Ardennes

I think Dark Souls and Skyrim have very different audiences, Skyrim is all about exploration and combat is kind of a secondary thing. Dark Souls is all about its very unique combat system and the desperate difficulty of fighting enemies.

I do agree that the melee system in Skyrim is one of its weakest parts, but honestly I think it is kind of up to the player to try the other systems out. I think archery feels fantastic, and is fun. It is more challenging than melee but there is a great sense of challenge and the overall feel of bow just works. Magic is really great too.

It isn't the best melee game in the world (although there is more depth to it than people think, you can do different types of hits by pressing a direction + hitting).

Ultimately, it seems unfair to hold up Elder Scroll games (or any giant open world game) to the same standards of as a short scripted game. There is going to be more bugs/issues because the game space is just that much bigger and you can't just script everything into a button mashing sequence. People want much more fancy combat with dodges and feints and stuff, but they don't think about how to properly implement it so it doesn't bug out the game's environments. Also most of the stuff wouldn't work at all in the first person and you can already do much of it by trying to step out of the way of blows. It just isn't a third person action game like Dark Souls.

There are obvious issues, but the meat of the game is a fucking giant world, one of the biggest I have scene. I am sure there has been bigger randomly generated games out there, but seriously most of the random dungeons I have gone to have their own little unique storylines and characters. It isn't a perfect game but in its genre, I think it is a giant leap compared to Oblivion.

One thing I think Bethesda did screw up is a lot of the wood textures which look low resolution, and make things look uglier than they should be. Obviously a mod will come and fix it, but that was a pretty major fuck up because alot of the other textures look great but especially wood looks like really dated and low res.

Ultimately, it is a question of if you want a giant unique world to go adventuring in that has some jank in it or a much more restrictive experience that is more polished?