What Did Skyrim Do Right?

[slainia]

In a good way. The quest is one of the ones that made me sad, although i feel they could've expanded on it more. Probably one of those...do the quest enough to make people imagine the rest things, but i wanted a more concrete resolution. Pretty well done imo, especially in terms of impact, and even to some extent creepiness.

[Rational314]

If people can't discuss with out petty insults, and personal attacks this thread will be locked and punishments will be handed out

[scottym23]

-Sidequests

 

I'm glad someone mentioned this haha. I am going through a traditional Nordic character and preparing him for the Dragonborn dlc before it's release, and stumbled upon some extremely enjoyable and thrilling quests that you could only partake in through exploration. It never ceases to amaze me how people can say Skyrim isn't how an rpg should be made, or that it sucks because of the combat. I hardly ever even notice the combat because i'm trying to kill the people as fast as I possibly can so I can take a look at the scenery and epic world of Skyrim lol.

[Riprock]

Skyrim?

 

1) No real "good" or "bad" path. I really like the 'gray area" that Skyrim allows you. I look back at all the "Empire vs. Stormcloaks, which are right" discussions, and to me, that right there means that the decision was a hard one for players, and that's because the dev team made it that way. That's a good thing to me- decisions mattered to the players. They have less impact on the character, but making the player think and talk and consider is a good thing

 

2) Seamlessness in the story forks. In this regard I mean the CW quests and how they run if you're also doing the MQ. I don't want to post any spoilers (yeah, but some people still may not know) but I'm talking about the way you'd never know that certain events were missed if you weren't doing both at the same time- the game neatly blends that in without any sense of anything missing by the player. That is good story branching

 

3) Overall subtlety of skills. I don't like Skyrim's system better than OB or MW, or less than either. It is different and has it's pluses and minuses. However I like the subtlety of the perks vs. skill level. I have different characters that use perk trees differently- that seems to have been the whole point. I like the freedom of that. I can have high skill in say one handed, but I don't need to spend a single perk in it

 

4) Placement of towns. They make logical sense in most cases now. Take Skingrad in OB for example- this big town with a wide avenue right in it's middle. But that avenue is far removed from the main road. Makes no sense to me at all. It's location and situation is wrong. Skyrim uses more logic in location

 

5) Combat is more fun. Not that any TES game is a showcase for it.

 

6) Appearance of caves and dungeons. I dislike their linearity, but they sure do look better

 

7) atmosphere and lighting

[arcanewizard]

I've made plenty of anti-Bethesda posts since Skyrim came out, since they rushed the game to meet a silly deadline, and somehow still got lauded for it by all the reviewers. There are plenty of good reasons to be disappointed in TES V, but you're right, they did do a few things well.

 

they didn't rush the game...i had the game the day it came out and it played really good for me on the xbox...its a huge game so there's no avoiding some glitches but nothing close to gamebreaking...the patch..that came out after...patch 1.2 i think it was...that patch did kinda break the game cause it messed up magic resistance and some other things it made pretty bad but that stuff got resolved on the next couple patches...but i played the game from the get go and it played really good on the xbox...and still does.

[JanusForbeare]

There's plenty of proof that Bethesda rushed the game if you dissect it in the CK. For example, the civil war was originally intended to be dynamic, with both sides attacking and defending. Also, the campaigns for each hold were intended to consist of battles for villages, forts and finally the hold capital - which was scaled back to simple fort battles in most cases. A number of side-quests were similarly cut short or scrapped altogether. I wouldn't be surprised if dragons were originally intended to be used as steeds, just to have the mechanic reduced to a single cutscene to meet 11/11/11.

 

The game was reasonably stable upon release, I'll give you that. Of course, as you mention, subsequent updates were not up to the same standards (dragons flying backwards through mountains, anyone?). Another issue that you may not have been aware of as an Xbox player was that the port to PC was a real hack-job. The game was clearly not designed to be used with a mouse, which is demonstrated through the immense popularity of SkyUI. Even professional reviewers (who were, for the most part, $trangely $upportive of the game) commented on the sorry state of the port.

 

If you look closely, there's plenty of evidence that Beth rushed the game to meet their eye-catching release date. Not all of this would be evident to console gamers - after all, they're the demographic the game was designed to please.

Edited November 9, 2012 by JanusForbeare

[billyro]

One of the best things was the animation blending (what's the technical name for it?) which just does wonders for the game. Still a bit peeved that I can't walk the same speed as NPCs though...

[Rossum]

Me? I really like the books and bookshelves, specifically how you can find a bookshelf, put books in it, and the game auto-shelves them. Its nice that I can store things in useful containers without them disappearing completely from the game world. My decorating skills are fairly poor and I can't imagine myself individually placing potions and items on shelves, but its nice that there is a sort of compromise between hand-placing items and shoving them all into chests.

 

I'm sure there are mods for things like auto-sorting alchemy shelves or whatever, but the fact that the bookshelves work in the default game is really nice.

[Calamachus]

It's a long list to me. The best way to address it is probably to sum up a lot of what others have said, just with some caveats -

 

The idea that it was 'rushed'. No game or product is ever finished. If the things we see traces of in Skyrim were finished there would have been other things being worked on that were not. At some point you have to draw a line. I don't think Skyrim (at least for the PC, where I play it) was 'rushed'. The core of the game worked and gave me no issues. Where TES games since Morrowind have really shown is in the idea of creating a world, engine and environment about which players can play but more importantly mod new things in.

 

The lists of things that were in Oblivion and Morrowind - almost all of these things are mentioned as MODS that were out for Morrowind and Oblivion. Taken as a stock game Skyrim adds tons. It out-performs a fully modded (and I had 250+ mods) Oblivion in terns of environment and functionality. So they moved the mark forward, then let us mod on top of that. That's amazing.

 

I'm still let down by the lack of attributes and skills but that's clearly a personal preference thing. At this point with ACE and the dozen or so mods of that sort I play with I'm pretty contented.

 

I'm pushing 800 hours of play time in Skyrim. 767 as of right now and I'm about to start a weekend with some new mods. ME2 got 22 hours out of me. The 4 Assassins Creed games I've played total maybe 80 hours, so 10 times the enjoyment I've gotten from 4 Ubisoft titles put together. The game itself is amazing - it's a phenomenal foundation. The support for modding allows it to become epic. That is what is important to me - the ability to take something that's enjoyable for 20-40 hours and pimp it into something that will probably see 1,000 hours of my life consumed in playing dress up and RAWR KILLZ IT! Oh Steam, why must you show me the hours I've played? Why must you make me see that? Why?!?

[sajuukkhar9000]

There's plenty of proof that Bethesda rushed the game if you dissect it in the CK. For example, the civil war was originally intended to be dynamic, with both sides attacking and defending. Also, the campaigns for each hold were intended to consist of battles for villages, forts and finally the hold capital - which was scaled back to simple fort battles in most cases. A number of side-quests were similarly cut short or scrapped altogether. I wouldn't be surprised if dragons were originally intended to be used as steeds, just to have the mechanic reduced to a single cutscene to meet 11/11/11.

 

The game was reasonably stable upon release, I'll give you that. Of course, as you mention, subsequent updates were not up to the same standards (dragons flying backwards through mountains, anyone?). Another issue that you may not have been aware of as an Xbox player was that the port to PC was a real hack-job. The game was clearly not designed to be used with a mouse, which is demonstrated through the immense popularity of SkyUI. Even professional reviewers (who were, for the most part, $trangely $upportive of the game) commented on the sorry state of the port.

 

If you look closely, there's plenty of evidence that Beth rushed the game to meet their eye-catching release date. Not all of this would be evident to console gamers - after all, they're the demographic the game was designed to please.

Umm no, the CK only shows that Bethesda decided to cut large parts of the civil war for the same reason they cut the large nobility questline from Oblivion.

 

The civil war got so large, with so many features, and so much stuff you had to micromanage, that it detracted from the rest of the games quests, and guilds.

 

When you have a game like skyrim, with many different guilds/sidequests, and you have this ONE questline that's so large and consuming that it detracts from the others, any good game developer will cut that questline down.

 

It has nothing to do with rushing the game, it has to do with simple good game design.

Edited November 9, 2012 by sajuukkhar9000