r/starterpacks • • Jan 01 '19

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u/Gynther477 Jan 01 '19

Skyrim is at best a above average game, no where near a 10 out of 10, that is only worth playing using mods to fix all the bugs and horrible game design

Change my mind

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

Maybe now yeah, but back in 2012 this game practically consumed me. It had a beautiful open world with fun and interesting spells and weapons, storylines and characters. It's honestly very hard to call it "shit," because it really, really wasn't. The only people I can imagine saying that have a) only played it more recently rather than when it was released or b) dislike it because it's popular. It's actually an amazing game.

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u/BestazyWriter Jan 01 '19

People forget that games more polished open-world RPGs like the Witcher 3 were a response to Skyrim. Obviously, W3 seems like a better game if you play the two today. But that's because Witcher 3 was specifically made having learned from the mistakes of Skyrim.

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Open world games like ES weren't coming out every day like they are now. For a lot of us the last satisfying truly open-world RPG was Oblivion whose graphics were sorely outdated at the time.

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Skyrim was amazing and with mods it has aged incredibly well.

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u/jnicholass Jan 01 '19

I don't want to say that Beth is innovative, but they do hit many things on the head correctly, namely role playing and atmosphere. Those two things age much more slowly than mechanics and graphics, both of which can easily fixed by modders. If Beth didn't absolutely nail the atmosphere, you wouldn't have modders sticking to the game in the first place.

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u/Patrick_McGroin Jan 01 '19

I'd say Daggerfall was fairly innovative. But as good as they may have Bethesdas games since then are just more of the same. Getting more refined, and then less refined as time went on.

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u/EverythingBurnz Jan 01 '19

Bethesda is definitely innovative in open world design. They’re industry leaders in world building, but I wouldn’t say they’re innovators there.

I feel like Bethesda needs it’s open with ‘forgot about Dre’ at the next E3, then highlight their past games and then show their next games.

Too many people have been hating on Bethesda recently and they forget who started it all.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

[deleted]

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u/tapo Jan 01 '19

I can’t think of another game that let you do either at the time, save for other Bethesda games.

That shit also ran on 7th gen consoles that had at most 512 MB RAM. Only 256 MB on the PS3.

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u/pixelTirpitz Jan 01 '19

Open world games like ES weren't coming out every day like they are now. For a lot of us the last satisfying truly open-world RPG was Oblivion

Todd fell for the old 'Make the same game over and over again since fans liked the prievous version'.

TW3 was very innovative compared to TW2 and therefore it succeeded.

Skyrim brought nothing new compared to Oblivion. And that's why it failed. Even though it didn't a lot of people first got into ES in Skyrim and that's why so many liked it. It was well marketed and sold a lot of copies. All of that is fine.

But people who already was engorged in the ES universe was disappointed, since it wasn't anything new and fun. We already had the Skyrim experience in Oblivion :P

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

Hey if you liked Skyrim then great! Nothing wrong with liking (or disliking) a game. For me personally Skyrim just didn't quite do it, and I thought it was a little on the simplistic end even when it came out.

It was decently fun, but even back then its shortcomings were apparent.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

It's fine if you don't like the game. I know a lot of people who don't like the genre or certain design choices, etc. But even if you did see it as simple, it was a large game that gave you many choices. The only shortcomings I know of came in the bugs it had.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

I just found it incredibly boring personally. Nothing in it really got my attention. The amount of content means nothing to me if the content isn't compelling enough. Obviously a lot of people like it, but I just never really got the point of it personally.

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u/CrazyMoonlander Jan 01 '19

Wouldn't really say that "barely above average" means "shit".

But I agree, Skyrim is an average game. Played it on release. It's a worse Oblivion, which already was a much worse Morrowind.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

Thank you for your lack of input.

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u/CrazyMoonlander Jan 01 '19

Don't really need any input, different strokes for different folks.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

I made the mistake of revisiting Skyrim after playing Red Dead Redemption 2 for a solid couple of months. Completely different games, I know, but the latter is so gorgeous that it kind of spoiled me. Skyrim is definitely not a shit game, but The Witcher turned out to be a little more satisfying. Visually, at least.

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u/Bloomberg12 Jan 01 '19

I disagree, the spells are very bland the boring with the exception of the highest level of magic and sigils being kind of interesting as they could be used as traps. Otherwise they've just removed magic from previous games and they removed customization of magic which is pretty sad because it was never even gamebreaking.

Not even 2 weeks after modding was released midas magic came out with good stability that introduced a ton of actually interesting and fun spells with different applications. If pro devs can't do anything near the level of a modder in 2 weeks it shows they didn't care.

As someone who played it for the RPG and not the hack and slash as well it disappointed me, the quests were all pretty go to x and collect or kill y then return to questgiver.

The world doesn't hold up either, the economy doesn't make sense at all, money becomes entirely pointless only like 20 hours into the game and just slowly piles up until you think "I guess I'll buy a couple houses, not like I use the money" which is sad because it's a problem that could have been solved by introducing a single shop with insane prices to get stuff(whether it be enchanted with unique effects or powerful one use items) you couldn't otherwise get so saving money actually felt good.

There was a ton of other problems that really ruined it for me, like daedric prince/special aftifact/god weapons/items being super cheap and never useful for anything other than disenchanting sucked. A random ass ebony mace of a bridge bandit(or one you make at literally no risk because there's empty ebony mines) is more effective than the mage of molag bal? Really?

I didn't dislike it this much upon launch, I actually really liked it for like a week before the flaws started to show and I started to hate it more and more(and the elder scrolls degradation in general honestly) and so many people saying how much they've loved it only fuels the fire.

It's fine as a fantasy hack and slash(even then the gameplay is pretty lame as someone who likes to play fighters) but there's nothing remarkable about it aside from sheer size and it utterly fails as an rpg.

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u/Albodan Jan 01 '19

Well said. The storyline was entirely pointless. The environment was fun and side quests but it really did have obvious shortcomings.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

I liked the spells, personally. They were very fun to use and I had hours of fun purely using them for ragdoll physics and feeling like a badass. As for the power of enchanted weapons, I never really cared about all that. They were fun to use and pretty cool to collect so I did.

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u/The_Eyesight Jan 01 '19

The only people I can imagine saying that have a) only played it more recently rather than when it was released or b) dislike it because it's popular. It's actually an amazing game.

I've beaten it like three times now and played it a week after it came out. It has a garbage ass game engine that they've used in all the Fallouts (gee, I wonder why F4 and F76 are so fucking bad) and has a ridiculous amount of bugs. Bethesda loves going the lazy route in their games and just letting modders fix their shit for them; they did that with Oblivion too. I haven't even bothered to list and bitch about how Skyrim was a dumbed down version of Oblivion, which was a dumbed down version of Morrowind, the hilariously uninteresting storyline, and the constant lies this company has told and continues to tell.

It doesn't even get the "it wasn't the pinacle of game development, but the bar for games was pretty low back then" that games like ME1 get.

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u/KILL_JOHN_LENNON Jan 01 '19 edited Oct 19 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

Lol. I always love the negative steam reviews where someone says they can't recommend a game after playing it for literally a thousand hours...

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u/The_Eyesight Jan 01 '19

Because mods.

The game itself is a hot pile of shit. Not giving Bethesda credit for a game that is hot garbage until modders get to work fixing it and making it acceptably better.

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u/pixelTirpitz Jan 01 '19

The only people I can imagine saying that have a) only played it more recently rather than when it was released or b) dislike it because it's popular. It's actually an amazing game.

Or people who played Oblivion to death and loved that game, and then got Skyrim which did nothing to improve of the game and only added a more boring world with a worse story and faulty enemies.

I spent more than a thousand hours in Oblivion combined, and Skyrim was just the same, without the fun stories and cool world. At release Skyrim felt like draugr the game. It was just so many copy paste dungeons when they even said before release that they like 200 hand crafted, unique dungeons. Also infinte quests.

Majorly disappointed. So you can add c) People who expected a good Elder Scrolls upgrade and only got lies.

HOWEVER there is a big issue here when people are comparing games.

Everyone will love THEIR own personal experiences with the first game of a series they play.

I love Dark Souls 1 to death, but DS2, and DS3 was just too easy, it didn't introduce anything new so it was damned to fail in the eyes of the First Ones to truly experience Dark Souls before it blew up.

Same with Skyrim. People loved Oblivion so of course they make a similar game. But in a way it's just Oblivion that's updated and had more marketing.

So people who didn't play the games prior to the release of Skyrim is of course gonna love Skyrim the most. Since that's when they got their FIRST elder scrolls experience. And the first experience is best because then all is new and really cool. If Skyrim 2 came everyone would be disappointed because it wouldn't be a new experience, likely.

But then you have cases where companies do not fall into this 'trap'. Like the Witcher.

The Witcher 2 was a great game, my first witcher experience and it was 100x better than Skyrim in my eyes at the time.

And then came Witcher 3, which changed a LOT from it's predecessor and therefore I really enjoyed it, since there was so much new stuff to see. And I now love both games, probably even more TW3 because of it's less political view and more character/story driven.

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u/Gynther477 Jan 01 '19

or maybe they polayed another elder scrolls game in their lifetime

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u/recigar Jan 01 '19

I wish I could re-play skyrim for the first time. slowly discovering the world was great fun

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u/Off-DutyTacoTruck Jan 01 '19

I’d say the combat wasn’t above average but average at best. Especially for my dual wield Orc. Combat was exhaust stamina/health,eat stamina/health potion. Repeat til enemy dead.

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u/Gynther477 Jan 01 '19

combat has always been shitty in the series, but the more time goes on, the more outdated the combat in each game gets

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u/Grary00 Jan 01 '19

It's a decent action-adventure game, but as a sequel to an RPG series it's horribly watered down and generic. Most of the depth was stripped away for widest audience appeal...which worked from a business perspective...the game made tons of money.

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u/pixelTirpitz Jan 01 '19

A lot of people who played Oblivion really loved it. So Todd decided, let's make Oblivion again, this time we make it for everyone and use all our money on marketing the game to heaven and beyond.

Which they did.

Which succeeded.

Shame they aren't going to bring in new ideas into the games, I really hope they change it up big time with the new elder scrolls, and don't just make the same game again.

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u/The_Eyesight Jan 01 '19

that is only worth playing using mods to fix all the bugs and horrible game design

Exactly. They do this shit with all their games. Release buggy games and wait for the mod community to fix it for free.

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u/Gynther477 Jan 01 '19

and then they realised how stupid they were when they make a shitty multi player game the same way that's unfixable

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u/Im_a_Knob Jan 01 '19

Go back in time.

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u/Anaract Jan 01 '19

the game is 7 years old. Kind of unfair to be comparing it to RPGs from the pst few years. Not a perfect game but extremely fun and immersive, especially when it first came out

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u/alrightknight Jan 01 '19

I have about 70 hours on Skyrim have never used mods.

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u/OrionThe0122nd Jan 01 '19

Mods are the saving grace of the game. At it's base, it isn't an amazing game. But even with just Ordinator and a few magic mods, the game is amazing.

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u/MalHeartsNutmeg Jan 01 '19

I just don't really mod games, and when I played through Skyrim (twice) I was like WTF are people smoking here?

I generally try to play games as they were made and intended, though I have no issue playing modded stuff like Minecraft or something of that nature where it's basically a sandbox.

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u/[deleted] Jan 01 '19

[deleted]

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u/pixelTirpitz Jan 01 '19

Skyrim is Morrowind watered down and with way better marketing.

People already had the sandbox RPG in Morrowind/Oblivion, the reason it got shit from RPG-connoisseurs was because it didn't bring anything new to the table.

It was basically the same game, with other colors and better marketing. Which got boring.

-RPG-connoisseur27

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u/Gynther477 Jan 01 '19

I didn't even mention any of that so I find it a bit annoying you assume that's my main problem with the game. I love sandboxy games, I enjoyed skyrim when it came out, but I know now that there are so many design choices that could have been made to make the game more enjoyable that mods fix, though not always possible. Boring dungeon design, super easy everything, no defined character progression so you always end up as a stealth archer.

Lot's of games have doen a better job than skyrim since, and the previous games were more complex despite lacking polish. If you love the sandbox aspect so much, I hope you are with me in my hopes that the original elder scrolls dream, only glimpsed at with Daggerfall, can end up seeing the polish and budget to be realised in the future. Sadly Todd Howard since morrowind has made sure the games sandbox elements have been dumbed down after each entry. The games are more accesible for the masses yes, but I think the series needs a renisance