Skyrim dumbed down?

[alsoran]

Yes, lots of dumbing down and removing key features of the series.

 

Yes, pretty, but shallow. Spent a long time on skyrim all the same and what I think I miss most is interaction with npc's and consequences of my characters actions. If I steal or kill someone I can pay or talk my way out of it. Mods provide all the fun.

[beeblebub]

my 5 year old son plays it kinda. now when daggerfall was out, i played it round my uncles in 97 and i was 9. i was lost and walk away after like 5 minutes. thats what my uncle keeps telling me, lol (he's a super hardcore TES fan, pretty cool)

[DeathCl0ck]

You guy's are looking through rose tinted glasses! If anything Oblivion was the game that brought the series down! Hell I just tried Morrowind for the first time not to long ago and It reminded me of Skyrim right from the get go! The unique handcrafted environments and dungeons, to the way NPC's look and react to you were all very similar! Oblivion on the other hand, had very identical dungeons verging on the point of Copy and pasting. The NPC's were flat and lifeless(And had really weird looking faces as well)! The enemy's leveled with you to the point that leveling was almost useless because you never felt truly powerful! Skyrim Is 200% better than Oblivion in the areas that matter most "To me". However, Oblivion does have more memorable quests than Skyrim does. Which is unfortunate, because if Bethesda put as much effort into the rest of the game it would have been a masterpiece.

[Moraevik]

As a hard-core Oblivion fan, at least of the modded game, I'd have to echo alsoran in saying that Skyrim is pretty, but shallow. I'm not sure that "dumbed down" is the right term for what happened, though. Some aspects of it have certainly been simplified, but others are more complex. It's a mixed bag, but lower on the complexity scale, overall. It's almost as if Bethesda were trying to address the entire 15-50 crowd, but forgot that fifteen-year-old kids can be pretty smart gamers.

 

I think gsmanners hit the nail pretty much on the head, but I'll go on to say that it seems to me like the big quests (main quest and guild quests) have attention deficit disorder. We don't stick to "companion stuff" with the Companions. Instead, we get off on a were-wolf tangeant. Same with the Thieves Guild. Again, we have a secret society buried within it (the Nightingales), and the entire Thieves Guild quest-line revolves around that. I'm surprised that the College of Winterhold quest didn't do the same thing, but it also seemed pretty tangential compared to what I was expecting -- a college where I could study about magic, do some research, and get better as a mage.

 

The Bard's College was just a joke, really. Nothing about its quest had anything to do with performing in any way. I find it ironic that you can get to be Arch Mage and trudge your way though the quest-line as a front-line fighter, or that the Companions eschew magic, but you can become Harbinger and play as a pure mage. At least the Thieve's Guild made sure you had to do some thieving to get through the quest.

 

Oblivion seemed much more focused on the big quests, the Mage Guild somewhat less than the others. The Fighter's Guild adhered more to the spirit of its purpose than any of the guilds in either Oblivion or Skyrim. All of them suffer, I think, from the "we have to give the player intrigue and make him save the guild from certain disaster" mentality that appeared to be the central theme of guild quests in Skyrim, though. Even the main quest couldn't decide what it was about, with the Dragonborn having his puppet strings pulled by Delphine at every step of the way to see to her own personal agenda against the Thalmor, rather than attending to the immediate problem of an invasion of dragons. It didn't help that said "invasion" wasn't really happening, but that there were only infrequent, isolated attacks by dragons on centers of civilization, and even then only one at a time. And what's with having the Dragonborn mediating in the civil war, or even having to take sides in it? Like I said -- attention deficit disorder. The Oblivion Crisis seemed like a real crisis, escalating through the game to a potentially world-shattering end. The "Dragon Crisis" wasn't much of a crisis at all. In all, the quests in Skyrim seem disjointed and watered down to me.

 

The game system, itself, is definitely watered down. Much of the functionality was removed from Skyrim, relative to previous ES games. Yes, it makes the game easier to play. Morrowind had a pretty steep learning curve, from what I understand. Oblivion was a lot more complex than the games I played before it (primarily Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Portal, and Borderlands). Personally, I enjoyed that complexity. I haven't played Fallout 3, yet, but from what I've heard its a better game than Skyrim in many aspects. Basically, I think Skyrim is a step backward in the ES series of games, even though it offers more eye candy. I hope that Bethesda comes to realize that eye candy doesn't insure the stability of a franchise and that they bring back more of the Oblivion feel to the next Elder Scrolls game.

 

In spite of all this, Skyrim is a good game. Not a great game. It would have been a great game had the functionality of Oblivion been retained. It outshines Oblivion in the attention to detail taken in the creation of the environment. As a lot of people have pointed out in this and other topics, Oblivion's ruins and caves were repetitive to the point of being almost predictable. That's not so much the case in Skyrim. I still see a few places where sections of a ruin or cave are obviously being reused, but mostly the developers have taken great care to dress up the vanilla layouts so that almost every place has its own character and atmosphere. I think that by fourth or fifth play-through most of us in Oblivion had memorized the tile sets and how they fit together, from just playing the game. That's a lot harder to do in an enriched environment like we get with Skyrim.

[slzy]

The Good:

 

Amazing art

Good sound

A few new things

 

The Bad:

 

Shallow and infantile characters, plot lines and quests

Poor writing (compounded by using the same 5 voice actors for everything). Seriously if you are not 15 years old the content is really childish and frankly boring.

Awful animations

Very shallow and un-challenging generally.

Lack of consequence or change in the environment as the story unfolds. Personified by the clueless NPC's. Bethesda created a world and populated it, but never provided the glue to make it believable or interesting. Shame!

'Little' things that ruin immersion completely: follower AI, lack of faction checking, lack of divergence in quests, rampant play style homogenisation and imbalances for the ADHD crowd.

 

The main things I can overlook, as I did with FO:NV as long as the story is fun, believable and immersive and has actual divergence based on player actions/choices. The way NV used factions was far superior to the 'any old iron go fetch 5 mammoth tusks' crap in Skyrim.

 

When designing and writing any kind of game story/quest I got three rules:

 

1. Allow for violent/non violent quest solving (playstyles matter!)

2. Stealth, brute force, environmental interaction solutions (thinking required)

3. Divergent storyline. Decisions effect outcomes. Outcomes matter to the world.

 

Skyrim doesn't bother with any of that. Instead they kind of presume you are just here to hack n slash for an hour or so before you get bored and go do your homework. Its a game aimed squarely at short attention span males aged 13-20 with an xbox360. Which is sad. But hey ..

 

FO: NV is still a masterpiece and easily the best Bethesda-published gamebyro game.

[Thepeon]

well I just wanna add my opinion that is just a simpel one I played both Morrowind and Oblivion and skyrim and yes Skyrim maybe a bit dumb down but for me it is a bit of good I wanna play the game and have fun not spend 20h to learn how to play the freaking game. >.<

Also dumbing it down makes to game attractive to a wider audience witch is good making the game more popular witch I see as a good thing and not a bad thing.

[chuckskyline]

I was extremely let down by nearly all of the quests in Skyrim:

 

The mages guild/companions/thieves guild/main quest/civil war

 

the dark brotherhood, I liked the most, but they still screwed it up a little bit..

 

 

The Dark Brotherhood with the end: I mean you are the listener and yet you do all of the work? The listener was to listen to the night mother, then tell the speaker, and have the "pawns" do the killing. I think a balance of that: maybe higher end jobs require the speaker/listener get involved.

 

The thieves guild: instead of a major heist, the nightingale thing blew hard. I mean in oblivion you freaking rip off the imperial palace.. here you get some cool armor.. really? Where is my major heist?

 

 

 

[Cthuloot]

I just read through this and can now pin point my gripe with the game. It's the ADD in all the damn quests. I cannot safely say I've done everything. Like I still haven't done ANY of the DB stuff or even the Civil War quest (That's probably bad, but neither really interested me.) But the main quest alone I feel like there was just too much going on all the time, any nothing was really looked into farther than it's face value. I mean really... I can sum up the Main Quest's entire plot in less than 2 minutes.

 

Oh no, you're a prisoner about to get killed! ZOMG! Dragon guys! Run away lol

Cool we escaped even though there was never actually a possibility of either of us dying. Let's go talk to my friend!

My friend wants you to talk to the Jarl. Also, get involved in this war you know nothing about!

Jarl wants you get a a rock. Yay we got a rock. Oh and there was a spider!

ZOMG! Another dragon just happened to show up the second you got here.

Wow! You're apparently the Dragonborn! Oh and some old guys are screaming from on top of a mountain for you!

Yay. You get to walk up a pointlessly and stupidly long path. Enjoy that 30 minutes of gameplay!

Wow bro, you ARE the Dragonborn, who would have guessed. We could teach you more now, but go get an horn for us...

Oh no! It's not there! Better do what this creepy random note says. Even though there's no way anybody who didn' have whirlwind sprint could have gotten in here.

Oh by the way the Blades are still a thing. Yeah, you're one of use now. Let's go kill some dragons

Oh yeah there's these elf guys. They wear black robes so they're bad guys.

Okay we didn't actually learn anything, go save my friend who I'm just now remembering exists and knows stuff about flying lizards.

Oh no! More bad guy elves are here! Good thing Esbern is essential lol

Hey, there's this super awesome base, let's go there.

lol jk this base sucks

Surprise! There'a nother dragon on the tall mountain! More climbing!

Go get a scroll because somehow being an awesome dragon I forgot the shout that basically wrecks every member of my species

Surprise! The Elder Scroll doesn't blind you, welcome back bro!

Oh no! Alduin is showing up just in time. Good thing you JUST learned that awesome shout!

Alduin ran away, better go capture a dragon!

"lol You're the Thane, you can't capture a dragon here!"

By the way the war's still a thing. Better negotiate a peace treaty, because apparently that has to be negotiated, despite dragons murdering everybody. Oh and you should kill our one inside guy. The dragon that's helping us. Do it for the lolz

Yay! We caught a dragon

Yay! We're riding a dragon

Oh cool a portal to dead people land

OMG mist is everywhere

Oh no! Alduin's here!

Okay, let's only send 3 guys to go with the Dragonborn!

Alright guys one the count of three shout!

"Friendship is Magic!" (I SERIOUSLY hated that bit of the quest. I stopped playing there for a month. Seriously... What the actual ****?)

Yay! He's dead! Okay time to send you back to the real world!

Yay! Some of the dragons might be actually friendly maybe.

lol Nope! They're all still hostile!

2 weeks pass.

"Dragonborn who? What all this about Alduin? Nope. Never heard of him."

[Brandy1123]

Promiser you are absolutely rediculous. What you posted is absurd. How could you be so insensitive and mindless in what you wrote. You forgot a few key things ;) . If I may be so bold, I'll add them in a not so sequenced and time lineated type order.

 

Radiant quest you can't avoid - go kill a "thing" in the cave, ruins, or camp.

Radiant quest you can't avoid - thing taken/done out of sequence. Quest breaks.

Radiant quest you can't avoid - thing taken/done out of sequence, The Sequal. Thing won't leave inventory

Radiant quest you can't avoid - a quest you already did, go do it again.

Mindless, skill-less currior with GPS tracking shows up

Chicken catches you, go to prison

 

 

 

very funny (sadly accurate) game sequence you posted. :teehee: Kudos to you!!! :thumbsup:

[BCbrad]

Even Oblivion's side quests had great depth, I remember being disgusted with myself for wiping out an entire village. Albeit, it was unknowingly and I was on drugs. I left feeling terrible... Skyrim, killem' all!!!