I don't see how the MMO part is anywhere relevant to your conclusion. I agree with you though, I love Skyrim, but the system/mechanism is outdated. It's Oblivion with better graphic and improved game play.

The open-world part hasn't changed much. Imagine in the world where NPCs actually gain age, engage with each other, and produce offspring. Imagine in the world where NPCs would build their house when they collect sufficient amount of gold, and when their business go wrong, they have to sell their house to pay their debt.

THAT is what I would call the ultimate single player game. I have faith in you Bethesda!!!

I can't believe some people are actually satisfied with the guilds in this game. It took me two quests to become the leader of the companions. The obvious lack of important guild related quests are mind boggling, how can there be so little to a guild? And no, Auto generated side quests after becoming the leader are not an excuse.

This game clearly lacks in guild related content.

GTA and LA Noire have set characters, which are easier to craft stories around. And are you seriously suggesting cutscenes would be good for a series like TES? :confused: I'd hate that. The day TES becomes all cinematic and filled with cutscenes is the day I lose all interest in the series.

To be honest, i'd be perfectly happy if they just stopped doing main quests altogether in TES games, and just invested more time in side quests, factions, and the gameworld itself.

Oh yes, I find the factions far more interesting than the main quest (I'm not far into the MQ for Skyrim yet, nor in the guilds). However, I feel that in Skyrim the main quest does feel a bit more forced as you can get some shouts only thorugh the main quest. So unless you don't want to use these, you have to follow the main storyline a bit to get them, which slightly ruins the open world aspect.

Sub-par or simply annoying characters was one of the main things that kept me from enjoying previous TES games and Fallout 3. But happily Skyrim is a huge improvement. I've grown very fond of the Companion guild in my as of yet rather short time with the game, and this time the characters actually have some genuine grit to them, something they lacked in previous games. They aren't as gnarly as they were in Gothic, but they're believable and unique enough to work pretty well.

So far the questing has been quite enjoyable. I like the limited-to-no cutscene storytelling method, have appreciated it since Gothic, and it works well here too.

Bethesda has got right what Bioware usually gets wrong, and has fixed many of the things that in my opinion they used to get wrong. So far I have no serious complaints, apart from the crashes (was especially annoying when I just killed that second giant chasing my poor level 4 mage around the map, and had to reload and do the entire Benny-Hill-with-a-flamethrower sequence all over again :drool: )

You know there is actually a game that does quite a lot of what you describe? Graphically it looks like crap but its being developed by one guy and the mechanisms he uses are awesome.

When you start a game it creates a new world from scratch using some massive algorithm..Mountains get raised, oceans created, rivers, biomes etc. Then it will inhabit the world starting at some point in the past (like 500 years ago or like 2000) and will create an entire history with royal bloodlines being found, wars fought, monsters invading the lands and racking up deaths (this all gets tracked and they gain titles based on it)

You run a small dwarf colony who all have their own desires and can get married etc, your task is to setup a colony and build them a mine, but your dwarfs follow their own desires, they will make murals and art based on their own life experiences and the history of the world. So for instance, two dwarves get married and get a kid, kid gets killed in an unfortunate accident where mum was carrrying it during an elephant raid. Dad finds out, goes into a deep depression and becomes a raving alcoholic who roams the hallways for the rest of his days harassing other dwarves, some other dwarf gets fed up and knocks dad down. Mom will grow a grudge against the other dwarf, and the next bow she carves has a nice decoration of that dwarf surrounded by vermin or some other object he totally despises.

Game is called Dwarf Fortress and you should definetely check it out if you are able to use your imagination and look beyond the ascii graphics. On a sidenote, Notch was an avid Dwarf Fortress player before he came up with Minecraft, which is pretty much a dumb down version of it with 3D graphics.

P.s. I love Skyrim for what it is right now. My ideal future of a single player open-world rpg would be like above though. You start the game and it creates a random world with a random history, random factions etc and then plays it out for a couple of hundred years before you jump in Radiant story eat your heart out lol.



Anyway, peace out.

>Any Developer trying to take lessons from Bioware

Ha ha ha, no.

Bioware makes waifu simulators with trash writing and "decisions" that never follow through.

I agree with you, but if you remember, Bethesda throwed by the window all the story tellers and non grafical employee by the windows.
They are just Milking the same old formula, again, again and again, without doing any progress and even regressing in a lot of cases.
Its clear the engine is old a mix of Horriblivion with Fallout 3.
The game has a very high steep rate of decreasing interest factors, you can see that on the population that lower they notes at metacritics as time pass by.
Most of the high rates are merely given by people who played less than 24 hours.
Bethesda risk to be milking a goat in their next game.
They have HUGE progress to make in ALL departments:
Story telling
Interface
GFX
(not that important as much as the road if easy and free for modders)Settings are good but totally unimaginative
and above all,
They have to start hearing the recurrent claims of playerbase, there are gameplay improvements that are repeateadly done by modders since Morrowind, its absurd they aren t in Skyrim. Because the download rates are stellars and they comentaries are always positive. Its like bethesda never visited TES vault or other sites.

At least they haven t put cutscenes a la GTA in t...yet.

This is going to sound like an insult (or worse: flaming) but it is not intended to be Skyrim is a lot to do with how much imagination YOU bring to it. In ME everything - despite the illusion of some freedom - is highly scripted and you are always lead in a certain direction. This allows for far tighter writing and plot development. This is not the case in the ES titles. They are both RPGs yes but very different beasts. Perhaps Skyrim simply isn't for you?

Comparing Bethesda to Bioware is Blasphemy. Especially after they trashed the Dragon Age storyline with Dragon Age 2, what a piece of garbage that turned into. Sorry I thought Oblivion was bland and generic and DA2 was worse, much worse.

Console RPGs are like single player MMOs. Your Bio 1/2s, Dead Space 1/2s, Metal Gear 1/2s, Mass Effect 1/2s, etc. Where you have an 'open world on rails' pseudo open experience. You go through the motions and feel comfortable having a direct path with mechanics designed to tell you what to do at every step of the way. All you need it time.

Skyrim is like an old school PC RPG, where you are given the dev tools to make whatever you want, with no hand-holding. It can be fast, slow, easy, hard, or anything you want. Perpetually wild imbalance is the name of the game, and there is no correct path.

There is no such thing as a single player MMO, its a contradiction in terms!

-After 48 hours Skyrim sold 3.6 millions copies, no bioware games have ever done that... So saying that it doesn't cut it in 2011, is completely biased and based solely on your own opinion, facts are against you.

-I'm not sure I'm following you with "characters that develop through the game" but if you're talking about the main character changing, or close companions that would evolve through the game's main story... Then I think you're expecting too much: you want bethesda to create the kind of relationships you have in a bioware game... But while creating a game that dwarves in size Mass Effect 1 + 2 + Dragon Age 1 + 2 ? How fair is that... Bioware makes great games, and my all time favorite is still Baldur's Gate 2... But Bioware creates completely on rail games, with zero exploration and one single way of playing it (main story... that doesn't even have true multiple endings...). That's complete BS, sure Bethesda should try to improve (and they did, their quests in Skyrim are I find more carefully handcrafted that in previous games, sadly it also means there are less of them), but you can't possibly expect from them the same care to character development then Bioware can... For that you'd need skyrim to be completely linear based solely on the main quest, with no free exploration, and a world a tenth of it's size...

-I don't give a DAMN about story telling, I'm not playing a Bethesda game for that... Sure it would be nice... But I played hundreds of hours in Daggerfall Morrowind and Oblivion without ever caring or completing the main quest, I just don't play a Bethesda game for the storytelling, *I* create my own story... If I want great story telling I'll play a bioware game or hell maybe even an Uncharted game. Expecting both great story telling with memorable characters super cool scripted events and a huge open world is just unrealistic. Why don't you go on the bioware forum and start complaing about how small their games are with so little exploration? You'd get a similar answer...




F:NV is not made by bethesda... It's made by Obsidian that has close ties with... Bioware. Still only 5 hours in that game (for some reasons I just can't really get into it... even though I'm a huge fan of Fallout 1 and 2. But I think you have way less companions available then in Skyrim don't you? (Though I have to say I'd rather have less companions but with more unique dialogues I'll give you that.)

And Rockstar Games puts absolutely *UNREAL* budget in their game... I'd bluntly say Bethesda probably can't even afford the kind of budget rockstar can... If I recall right GTA IV still has the record for the most expensive game ever? And L.A Noir is linear, it's a fake open world. You go through the same crime scenes in the same order, always.

*EDIT* damn double post... now way to delete it I guess?

After almost 6 years of WoW and Rift, I'm glad to be back in TES. There's something to be said for MMOs - there's always someone playing you can group up with, talk to, etc.

In the end, I missed TES - and I didn't realize how much till I started playing Sky. The freedom to do what you want when you want is just great. My mage is level 6, been playing since Friday and complete one quest, The Golden Claw. I love not having to always push to get to level 85 (or is it 90 now in WoW).

But, everyone is different OP, and maybe TES type games are not for you.

Good luck.

Once again look at the sales. Once an roughly official number comes out it will show how well the game is doing. A good portion of those sales is word of mouth and tons of marketing that brought in new comers. It's getting great reviews not only form the Game Informers and IGNs of the world but from the average player like you or I.

I understand what you are saying though, it happens with COD.

Speak for yourself OP, I'm having a great time

I love the dungeonn crawling, looking for new loot (although that is somewhat diminished by blacksmithing but I'll try to avoid smithing for my next playthrough) and all dungeons I've been in so far tell a small story, they have a background etc. I find myself stopping at my house in Whiterun to drop off the stuff I'm keeping but afterwards I stop to read some of the books I picked up along the way. Not all characters are Bioware level of awesome (I haven't even spoken to the greybeards yet though so no major progress in the main quest, spent all my time exploring many dungeons) but I find towns and their people very interesting with their conflicts etc. The game just oozes atmosphere for me

Look it's another thread that basically says "Hey lets take what made ES popular in the first place and change it"

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be differing with you on 12/20/2011.

I believe Bethesda spent so much time making an environment that we would like(like town, scenery, and the overall feeling of the game) that they forgot how to make NPCs interesting and important. I also feel that doing the actual quest itself and doing the objectives that I often forget or don't even care what it is about and I just do what I am told. IMO

In my opinion, the "tight" story telling style of Mass Effect simply doesn't work with games like these. You are supposed to do what ever you want. In Mass Effect the story is a straight line until you "choose" what you want to do. But your choice is already decided by the developer. TES series is a unique exerience in a sense that you are what you RP. They give you a mass amount of options, you design your OWN character. Your OWN story. Thing is, most don't want to use that imagination anymore.

As far as the quests go, They are pretty much TES standard fair. To get the most out of your TES exerience it's through the lore, and in my opinion, there are very very few games that can hold a candle to TES lore. It's so deep and well written. Fun to read too!

You are very much alone in this regard, OP. I absolutely love sandbox style games, and am glad this is one of them.

While Im enjoying this game and have played TES since morrowwind I think you're a little off on this statement.

Its not like Bethesda doesnt have a large budget to market and "sell" their games and lets face it, eye candy sells. What the OP is talking about is the actual "life" of the game, which I can somewhat agree, feels lacking in a way. The NPC's do seem quite robotic, even though they now have "schedules" and multiple tasks ina given day... (which btw, has been around for years and is nothing new in rpg's...)

Thats funny....I was thinking the same thing today - "This is like my favourite MMO of all time - Everquest 2....it's just amazing". I've been a game since the days of the ZX81 and own gaming PC's, 360 and PS3 and Skyrim is the best game I've played without question. It runs like a dream....not had one crash or freeze and runs at 60 fps with everything maxxed. The developers deserve a ton of credit for what they've achieved with this.

While initially agreed with OP, after reading a couple of opinions, I realized that this type of game is just not for me. Apparently it's unrealistic to expect a quality storytelling in an open world RPG. Even in 2011. Even from Bethesda.