Hello everyone, It's been a while since I went online here but now I'm back and It's mainly because I found this awesome video about the "dumbing down" of The elder scrolls series.

When I played Skyrim for the first time. I thought that the game was "perfect". Great combat, Great quests, great story etc.. However after I watched this video I really began to think about how and where Skyrim got it wrong. And when I say "got it wrong". I haven't played any of the other elder scrolls game at all, and that's probably why I didn't understand the video at first. Take a look at the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JweTAhyR4o0&list=PLjeh5MaFvzeSRylyuXowSfscHoW6eqVmn

http://youtu.be/KHa8c2EPFNY

The counter argument video needs a counter-counter argument video asap!

Seen that video before but I pretty much agree. Love the TES games even Skyrim, but I was so overwhelmingly disappointed by the majority of Skyrim that it was very sad to me. I just hope TES VI doesn't fall even further than Skyrim.

So sick of these threads.

At least its not a civil war thread!

It actually does, because the counter argument video is terrible and misses the point completely. It doesn't counter anything and only serves to make the creator look foolish.

Might as well be a CW thread. This is just as bad.

or. it dissaproves all the points that are brought up. What is wring with that video, where is he missing the point? The original "dumbing down" video is biased beyond all imagination, seeing ONLY through rose-colored glasses in many of the arguments.

So you're saying that even if the next TES game is bad it will still be amazing?

You make a good point but It's still annoying that Bethesda is starting to focus more on kids than elders..

Why? He makes some good points

Then don't read them and don't write in them, problem solved

Thank you! God I don't want to hear about those again lol

It won't be bad. It might be worse than Skyrim (Hope not) but it will still be an amazing game.

I hope you're right. I hope so

The thing that amuses me about this is that most of the people who have a problem with Skyrims setup are on PC and can easily install mods to counter the changes they don't like instead of whine about them....Beth never looks back so crying won't make them cater to you and return to older setups.

There's changes I disagree with and there's changes that I thank the god they've made. Overall it's still a great game and has sold well which tells me that they've mostly pleased most players, from the new casuals to the 2002 PC players

Theres a million of them. Why keep beating a dead horse? Yeah Skyrim has its flaws but it's still a great game. Whatever happened to people playign the games they love without complaining?

Ok, to give some examples, the creator of the counter-argument video defends Bethesda's decision to make so many NPCs immortal by saying that if they didn't, random dragon attacks would ruin the game. What the creator of the video completely misses is how simple it would be to make certain NPCs invulnerable to dragons but not the player-character.

He also tries to justify the excessive use of quest markers by pointing out one isolated instance where NPC directions in Morrowind weren't good enough (something that can easily be fixed/avoided in future) then makes the ridiculous suggestion that it's not dumbing down because most games are doing it these days.

Overall, the arguments are weak, ill thought out, and fail to counter the original video. The only people who seem to agree with the counter argument video are the kind of people who will blindly defend any and all criticism of Skyrim regardless of whether the criticism is justified.

Oh, and the old "rose-colored glasses" remark is nonsense. There are plenty of people who played Morrowind for the first time only after playing Oblivion or Skyrim, and yet they still recognise that in many ways it's a far better open world RPG. You can't just cry "nostalgia!" every time someone dares to suggest that the most recent game in a series isn't the best.

1. except the "protected" status still does not help againt Dragon fire. Actually pay attention to a "protected" character, they can still easily die if hit by a DOT.

2. Except that happens A LOT with many of the minor quests. and it is true, the bigger the game, the harder it is to qrite more and more quests with good journal entries and decent directions. If they had issues doing it in a game like Morrowind, where several of th quests were fairly close, It would be near impossible to do it competently with games like Oblivion and Skyrim, where the game world is A LOT bigger and quests are MUCH farther apart. even the mod that tries to do that in Skyrim failed and was basically stopped because it took SO long to work on and still was not even accounting the DLC and several of the minor quests. His point was not that it was bad quest design totally, but that the reason companies do it, is because doing journal entry style quests take up A LOT of time and resources that could be used in making the game better in nearly every other area. Skyrim goes to far in many quests with the markers, having them floating above the exact item or person you need to talk to.

Francis didn't rage quit Skyrim so it should be ok for now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnCIW7JwnVI.

That's an act....

he does have a video though explaining what he really thinks and he does basically agree, ESO is WAY too average of a game.

1. So you're suggesting it's impossible to program an NPC to be completely invulnerable to all dragon attacks, but not to the player-character?

2. What a load of nonsense. Oblivion and Skyrim aren't that much bigger, and even if they were, NPC directions, signposts on the road, etc. would still suffice. Considering how markers completely ruin and undermine the very essence of what makes open world games great, I'd say that the extra time taken (which you exaggerate btw) to do NPC directions right would be the single greatest improvement they could make to the game.

Eressa explaining why the counter argument vid is bs, even without the "dumbing down" video's existence.

Ive been playing Beth games since I was a kid with Morrowind, and I am in love with Morrowind, I could chat with those centuries old mage lords all day...

I dont think that Skyrim is some sort of complete piece of crap whereas Morrowind is some sort of divine experience. If anything, I think that every Bethesda game is far in advance of nearly every other game, and that Morrowind is the 2002 version of the divine experience whereas Skyrim is the 2011 version. Sure, the games may change over the years, in various ways, but so long as Bethesda is at the helm, I think I will love each and every one of them. I just wish that they would make more factions like House Telvanni. A mageocracy ruled over by eccentric mage lords who live in towers checks so many of my boxes in "Things i love about fantasy".

1. considering they could not do it, yes, to that complete extent it is very possible that they could not make NPCs immune to everything but the player. someone does not understand progeram design.

2. yeah, take your nostalgia glasses off please, and go paly the game, Vvardenfell is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH smaller then Cyrodiil or Skyrim, anyone who says otherwise is deluding themselves. those who refuse to have quest markers to any extent are a very select few, the few people on this forums are so in the minority that it is basically meaningless. Even those who like directions understand how long it takes to completely get make them great. It would increase production time by well over a year easily, for something only the minority cares about.

I think a lot of people when they play Morrowind nowadays have a good understanding of how to get around Vvardenfel, so those really hard to follow directions are pretty much a non-issue.

For someone not playing for the 50th time though, it can be quite hard, especially with how poor those directions were at times. In Skyrim I thought that spell that drew a path to your current objective was a excellent way of doing it. I turned off the quest markers showing up in the game world and just used that spell whenever I needed to figure out where to go, although I preferred to just wander around until I either found it or found another thing that was interesting most of the time.

Skyrim is my first Elder Scrolls game, and I don't find it overly simplistic really. Certainly not when put in comparison with the likes of Fallout 3, for instance.

I think that when they stuff as much content into the game as this, then every quest can't be an epic multi-choice adventure. Many quests are really simple fetch quests, and while it gets repetitive after a while, we're all still here, aren't we?

I'm fine with this. More money means more money for improving their games.