Nell2ThaIzzay

No, I'm not, and haven't been a predominantly console player.

But prior to the past couple years, I have been predominantly a PC gamer, though I have always owned consoles, and have had at least one console from every generation going back to the original NES.



I see what you did there!


It's all good dude, I do enjoy Skyrim, it's what i'm playing at the moment, but I had to let expectations drop and see it as an adventure/action game, but it does look awesome on pc, even if the UI isn't designed for pc and svcks my avatar hard.

I feel the same , excellent adventure game , good value for money (more than 100 hours ) , but for the quality RPG content , interesting quests and story telling i guess i'll have to be patient

What did I do there?

I've owned a lot of consoles, yes, but ever since I discovered PC gaming, I have played mainly on a PC, using consoles just to play games that either weren't available on PC, or the rare exception of a game that plays better on console (like sports games, for instance)

It is not a reality of capitalism, but a myth. Mozart was a professional, paid for what he composed. According to your vision, modded Mozart should be even better than the original. Good luck finding the superior works of those more-freely passionate hacks. Inspiration, passion, ability, and work make those who make the very best. People who are the best sometimes find sponsorship. Some sponsors want to capitalize on talent. If they are smart sponsors, they butt out of the creative process and leave it to the experts to call the plays. From all indications, Bethesda's development team has smart sponsors.

Agreed 100%

Thank you for that.

It's the myth that anything "underground" or not mainstream is inherently better than anything that is "mainstream" for the simple fact that it's underground, and it's a mindset that I absolutely cannot tolerate.

Raise children?
It takes 9 months, nine ingame months, and then the baby is just an infant, it will take like what? 1? 2 years? For it to take it's first steps?
"Perfect RPG", pfft, no. This is an urge for a "Creating and raising a child"-simulator.
RPG's should allow choices, I agree with that, but to this extent? No.
And no Fable or Sims babies that turn 7 after like 2 to 5 hours of gameplay, that's just ridiculous.

As for Character Traits, I got the best RPG yet for you: Sims 2 and 3.
Since it uses a fictional language and talk bubbles the limitation is your imagination.
You can create characters with unique personalities and characters who clash with other characters well or bad and then see them grow up and influence their lifestyle and choices.
The Sims series is a fantastic RPG franchise in that aspect.

TC, the game you are looking for is Fable 2 (or 3). I personally hated Fable 2, but it meets your description of the perfect RPG much closer than most.

And god knows how you rated Skyrim 9/10 for gameplay, it stinks.

You thought Myst was challenging? Maybe I'm just good at adventure/puzzle games (Gruds in Space was my first one; ever heard of that?), but I beat Myst in a single evening. Glad I had it passed on from my sister rather than wasting the money.

And if you seek fulfillment of your particular taste in RPGs, stop looking to mainstream houses like Bethesda. The "21st century liberal mind" as you call it is the current marketplace. That's where you go to sell stuff. Bethesda wants to sell stuff.

Start looking for some indie game houses that cater to your taste, rather than lamenting the mainstream's refusal to do so.

The OP left out a very important benchmark with his rating system of RPG's: Enjoyment Level.

This benchmark is quite broad and like any game, suffers from diminishing returns over time, but it is still important.

Skyrim Enjoyment level: 9/10

To the people who naysay Fantastic Graphics in lieu of Fantastic story, gameplay, etc, I'd like to ask: Do fantastic graphics add to your enjoyment of a game?

Because they definately up the enjoyment level of a game for me.

Really? You've never thought (even for a second) that games might be better if not designed for hardware that is 6 years out of date? Not to mention limited even for its time. Talking about the 360 here, which seems to have been Skyrims main target. But the same applies to all consoles.

I'm not a console basher, i've generally always owned once since Nintendo NES. They definitely have their place. But to say that they aren't limiting gaming these days where games are designed for consoles and then ported to PC reeks of...well...ignorance. The PC is the most powerful platform out there, simple as that. You're basically saying if you raced a Prias vs a Ferrari, you're not limiting yourself in any way.

In Skyrims case, there could have been much larger battles given the hardware available today. And the size they could have made the cities... I'm not saying they would have, because as previously mentioned it's all about development time versus paycheck. But at least the potential is there to be able to do such things. I just hope the next generation of consoles come out soon, so we aren't so severely limited for like...a year .

Your perfect RPG doesn't exist, and never will.

Bard's Tale on NES. Yeah! (30 y/o)

Skyrim did some things right, going back to the way Morrowind was at some points, but at the same time, there is a lot wrong with Skyrim.

In morrowind you had to find the location of the quest givers, the location of the quest, etc, without it telling you by having an arrow point it out, you had to read the NPC's dialogue.
I'll admit, it's challenging to actually sit down and read through all the dialogue, especially if you're used to just listening, but when you do read, you become engaged in the world, the NPC's give so much more depth than Skyrim or Oblivion does, even if some unimportant NPC's repeat the same thing, doesn't Skyrim and Oblivion do the same? Another thing to bring up is dialogue choices that the player can choose, in Morrowind there were only "yes" or "no" and sometimes nothing, but that was fine, because it wasn't your dialogue choices that effected the game, it was your actions, you could choose to kill Vivec and break the mainquest so you had to jump through hoops to complete it, or you could choose what ashlander group you wanted to represent as the Nerevarine, you could literally kill any NPC you wanted to, even if it broke the quest, hell, like I said before, you can break the mainquest. Skyrim? I love the game, but damn does it hold your hand, you can't kill a majority of NPCs, I'm serious, go to Whiterun, even after you finish the mainquest, and try to kill the population. Many people also say that you can turn off quest markers, well the way I look at quest markers is that they're implemented so that Bethesda can use a cheap way out of writing and voicing all the dialogue necessary to tell the player in words the direction of the person or quest location you're looking for. You can't play the game without quest markers, unless you can call "exploration" literally wandering aimlessly. Morrowind did exploration right, you'd be given a set of directions to the location of interest from an NPC, these exact directions would be recorded in your journal. You then had to "explore" by trying to follow these directions, sometimes you'd hit where you wanted, other times you'd over-shoot and discover a location you didn't mean to. You don't get a marker on your map telling you the exact location of the quest, you were giving directions to find it yourself. This is tedious for many people, so it could be viewed as a design choice to add quest markers and hand-holding to appeal to a broader audience. A thing that Skyrim did right is that close to 1/2 of the dungeons actually have some degree of a story, whether it be a journal left behind, with dead NPC's littering the floor, or a live NPC, giving a minor quest. The locations in skyrim are designed much much better than oblivion, in fact, I'd even go as far to say that the design has surpassed Morrowind. The catch is that when you explore the Skyrim dungeons, there isn't much in them past the quests. In morrowind you had the chance to find loot, something which is effectively dead in Skyrim because of leveled loot. What I mean by this is you could go to any dungeon in Skyrim at about level 30 and you will always find a chest at the end filled with leveled loot, let's say it's an Ebony war-axe with an absorb-health enchantment and a pair of glass boots that you already picked up hours ago, you then look at what you are currently wielding, this loot is nothing compared to the equipment you currently have. So do you feel accomplished? In morrowind, things like daedric armor were unique, you would not find randomly generated NPC's wearing glass or daedric armor. There was literally (iirc) only 1 piece of each part of daedric armor, something many people spent hours on trying to complete. You felt very accomplished if you ever found a piece of the daedric armor, which is all hand placed, not leveled, auto-generated loot. It actually meant something to find the best armor in the game. If you ever stumbled across a certain dungeon in Morrowind, (lets say this dungeon is the one with a hand-placed glass helmet) and you were only level 5, there where many tough enemies guarding this piece of armor, this piece of armor was not leveled, randomly generated, it was hand-placed. A true treasure. In Skyrim you can find a glass helmet in any chest past level 30~. There is nothing unique or interesting treasure-wise to find in Skyrim's dungeons. Yes you could argue that you can find artifacts, but that's something that should be taken for granted because every game since Arena had artifacts. So what? There's maybe 20 or so artifacts that are easily surpassed by smithed and enchanted weapons and armor? But that's another gripe about Skryim I don't really complain about, you can make the game easy with Smithing and Enchanting if you want to. In Morrowind it felt really awesome to find equipment that is now mundane in Skyrim. What happened? I guess you could say leveling, but I don't want to get into that. Skyrim does have a very nice environment, the wilderness is very beautiful and awesome. Morrowind had it's own unique feel to it, it's simply a matter of opinions when it comes to the setting of both these games. I personally find them equal. The combat in Skyrim is much improved compared to Morrowind, spell effects look and are easy to use as ever. Problem is, because of leveling, a destruction mage will become very weak by level 40, but that's another leveling issue I don't want to touch. So in the end each game has it's own strengths and weaknesses, but when it comes to Skyrim, it seem like it forgot what its predecessors were good for, a level of depth with NPC's, longer and engaging Guild missions that actually intertwined with other Guilds, exploration and treasure. Before I get tons of people saying I'm simply hating on Skyrim (wait they already hate me if they got this far) I love Skryim, the setting is just great, but it's missing the soul that Morrowind had. The soul was removed in Oblivion and partially put back into Skyrim. Bethesda has forgot it's audience in favor of money, this is the simple fact. The amount of money put into advertising the game would honestly be more than necessary to make Skyrim one of the best TES games ever. With nearly 70 more people working on Skyrim compared to Morrowind, what went wrong? Some say it's that saying about more cooks in the kitchen makes the soup taste bad.

It's the cold, unwelcoming truth, Bethesda made the game wide (in an attempt to half-assedly hold it's original audience) but at the same time shallow so it could try to appeal to more people. Morrowind was made the way the developers wanted to. Deep, with a learning curve that didn't hold your hand.
Criticism is necessary for a game developer, no matter how much you want to say Skyrim is the perfect game, it isn't. Why wouldn't you want the next TES game to be ever better? You have to complain and whine so that the develop knows what's up. I love Skyrim, I love Morrowind, I just want the next TES to be even better.

TL;DR? I didn't make paragraphs, I don't blame you if you didn't read.

Just a thanks for this thread (well the first page at least...don't have time for the rest)

This has been much more insightful, well arugued, and informative than so many others. Computer games to me aren't RPG's (ya I know, but my definition is my own and involves talking in silly accents, imropmtu dialogues, etc.), so I look more for atmosphere and complexity. Computer games essentially have no choice since it's all programmed, so it's moot to me.

It sounds like I'd like Skyrim's atmoshpere, but not the brain bending aspect. Think I'll wait for a price drop or bundle; I'll at least wait until they stop patching it

But to the OP, your arguments aren't back to the 1980's. Remember the original Wizardry Trilogy? Not very deep in atmoshpere, story, choice, etc. Zorks were better, as the text let your mind create its own images which are much more profound, and in my opinion, immerssive than anything "movie like" in today's games. Reading a book vs. seeing a movie for me.

You're kidding right. It had a "Luke, I am your Father" storyline and as far as "things to do" it was a pilgrimage of straight-line maps with a quest arrow (I think the tester-monkeys must've gotten lost). Anything you had to do (save for the temples of orb-rearranging) was combat. Killing more things in a game about killing things, not much else. Blitzball was kinda fun, but once you levelled your team beyond stupidly bad, you won every time. Combat was pretty much on rails as well, in fact, my most headslappingly useless death was me having trouble with Seymour -- until I realized that the "help scroll" thing was telling me what moves he would make in the order he would make them. To this day, I'm embaressed that I ever lost a hit-point to him.

I want some difficulty, and frankly I want to have to think both in combat and in RP. I want a real puzzle, not spaceball's airlock puzzles. I want enemies that use tactics and healing potions, and that attack in units more or less. I want choosing a faction to be a lifelong thing -- because they care that my DB assasin just doesn't meet the ethical standards of the Fighter's guild or that my Mage can't throw a fireball.

Dude, this may be the most astounding, inciteful and fascinating piece RPG wisdom that has ever been bequeathed to the gaming world since the birth of J.R.R Tolkien, but no-one who doesnt have some rare form of Savant Syndrome will ever be able to effectively read and absorb it with tearing out their own eyeballs.

Please use punctuation, it really makes life easier.

Thanks.

Well I disagree. "vs every other game back to 1980" Really? 1980? There was no mention whatsoever of some landmark RPGs including Daggerfall, the Baldur's Gate series, the Neverwinter Nights series, Dragon Age, Might and Magic, the Ultima series. The 80's had a lot of RPGs (lower tech of course) besides several Ultima releases. Wizardry sticks in my mind. There's many many more. There was a whole series of D&D "gold box" games. You could even buy a construction set for them. And that's just fantasy RPGs.

I never did play the Ultima games much but I heard that some had some very good puzzles.

Myst was not an RPG. It was a puzzle game. That's all it was. It didn't do anything else. No RPG is going to be as good at puzzles as a puzzle game if it's to do RPG any justice at all. Incidentally Daggerfall had some challanging puzzles. I remember a few good ones in some of the Might and Magics too.

So if you removed the "vs every other game back to 1980" part of y our title I wouldn't have so much to argue with you. Although I absolutely don't agree with you on your ratings (for me Morrowind<

Wall of text crits and all that...

This is my first post on this forum. I really do love Skyrim but it is missing that mystery that Morrowind really gave you. Nothing was laid out for you. The world seemed so big as you didn't know where you were going and quests were stumbled upon. It would be nice if TES went back this way and re-implemented a more complex character development tree.

In saying that Skyrim really is a lot of fun!

Whatever credibility you try to establish with your opening paragraph, you end up squandering with a comment like this. A self-respecting veteran gamer should appreciate diversity and inclusion in the gaming community and perhaps even take the time to recognize the merits of more games than just those they like. Instead, time and again, I see derision and immaturity toward new games and new gamers from those who have been gaming a long time, borne perhaps from fear that their once-exclusive pastime is becoming "popular" or "for kids" (even if they themselves were kids when they started gaming). I am taking the time to point this out because you actually seem to have invested thought and passion into your post, and thus might have the capacity to understand how childish and pointless this statement is. Why should I, having read this, care about what games you've played or how long you have been playing them? It's clear you don't love gaming—you only love your personal and particular opinions on gaming.

I don't usually bother to reply to such posts but....

I play wow. I like to think I am not dumb. Some people play wow who can't work out how to avoid dying when they stand in burning fire until they read on some website that they should not do that. Similarly boss fights- you could wipe a few times, see what works and what does not and then have the satisfaction of having thought of the solution yourself. The common experience in Wow is that if you have not read about it and are doing what I consider proper gamers do, then you are called a noob.

I did not say 'all wow players'- I specified DUMB wow players.

After all, what's the point of paying for a game if you're just going to cheat to get the satisfaction, such as it is, for following instructions.

Yup. Especially agreed on the older game comparisons. People, I think, are forgetting what they've played in the past and letting fuzzy nostalgia guide their assessments of current games.

For me, Skyrim beats all other CRPGs I've played. DAII is "okay" as a second, but too "action" and not enough "roleplay". Oblivion, DA and ME2 are up there too. Also in my top 10, if you go by a sort of "weight class" applying time instead of pounds, would be an OLD game called "Wasteland". I expected every Fallout game to bring back that Wasteland magic. They didn't (although I haven't played NV).

I really disagree with a few points you make OP.

First of all, Oblivion's UI was horrible. Especially the inventory, which showed a grand total of 6 items at a time. Yeah, 6. That's completely insane for a TES game with the amount of items you can carry with you at any given time.

And you claim that Morrowind had a good and deep dialogue system. But Morrowind's NPCs were nothing more than walking encyclopedias. There hardly was real conversation, it was just topic and generic reply. If you selected Background, most NPCs only said "I'm %name, %class.". That was the depth of the average Morrowind NPC.

In this thread I see a lot of people claiming how great Morrowind was en how TES has gotten worse over time. But I guess they're just living on nostalgia. Even though Morrowind is, and probably will be, my favorite game of all time, it was really flawed in a lot of aspects. Most quests were extremely shallow and I think 95% of them were fed-ex (go here get that/go there kill him) quests. The character development was pretty poor as well. A lot of skills were useless and others were completely overpowered. Dialogue, as I said, existed almost entirely out of generic lines and nothing NPC specific. The combat was horrible, probably the worst in any game I've played. The performance at the time was really awful on most PCs as well. You had long loading times even when walking outside. Walking speed was also slow as hell until you got to later levels. And I could go on with it's flaws, but I think you get the point.

I loved it and still do because it was the first open-world RPG I played and the sense of freedom and immersion were way beyond anything I had played up until then. But that was then, this is now. And a lot of people need to get over the fact that it's 10 years later and games have evolved.

Bethesda can't make a perfect 10 game because they, like all other commercial businesses, have budget and deadlines and errant human beings who may find debugging and proofing tedious and boring. They can make a fun game, and Skyrim is that and is one of the best on the market, IMO. But Skyrim needs some polish. Every game I've ever played needed some polish, either a little or a lot. We're talking about 100% perfection, which you can't get from a commercial game developer. That's the reality of capitalism. I'm not knocking it. I'm stating an objective observation. Those who demand a 100% perfect game are the kind of people who view the world through romantic ideals.