MikeyA

I'm a little suspicious that people weren't worried after Borderlands 2. For a game that was well received, it is shockingly boring and unoriginal. Brad recently handed Dead Space a (well deserved) 3 stars, and since they are so temporally distant it isn't a big deal or anything, but Borderlands 2 was lazier and less compelling than Dead Space 3, and I don't know it reviewed so well. If anything, ACM feels like vindication for me. Gearbox has produced a few excellent things (all their Half-Life stuff, Borderlands 1), but it's just about split 50/50 between that and garbage.

Good on Alex for pointing out that this looks like this game is going to suck short of a total tear-down-and-start-over job. We should've all learned the lesson that bad "betas" and crappy showings are virtual guarantees of a bad game to follow long before Too Human, and that was like six years ago now.

It's sort of a shame though. This was a game that could've really brought the DayZ style zombie survival game to people without the time to master it or The War Z.

@GS_Dan said:

I finished the main quest at the exact 100 hour mark. I'm so OP it's ridiculous- despite being light I have well over 500 armour and my bow does 350 damage or something daft (also leeches 20 and freezes 25) from sneak attacks, which nearly always are successful as I have 150 sneak or something with enchantments. I'm also resistant to fire and ice.

I've only met two dragon priests, but I took the second one out in two shots. :P

Haha, yeah, the scaling in Skyrim is pretty terrible. There was a point in the game where I couldn't do ANYTHING playing on Adept through absolutely no fault of my own. I had focused on a good mix of skills (the same ones that would later prove astronomically overpowered), and had to resort to abusing level geometry to win fights. Maybe 10 hours of play later, the game was far too easy on master. At the time I put the game down (I don't think I would buy any expansion packs) I had in the region of 2100 armor, and hit for just a little shy of 400 damage with my daedric sword. When blocking, I am functionally invincible (even with stamina full depleted, I regenerated health faster than a pair of draugr deathlords could drain it).

Skyrim is a blast, but there is no way to hit all of the content in the game (probably not even half of it) without reaching a point where you are now sufficiently powerful that you have taken combat and the character building aspect (the most important one) out of the game.

It was an easy 10/10 A+++ all the same though. I'm just sorry it didn't finish with more of a bang. Just dumping you back into the world you'd basically made your beyotch already was anticlimactic.

Dropping review scores defeats the whole point of reviewing. Anyone can list a bunch of facts and/or feelings about something. The whole point of the craft is to pass singular judgment on how good something is or is not.

If you give me a review with no review score, that says to me that you don't have any strong feeling about this game; in fact, it says to me you are so confused about your opinion of this game that you can't even be sure you don't have a strong feeling about this game.

So I'll grant you, the jump from 72 to 75 is a weird call to make, but it's not cardinal. It's ordinal. The gaps are small between 62 and 63; the "error," if you like, is huge relative to the "precision" of the review. But when you get to 9.0+, now those 0.1s are a big deal. That five star system works great up until you hit that five star point, and then it's a giant sack of crap (with apologies to Jeff G and co.: you guys were the heart and soul of Gamespot, and I get that you wanted to start fresh, but that is one thing you probably should've kept).

For instance, I agree that Uncharted 3 is a five star game, and that Uncharted 2 is as well, but I think that Uncharted 2 is IMMENSELY superior to its comparatively extremely shitty sequel (that is nevertheless excellent measured on its own terms). You need to capture that difference somehow. Calling Dead Space 2 or Super Mario Galaxy the equivalent of some pretender like AC:Brotherhood or Kirby's Epic Yarn is a joke.

Safer to assume that Naughty Dog just blew their writing like they did by putting the purple men in suits at the end of UC2.

Compared to its mind blowing predecessor, Uncharted 3 was just so undercooked on so many levels.

I remember that there were some genuinely amazing visual mods for Oblivion. All of this is seriously B-level. Stuff that was made because it was fun to make, not because it actually does anything people would want. I guess if you summed it all up, it might look slightly nicer, but even the most significant of these would be accurately described as minor.

The Gameplay changes section is excepted from the above, obviously.

Well, I can safely say that this is the longest a game has ever held my attention with interesting, new content (with the possible exception of Baldur's Gate II, but I don't really remember how long that actually was, only that it was long), and I gotta say, it was magnificent. I didn't even manage to get through all of the questlines, although I feel like doing any more would've been boring (character functionally maxed and once you've hit level 50 or so, the remaining content is just variations on a theme).

My only two complaints are probably the standard ones, i.e. if you are able to kill the dark brotherhood, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON you shouldn't be able to kill the Thieves Guild / Maven Blackbriar, and kill the blades. Otherwise I consider Skyrim to be an unmitigated success, and well worth my purchase.

Anyways, I really wish they'd included a more definitive end to the game. It's unfortunate that it just dumps you back out into the world like that with nary a minor cutscene or series of stills with accompanying voiceover. I guess its perfect for people who raced through the main quest (its really quite good!), but I suspect most people are like me and leave the main quest until the end (at which point, if you're a completionist like me, you are one hitting enemies on master difficulty and have become functionally invulnerable), and I felt like something a little more significant would've been nice. The in game cutscene is a good start, but I would've preferred more.

Anyways, that's what I thought. Happy skyriming.