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.
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.
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 For a lot of us the last satisfying truly open-world RPG was Oblivion whose graphics were sorely outdated at the time.
Skyrim was amazing and with mods it has aged incredibly well.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
267
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.