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March 28, 2024, 03:54:52 PM

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This November...

Started by Rev+, May 10, 2021, 03:57:17 AM

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Rev+

Will mark a full decade since Skyrim was released.  That can't be right, can it?

Never liked it myself.  Morrowind was better than Oblivion, which was better than Skyrim.  This one just never clicked for me.  Dragons and that.  Still, ten years, you'd have thought there'd be another one.

It was also the year of "the binding of isaac", "muchi muchi pork", "akai katana shin", and the criminally misunderstood "brink".
Man, such a vintage year for me!

Yeah, skyrim was dogs eggs. People still to this day say it's the best game ever made, and like you say, it's not even the best elder scrolls!

Me and honks were talking recently about how you have to dislocate your brain when you're playing games, you have to ignore the man behind the curtain and use your imagination and play along. That's really hard to do when you have to keep yanking the curtains apart to fix the latest thing the man has fucked up.

I did enjoy pretending to be in the world and exploring but when it came to the actual game mechanics, they were so flimsy, such an afterthought.
Risen (2009) had a lot of similar problems but it was way better, I thought. A much better sense of place.

I remember totalbiscuit saying that skyrim had the width of an ocean and the depth of a puddle which I thought summed it up really well.

wooders1978

I really loved Skyrim - the snowy environs, huge areas to explore and interact with - ok fights were a bit clunky and you had to grind to get good enough XP to be able to make decent gear

Lemming

The amount of time between today and Skyrim is about the same amount of time as between Skyrim and 9/11. Fucking what. Can't be right.

Skyrim isn't too bad. Morrowind itself absolutely gutted the mechanical depth of Daggerfall and streamlined it all into very basic, very clunky RPG-lite combat. Skyrim in some ways is a step up mechanically from Morrowind, in that at least it's fully committed to being a load of spam-left-click-to-win shit, rather than Morrowind's odd unsatisfying compromise approach. The loss of the spellmaker is the only really bad fuckup Skyrim makes.

I don't think any of the Elder Scrolls games end up really comprehensively working as games - Arena is a janky mess, Daggerfall has a lot of half-implemented skills that never get put into proper use and the dungeons are often just stupid, Morrowind's combat is somehow simultaneously too complicated and too basic for what it's trying to do, and Oblivion is HP-bloat hell. Set alongside the other games, Skyrim comes off alright, mechanically - the combat is weak, unimpactful and, after a certain point, impossible to fail at, but at least it follows consistent rules and achieves its own incredibly low ambitions.

As for the rest of the game, it's fine - quests are boring and heavily railroaded, but then again, they are in every TES game except Daggerfall (which is very slightly less railroaded).  The depiction of the setting and lore is far worse than Morrowind but generally better than Oblivion. The dungeons are linear but decently-crafted (and I'd take them over Oblivion's more complex but also completely frigging boring dungeons), etc. It's the ultimate embodiment of the formula Bethesda have been doing ever since Morrowind - you want to continue over the next hill because there might be something really cool there. There never is, but the game lays down such a strong "you can go anywhere and do anything!!!" setup at the start that it takes you a full playthrough to realise you've been conned and there's really nothing to the game.

It does do a fantastic job in the visual and world design departments. The best moments are always when you look out over a valley or mountain and feel briefly like you're really in an inhabited, living, alien world. The illusion falls apart when you bump into literally any NPC or stumble upon the next theme-park-ride dungeon, but whatever. Honestly, if they'd made proper use of the fantastic setting they're working with and gone for a Morrowind-esque style truly alien world full of strange religions, mythology, ideologies, hatreds, beliefs, metaphysics and all that, Skyrim would probably stand up alongside Morrowind. Instead they went for Vikings swinging big axes at zombies, bit of a missed opportunity.

Jerzy Bondov

In my opinion this needs porting to a few more systems