This is my review after 205 hours and three characters in Skyrim.

I'm afraid it's rather long, but that's to be expected with a game of this size. I tried to split it into easily digestible categories.

Art and World Design
I think this point is undisputed. Skyrim is artistically sublime. Each region has a very distinct look and feel, although this cannot be said for most dungeons. The palette of caves, barrows and Dwemer ruins is pretty much identical. Morrowind’s rather futuristic interpretation of dwarven ruins with a yellowish lighting might have been beneficial to increase dungeon diversity, but this is only a minor issue.
Yet, Skyrim falls short in some areas due to unnecessary technical limitations, such as low resolution textures and not taking advantage of present day PCs. Most of these would have been rather easy to change, as we can see with a plethora of mods improving the graphics quality of Skyrim shortly after release.

Setting and Main Questlines
After the very well done introduction, I was totally hyped. A war between the Empire and Stormcloak rebels, threatening the extremely fragile and costly peace with the mysterious Aldmeri Dominion. Who would gain most out of which situation? What is everyone’s agenda? And on top, the return of dragons. The setup could hardly be better. If you take a step deeper into the story, the characters appear to be fleshed out really well. Nobody is clearly a good or a bad guy, and their motivations are comprehensible. Sadly, this is about where it ends.


Factions


Dungeons
Given the lackluster questlines, the meat of Skyrim are indeed the dungeons. Caves, barrows, ruins. In contrast to Oblivion – and this is probably the biggest improvement – almost all of them have a rather unique design, although the same resources and parts are used over and over again, which makes the experience somewhat predictable. As mentioned earlier, a bit more variety between the different dungeon sets might have helped.
Nevertheless, the quests you get in dungeons are the more interesting ones. They are surprising diversions and a huge step up from previous games. The only two problems I have that first, most quests are limited to that specific dungeon. This makes Skyrim feel more like a themepark than a sandbox, because every dungeon is rather disconnected from the rest of the world. And second, the quest design is the same in most cases, as you defeat a boss at the end and get a chest to loot – with rather disappointing contents most of the time. This doesn’t allow for many different approaches to solve such quests. Actually, it doesn’t allow any at all.
Overall, dungeons are a huge improvement. The sad part is that they make up almost all the content you get to experience in Skyrim.

Sidequests
The sidequests are much more enjoyable than the questlines. Because they are short by design and don’t try to be anything else, bad writing isn’t really apparent. In fact, the short length of those quests rather benefits the writing. I thoroughly enjoyed most of them, especially the daedric ones. Well done.

NPCs
I really like the new dialogue system. It doesn’t take you out of the game as Oblivion did and most recent RPGs do, too. So that’s the bright side.
However, dialogue options are basically nonexistent. Even if you get different options to choose, they always have the same outcome. Whether you want to accept a Daedric Prince as your lord or not, your choice has no effect on the game. This is a gigantic disappointment, considering the promotion of their Radiant Story system which supposedly watches “everything you do”.
Further, all NPCs are bland and generic. Because there is no longer a way to influence their disposition towards you, except for quests – and those are rare to begin with - , everyone reacts “neutral” towards you. In Oblivion, stupid as the minigame might have been, I at least could make everyone smile if I wanted to. In Morrowind, I could taunt everyone until they attacked me. Skyrim has none of that. Even if I beat someone up in a brawl, he greets me with “Good to see you, friend.”. And when you try to kill him for his obliviousness of your resentment, he turns out to be an essential and immortal NPC.
Overall, NPC interaction is a humongous step back from previous games.

Scaling
I was rather pleased with the enemy scaling on my first character. Every encounter was challenging or even impossible. However, progression is fast and you quickly become a demigod (unless you are a mage). I feel there is a lack of challenges in higher levels.
However, the problem of item scaling is worse than ever. There are very few hand-placed items, and merchants magically start to sell better equipment once you reach the appropriate level. Citizens’ houses rarely hold anything of value. The lock level of a chest doesn’t have anything to do with its contents. This makes most exploration endeavors unsatisfying. Furthermore, certain quest rewards are scaled to your level, and you are unable to get the better version later on. Again, you are being punished for completing quests at a low level.

Character System
Oh boy, where to begin. This could be its own thread, and indeed we have seen a bunch of those already.
The whole thing is a dumbed down (not streamlined), shallow, confusing, incoherent and unbalanced shadow of its former self – which had its own problems to begin with. Many possible builds from previous games are gone once again – among athletes and monks, mages took the hardest hit, with most of their spells simply removed. I will try to address each skill individually.

Destruction
As all magic, Destruction magnitude does not scale with your level. This is not only a severe problem for mages in higher levels, it is also inconsistent with other skills, defying the whole streamlining premise. Instead, you can reduce your magicka cost and even reduce it to zero, which makes the whole point of skilling magicka as a mage obsolete. Even more, because your damage with skills won’t increase with your skillevel, a character with Destruction at 10 is equally skilled as a Destruction master, provided both have zero-magicka-usage-gear. It’s the opposite of the long time Elder Scrolls premise: You get better at what you do.
The perks are mostly fine, although Impact is sort of a “must have”.

Alteration
Same basic problem as Destruction, and all magic schools. Because of fixed magnitudes, the *flesh spells are no match for real armor, which has no drawbacks for mages anyway. On the other hand, ridiculously powerful spells like Paralyze, which should have been balanced with magicka cost, can become a real gamebreaker.

Illusion
This school got a lot of its appeal from influencing NPCs in dialogues by charming them, so they would accept your as their friend for the duration or give you better prices. As this functionality has been completely ripped out, Illusion is left with fear, calm, frenzy and invisibility. The problem with the first three are their level restrictions: By the time you get to use them, most enemies are already on a significantly higher level, and your spells just won’t work. Which makes Illusion especially difficult to level. Invisibility, on the other hand, is incredibly powerful in conjunction with Sneak, and should be balanced with magicka cost as well.

Restoration
Aside from the aforementioned scaling issues, this skill provides little useful spells to begin with. Turn Undead rarely works (same as Illusion spells) and is not helping to defeat your enemies either. Wards are difficult to use and provide no benefit over a decent shield – because they have a rather long charge-up, you cannot use them when you need them the most. For healing, you are better off with potions.
To get some functionality back, Restoration needs to regain its Fortify Skill, Resist Magicka/Fire/Frost/Shock and Cure Disease spells. All effects are in the game, there is no reason to withhold them from Restoration users.
The Respite perk is a bit too strong in my opinion. Stamina regeneration speed is an important factor in balancing heavy and light armor, and this perk nullifies that.

Conjuration
By far the most useful magic school. Conjuring atronachs is your best way to deal damage as a mage, although there should be more possible summons. Further, there should be more bound weapons and armor spells – bow, sword and battleaxe are just pitiful options compared to previous games. The perks are fine.

Enchanting
Several problems with this one. First, the Fortify Skill enchantments don’t actually fortify the skill, but one of its effects directly. This is the opposite of streamlining once again. As a player you have now several bonuses and numbers (perks, skills, enchantments), and the documentation is so bad that you have no idea how much which effect contributes to your overall abilities. Second, the restrictions on where you can place an enchantment are frustrating, confusing and arbitrary. Third, the magnitude of most enchantments is too high, outshining artifacts by far, and in some cases providing more bonuses than the actual skill itself (see Destruction). Fourth, the skill is useless in lower levels, because everything you can possibly find is better than what you can craft. This also stems from the design that you first have to disenchant something to make something new, which is generally worse than the original item. Fifth, staffs are still useless, because you can’t make your own you have to rely on the ones you find, and they don’t get better with use. The Enchanting level should scale the magnitude and charge cost of staffs.
The perk descriptions are sometimes not quite clear. The master perk that lets you put two effects on one item is insanely powerful, whereas Soul Siphon is severely underpowered, especially for staffs.

Block
Blocking is one of the most enjoyable combat options in Skyrim. I can’t find much wrong with this, except I think the magnitude of the Elemental Protection perk is a bit high. 50% fire, frost and shock resistance is a huge amount for an actually un-magical skill.

Archery
I really enjoy the bow as well. The staggering perk is a bit weak in comparison with Destruction’s Impact, and Hunter’s Discipline is rather pointless. But otherwise, I think Archery has improved quite a bit in Skyrim

One-Handed and Two-Handed
They are basically the same, so I think I can group them here. Not much to tell, the perks that were supposed to provide a better distinction between swords, maces and axes are quite lackluster, but overall, it seems the development focus has been on these combat options. If only the rest would have gotten the same attention. Why are there no finishing move for magic, archery and unarmed for example?

Heavy Armor
The armor skills are a mess once again. They are just too similar. You can circumvent heavy armor’s drawback either by getting the Conditioning perk or The Steed guardian stone, which makes it the preferable choice over light armor. Disadvantages while sneaking can be negated with perks and enchantments. The Fists of Steel perk is either bugged or useless by design, as it only applies the base armor rating as extra unarmed damage, but doesn’t consider skill level or upgrades.
Because there is no armor degradation in Skyrim, you can also easily abuse the armor skills to level up fast, just by letting something hit you and healing back up.

Smithing
Smithing becomes insanely strong in conjunction with Enchanting or Alchemy. Such synergies have caused a lot of ridicule for Morrowind as well, but Smithing has more relevant inherent flaws. First of all, it’s incredibly easy to level just by crafting iron daggers. You would assume that lower level gear gives less experience, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Second, upgrades are a flat bonus and not a percentage of the damage/armor rating, which makes upgraded low level and low rating gear relatively stronger than high level and high rating gear. A steel dagger with a damage rating of 15 can be upgraded to 45 (+200%), whereas a glass dagger with a rating of 27 can only be improved to 57 (+111%). Those are numbers without any benefits from Alchemy or Enchanting.
Another problem is that equipment that doesn’t have a specific perk in the Smithing tree cannot be upgraded to the highest level, no matter what. This includes several artifacts such as Savior’s Hide, which means that in the end, upgraded equipment will be better than divine artifacts.

Light Armor
As mentioned above, the armor times are too similar. Light armor provides no real benefit over heavy, except that you get the perk that makes your armor weightless a little earlier. The perk that increases your stamina regeneration isn’t such a big help, either. As it currently stands, light armor totally misses its target audience of agile characters, which are virtually extinct from Skyrim. Light Armor perks that provide more defense are quite pointless, because if I wanted more defense, I would chose Heavy Armor in the first place. Instead of reserving it as a master perk, the basic perk should provide a chance to dodge attacks, and heavy armor should retain its inherent movement penalty. Or even better, bring the dodge from Oblivion back.

Lockpicking
Because the minigame is manageable even on low skill levels, the Lockpicking skill is 100% obsolete, as are its perks. You should not be able to attempt high level locks with a low skill level, and lockpicks need to have more weight and value.
However, a big problem is that most locked chest don’t contain anything of value in the first place.

Pickpocket
A real joke of a skill. Because you still need to sneak to pickpocket, this skill is rather superfluous. Worse is that you basically have to level it by abusing the savegame system. The perks are rather nice, though.

Sneak
Sneak is really fun in Skyrim, sometimes challenging in lower levels, incredibly powerful with the Shadow Warrior perk, plain godmode with the right enchantments to perform 60x damage sneak attacks. While I think you should be able to kill humanoids with one hit while sneaking, this becomes rather ridiculous in the case of larger enemies like mammoths and dragons.

Speech
Because NPC interaction in Skyrim is crippled, this is basically just Mercantile. For what it’s worth, it’s a decent Mercantile skill. Except that you can’t barter anymore, and thus level Speech whenever you sell or buy something. You can’t avoid leveling Speech. They removed Athletics and Acrobatics for this very reason, yet they repeat the same mistake again.

Alchemy
Not only does Alchemy have a lot of exclusive effects that used to be magic spells. The magnitude is also insanely high. This makes it preferable over any magic school and is, like all crafting skills, best utilized with a warrior type character.

Overall, the character system is even worse than most critics before launch feared. Even with the terrible effects of spellmaking gone, nobody thought they would effectively kill magic to this degree. Agile characters have been removed from the series as well, with no benefit for light or unarmored, no way to increase running speed or jump height, no way to dodge in combat. The loss of options is mindblowing, and easily dwarfs the cuts from Morrowind to Oblivion. Personally, I have no hope that Bethesda returns to a system with more options and freedom.

Some Words in General
The overall development philosophy of Skyrim seems to be one of less options and gradients, but more defined categories and boxes. Either an NPC is your friend or not. Either you can do something or not. Either you picked a perk or not. Either you are Archmage or nobody. Either you are thane and can buy a house or you can’t. Yes or No. 1 or 0. This leaves no room for different approaches. Once you get a quest, there is usually only one way to solve it, even if the dialogue suggests different options.
And questing, sadly, is more dependent on quest markers than ever. NPCs give directions to your objective very, very rarely, so you have to rely on the marker on your map to have the faintest idea what you are supposed to do. The journal entries are also awfully short, miscellaneous quests don’t have one to begin with. To see all of this after the amount of feedback that was given after Morrowind and Oblivion is quite saddening.
There are many more little issues, good and bad, which I could not hope to address here. But I guess this wall of text is long enough as it is.

Conclusion
Skyrim is a vast and beautiful game with varied dungeons, an intriguing setting and interesting sidequests. This is sadly diminished by a watered-down character system, a lot of handholding and little perceivable influence on the world.

Dragonflesh (or whatever its called) gives as much protection as the armor cap wearing heavy armor. ITs not bad. You are. Don't review things if you dont play with them.

Also your review on illusion? If you overcharge illusion Frenzies, you can frenzy everything (once fully perked). You need to really try and grasp basic mechanics before reviewing them.

Furthermore, you DO NOT need to sneak to pickpocket, it makes a ton of money, and simply because your sword doesn't hit harder because you perked picpocketing does not make it bad. ITs even easy to level. Very easy. Did you even try pickpocketing? Or is your "review" on it simply based on the fact that you tried to fish a diamond necklace off of a NPC a couple of times, failed, and then said it was bad?

Also, where are you getting 60x backstabs? You are aware I hope that daggers do not benefit from enchantments that buff One-handed right? Please tell me you knew this before saying 60x? (probably not)

Its easy to hit the armor cap with light armor, just like with heavy armor, so therefore its not bad, and the stam regen perk is quite useful and quite frankly more stam regen and a 10% chance to dodge physical blows is more appealing that a perked out heavy armor tree thats also at the armor cap. Again, another case of not knowing mechanics and then reviewing them.

Im starting to think your entire review is completely pointless.

Did you read the beginning? Skip the skill section and read the rest. He has many point which I can agree.

I guarantee you, your opinion is vastly moreso.

Opinion on what? I didn't state an opinion on anything other than that I feel his review is pretty worthless since its riddled with countless mistakes and misconceptions on basic (BASIC) mechanics, just refuted his ill-informed "facts" that he based his "review" off of. You must be a fan of the OP to be so hyper-defensive and aggresive towards me refuting his points. Thats too bad.

I have not played Skyrim for as long as you have, but I have to say from what I have seen I have to agree with much of what you say.

While I don't for a second say that Skyrim is a bad game, with the streamlining that has gone from Daggerfall right through to Skyrim I feel that for myself Bethesda has taken the Elderscrolls series in a direction that is not for me. I must say that I am deeply saddened by it but I appreciate that they feel they must move on in the direction they have chosen.

Faulgor, many thanks for your excellent and objective review,

Someone takes time to play different ways, post his personal experience / impression, point out the plus and minus of the game and there we go again: give it a couple of posts for the "Skyrim Rocks Brigade" to flame him, while the "Martyrs of Skyrim svcks" show why Destruction's strongest perk is "Criticism", etc...

I thank the OP for his time in sharing his experience.

The spell is called Dragonhide. But I don't see how that invalidates anything I said about Alteration. The flesh spells are still weak in comparison, and once you get Dragonhide, they are not only obsolete, but so are the 3 perks associated with them. Still, you have to use those spells before you even get to master level.

You are right that you can dual-cast Illusion spells to circumvent the level restrictions to a degree - once you perked in Illusion. But thanks for being condescending, that trains my serenity.

I fullheartedly agree with everything in the OP. It's a shame Bethesda doesn't ever read these forums.

Im not being condescending at all. Quit playing the victim-pity card because you are dead wrong on a multitude of mechanics across a variety of sills. The Flesh spells, are in fact, not weak in comparison, especially once perked, did you even try to compare them? Like numbers here, not preference. There is no "to a degree" you dual cast a frenzy, you can frenzy guards at level 80. Perked into illusion fully of course. But why else are you trying to use illusion if not fully perked? Its a pretty fine system, though I can agree it can be a bit tough to level. Its almost as if they planned for illusion users to spam Muffle to cover the gaps.

OP is pretty much spot on.

I really don't like the way this series is headed, and the worst part is that its painfully obvious it is going to keep going down that path. Would you honestly be surprised if ES 6 ended up being nothing more than a glorified God of War clone (but in first person view)?

I think the skill criticisms have missed out on quite a bit, and as mentioned, without those pieces its not actually a bad summary of the game, with some well thought out points, and others equally badly thought out points.

I really think people overlook the impact level designers instead of art direction staff has had on the creation of caves and dungeons. They are vastly more unique than Oblivions, and often more so than Morrowinds even. The secret door to the start is a bit silly at times, but is useful as a mechanic in the absence of mark and recall etc.

Its overlong to lay my criticisms point by point, but overall an interesting read, thanks for writing it. Don't agree with some of it, but thats the point of having opinions

As someone who has played around 125 hours now, i can honestly say that i do agree with your review and the points made within it. Very valid. You also wrote the review in a very constructive manner, kudos for that.
I can`t comment on spell casting as i haven`t really tried that, but i know i have the same opinion on the rest of the content. Faction quests do feel short and rushed, while side quests can indeed be more fun to do. The civil war side feels quite shallow and more a gimmick than anything that adds any noticeable effects on the gameworld.

It doesn`t stop me loving this game and i`ll still be playing it for a long time, but there certainly are flaws and you have pinpointed them very well. +1 on your honest and well documented review.

Arguing within the first 3 posts, nice one guys. No doubt this will be yet another thread of "your opinion is worthless" "no yours is"

Can we be civil for just ONE THREAD and discuss the guy's opinions without being arrogant petulant children?

ON TOPIC: It's great to see a well structured piece of feedback like this - gives plenty of room for discussion rather than the usual "GAME IS BROKEN :@" tripe we get spammed with. Agreed speech is pointless btw, I'm not quite sure why they included it... I guess higher means you're more likely to "intimidate" and "persuade" in dialogue options, but again it's out of your control really.

Sometimes there are employees online. I know that Hayt has read a thread about destruction magic imbalances. He belongs to the Bethesda Games Studio group. Those are the developers, methinks?

OP, I agree with pretty much everything you said. Good review! :thumbsup:

What do you mean "opinion on what?" I quoted your opinion. In fact, it was the only thing I quoted, and you've elaborated that opinion in your response to me. I must be a fan of the OP... whatever that means. And why that's too bad isn't explanatory either. Your follow up response makes perhaps even less sense than your initial opinion.

I feel that Bethesda has taken the Elderscrolls series in a direction that is not for me. I must say that I am deeply saddened by it.

Some mildly interesting (albeit worn-out) points, until you get to the Skills section. That's where this crosses the line from opinion to misstatement of the facts.

Just because they changed the skill/leveling system doesn't mean that it's bad. It means that it's changed. If you're the type of person who naturally fears change, then don't bother playing the next ES game, because they're going to change more things. And after that, they'll probably change things again. Basically, if you can't handle them updating the system as they go, you're going to be constantly disappointed with every new release.

And, as everyone else has already pointed out, you're just flat out wrong about most of the skill trees you criticize.

would agree to this 100%, especiall to the conclusion...

Its funny how much more honest reviews are when they are made by hardcoe fans of the series. This guy put 200 hours in and he is honest about its flaws and strengths. Why can a game magazine publish an article like this?

And another par to the course "it's pretty but it's dumb" complaint, goodie.

so this "dumbing down" thing stems from having binary scales instead of a scale between 1 and 100, but honestly, how does this matter?

In the case of Disposition how does a Disposition of 50 help you? How is that any different than 60? Nearly not at all. They either like you don't care about you or dislike you, inbetween just doesn't matter.
Similar with skills, does it make a huge difference between having 50 or 55 in one skill or attribute?
How does it even add more choice? You either get better at something, or you don't.
Having bigger scaling won't matter much unless the scales themselves have their own meaning, and on more dense scales, the differentiation will be less.

Character blandness always make me scratch my head, especially if it is coming from a TES fan. TES was never about deep converstation or even interesting characters. Yes there are a couple of memorable ones, mostly from the main quest, but the everyday NPCs were always just there. Oblivion tried to give them some story, some character, which Skyrim followed but it tend to annoy people more than anything really...
Same with the "linearity of quests". Most of the time you'll unwillingly start quests in this series. Especially Morrowind there are many cases where the quest starts the moment you ask about it, or even enter an area. So you hate the Tribunal and the Temple, too bad, you've entered their sacred shrine, you cannot even desecrate or destroy it and you even got a quest about completing the pilgrimage.
Even in those Boss rooms you've mentioned, I was able to sneak past quite a few of these bosses because I was just too weak to take them. The door had a Master lock, yes, but it was pickable. Also, I remember a number of quests where I was given a number of choices at the end of quest, like demanding the horse I just stole for somebody, killing the person after giving me their secret...

And I have no idea about this "kick in the nether-regions" about the lore you've mentioned. Why, Daggerfall wrote everything about Morrowind, how the Dwarves dissapeared, about the chimer, about Dagoth Ur, about the great houses, about the battle at Red Mountain?
Or Morrowind ever mentioning the precise geography of the Shivering Isles, Mania, Dementia? Where does it say anything about Arden-Sul?
Heck what's with Talos, Morrowind just included it in the main religion just like that, in Daggerfall there was only the 8.

The biggest issue i have with the game are some of the obvious imbalances.

Light Armor v.s Heavy armor. (Armor cap easily reached with light armor, and heavy armor perks svck)
Crafting (as individual skills they are fine, the problem becomes when you make super pots, with super enchants to get insane levels of Smithing/Enchanting)
Destruction magic i found was decent but was lackluster in damage because of poor scaling (although NPC destruction was so hilariously overpowered you are forced to get the 30% magic resist perk from the atleration tree along with the lord stone for 55% Magic resist).

A good review, I agree with everything except for a few mistakes about the skill trees. Regardless, most of your points are completely valid, especially about world/npc interaction and influence and quest design, especially the guild questlines. A major disappointment, because it was done far better in Oblivion, and I expected at least the same in Skyrim.

It's amazing how people tend to rate the effectiveness of a review based on whether or not they agree with the writer.

"hardcoe" fans make up a small fraction of the people who play this game. A mainstream reviewer is trying to review the game for everyone. Just like Bethesda is trying to make the game for everyone. They are not in business to create games tailored to the smallest group of "hardcoe" players.