Mostly i don't mind the "dumbing down" in terms of skills vs attributes (the fact that they were so separate always seemed a bit odd to me) but I do wish they had expanded on a few more things rather than reducing them. I also quite like the alchemy system though it would be nice if there was an extra section in the Journal to list effects of stuff you've not got in your inventory and if cooking was something you had to find or come up with recipies for rather than having them all from the off.

There are things I don't like though, such as the lack of clothing customisation compared to Morrowind where you could pick out pretty much everything. Mainly it's annoying because I'm playing a female for the first time this time and she looks silly and pretty cold wearing nothing on her legs. t would be much better if you had the option of wearing skirt / trousers as well as the armour set and it's clearly lies that they sacrificed this to get more NPCs and armour types because there are less than Morrowind. Plus it was fun to explore and quest for a whole set of Deadric or Glass.

One thing that would have been good would have been having your stamina drain slowly in snow storms unless you were wearing fur. They hinted at such years ago when they were first talking about Skyrim, along with the idea of drifting snow and a whole bunch of other stuff but obviously the idea got canned along with so much other cool stuff.

Then there is the fast travel. Admittedly it is way better than Oblivion where there was just no point not using it as there was nothing to discover between key areas but it would have been nice to have had more travel options than "coach" or insta teleport. Part of the fun in Morrowind was figuring out the best way to get to other places via mages, scrolls, boats, striders and more. I was at least expecting coach or dog sled. Related to this I wish they'd put in Mark / Recall too. They say it's so you don't break the dungeons but I say if you break them then tough - it's the gamer's own fault.

I was also hoping for a bit more customization of houses, even if it was just like the Saint's Row 2 style where you can pick elements from 3 sets (though they've got rid of that in the third one, which is a small shame).

I do have other issues with the game too, like the bad UI (and it's bad for console AND PC, not just PC), the over hyped then hashed out elements (snow, graphics, radiant story, size of towns and crafting for example). Overall I am enjoying it but it's sad because had they looked at what people were hoping for (and implemented it) it could easily have been the best game ever made, pleasing both fans and newcomers alike but instead they made some really bad decisions and we get something which has some great elements but generally is not quite as good for the time as Morrowind was (and in some ways still is).

After reading the OP and 20 of these posts the last week, I skipped the 7 pages of comments, but I'm sure not the only who thinks the OP sounds like a 12 year old who think he is being accused of being a 10 year old. I mean in the title and "what could have been the best game ever."

Take a step back and realize you bought a $60 single player game, you didn't buy a house or have surgery go wrong.

The only thing positive thing we lost from Oblivion was longer Guild questlines. Attributes made OB harder to play than it needed to be. The attribute system was not about being smart it was tedious and nearly gamebreaking (well it was gamebreaking my on my first two attempts).

Are we even sure the OP is playing the same game, I found that adept difficulty is pretty hard in certain situations.


Agree 100% there.

This is probably the most pretentious thread I've ever seen.

I am really sick to death of all the dumbing down, simplification description being aimed at people who enjoy playing Skyrim. It's insulting and it doesn't make someone superior to say the game is for dumb people. :flamethrower:

I'm finding plenty of things I have yet to learn about this game. It's quite complicated.

That's all, just sick of it.

:tes:

*slow clap*

Number crunching and tedious +5 modifiers don't make a game fun or a more in-depth RPG. They make it annoying.

As far as RPG's go, Skyrim is a giant leap in the right direction. Becoming the character that you play, through what you actually do in game, not from what class you pick during creation or what attributes you grind for +5 modifiers, is the very essence of an RPG to me.

So what's different then?


No, really, I still have not got a good answer why Skyrim takes "less thought".

You're the first person ive seen say the UI for consoles is bad. i personally love the UI for the console.

Did we play the same game?

I bet 90 percent of the people whining that the game is "dumbed down" either drive (or aspire to drive) a car with an automatic transmission...

Off topic? Perhaps. But I think the same principle applies.

i recently have done a quest where you have to find some diaries wich where lying next to their writers corpses and as soon as i activated the corpse (not the book next to it) the game picked the diary up and opened it.

my thoughts where like: thanks game, wouldnt have found it without your help :brokencomputer:

I'll tell you what a Mage is like 15 levels. Im grinding Endurance while I still can.

....

Now, I'm a Mage.... man, it's dark in here but I can't afford to use my Light spell or I might level up and Personality is useless (especially when Illusion can replace it anyway).

This argument is like saying that the iPhone is a dumbed down version of any older cell phone. Similar to saying I don't like how apple simplified the UI or it used to be that I had to open 5 screens to get to and set the information I had on my phone and now it's so simple a kid could do it. Is the iPhone dumbed down? I think not rather it was made much more intelligent and intuitive. I no longer have go to those 5 screens anymore to do the very thing it was designed to do. Improvement through simplicity.


Skyrim is no different. It offers myself and other gamers the ability to control and customize without the drudgery. It allows us the ability to improve the areas of specialization we wish to use by simply playing the game and not staring at a spread sheet with medieval font adjusting arrows up and down to see other numbers go up with minimal impact. It is like enjoying a Coca Cola without having to know the ingredients.

To me this game is the most immersive Eder Scrolls yet for the very fact that they have simplified (not dumbed down) mechanics that used to take me out of actually playing the game. If I want my sword arm to improve I use my sword arm and I get rewarded for doing so. Now all I have to worry about is which cool sword I want to use to decapitate those bandits. I don't have to deal with an ugly attribute screen 3 levels deep adding numbers to my sword skill every level up netting the exact same result, my sword is better. This is fine by me.

Simplicity does not equal dumb.

Well according to these old school gamers we have these days, who aren't really old school at all, things that are designed to actually make logical sense are magically dumbing down the game.



I can agree with this.
The part where the Greybeards explain shouts to you is the most pathetic thing in the history of TES games, it sounds like they're reading from the game manual.
But all in all the main story has never been that strong in TES games.

My cRPG gaming dates back to Ultima 3 which I completed at 10 years old. What game, specifically, required some great amount of intelligence to understand and complete? Or was your golden age of intelligent gaming before mine with such masterpieces as Zork?

Newsflash you pretentious nerd: cRPG games aren't hard and they really don't require a superior intelligence to play (and win).

I'm sorry you don't like this one but, lucky for you, there's GOG...

Lol exactly

In terms of navigating, it's mostly ok but it still falls foul of rules about making the most use of available space, letting the user know there are more items in a list than are currently displayed, mapping intuitive actions to the primary buttons and reducing the amount of interactions to get to a particular end point.

The worst one for having too many navigations is the skills screen, which would have been loads better if it were zoomed out from the ring of skills so you could see them all at a glance but still focus on 1 in particular, kind of like a carousel system. They could even have kept the swooshy background and moved it when you changed focus to another skill. And why does it always reset back to destruction? Would it really have been so hard to have it remember what you were last looking at?

The favourites menu is probably the worst overall though. There's no reason for it to be so small and uncategorised and there's no reason it has to be activated by one button press and deactivated with another different button. It should be more like how you change weapons in Saint's Row and pretty much every other game with a quick-inventory kind of setup - hold down a button and move the left anologue stick, press primary action button and it uses the item. They could even have done something nifty for categorization by utilizing the d-pad as well.

The fact that primary action buttons do unexpected things depending on the situation is really bad too. I can see that they did that thinking of consistency but that's not always a good idea. If I am looking in a container I want the primary action to be put item in / take item out, not use item. Bees are not tasty.

This is all really basic stuff, the sort of thing I'd expect to be flaky when playing a retro game but this is 2011 and modern games should not have such bad interfaces. Most things have been tried and we know what works and what doesn't so there really is no excuse.

Although OP is unclear on which aspect of the game makes him feel so,I also share his thoughts on characters,dialouges and storyline.

What the? The game feels more like a fairy tale than a fantasy game.I mean,absolute bad vs absolute good.It's something I find really immature.So the Septim Empire was an utopic empire where everybody was treated equally and happy? Brave sons of Skyrim killed the evil evil bad dragons. Altmer are purely evil creatures,and every single one of them approve Thalmor's ways...But Stendarr Vigilants are warriors of Justice,who are doing exactly what Thalmor are doing,banning worship.Ah,but Daedra are evil evil things again,right?No. I don't like this.

1-For a story to go on,I know we need bad guys,but do not make them absolute black. At least give them better reasons for their actions.All the bad guys are after "world domination".Seriously? What will they gain from making everybody suffer pain? What was Alduin's reason for making the mankind suffer? These are unoriginal and shallow reasons.Give me story depth,please.I do not mean lore by that.And also,black chars in white and white chars in black please.Do not make every single Blade honorable,and every Thalmor unreasonable.Bad faction or not,why would Bethesda totally eliminate the already-lacking love for Altmer? (and a totally original race exclusive to TES) I like Altmer,I recognize what Thalmor are doing is wrong,but the game isn't offering me any Altmer I can get on with.

2-Make the quests less linear please.There is no way to do the Thalmor Embassy quest in a peaceful way,for example.Putting away the option to get drunk with the ambassador to persuade her into giving you the stuff you're supoosed to steal,at least make it possible to steal them without fighting anyone.My intention was to steal the reports without killing a single guard,but even with the broken sneaking system,your path always cross at some point which leads to a fight eventually.

3-Bad guys less obvious.The Winterhold College quest was a joke.Agents or people who have secret ambitions are not types that can be recognized in first glance.Same thing for that orphanage quest.Or the mythic dawn collector.

4-The dialouges.They are out of Transformers movies. (hollywood action stuff aimed at teenagers or people under 25) The same arrogant,"I know everything and I talk so cool" approach.This refers to NPC lines mostly,but especially the quest when you meet Paarthnax,the choices were absolutely terrible."Do you know the shout or not?" "I have not come here to make philosophy with you" "I don't care,just give me the shout" "You are taking too long" and things among those lines popped up pretty often in that dialouge.
If you are still rejecting the fact that TES is getting streamlined to appeal to every Joe Gamer out in the market,take those lines as proof.These cannot belong to a lore-deep game like TES.