I gotta say I agree with most of what you outlined above. The game is a lot of fun...but it has a multitude of little things that are annoying/poorly done.

Personally, I'm close to 85 hrs now on 2 characters...and I'm about done with the game (haven't beat the main quest on either character). I'm not bored; the issue is that I just have zero interest in doing quests/dungeons anymore. The loot is garbage, the other rewards are garbage, the scale system svcks, within a few seconds of entering you know EXACTLY what type of enemies you will fight AND what the final "boss" will be.

The sad thing is, the game has this beautiful world...but it feels so artificial and lifeless due to these annoying issues. I think I'll give it 6 months until DLC/mods start coming out, but at this point, I gotta say that FO3/NV are VASTLY superior games in terms of rewards for your actions.

I feel similarly, though I am not as fussed about the leveling mechanics, as I am about the lackluster balance, challenge, and writing.

As I had said in another thread, I just wish they would invest more in writing better characters/quests/stories, along with true dialogue/quest branches, better difficulty and balancing, and real consequences. Having finished Fallout 3 and New Vegas just before hand, the step backwards in many areas is disappointing.

It's got a great looking world that's fun to explore and there's lots to discover but so little of it has any real substance. It's a game of endless distractions and trivial amusemants that's afraid to offer you anything better because it would impede their double-edged mantra of "do whatever you want". And even then, some of the broken balancing, and rail-roaded questlines don't even manage to allow you to even do that.

I'll try to be quick so I don't catch integra88's viral immaturity...
I can certainly agree with most of the OP, but to be honest, I still think it's a little too much "pro-Skyrim".

Edit: Damn, I wasn't fast enough.

Of course a dungeon crawler does not need a numerical value to check how much a character likes XYZ. And again a dungeon crawler does not need characters with a bit more background.
An RPG, though, could really use and fleshout this "numerical like value thingy", don't you think?

Spot on.

It's the only realy issue I have with Skyrim, but it's enough to make me go back to Morrowind.

Regardless of what I think of your review, why was it necessarry to state that it was from a Morrowind-lover in the thread title?

Something about numbers makes my skin crawl. As M'aiq says (referencing attributes, but it still holds true here): "It does not matter to M'aiq how strong or smart one is. It only matters what one can do."

Of course it was. How else can we be absolutely sure that the review will be unbiased? Only a Morrowind lover could give us a clear review with no agenda.

I'm only about 74 hours in but I agree with everything you said OP... I think anyone who loved Morrowind would have a hard time disagreeing with you..

Fullheartedly agree and great review.

Im a long time fan of the TES series but Skyrim is just a dumbed down game for casuals that never had the time or interest to play the older TES titles.

In this direction they will eventually loose the loving TES fans in favor of the Casual console croud.

Some stuff I agree with, some stuff I don't, but thanks for a well-thought-out and interesting review. Out of interest, how much are you enjoying the game?

I love Morrowind. A lot.

But since I don't wear rose-colored glasses (Elton John was really the only one who could pull that off), I completely disagree with every "They're dumbing it down," criticism that's been made on this board. Now, maybe I'm just not a "true fan", but if that definition includes ignoring the glaring flaws in Morrowind (or worse yet, making them virtues) in order to pretend that it was a perfect game, I'm fine with not being one.

i dont know...really wanted to love this game and play it forever...and i like it..really...it simply gets shallow and bland way faster than i expected...

Sure, in the end, a larger scale is just divided into more "boxes". What I was critizing is that on this scale, several points have been lost - for example, the option to taunt someone. Even though this was provided with a disposition scale, it was "just" one more option - but another option nontheless.



I'm not sure where I said that characters are bland - because I wouldn't agree with that. I think most of them are well-written and interesting personalities, much more so than in previous games even. It just seem that there are less options to interact with them.
Linearity of quests is not really something I see done better in other TES games. Morrowind had more options to kill people, but that's about it.



It's not so much that some things have been rewritten (most weren't set in stone anyway), but that the changes aren't well explained. While it's usually entertaining when more questions remain than are answered, Skyrim doesn't give a lot of indication for possible answers - if anything is possible, the whole story becomes rather arbitrary.

Concerning criticizm about my skill system review: I did not claim to give a full view in, in fact I said that would be worthy of its own thread. Thus I remained largely superficial in many aspects, which could be debated further, including the usefulness of certain skills in perks. I'm not adamant about any of my points.



Because this is usually one of the very first accusations: "You just want Morrowind 2.0". I hoped coming clean from the beginning would prevent that a bit. Also, I can't guarantee that I'm not biased towards Morrowind in one way or another, and I didn't want to promise objectivity when I can't live up to that.

Just to defend a very well thought out post, I'm going to do this.

As for Dragonhide, it's a level 100 alteration master spell that costs ~400 magicka to use, and then it only lasts 30 seconds before you're going to have to shell out another 400 magicka. Besides, he never talked about Dragonhide, he was simply discussing the flesh spells. Which I also found to be underwhelming in my play through.

You talk again about being once fully perked and trained up. The OP was stating that when you get to use your illusion spells, most enemies are very high leveled already and the spells rarely work. I'll agree with you that he should have discussed dual casting, because eventually this allows illusion to work, but the problem is it -eventually- allows illusion to work. At the beginning of the game you feel very underpowered trying to use an illusion spell.

You do not need to sneak to pickpocket? Please, tell me, how do you pickpocket somebody without sneaking? Because from what I understand, you must be in the sneak position to even have the option to pickpocket. Continuing this point, if your sneak is leveled high enough, pickpocketing becomes easier even without getting the pickpocket perk. Hence, perking pickpocket feels obsolete. There is the advantage of having more options available to pickpocket, or being able to poison somebody with pickpocketing, but overall pickpocket is not necessary to perk in order to improve pickpocketing success. The OP even mentioned that the perks were really nice.

I think the OP was also mistaken on the 60x backstab damage, however that is not an obvious thing to see in the game. If you use a 30x sneak attack with a highly upgraded dagger and everything you attack dies in one hit, who are you to say you're -not- doing 60x damage? However, unless the OP knows something I don't (and with 205 hours put into this, that's very possible) it is impossible to get 60x dagger attacks thanks to the fact that Fortify One-Handed does not include daggers. This is far from intuitive and in my opinion is a forgivable oversight of the OP. I suppose you like to feel superior by saying you know something he doesn't, though.

I don't even know what to say about your review of his review of the armor system. He mentioned the dodge is nice, you said you liked it. He says stamina regen isn't that useful, and you come in with a big "No, it is useful!" Then you continue to say he doesn't know what he's talking about. Granted, he might not know the armor cap, but I'll get to that in a second. I don't know about him, but I don't even see the point of perking the armor system at all. My armor works great without it.

Something you haven't seemed to grasp is that this is a review from a play through. To a person playing this game, how did it feel? I honestly didn't even know there was an armor cap, because I didn't spend any time looking up the hardcoe mechanics of this game to optimize my character. That would've been so much less fun than if I just played through how I wanted to, and assumed there was no armor cap, so picking the armor with a higher rating was useful. Or hell, picking the armor that I thought looked the coolest! Knowing the mechanics inside and out is not necessary to review how this game felt on a play through. Of course a basic understanding, or even a great understanding (which I would say the OP does have, especially when it comes to comparing the Elder Scrolls games) is nice, but there's no person that is already going to understand every mechanic of this game. The game is too big, and it hasn't been out for long enough.

Finally, you say his review is pointless, without commenting on any of his reviews of the guilds, the lore, the main quests, the NPC interaction, anything. All you seem to care about is the skills. To be honest, it looks like you're defensive about the skills you perked and that's why you're lashing out like this. Probably not true, but that's just how it looks from this angle.



ALRIGHT. Onto the OP : )

I love this review, even though it saddens me a little. This is my first Elder Scrolls game, and I intend to go back and play Morrowind and Oblivion when I'm all finished here, and I hope I don't come back to Skyrim feeling like it's not the gem I see it as now.

From somebody who's never played an Elder Scrolls game, this is amazing. I feel like I have so many options and freedom in this game. I of course have realized your decisions don't matter all that much, but I figured that was just Bethesda wanting you to go through their storyline. I have posted complaints on another forum however, and one of my big ones is that if I wanted the Jarl of Whiterun to die, I can't kill him, and that svcks.

I can agree with a lot of your points, and I'm sure you've guessed as well as I have that the reason for so many downgrades is due to the release to consoles. I think Bethesda was trying to appeal to a larger audience, and realized your average gamer would get bored and take the game back if there wasn't a clear quest marker to your next destination every time.

I will say that I think your review of a mage is slight off however. I went through as a mage and beat the hell out of my dungeons. Dragons fell to me without a problem. Mage is a class I enjoy playing though and I haven't yet gone through with my sneaky archer yet so maybe I just haven't had the comparison of ease yet. You'd certainly be more likely to have a valid comparison than me, having only played one class.

I enjoyed your review, I hope I didn't shame it by defending your points, and I thank you for posting it : )


Ah! I did want to say one thing to the OP, to maybe improve one little area of the game for you that I think you may've overlooked.

I hope this is how you spoiler...

Yet Skyrim has 10 fold Morrowinds flaws.. Think about it as a whole with npc interaction, character creation, spells and effects etc.

Written as a fellow Morrowind fan and not as a newfag hater

Best thread on this forum. I dont care that much about the perk tree or "balance issues", but the NPC interaction really is a huge let down.

Whatever you do, don't play Daggerfall, or you'll really understand how dumb the [censored] has gotten.

EVERYBODY, SHUT UP!
I have a http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_2ORqVKMZlrU/TKRRmml5ySI/AAAAAAAAABE/62zyNzw7QuY/s1600/Point+Diagram.jpg

This thread is amazing.

I agree with everything you wrote.

For those saying he is flat out wrong on some skills, please provide an example. I'd like to refute whatever you say, because he's speaking the truth. Additionally, the Civil War quest line had SO much potential and was crushingly disappointing in my opinion. I haven't done the entirety of the MQ yet (saving best for last I'd hoped) but I agree with his assessment. The sidequests are lots of fun.

I cant comment on it all but you have several flaws in there.

Sprinting in heavy armor and light is a lightyear away from eachother in stamina drainage.
Thats one.
Light armor gets not only weightless perk earlier, there are no wasteful perks in there.
Heavy armor gives amazing armor, light armor, less then half that.

Hunters recall, or so in Archery. I see alot of people find it pointless, but thats cause you have NOT tried this perk.
It has more then that effect.
: It gives you back the arrows you use on your targets, 95% of the time. That means when you use your expensive elven or ebony arrows, you can take them back from the corpse after the fight.
Without this perk, most of the arrows you use are "broken" and you cant take them back, once in a while it works. With this perk, you almost always succeed. And, you get twice as many arrows, which is not a bad thing when enemies
carry orcish and elven arrows on them. I took it for RP reasons but realized later its freaking good:-)

Too many none valid complains, some hold true for sure.

Regarding the environment. Thats it.
I mean, the environment is perfect, caves too.
Try going into a cave in North america, then go into a Cave in Slovenia or Croatia.
They will look almost identical.

Try walking in the forrests of Canada and Alaska. Then travel to Sweden and Norway and do the same. You will have thought you maybe traveled a few miles since the landscape is different ONLY in surrounding and lows and heights.

The chinese wall looks almost the same from start to finish.

I think they have done it perfectly to have made a game that still have fresh areas, but we should not forget that we are in the same country, we are not traveling from Africa to Far East, back to Alaska.
No, we are in the North at all times. We are In Alaska, Canada, North Scandinavia, the entire time. And that they still managed to make differences in flora, fauna and areas I think is wonderful.
The real world is ALOT more dull then the one in Skyrim. But people now adays tend to live in Cities and simply put, dont know.

Companions quest line: I thought it was good. Under your spoiler there you mention something. But you are wrong. You do have a choice. Its up to you to go on or not. The game does not force you.

The war effort: Whats wrong with what they have done? Peoples expectations leads them to believe that would have its own game completely, that it would be a 100hr quest to do this.
They didnt want to do that so the casual gamer would get tired. Sure, the hardcoe fans will suffer, as always.

Overall OP. From me, most negative points are quite nonsense and the positive things, they are ok. I do agree on a few lines but otherwise, you seem eager to find faults and failures instead of enjoying the ride.

Something I see with many hardcoe players: You go out of the way to beat eachother in finding faults and what you dislike, instead of just enjoying the ride, and realize that Skyrim is many games in one, but none of them will be very long.

You are categorically wrong. I've played TES since Daggerfall and Skyrim is the best one yet.

I'll probably try that one too : ). I don't think I'll ever view a game that's become so enthralling to me as dumb, or vastly inferior to a predecessor, or anything like that. If I find I like one more than the other that's cool, but I won't be upset about it.

I've found in most areas of life the original fans are simply against change and that newer fans can appreciate the new and the old. Then the next game comes out and they find problems, and then another and they say they hate the changes. I did it with Pokemon back when I played that religiously, flat out quit. I see it happen with Brawl, I've seen it happen with books, I've seen it all the time in the music industry.

I wouldn't dare say anybody's opinion is invalid, exceptions in extreme cases of course, but I don't see why others need to try and bring down the experience for those who are enjoying it. Is there some sort of perverse pleasure in telling others "You're not really enjoying it, you're just falling for cheap tricks the game developers put in. It's actually a terrible game, if you're lucky you'll find out eventually."? I don't know, but I'll continue to enjoy my game : ).

overall speaking, taking everything into account, from a neutral perspective, it probably is yes...but there were parts in the older games that were way better and sadly left behind for no apparent reason (except of course economicalf) or things that are obviously flawed from a tes veteran or newbies perspective - some of them could have been easily fixed, some maybe not that easy...

I know, right? How dare he have an opinion different from yours. I for one think Morrowind is better, but since there's really no matter of objectivity in this, I can't say that someone is arbitrarily wrong for thinking one game is better or worse than another.

_{unless oblivion was your favorite}