For practically all of us on these forums, Skyrim will be a day 1 purchase guaranteed.
But how can Skyrim reach a broader audience? If I was new to the series, I couldn’t help but feel a little intimidated seeing everything Skyrim has to offer.
Todd Howard said in a G4 interview that he would liken the game to The Lord of the Rings or similar fantasy worlds where you could be who you wanted to be and do anything you wanted to do but in a video game sandbox environment to entice new fans to give Skyrim a try.

How would you convince the casual fan to purchase Skyrim?

dragons

seriously...


EDIT: to be more specific, a centralised theme or figure that people find compelling or can related to

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gazFV8X8bRE

Actually I'd say TES IV is quite appealing to casual gamers. As a single-player exclusive you don't have to worry too much about your individual skill, and it's open-world design lets you take things at your own pace quite easily. So many options can be intimidating, and many people either stay riveted to the main quest or try and do everything with a single character rather than trying multiple designs.

I'd say the bigger problem isn't casual gamers, but people who don't play RPGs too much. They're uses to their games working in different ways and this sometimes causes friction.

I know a few more casual players who tried Oblivion, and the number one thing that turned all of them off was the opening dungeon.

Everyone I introduced the game to who stuck past the opening dungeon and got out into the world enjoyed the game, but several people just quit before ever getting out. That dungeon was meant almost as a tutorial, to ease new players into the mechanics, but it had the exact opposite effect.

My advice to Bethesda would simply be to give players more freedom faster. Don't worry if it seems overwhelming. People naturally like to explore and expiriment. So long as your world looks worth exploring, they'll learn as they go.

I don't think Bethesda is really worrying about getting the casual gamer interested, although I agree that they shouldn't have too much trouble with that. Their philosophy is to just make games that they would play and not worry too much about marketing the game to specific types of people. The casual fan will buy Skyrim when they read the reviews and get a chance to play it at their friends house.

That was a problem with Daggerfall as well. A new player not designed for melee would have an extremely difficult time getting out - and given that the exit doesn't stand out some people just wandered around until they quit.

That's a tough one, I think. Both my wife and my little sister are what I would think of as "casual" gamers - I'm not sure either of them have ever been at all interested in a Bethesda game before, however.

For my sister, the only game she ever really plays is The Sims. I know a knee-jerk reaction a lot of people have to the term "casual" is that it really just means people who want simple and easy games, but I don't think there's really any good evidence to support this. For someone who doesn't play a lot of videogames and isn't used to the common tropes, even a game like Sims can be a little bit daunting, at first. Each time a new one comes out, my sister has to climb up the learning curve again - but it's never been a factor in her not playing a game. If she likes the game enough, she doesn't have a problem spending a bit of time learning it.

She's messed around a bit with Oblivion - but the only thing that appealed to her at all was creating characters. She wasn't at all interested in the actual game, itself. For her, all the dialogue and combat and exploration was really just a bunch of stuff she wasn't interested in. "Casual" gamers like her - I don't think there's any appealing to them with a game like this. It's just not going to be their cup of tea. I've never considered The Elder Scrolls to be a terribly "hard-core" or complex roleplaying game (it's certainly never had a terribly complicated ruleset,) and I don't think complexity in Skyrim is really going to be any sort of a factor on whether or not less dedicated gamers are going to be interested.

My wife, on the other hand - she plays a bit more videogames. She really gets into Bioware's RPGs. She loves Knights of the Old Republic, and we've had to work out playing schedules whenever a new Mass Effect game comes out. For her, however - all of the questing, combat, exploration, etc in the game is something she sees as the "work" she has to do to get back to her ship and claim her reward. Which would be interacting with her party, unlocking the next level of their dialogue path, going a bit down a romance avenue, etc. She enjoys the characters in the story, and going back to the primary ones and exploring more about them. To her, everything else is just stuff she has to get through.

I've had her play a bit of Oblivion, but she just couldn't get into it. She felt like the character creation was too existential for her - in her mind it didn't matter what character she made because the game itself never seemed to care. She felt like her character had no personality, because she was never given any feedback. And really, the whole of Oblivion consisted entirely of all the stuff she endured in Mass Effect, without any of the rewards - from her point of view, at least.

Frankly, I'm going to have to play Skyrim and see what new wrinkles it brings to the table before I consider recommending it to my wife. It could be a game she'd be interested in - but it would have to have more characters that are more than quest-givers to be able to give her anything she'd be interested.

Adding dragons, adding perks, removing attributes, spellmaking, armor slots, half the skills...



But yes Beth, if you must make us do a dungeon at the start, don't force us to wade through agonisingly slow scripted dialogue scenes.
I don't think anyone really thinks The Sims is a casual game, it's just they like to say it is because it's popular with women.

Wow, no offense but maybe it was a good idea that they quit. Oblivion was my first TES too, but to quit at the tutorial like that is kind of sad.

Morrowind/Oblivion don't appeal to all casual gamers but they sure appeal to many casual ones. You guys are fooling yourselves if you think Elder Scrolls is anything but a casual friendly game. It's easy to play, there's not many mistakes you can make, it's simple and easy to get into.