Actually, some things have been made easier. Whether to call it "dumbed down" or "simplified," I'll leave to other people to decide.

But, let's be honest. The only issue you face is which particular faction/race to roll - and most of the time the racial traits decide that.

The other issue is where to assign perks. And again, depending on what you roll determines where your perks go.

But, my opinion is that gaming companies are simplefying games to some extent, making it easier to play and attracting a larger player base. Those of us who are used to doing a lot of research before rolling a new character are becoming a minority, because a lot of players are married, going to school, have a job, and don't want to spend time reading a lot of data to make their characters viable.

I believe this started several years ago when Blizzard decided to remove defensive requirements from tanks in WoW. Those of use who had a tank, especially a prot paladin, had a large part of that game removed from play. It allowed players that had no business playing a tank to now jump in and lead others to wiping in dungeons/raids while claiming that it was the DPS or healers who screwed up, but not themselves.

I think other gaming companies watched that very carefully and are now following similar practices. Tweaking games here and there; I wonder where it will end.

If enough people whined about dumbing down and hand-holding, there's a chance the series would be much better off.

A lot of people whined about level-scaling in Oblivion, and Bethesda seemed to listen.

Well, sure if I′d go into detail I would find a lot of little things that could be made better.
But to be honest I never enjoyed a RPG as much as Skyrim since Morrowind and played pretty much every SP RPG out there.

You're right. If enough people have intelligent, well presented cases and a solution to said problem. Then Bethesda may well take it on board. But when the complaints come from people who are either using platform slander or directed insults about a demographics intelligence, then its hard to take it seriously.
By and large, this is the kind of complaining I see on this forum.

to the people who think distributing points to attributes like strength, endurance and agility.... you're clearly intellectual heavy weights.

you're wasted playing fantasy RPG's, can you please solve the current economic crisis, find an infinite clean energy source or at least find out if neutrinos really are faster than light?

TIA

It's ironic because WoW is considered the ultimate Dumb Down, yet the game has more math than just about anything out there.

I don't necessarily think that many decisions have been removed from character development, you just don't have to make them up front. At the end of the day, choosing to level your weapon, armor, health, and stamina skills is the same thing as putting points into "strength and constitution" attributes and picking those skills out of a list. It's really just a matter of presentation.

I think Skyrim is the best implementation of Bethesda's vision for an organic "use it to improve it" concept they've been working on for a long time. Oblivion was the perfect example of what that idea looks like when everything goes terribly wrong, but I think they've struck a good balance here.

Mostly, yeah... sadly so. But I've come across several past threads that was already sinking to temper vortex, tried giving some sympathy instead of the urge from within to shoot it with "troll" post. When it calmed down, it turned out that the OP was just our fellow Skyrim lover, nearly misunderstood as hater.

Well, if you realized that there's no reasoning to a particular hater, then just leave the thread.

I think given the huge frequency of the "troll hate" threads, its almost worthless attempting a quantified complaint thread. People are just sick to death of it.
You'll notice its usually the same half a dozen members starting the complaint threads at the moment.

Definetly Witcher 2 in the terms of story, characters and narrative. Even though it's not as open as the TES stuff.
Plus the RPG mechanics actually work.

Some may argue it could be also Deus Ex 3, but then again, it could be too much "FPS-y" for some people.

The Witcher 2 had a great story telling ability, but I found the game play mechanics horrible.

Again, most of the compaints are that the game isn't a 1990's RPG. Which is fine, actually i'd like to see the next game in the series go back to the roots (somewhere in between DF and MW) in terms of skills, levelling and classes.

I love Skyrim though, i truly believe it to be the best game in the series.

Really? I actually liked how you can't max up everything and have to specialize, helping the re-play value.

And I had some trouble with the combat system for example, but that was fixed quickly with CD Projekt supporting the game with patches and free goodies till this day. :celebration:

I gotta tell you, I feel the same. Technically, Skyrim is the superior game, but theres just something about it that make it feel less attachted to Oblivion and Morrowind.


Almost as if it could be another game than TES.

I personally think this is the best iteration of the series thus far.
Better than Oblivion and better than Morrowind (my introduction to this wonderful series).
Yes the game has been streamlined and some things removed. There are a few things removed from the game, though in large part they were the tedious tasks, most aspects of the game people complain about are stll in the game, albeit in a different form.
The loss of statistics seems to be a huge thing for a lot of people on these forums (most people who bought the game probably don't care and are off playing it blissfully unaware or apathetic to these forums). The thing I tend to find amusing is that these statistics, as someone else pointed out and as I have before, were used before the advent of computer based RPGs to simulate a world with some form of order and allow people to simulate events and outcomes. Surely with computer games that can be done just as efficiently behind the scenes, without the players poring over it, the key aspect people should be worried about losing is choice, and that still exists in spades (moreso in character development than prior games where choices with reprecussions on character development have to be made and you cannot be the best at everything). Those that decry the loss of visible statistics as a design choice to appease those with 'less intrelligent' than themselves can surely see this arguement is a fallacy?
Companies ARE making games more accessible and in many cases easier (though lets not kid ourselves, most computer games have never been all that hard). However Skyrim is no easier than Oblivion, or Morrowind. The series in general has never been 'difficult' and those that wanted more challenge had the creation kit, or mods, to appease them (as will happen again here when it released).

However everyone is free to have their opinion on the matter.

I heard for quite a long time how great The Witch 2 is. So I played it this summer and found it pretty dissapointing.
The story is OK until the moment Foltest dies. From that point on the quality goes down and down.
Something about well Witches and finally a Dragon. I didn′t find anything interesting in The Witcher 2 plot.
I think it′s totally overhyped. Also it′s easy to let a game look dense if you have extremly small areas compared to an open world game.
After all I think the world in Skyrim is much more believable.

The stories I remember most is still Morrowind and maybe Dragon Age origins.

I was referring to the combat and character control. I always ended up either looking at my head or my crotch swinging a sword aimlessly at something I couldn't see.
It did my head in and I've not played the game since.
It just didn't capture me really.

Some of the side quests are a little easy and can be completed in just over 2 hours... as it is I finished the Mages Guild, Dark Brotherhood (Hail Sithis!) and thieves guild in one day...and just over 4 hours for the main quest...
I would have liked for them to require more time and be more complex story lines...

Best game I ever played to date. Only a few games can keep me interested for hours at end. Those would be the Arma series from BIS (military sim), Total War series and TES.

EDIT and M&B from Taleworlds.. phew.. important one :biggrin:

I'm glad they ditched stat attributes. The amount of micro in Morrowind and Oblivion to optimize them were [censored], and completely un-immersive. Phenominally terribad implementation.

If I want to maximize the economic cost/benefits of a spreadsheet, I'll head back into the office instead of coming home to play a game.

I know a lot of people are emotionally attached to mathmagic, and being elite wizards thereof (which I say sarcastically, because most of you are probably poor at it). Unfortunately, it's completely superfluous to the development and implementation of an RPG.

Skyrim's the first game in awhile where you spend most of your time just running around doing [censored] instead of planning out numbers. Excellent.

There are a lot of "under the hood" dynamics that need tuning -- some need it significantly. The game could use a lot of balance tweaking, sure. But ... who cares? Go play the game. Use some "house rules" if you have to. Retuning of some of the behind-the-scenes numbers will come in time from Bethesda or mods. Relax and go play a fun character design instead of a min/maxed one. Use some imagination. I know spreadsheets don't require imagination, but this is an RPG game. Try it out.

Very true.

Witcher 2 (1 too) is good game and enjoyed it, but it's barely even the same genre.

It's more of the "action/adventure" with some role-playing mechanics than TES. In fact, there really isn't anything else out there right now that does the open world sandbox thing for actual role-playing.

I enjoyed both Witcher games, but I can't ever really bring myself to play through those games multiple times even though I intend to during my first play through (I always feel like I want to see what happens if I make "the other choice"). However, I inevitably find myself unable to follow through with it, as the games are so small in scope that I'm just "grinding" my way through 90% of the content, which is exactly the same every time regardless of which "choice" you make at most points. And then I generally find that those decisions that "felt" so important when I had to make them the first time really don't usually amount to all that much other than a slightly different dialog response. Really, it's the illusion of choice that makes them "feel" cool during the first play through, but the actual path turns out to be 90% on rails anyway. I played Witcher 2 a second time far enough just to see Act 2 from "the other side", was completely bored and had to force myself through replaying all of Act 1 just to get there. I explored that side of the map for a while and did some quests, but ultimately felt like there wasn't much point in continuing after that. It was time to move on, there were no other adventures to be had.

Again, good games that I enjoy, but not of the same type as TES.

And when people compare technical merits, most completely overlook the actual scope of what is being done. It's far easier to "polish" both performance and appearance when you're dealing with extremely small "levels" that are basically on rails like most other games do.

Nobody on PC plays COD.............................

The game is very good, but some of the things they took out make no sense...... Why so less spells and customization?

Why are guild quest lines so short and means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things in the game? At least oblivion had large guild quests, skyrim has the worst Guild quests of all TEs games.

Bs froma skyrim defense member. The witcher 2 story and writing is strong from beginning to end and it blows away anything TES has done.....

Skyrim world more believable? ROFL, yeah the first small villiage has more atmosphere, life in TW2 then all cities in Skyrim... Everything you do has repercussionsm making the world seem connected. I love skyrim, but some things other games do WAY better, TEs tries to do many things but doesn't master any of them. They are exploration/dungeon crawling games.