Hey,

First off, pretty please, no spoilers about later in the game, I don't want all the most exciting quests and moments ruined (or even most of them). What I am looking for is, for where i am now in the game, level 6, having just finished the horn of Jahol (or whatever) quest, where can I go to make this game a little more interesting?

I will explain. Starting with the good, I feel the world is beautiful. Finally an open world game with good draw distance where you can actually see things out there, that's huge. The experience of walking around in the world, in the snow, is tranquil in small doses. Combat isn't great but it's fine, looks good, although repetitive.

But here's the issue. It all feels so empty. There are barely any enemies on screen at one time, you walk for hours only coming across a few enemies, no people, no plot developments or dynamic situations that surprise you. Worst, the writing is absolutely terrible. The opening sequence of the game had okay writing, the leader of the rebels seemed interesting, but since then it's been painful. Like I said the game feels so empty, and the crux of that is that the empty feeling makes you long to come across more characters, yet at the same time you dread coming across them because that means you will be tempted into talking to them, which could not be more of a chore. Every time you pick any dialogue option asking anyone about anything, the NPCs go into these long winded, terribly written explanations, and they take forever. Yes, I could just not click on all the dialogue options, but the problem is you dont know whether it's something important or not without clicking on it to find out.

So it takes about 20 minutes every town I come across just listening to these terrible characters blather and get the information you need. And they never say one interesting thing, there is no dynamic interactions with them, no forging of relationships, no way of feeling like they are real people. They're not clever, they're not actually talking to you like a person. There's no "How are you? Let's get to know each other like real people." It's ALL exposition. "Here is the history of our town. Here is information on the item you're questing after. Here is information on the war happening, that I'm going to tell you about."

Rule #1 in creative writing, show don't tell. Skyrim is absolutely awful at this, and it makes for awful story telling, at least so far.

Even so, I could still probably enjoy the game if something actually happened, and if it wasn't so slow and repetitive. Like I mentioned I just finished the greybeard horn quest. It took literally at least an hour of just walking in the snow to even get to where I needed to go. Nothing happened the whole walk there. I finally got it, took it back, and the next quest is the same thing. It's all the same thing. Get the quest from the dull as nails NPCs, walkor horseback ride an hour or two filled with almost nothing happening besides a couple enemies to get to the location, find the thing, and bring it back. Maybe find a tame dragon that's way too easily to kill and does the same stuff over and over again on the way if you're lucky.

Where are the set pieces? Even Fallout 3 on the horrible engine had some great set pieces. Where are the mysteries, the interesting characters, the believable relationships? Can I expect to actually care about any character in this game? There are so many examples in film, but most recently i watched Super 8. The girl in that was a well developed character, realistic, well acted, and an endearing character. She added emotional weight to the film. Where is that in Skyrim?

The story as well. At the beginning it seemed like there would at least be a focused narrative, war against one of the factions or war against the dragons (or whoever brought the dragons back). But instead of dealing with that conflict in an interesting way, I'm walking for hours to find horns, and stuff like that. Yes, technically they are related to the narrative because the horn is supposed to help solve the dragon mystery, but it's also removed.

So I am wondering, where can I go in the game now to find:

1. A much faster pace, and a better told story overall.
2. Better, realistic writing.
3. Big set pieces like in fallout 3 at times.
4. Quests that aren't repetitive fetch quests that take hours to get to (ties into the pace). Quests with actual interesting storylines and twists and interesting characters and pace.
5. Actual interesting characters that you can connect to emotionally. Even Mass Effect, far from nailing this aspect either, at least tried to do this with characters like Ashley, Miranda, Tali, whoever else. This has been a huge issue with Bethesda games since I started playing them with Oblivion, and they don't even seem to know it. Todd Howard has been everywhere doing PR raving about the open world and how you can "do anything," except none of that means anything if the game is empty with no real people. Who wants to save a lifeless world? Would you risk your life to save mars if it did not affect humans? No one wants to save worlds, they are just made of dirt, rock, water. People want to save the people they care about in those worlds. Problem is, I can't find any of those in this world, or any bethesda games. Are there any? I'm not even sure there's a character in this whole game who has more than the lines of dialogue necessary to tell you a quest. Guess what, in real life, people have more to talk about than just giving you your quests. I would like to come across interesting characters, have them make me laugh, learn about them with their initial lines of dialogue, and then come back to the town they're in an hour or two later after I've done something, and have the game adapt dynamically. Have them have new dialogue throughout the game, so your relationship with the characters can evolve. Like how it is with real people, or good characters in books, movies.

6. Just anything you think might be interesting. Or is the whole game just the same as what I've experienced so far, long walks followed by a dungeon to retrieve something and then bring it back to town and repeat?


Thanks for your help. This is just my experience, i understand others are enjoying it that's why I'm hoping it's just me and I haven't done the right quests yet or gotten far enough in (although it's been 10-15 hours). If you can avoid spoilers in helping me that would be great too. Thank you very much for your help!

Get lydia as a house-carl, when you do the Dragons-reach quest...

Then crank-up the difficulty, and try NOT to kill her in battle...

There are many more quests that are interesting, and have more life to them. The writing is the result of a mixture of multiple creators, creating one world at once. Some is BLAH, but some is WOW, most is OK, and a few are FUNNY AS HELL, with only some that make you say WTF?

If your game is running... You are half-way to greater things ahead. The higher your level, the more populated and difficult the levels. However, as for the writing... It was intended to help those who were unfamiliar with previous games, and will always be drawn-out... So they can catch-up on the past. Personalization... Only Lydia seems personable as a companion. Me, I have not found anyone, or entity, that I can relate to, or can say... "Yes, this is what I want to do. This is who I want to help." It will always feel like an unpersonal solo game. You are alone... Forever alone... Unless you get Lydia, a wife/husband, a dog, and a few summoned sparring partners.

I felt the same way in Oblivion. Walking alone or on my horse on a big mountain, with this epic music playing in the background, it was pristine for a few moments. An hour later, it was the most lonely game on any system (and not in a good way, or on purpose). Stayed that way. You feel like you're the only thing real in the entire world.

Also I have Lydia. She is terrible. She has no dialogue options! "I need you to carry something for me. I need this." There's no development. She even responds with the same things every time. "I am charged to carry your burdens." That was kind of clever the first time. It's not enough to develop a character. She's not even a character. You can't call her that. There was one little scene where she came up to you and told you she was your house-carl, and more exposition about what that meant. Other than that, no dialogue, at all. Who the [censored] is she? Where is she from? What does she like? Does she have a family?

I know nothing. And those are just the trivial details. Even those would be insufficient. It's about getting to know someone. If you have a companion for a 200 hour game, that companion should have, I dont know, 30 pages+ pages of dialogue for those 200 hours, and as you fight alongside each other, risking your lives to save each other, that should be an epic partnership, evolving as the game goes on. Instead they are these anonymous, well, they're NPC's, is what they are. They're not charactrs.

So if Lydia is the best you can give me, YIKES. Lydia is a prime example of the problem, not a solution

Do the quests at least get more interesting and varied, with more enemies? What about the set pieces? At the end of Fallout 3 (spoilers) there was that big robot fighting with you along with like 10 brotherhood of steel soldiers, and you were storming some road, the robot kept blowing up cars in real time (it wasn't scripted because you could do it too), blowing up enemies, same as the other soldiers, same as you. Tons going on on screen, very exciting. It was a little easy at that point because you had the super robot, but stuff like that happened throughout the game minus the robot.

Any set pieces like that in Skyrim?

TES doesn't do companions well. The best storytelling is always hidden in journals, little notes, books stashed away somewhere. It's just the style I think. To me the whole thing is a very masterfully done abstraction where the real magic comes when you inject your own imagination into the experience and do much of the role playing in your mind as you play the game. A marriage between open world video gaming and playing make believe. It's certainly not for everyone and the strength is not in the upfront exposition or obvious narratives.

Who wants to read 100 pages in a video game? The game already comes to a dead halt every time you have to talk to someone, to read all the books too is the same thing. If you're getting better stories reading the in-game books than playing the actual game, how is that not a problem?

I'm still looking for more responses and opinions and maybe some hope about this game, but so far I seem to be getting, "yup, pretty much everything you've experienced that svcks is just part of the game, either you can enjoy doing the same empty things over and over for 200 hours or you can't."

I just don't get it. The reviews this game got, saying it was a masterpiece, how everything came together, a step better than Oblivion... how could anyone say any of that? It's just not true. It feels like the game I'm playing is completely different than the one everyone reviewed. Did they pay off the review sites?? It's ridiculous. What am I missing here?

I feel what you mean and if you have played the masterpiece called Fallout 3 and compare them, it's natural to be let down a bit. Fallout 3 has unparalleled depth.
Anyway i'm personally put off by character development, which is the reason i got bored of the game much earlier than the previous TES games or FO3. Now about npc or dialog depth, i'd advise that you rp as hard as you can and try to forget about it (also mods may help in the future if you have a pc version)

Fallout 3 was a masterpiece, but how is it unfair to compare them? "Masterpiece" is also in Skyrim's very own advertisemant, and pretty much every review. If they'd told me it was just a prettier version of Oblivion, I would have known what to expect. But I expected them to build on their last game, not revert to old bad habits. Even so, it's not that I'm just disappointed because Fallot was better. If Fallout was better but this was still very enjoyable, too, that would be fine. But the problems in this seem to break the game. How many times does Bethesda expect me to walk for an hour and a half to find some random item before I get bored?

No one's answered about the set pieces. Are there going to be set pieces in this game like there were in Fallout 3? With the better engine I was expecting bigger set pieces, not less. Will there be ones like Fallout or bigger?

Im new to this forum, do you have to bump your topics here? I didnt realize it was that busy!

I feel the same way. I mean, the game is fun and all, but the world feels like an empty shell. You don't get to know anyone, so it's hard to really care. And it dosen't help that npcs don't react to stuff you have done, except the random arrow to the knee guard.

I played Dragon age origins before Skyrim. It might not be a open game, but what a experience, considering npcs and how they react to you. If only they took a little inspiration from the game, Skyrim would have been so much better.