I was, and still am to some degree, pro removal of spell making, removal of many spells, removal of attributes, etc. etc. I even gave them the benefit of the doubt when it came to their new level scaling system.

I wanted, and still, unfortunately, want for balanced and challenging but fun combat. I thought and hoped the above were part of Bethesda working towards that.

But now, I'd rather have the cheesy overpowered spell making and spells. Why? Because there isn't any balance in the combat. I would feel no guilt whatsoever for using levitation and a bound bow to easily dispatch of the majority of enemies in the game. There are already so many ways to trivialize combat, I now kind of find myself thinking, if Beth can't balance combat, we may as well have our overpowered but fun and amusing stuff back.
(I still don't care about attributes though, actually )

My preference will not change, but I think I can understand this about those who don't share it with me. Beth can't please both parties completely, but in Skyrim they didn't please either.

I concur with OP.

It was never about balance, or lack thereof, when it comes to spell creation. Its about using your imagination and getting creative, making new spells and build types/playstyles. Fleshing out RPs, or making brand new ones. And that's just one mechanic that allowed that. The SC vets balanced their spells anyway, so the game was, you know, actually fun.

There is no good reason to remove spell crafting. Balance is not a good reason, more unique spells is not a good reason. Nothing.

Combine that with what you said about Beth's GOD AWFUL balancing abilities and it actually kind of makes me mad that they are too stupid to understand their own folly.

Loss of spellcrafting shouldn't have been a big problem, but the loss of it AND the reduction in spell variety was a bad move
In my opinion they should have either keeping spellcrafting and let players balance their own gameplay (but given the whining on these forums and apparant lack of self control...), OR give a healthy variety of spells.
Hopefully though this could be rectified, though the cynic in me sees DLC on the horizon...

Balance is a good reason for me, as is more unique spells. But there is no balance, and although there are more unique spells, there aren't many and some of them aren't even useable in their current state.

Yes, but you can balance spellcrafting, and you can have as many unique spells as you want even with spell crafting. The only thing spell crafting would allow us to do is give us a viable "Flames" spell to use at level 30+. Same with every other spell that becomes UTTERLY USELESS. (yeah real variety of unique spells there)

And my point was, if you are going to sacrifice something like spell crafting for the sake of balance...for the love of God, make sure you actually balance the game!

with a project this big, something like spellmaking can get left behind. deal with it. The spell tinkerers are a minority, there are so many other things to program and get right with offensive capabilities (some which still could use more time) that spell making couldnt have been a priority.

I can't imaging it would be that difficult. Not like they've had experience with it or anything

I personally don't think it had anything to do with not having enough time, balancing, etc. Just like with any Bethesda game, it has its own formula. I think they couldn't find a way around spellmaking with this one, because of the style they went with, for magic. They would have to come up with a look for every spell that is possible to make, then other ones to mix and match, and it would just become generic looking colours for the spells you make, instead of something unique. I think it would have been too deep for them to even bother with. That's just my opinion, though.

Thats my point, the effort it wouldve taken to polish a spell creation system would not have fit what they were trying to do.

Spell making in TES was never really that good as far as I'm concerned. It just seemed kind of contrived, but it definitely added a sense of freedom to the game world; and it's just part of the TES formula. I love the new spells in Skyrim, now they just need to combine the two, which make it totally awesome.

"I think I understand, maybe, why people are upset about some things"

Sorry but I don't.

Bethesda have created a masterpiece.

I have yet to see it score under 90%, it's already a shoe-in for every game of the year award in a year that has seen some great games released, has sold 7-8 million copies and yet all I see on these boards as of late is whine after whine.

Every game in history has a "path of least resistance" or exploitable game style but it's up to the player to use it or not.If the Bound Bow was too leet or overpowered for you play hard mode with daggers.Using an exploitable game style which makes the game a cakewalk only to complain the game is unbalanced is not an error on the games part as opposed to your personal choice to exploit obvious loopholes.The game is as challenging as YOU want it to be.

I do understand some peoples gripe with the loss of magical variation yet it's hardly game breaking and is seemingly a change of direction for the franchise which I have no issues with, especially considering the mods which will no doubt appear in the near future.

I always liken it to an anology of music.Sometimes a band changes direction, style and sound and it's up to the consumer to decide wether they want to continue listening, switch off, or move on to other music.Getting angry at the band is just futile.

In saying most gaming forums are full of "vets" arguing semantics while the majority are happily playing the actual game.It's just disappointing to see it happening here as I have really enjoyed reading these forums over the last few years but the last few weeks have been rubbish and imo unjustifiably negative.

They should have released the game with a copy of Baldurs Gate 2 to lessen the complaints that Skyrim is'nt 100% perfection and perfectly catered to please every player.The expectations shown from some posters here borders on fantasy.

Even though I never played a mage and use destruction spells occasionally, I'm not happy for the fact that spell making was taken out and about the "streamlined" spells. Beth has forgotten that people love options. The more stuff there is, no matter how useless it may be, we want to have it there as an option. Is sad how Beth has turned into. They are putting what they think is good for us instead of what is good for the TES community. I guess the classic curse of fame and power is getting the best of Beth.

Following this logic, Call of Duty Modern Warfare franchise is the best game ever made, and it got better with each iteration of the series as the sale improved and review staying well above 90%.

Not really as your taking my point out of context and placing it on other products which was not my intention.I am purely referring to the success of Skyrim.

I too was a bit disappointed by the lack of spell making. When i first started playing with the spells at the beginning of the game, my first thought was "Wow! I can't wait until I find a spell making stand to make some fire-lightning.. lightning-fire even!" Then reality set in, and I found out that there was no spell making, there was only spell buying.

I understand why they did it. The new spells are complex in their design, and they have different uses.

However, it really kicks you in the groin when you go to the Mages College, and J'Zargo tells you about how he's making new spells, and gives you a set of scrolls to try. He literally altered the Flame Cloak spell, and made it so it only explodes on Undead enemies, but also affects everyone in the area, including yourself.

If he can muck around with shoddy Flame Cloak scrolls, why can't I make Lightning Fire D:

Yea this. I honestly felt that magic was darn good in oblivion, and combat just svcked there were just so many "exploits" , especially with the drain health spell. But removing that AND giving me crappy spells such as destruction/ alteration spells is just :brokencomputer: . Alteration is just crap, up till the point where you get a paralyze spell.

i could care less about the spell creation being removed UNLESS they could apply it to how magic works in skyrim. for instance you could have flame spells that do more or less damage per second and their mana cost would increase or decrease accordingly. what i DONT want back is oblvion's and to a lesser degree morrowind's boring, mindless generic magic system. the only difference between the spells was a shader and a damage type. blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah, BORING!!! if i have to choose between a bioshock/dark messiah type magic get up where you actually feel like you are using powerful magic and it has different effects like slowing enemies down or damaging their magicka resevers or messing around with stats, ill take the dark messiah version any day of the week.

one of the reasons skyrims magic svcks is precisely because it doesnt scale which is something bethesda completely dropped the ball on. if you arent going to make the spells scale then let us get more powerful version of the spell later on. i dont want ot use chain lightning or fireball where half the time its hitting my followers i want o use flame or sparks. just give me spell called flame II of flame enhanced, i dont care what you call it just make it so i can cast the same type of spell throughout the game.

i do miss attributes though. i can live with the current setup but but i will always wish attributes were in. if fo no other reason that i really dreaded getting certain diseases in morrowind like that one that the bonelords gave you that drained you strength. you noticed those diseases, the only time i notice a disease in skyrim is if i happen to be checking the active effects page.

i love skyrim and its my current favorite TES game but at this point nothing is going to topple STALKER CoP or Fallout NV for my picks for open world sandbox games. there is alot more going on in those worlds and even if you consider that stuff just extra numbers to mess around with it helps flesh out the world. at this point after 150 hours skyrim has become fairly empty. ive done all the quests i could find, both sides of the civil war, daedric quests, main quest i just finished today and they were all extremely short. i was archmage after 3 or 4 quests. i was leader fo the darkbrotherhood after about 6 assassinations, the civil war consisted of 5 fort battles where you had a grand total of 16 npcs fighting at one time and this is one area where i WILL blame consoles because i played with over 250 npcs at once in mount and blade warband and that was on my old computer i built 4 years ago. im very afraid that despite all its improvements over oblivion and they are lots of improvements it just doesnt have the ability to hold my attention for longer than a couple of playthroughs like morrowind or fallout 3/NV or the STALKER games. skyrim really does in many ways feel like an empty shell.

thankfully we get the CK very soon and oblivion was a great game after the modders fixed that up so skyrim should be an outstanding game when modders get their hands on it.

I think you're missing quite a few different motives people have for talking about the game's flaws. It's not necessarily about expectations, I actually expected a lot of the problems it currently has just because they're typical of Bethesda. Disappointing to see them return in Skyrim though. It's also not about semantics, other than for the "Skyrim isn't a real RPG" crowd I guess. Criticizing the game also doesn't mean we don't appreciate the things they did right either, or that we don't like the game. I'd understand your frustration if we were all calling it a terrible game and giving it 1/10 reviews, but that's just not the case. For many posters, or at least in my case, it's really just about talking about what could use improvement, seeing why people agree/disagree and so on, and hopefully seeing some of the most common complaints get some attention from Bethesda in the next game.

You cited the market/review success of Skyrim as the sole proof of it being a masterpiece. Actual gameplay concerns were brought up, then summarily dismissed as "not important" without any further explanation.

There was no context to pull it out of. It was straight up "it was huge hit with positive reviews hence game is awesome". Call of Duty fits into that bill even better than Skyrim.