That's a result of having a purely built in fanbase who would buy a liquid turd if you put a price tag on it ( and no, I'm not calling Skyrim a liquid turd, it's not quite THAT bad ).

Look at FFXIII. [censored]tiest singleplayer FF game ever made, but it sold millions due to all the fanbois who ran out and bought it sight unseen on release day solely because "It's Final Fantasy! YAY!".

And TES games sell because the same type of people will buy them on release day because "It's TES! YAY!".

Err, my friends who have never played an elders scrolls game would disagree with you

I like it just the way it is. I love the drop me in the sand box and find my way around style of play.

There has been a trend towards more storyline driven RPGs with some good results (The Witcher 2) and some bad (Dragons Age 2). I agree that Skyrim is a step back to more classic RPG in that manner but its not a bad step. Bethesda gives us an open world to fool around with and we can create our own stories. I think thats just commendable. Now, lets just fix the bugs

//Feistin

I agree there should have been deeper relationships with the other characters in the game it's my only real complaint , that said the level of depth to the rest of the game blows Bioware out of the water.

Go play a linear story-driven RPG if that's what you want. :confused: There's plenty of them out there.

TES is for fans of open-world RPGs.

The thing you need to understand is, there's a tradeoff. In providing all the freedom we have in TES games (like the open-world, full control over who our character is, etc) it becomes a lot harder to craft a good main storyline. Think about it. It's much easier to write an epic storyline if you can control what the player sees constantly. It's also a lot easier to craft a great storyline around a set character you know everything about - not to mention have more meaningful NPC interaction.

This ^^

The open world can be frightening for some

All the decisions you have to make yourself. And the craziness of fighting a level 30 Ice Troll at level 3...
//Feistin

who says you cant have an open world RPG with also a strong story driven main quest line?

Nobody, we have this already. Its called Morrowind, Oblivion & Skyrim, GTA and Assasins Creed.

Next question

i liked mass effect and dragon age 1 , really enjoed companions there theyre quotes and jokes , but 2 is soo meh . But playing dragon age even if it was so awesome i could never get off the feeling im blocked in a closed space in a dungeon or something , that there are limited mobs , limited items and quests . It was a great adventure dont get me wrong , but i really felt i watched a move and was tight , i mean in Skyrim i am playing each day 5 7 hours for 5 days i think , with each class , and did lots of stuff i WANTED and still need to start mq

I edited my post slightly after you replied:

"The thing you need to understand is, there's a tradeoff. In providing all the freedom we have in TES games (like the open-world, full control over who our character is, etc) it becomes a lot harder to craft a good main storyline. Think about it. It's much easier to write an epic storyline if you can control what the player sees constantly. It's also a lot easier to craft a great storyline around a set character you know everything about - not to mention have more meaningful NPC interaction. "

..

I'm not saying open-world games can't have good storylines or that there's no room for improvement. But it's kind've stupid to expect an open-world RPG to rival RPGs with linear gameworlds and set characters as far as storyline goes.

Wow... I can't imagine how many people agree with the OP.

When you're referencing Bioware games, PLEASE don't tell me you're referring to DA:O. (I haven't played DA2 yet because I didn't want to pay full price for a dumbed-down game.)

The universe and story were good but formulaic and, the characters conformed to typical fantasy types, I don't know where you think all this depth was. I could tell I was playing a video game and not reading novel by an acclaimed author.

Maybe what you're missing are the major epic plot points where your decisions radically change the world or the constantly reoccurring characters. The plot points in Skyrim can still have an epic feel, but a linear game like DA:O really emphasizes them and makes them pop out of the story. In particular, many of these events completely change the world. That's just not going to be possible in a game where you're not forced in a particular story direction.

How the hell do you expect to have reoccurring characters in a sandbox game? The easiest way to have characters reoccur is to make them selectable as members of your party. Sandbox games cannot work with the multi-character parties of tactical RPGs. And as for non-party characters, you determine the ones you interact with in the world, and the world has god knows how many characters in it (most of which you never see or interact with at all). In linear RPGs the number of characters is vastly smaller since there is only one path with the same NPCs in every playthrougjh.

As for Skyrim, I easily get lost in the world. While no particular character in the game has all the dialogue options of Alistar or Zefran, where you could have couple dozen long conversations, and where each party member has their own particular reaction to in-game events, they do have remarkably distinct personalities considering how many there are.


I don't know what you expect Skyrim to be. But the qualities you're looking for are those that are feasible with linear RPGs. If you want every NPC to have 10 hours of voice acting and 30 long, extended dialogues each with a ton of dialogue options, if you want every single long quest to change the game world and thus require all the other major and minor questlines and NPCs to react to this change, then you're delusional if you think any of this is possible in such an open world as Skyrim's.

To be quite honest, I wasn't expecting even Skyrim's number of questlines, unique locations, and unique NPCs with distinct personalities. You should appreciate Skyrim for what it is, and if you can't, then realize that the qualities you're looking for will never be possible in sandbox RPGs. So just stay away from them rather than be disappointed every single time.

Agree, great game but forgettable characters. Script is a sort of a means to an end but lacks some punch, maybe it's the gee golly PG -13 nature of the game. In the end I'm enjoying myself quite a lot, but it could have used more depth. Someone mentioned cut scenes, those might have taken to much time if new animations needed rendering, then again it might have been possible to do some simple scripting to move the cameras to give some motion and action during a conversation.

so.. you went through all this trouble to sign up for the forums just to complain lol

This isn't Bethesda's formula, it's the formula of an RPG. Skyrim isn't like a single player MMO, it's like an RPG. If you don't like RPGs don't play them, problem solved.

You make a good point about companions.

In Fallout: New Vegas, companions already have their own conversations and personal quests. I again don't see why they can't do that for companions in Skyrim. They have shown that they are capable of doing this, why skip it for Skyrim?

Single player MMO? Single player massive multiplayer online? That doesn't make much sense to me.

It's an RPG game, and feels like an RPG game.

You call this a single player MMO as if it's something bad. Well, maybe there are just a lot of people that really like a concept like this. Ask the 10 million WoW players what they'd prefer as a single player RPG and most of them will probably come up with one of the TeS games. You can't blame Bethesda trying to cater for that large group of people that are tired of the rudeness and abuse in MMORPGs and want to try some single player RPG instead.

On the point of character development and story cutscenes: personally I couldn't care less. If you want good character development, read a book. It's simply a matter of "You can't have it all". Bioware does make good RPGs with memorable characters and nice cut scenes, but it goes at the cost of immersiveness and freedom of choice.

DA2 was a very very lineair game and really can't be compared to an open world game like Skyrim. As a developer you have to make choices and Bethesda opted for a large world with "large stories", instead of focusing on the personal affairs of a few main characters.

I agree! There are enough linear games (Witcher, Mass Effect, Dragon Age and many more). The fact that the TES series goes another route - providing a huge open world where a player can do whatever he/she wants but still also provide a decent main quest to follow if you want - that is a concept that never gets old. Especially when no other game actually gives you that.

By the OP's logic, Oblivion is then like a single-player MMO. Morrowind was like a single-player MMO. This is nothing new.

But look at the latest GTA, or LA Noire... It's kinda open-world, and still they make cutscenes and such to enhance the main quest etc.

It's not impossible to mix the too, although it requires a lot of effort and especially with TES I guess because it is a domain they aren't well-versed in yet (not saying they are bad either).

I would also tend to think that the mq (or even side quests) could have a little more cinematics moments, but tbo it is not a priority in my eyes for TES games anyway. The sandbox and "world is alive with or without you" is more important, as well as character possibilities and customization (which is a thing that still needs more work)

You seem to have stumbled into the Skyrim forum. I'm not sure what game it is you're playing but Google will probably be able to track down the appropriate forum for you.

fail troll is fail

The comparison "Single-Player MMO" is actually not that bad. Besides being able to play with other players in an MMO, another important aspect of MMO's is that they never end and provide a world that doesn't just stop when you beat the main villain. It goes on as long as you want to play it. In that regard it is indeed similar to the concept of the TES games. That is actually one of the big "+" I have with games from Bethesda, cause they exactly deliver what I want in a game.