What Did Skyrim Do Right?

[sajuukkhar9000]

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

 

OR bad game design. The civil war was terrible and most of the other guild quests were too.

They made the guild quests better then the ones in Oblivion, so I give them credit for real improvement.

 

And it was a war, what did you expect beyond "go take over enemy held X"?

Edited November 10, 2012 by sajuukkhar9000

[Helmic]

Having played Oblivion, Skyrim was a definite improvement, first and foremost the leveling system. It's less that Skyrim's is some sort of innovation and more that Oblivion required you to bend over backwards and kiss your own ass to have a good character. Optimizing meant avoiding doing fun stuff like fighting and instead making sure you've moved the exact amount needed to get enough skill increases in Athletics to get +5 to a stat; it wasn't fun, got in the way of the game, and it made little sense. Skyrim has its own quirks but it's much more organic and fun when you focus more on specific abilities like decapitating heads or casting silently rather than just tossing a point into a stat. People don't geek out over the stats in DnD builds any more than what's necessary, they focus on the feats and spells and items that actually make a character awesome. A bipedal cat that goes around killing dragons with its bare fists is badass and is what makes him memorable, not his choosing to make INT a dumpstat. Combat is still sloppy but since there's so many more ways to approach it (muffle, backstab, switch to twohander, summon flame atronarch, let atronarch tank hits from the big bad, focus on taking out weaker enemies with power attacks, when the atronarch dies RUN FOR IT OH GOD THE EXPLOSION) it's still a lot more fun. Dual wielding and weapon and spell switching is sloppy but still serviceable.

 

And there's of course the essence of why anyone plays Elder Scrolls, going to do one thing and getting distracted wanting to do another. The best way by far is to play the game without fast travel, wandering from one area to another and bumping into interesting little events and discovering caves and bandit camps and farmers who're leading a painted cow to a giant camp so that it maybe won't give them a free ticket for Giant Airlines. It's a brilliant game that has enough content for you to get lost in details.

[slainia]

Optimizing meant avoiding doing fun stuff like fighting and instead making sure you've moved the exact amount needed to get enough skill increases in Athletics to get +5 to a stat; it wasn't fun, got in the way of the game, and it made little sense.

 

l actually like this part, but overall l agree with you.

As for the athletics, l always liked the idea that if l was careful l could begin to tick off enemies by being just out of reach of them. sometimes (in morrowind) i found interesting grottos etc b/c swimming was the best way to level it, too. Lol.

[Lachdonin]

Bethesda's games never do anything 'right'. That's not the point, nor the intent of the deisign. What they do is create a world to adventure in, exploring both a simulated living environment (some of the best our technology can offer) and the essential qualities of the roleplaying dynamic. Sometimes, like Skyrim's magic system, they fall flat. Sometimes, like Skyrim's leveling (and Morrowind's before it) they hit on something gold. But they never, and will never so long as they continue with that philosophy in mind, get something 'Right'.

 

Instead, each game has strengths and weaknesses. Morrowind has a great story, more intuitive and meaningful leveling, creative and wonderful environments and real people (instead of just characters). On the other hand, it had moronic AI, boring combat, broken magic and Cliff Racers. Oblivion had great character customization, beautiful (if depressingly generic) landscapes, Radiant AI made it so the cities seemed more alive, it had more energetic combat and voice acting. On the other hand, it had voice acting, terrible character development, fragmented story focus and putty faces and an overal generic art-set.

 

Skyrim is big and beautiful. The races of Tamriel look like actual different populations of people rather than an assortment of round faced, generics with different colours. Mini-stories abound, with new (for first timers, anyway) discoveries around literally every corner. The Leveling is class-free and unburdened by arbitrary, start-of-game choices, and Perks bring back the potential for the massive variety of skills and equipment that could be found in earlier games. The voice acting is better, with some more generic conversation options rather than everything being story related, which lends its self more to better storytelling. On the downside, the magic system hasn't been so bad since Daggerfall. Characters are still flat compared to pre-voice acting counterparts, Too many story lines equates to none being particularly memorable, and many being clearly under-developed. Dragon spawn-rates make them little better than Cliff Racers.

 

Skyrim, like those before it, has both strong points and weak points. None of its strengths are so perfect that you can claim they were done 'right' and none of its weaknesses are so unrecoverable as to be 'wrong' (except for the lack of Spellmaking, that was, in a word, moronic...). The Elder Scrolls, again, has never been about getting something right, but always striving to explore and expand and try new things. It doesn't always work as planned, but it has always been an interesting ride.