Something I've been thinking about lately and discussing with some friends as well. Skyrim was a true phenomenon you don't see in gaming too often. Maybe once every 5-10 years. GTA V being the most recent. Skyrim took the gaming world by storm and propelled TES series and Bethesda into legit stardom. Was Skyrim ahead of it's time? It's loaded, packed to the brim with content, the audio/video/presentation is beautiful, and it's massive on every level.

Yes it was, it could have used couple of months more work.



But seriously speaking, it's got nothing i'd call revolutionary or exceptional. Just some damn fine world building. if they ever manage to make the rest of it with same quality no one will need to buy games form other developers ever again

It was decent...it should have had more time though.

I would have thought Oblivion did that.

Or even Morrowind.

No it wasn't. Doom, Deus Ex, Half-Life were ahead of their time. Skyrim has done a good job in many departments but nothing revolutionary, nothing to push the gaming one step further. maybe just the marketing campaign, that was impressive. GTA V is nothing revolutionary either.

I'm with ya on that one

Morrowind propelled Bethesda into Stardom? Lol nah. Oblivion certainly made TES brand more recognizable and popular, but Skyrim selling more than Morrowind and Oblivion combined obviously means TES is more popular than ever.

Wish Bethesda hadn't jumped on the MMO bandwagon though, and give us more singleplayer games...

I dont think they've done anything exceptional...more quests, more locations, tweaked interfaces, tweaked combat system, tweaked graphics, new follower system, new homesteading system and a few other things. While some of those the things are new in Skyrim, other games have similar features so its not really ground breaking.

The day a company is able to figure out how to make a completely adaptive gaming world then i'll be impressed. Unfortunately, that isnt possible due to limitations in computer technology. So what we have instead are a bunch of prescripted events, sometimes multiple prescripted events arranged in such a way to give us the illusion of a living and breathing world.

Bethesda has not jumped on any MMO bandwagon. Zenimax is making Elder Scrolls Online.

Well I also mean ahead of its time in popularity. Look at GTA V. Fastest selling game of all time. It literally slaughtered records. The previous record was $1 billion in 16 days by Black Ops 2 and that was with an additional platform (PC). GTA V did $1 billion in 3 days! Smashing that record by almost 2 weeks and that's with only launching on 360/PS3, no PC. Incredible.

Well that's news to me. Truthfully I haven't had any interest in it at all, so I just assumed they were.

Still, the fact is with TESO launching next year and it being an MMO which means it'll have a long life even if it tanks and goes F2P, we won't see another single player game for a very long time. They won't over saturate us with TES and Fallout 4 won't be until next Fall at the earliest. After TESO. I don't see TES VI happening until 2017 at the earliest.

Its a fantastic game to be sure, but not ahead of its time. Exceptional for it's time seems like a more appropriate description. Doesn't make it any less good, its just not pushing any limits.

I'd say it pushed the limits on what we thought was achievable on console 2 years ago.

Eh, maybe if you hadn't played Oblivion, which I did. But I didn't think that when I got it. Fantastic, but it didn't make me wonder how the xbox handled it.

Really? I played Oblivion. Got it the day it launched. Was the main reason I got a 360 at the time.

Same here. So after seeing that, playing Skyrim I was amazed, but I wasn't surprised the xbox could handle it. It barely did, lol, but you get the point. It wasn't a big enough jump to say it was before its time to me. Maybe if the content for the cw wasn't cut, and the arena stuff, then I'd think so.

With the "it needed more work" part, or the (implied) "they seriously need to start fleshing out gameplay mechanics and storylines in future games" part?

Witcher 3.

In my opinion as a PC player, no way.

Maybe Skyrim was a revolutionary console game, but from a PC player's point of view Skyrim is an old tech dumbed down console game. The game's graphics are only decent unless you improve them with mods. The game doesn't support any recent PC tech features that were already in 2007 Crysis. Every other area of the game like gameplay and interface also remind you that you are playing a console game.

Yes, totally ahead of its development time. 11-11-11 was too soon.

Every thing Skyrim did Fallout 3 did before it (well maybe radiant quests was something Skyrim did that was new but look how that turned out). So not really.

Dual wielding, Actual finishing moves, not just slow mo deaths, creating weapons and armor, house making.

Ok, add dual wielding even though it destroyed the hotkey system. Finishing moves are just VATS animations expanded (it even has VATS sounds) and the crafting system is the exact same as Fallout 3 but with a couple reskined workbenches that you could interact with, with new animations added but overall the same concept.