can do that, too. However, I don't like like to play the game the same way each time. I was a nice little robot the first time through -- and still managed to break several important quests just by doing what I was supposed to do (and no mods installed).

 

I never stated that I have not encountered any bugs. I have never encountered "game breaking" bugs in my entire play through. In the months that I have been playing, I have not once come across the "quest=Alias" issue that so many people are having. The only bugs I have come across are the texture flickering on mountains and mountains only, Navmesh issues, AI Pathing being dumb (Not necessarily a bug, really. Just Bethesda not doing such a good job with it). As long as my game is not going haywire with bugs, then I'm fine. I have simply have not encountered terrible, beyond-belief, bugs that so many people are reporting. Call me lucky if you want.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Elsarian

[RedRavyn]

@ ElricOfGrans: I'm a late-comer to the ES. My first experience with the series was the GOTY edition of Oblivion, so whatever the current patch was with that one, that's what I had. I played through the game, beating the main quest and all the guild quests with no mods installed, including the UOP. I don't remember the order I did them in, except that I did the Thieves Guild first, but I didn't encounter any major bugs that broke any quests.

 

I think my position is very much supported by the UESP, since that's where a lot of my information regarding bugs in quests comes from. The fact that most of these bugs are easily repeatable speaks for itself. They aren't random glitches or caused by mod conflicts. It's why I've mentioned a number of times on this board that you just about have to play Skyrim with the wiki in-hand or you're going to do something which will break a quest.

 

Much more so than in Oblivion, Bethesda has intertwined quests into a hopeless mess. In Oblivion most of the quests were very much "sandboxed" from each other. This is much of the reason for the quest-breaking bugs -- that and the random ways that radiant quests can interact with standard quests and the fact that quest objects are not put in the world when you get a quest, but at the very beginning of the game. Add to this the fact that some of the designers never bothered to "clean up" after a quest is over, and we have additional problems (like quest items staying in inventories after the quest is over).

 

This is, in my opinion, very bad game design.

 

 

@ Elsarian: Let me guess ... you visit the Lucky Old Lady in Bravil once a day and leave an offering, right? Honestly, I don't know how you've avoided the bugs, but whatever you're doing keep doing it like that. There are, I'm sure, gamers who would pay money to know your secret.

 

You're right about the most prevalent terrain-design problems, of course. The pathgridding in Oblivion didn't mesh well at all with the path-finding algorithms in the game engine. People had a lot of issues with companions because of that, but Bethesda, of course, didn't design Oblivion with companions in mind, so this isn't something we could really complain about. In Skyrim, though, I've seen horrible navmesh issues, and companions are supposed to be integral to the Skyrim game. On the other hand, I've also encountered numerous floating objects and tears in the terrain, and I don't have any mods installed that alter such things. The USP has fixed some of these. I doubt Bethesda will get around to fixing the rest. They have the modding community to do that for them.

 

The issues I'm most concerned with, though, are the badly-coded quests. People can defend Bethesda all they want, pointing out the fact that they "had" to rush this game into production to meet a deadline (11-11-11), but that's no excuse for shoddy programming. I've gotten to the point where I expect any given quest to stall out. I can even predict when this is most likely to happen with a lot of them. Most of these can be fixed by transporting key NPCs to another location with the console, or sometimes by disabling and then re-enabling them, but how such basic misbehavior escaped the play-testing leaves me to believe in a source which I trust. I know of one person who was a playtester for Skyrim. He reported many of the bugs which the wiki mentions. All of those bugs, including the quest and game-breaking ones, made it into the first public release. In plain terms, Bethesda shelved the reports of their playtesters, ignoring that input, and rushed a terribly flawed game into production. There's no excuse for that.

 

Essentially, Bethesda released a game which was still in beta to the public as a finished product. This is not defensible. Yes, I know. Microsoft does this with all their software, too. That's not defensible, either. The management of Bethesda should have told the marketing department to take a flying leap off the nearest cliff at the insistence of a Nov. 11, 2011 release date and let the developers do their jobs right. They didn't, and I have to ultimately blame high-level management for the badly-broken game their company released. The hurried patches didn't really fix things, either. They were too intent upon giving us more eye-candy (the additions to the kill moves) than they were in fixing the bugs, and the overhaul of Smithing, as an obvious strong-arm attempt to keep players from grinding levels, was just a fiasco.

 

At this time, I'm satisfied with how the modding community has risen to the challenges, but it's going to be a long time before we find all the little bugs squashed, and we all know that Bethesda won't even bother with those. They didn't in Morrowind. They didn't in Oblivion. They won't in Skyrim, or whatever follows it. I play the game in crisis-management mode. I know how to avoid most of the bugs, now. I've unraveled much of the "inter-meshing" Bethesda did with various quests, and know how to work around them. I still get tripped up occasionally with an unexpected radiant quest that intersects with a primary quest (like two quests targeting the same bandit leader, for instance), but most of those can be worked out satisfactorily -- if you know what you're doing. I've had my fair share of "reload a previous save" and "use the console to advance the quest", but these "fixes" shouldn't be necessary.

 

When all is said and done, Skyrim will be GOTY. It won't be for some years, after the modding community has been working on the game that it will really deserve the title.