It is exceedingly easy to find the highest praise for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim online. I don’t believe that Metacritic is the be all and end all of video game journalism, but it’s notable that Skyrim for Xbox 360 is sitting at a 96 right now, nonetheless. Frankly, it completely deserves the praise. I personally feel that it’s one of the best video game experiences that I’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own qualms with the game. This is an article expressing a few of the complaints that I’ve had during my first week with the game.

A Difficult Task

Bethesda has constantly had to deal with complaints regarding the difficulty of their games. The studio has never wanted to punish players for exploring and experimenting throughout their rich game worlds. In order to be as unrestrictive as possible, they employ a sliding difficulty system that will adjust the enemies and loot of quests relative to the level of the player. While I agree with this sentiment, I don’t think that they’ve perfected this method in Skyrim.

Run away immediately if you want to live.

At points in the game, I found the difficulty of enemies to be very sporadic. It’s expected that the difficulty of the main quest would slowly escalate as the player progresses, but this really didn’t seem to be the case from encounter to encounter. Immediately after clearing out a dungeon of relatively easy combatants (I focused on one handed melee combat, and most my foes dropped dead after a few hits), I was tasked with climbing a mountain to engage in the next part of the story. On the way up, I came up against a brutally difficult Frost Troll. His strong defense, deadly attacks and regeneration ability were unlike anything I had seen in the game up to this point. He was many times more difficult to defeat than even the Dragons I had faced. After many unsuccessful tries, I was able to trap the troll in the geometry of the mountain, and slowly hack away at him until his life was depleted. Now I know that it’s quite simple to either run past the troll or push him off the mountain, but it was still an event that broke the pace of the game for me.

Even within specific areas and dungeons the difficulty curve can be nonsensical. I witnessed this in a quest in Mistfall Keep of the Eastmarch hold. The middle level of the keep had a fight against three bandits that was moderately difficult. It took me three tries to figure out the right combination of archery, magic and melee to defeat them. At the top level of the keep, the boss was incredibly easy to defeat, and only required a generous mashing of the right trigger to repeatedly slash my Orcish sword. I understand that surprise and mystery are essential elements, but they shouldn’t be emphasized over the flow of the game.

Speaking of Problems…

Another thing that angered me was the complete tear down of both the Mercantile and Speechcraft skills. They have been united into a single, less satisfying Speech skill. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,players hoping to persuade somebody to take their side had to engage in a speechcraft game involving rotating a disc of pie pieces. While it was kind of strange and very unrealistic, it at least added a small level of challenge and interest to persuasion. Rather than improve upon this, Bethesda has completely removed it from the game.

It's kind of sad that I miss this. [Oblivion Speechcraft Mechanic]

There are Persuade and Intimidate dialog options, but they are simply pass/fail based on your current speech skill. The primary way that this skill is leveled is buying and selling goods. This system is very unrewarding, and still doesn’t make very much sense. I would have much preferred a separate mercantile skill, as well as a more advanced speechcraft system.

Bugsy Malone

When Bethesda Softworks ships one of its massive games, it’s now almost expected that it will be packed full of amusing bugs and glitches. The release of Skyrim has been no different. Much of the Skyrim reddit has been devoted to posting these hilarious bugs.

The proper way to sleep in Skyrim. [via YouTube user MasterRiion]

I think that they’ve done a fairly good job of keeping serious game breaking issues out of the release, but the amount of visual annoyances is staggering. It’s no easy task to track down and find all of these, but I think Bethesda should be better than they are at it. It’s been over 5 years since the last game in the franchise was released. That should have been ample time to create a product that was at least a little bit closer to being bug-free.

Simplicity over Complexity

Lots of RPG style games are significantly scaling back their complexity in order to appeal to a broader audience. In countless series, like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and The Elder Scrolls, each of the iterations removes some skills and mechanics in order to streamline the experience. In Skyrim, this generally improves the experience, but I feel they’ve gone a bit too far in a few categories.

Skyrim character creation has less depth and more face paint.

For starters, I don’t like that they’ve completely removed player attributes. As a result, your character begins as a completely blank slate that can branch in any direction. The openness is nice, but it destroys some of the believability of the world. You’re supposed to have a past shrouded in mystery, but this isn’t that interesting when you realize it has no effect on your future. I like being gently guided towards choosing a specific style of character to play. It makes the experience more plausible, and makes playing a second time with a different character more unique and interesting.

When levelling, you can choose between upping your Magicka, Health or Stamina, as well as choosing a single extra perk to add to your character. However, these decisions are not at all affected by what skills you improved during that level. By grinding your alchemy skill, you can increase your character’s stamina and grant a heavy armor perk. It doesn’t feel at all like the reward is tailored to your experience at all. In Oblivion, the player could choose to enhance any aspect of their character while levelling, but was awarded bonus points if they chose attributes that were associated with the skills they had improved. I liked this system, and felt it was an appropriate award for what you had accomplished.

Companions

On paper, companions seem like a good idea. Having a loyal follower along for the ride to lend a helping hand is fantastic! However, I have found them to be a bigger frustration than a help. They seem to always be blocking the doorway that you want to walk through. In battle, they almost always seem to be standing between you and the guy you want to swing your sword at. They also constantly shout repetitive dialogue, and have a bad habit of fainting early on in combat. It’s a neat addition to be able to pick and choose different ones, but I really feel that the feature is lacking overall.

It's not the nicest place for a wedding, but the price is tough to beat.

Another new type of companion is a husband or wife. For the first time in the Elder Scrolls series, you can engage in the vows of eternal love with a partner. In my opinion, this feature was seriously half-baked for a franchise that prides itself on a deep and engaging world. Video game series that I consider to be mediocre in comparison to The Elder Scrolls have presented much deeper and more satisfying marriage mechanics. For instance, marriage in Fable II involved wooing a prospective partner, buying them gifts, making love, and even having children. In Skyrim, you can win the love of your partner simply by wearing a special amulet, and once you are wed, they serve as a glorified general goods merchant.

Although I have all of these problems with Skyrim, it is still one of my favorite games of all time. The sheer joy that having a new Elder Scrolls game brings to me vastly outweighs any issues that I’ve run into. I can’t wait to explore the rest of the game world, and see what DLC and mods will extend my experience.

Looking for more Skyrim content? Check out our Skyrim Podcast Special and other Skyrim articles!

It is exceedingly easy to find the highest praise for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim online. I don’t believe that Metacritic is the be all and end all of video game journalism, but it’s notable that Skyrim for Xbox 360 is sitting at a 96 right now, nonetheless. Frankly, it completely deserves the praise. I personally feel that it’s one of the best video game experiences that I’ve ever had, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own qualms with the game. This is an article expressing a few of the complaints that I’ve had during my first week with the game.

A Difficult Task

Bethesda has constantly had to deal with complaints regarding the difficulty of their games. The studio has never wanted to punish players for exploring and experimenting throughout their rich game worlds. In order to be as unrestrictive as possible, they employ a sliding difficulty system that will adjust the enemies and loot of quests relative to the level of the player. While I agree with this sentiment, I don’t think that they’ve perfected this method in Skyrim.

Run away immediately if you want to live.

At points in the game, I found the difficulty of enemies to be very sporadic. It’s expected that the difficulty of the main quest would slowly escalate as the player progresses, but this really didn’t seem to be the case from encounter to encounter. Immediately after clearing out a dungeon of relatively easy combatants (I focused on one handed melee combat, and most my foes dropped dead after a few hits), I was tasked with climbing a mountain to engage in the next part of the story. On the way up, I came up against a brutally difficult Frost Troll. His strong defense, deadly attacks and regeneration ability were unlike anything I had seen in the game up to this point. He was many times more difficult to defeat than even the Dragons I had faced. After many unsuccessful tries, I was able to trap the troll in the geometry of the mountain, and slowly hack away at him until his life was depleted. Now I know that it’s quite simple to either run past the troll or push him off the mountain, but it was still an event that broke the pace of the game for me.

Even within specific areas and dungeons the difficulty curve can be nonsensical. I witnessed this in a quest in Mistfall Keep of the Eastmarch hold. The middle level of the keep had a fight against three bandits that was moderately difficult. It took me three tries to figure out the right combination of archery, magic and melee to defeat them. At the top level of the keep, the boss was incredibly easy to defeat, and only required a generous mashing of the right trigger to repeatedly slash my Orcish sword. I understand that surprise and mystery are essential elements, but they shouldn’t be emphasized over the flow of the game.

Speaking of Problems…

Another thing that angered me was the complete tear down of both the Mercantile and Speechcraft skills. They have been united into a single, less satisfying Speech skill. In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,players hoping to persuade somebody to take their side had to engage in a speechcraft game involving rotating a disc of pie pieces. While it was kind of strange and very unrealistic, it at least added a small level of challenge and interest to persuasion. Rather than improve upon this, Bethesda has completely removed it from the game.

It's kind of sad that I miss this. [Oblivion Speechcraft Mechanic]

There are Persuade and Intimidate dialog options, but they are simply pass/fail based on your current speech skill. The primary way that this skill is leveled is buying and selling goods. This system is very unrewarding, and still doesn’t make very much sense. I would have much preferred a separate mercantile skill, as well as a more advanced speechcraft system.

Bugsy Malone

When Bethesda Softworks ships one of its massive games, it’s now almost expected that it will be packed full of amusing bugs and glitches. The release of Skyrim has been no different. Much of the Skyrim reddit has been devoted to posting these hilarious bugs.

The proper way to sleep in Skyrim. [via YouTube user MasterRiion]

I think that they’ve done a fairly good job of keeping serious game breaking issues out of the release, but the amount of visual annoyances is staggering. It’s no easy task to track down and find all of these, but I think Bethesda should be better than they are at it. It’s been over 5 years since the last game in the franchise was released. That should have been ample time to create a product that was at least a little bit closer to being bug-free.

Simplicity over Complexity

Lots of RPG style games are significantly scaling back their complexity in order to appeal to a broader audience. In countless series, like Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and The Elder Scrolls, each of the iterations removes some skills and mechanics in order to streamline the experience. In Skyrim, this generally improves the experience, but I feel they’ve gone a bit too far in a few categories.

Skyrim character creation has less depth and more face paint.

For starters, I don’t like that they’ve completely removed player attributes. As a result, your character begins as a completely blank slate that can branch in any direction. The openness is nice, but it destroys some of the believability of the world. You’re supposed to have a past shrouded in mystery, but this isn’t that interesting when you realize it has no effect on your future. I like being gently guided towards choosing a specific style of character to play. It makes the experience more plausible, and makes playing a second time with a different character more unique and interesting.

When levelling, you can choose between upping your Magicka, Health or Stamina, as well as choosing a single extra perk to add to your character. However, these decisions are not at all affected by what skills you improved during that level. By grinding your alchemy skill, you can increase your character’s stamina and grant a heavy armor perk. It doesn’t feel at all like the reward is tailored to your experience at all. In Oblivion, the player could choose to enhance any aspect of their character while levelling, but was awarded bonus points if they chose attributes that were associated with the skills they had improved. I liked this system, and felt it was an appropriate award for what you had accomplished.

Companions

On paper, companions seem like a good idea. Having a loyal follower along for the ride to lend a helping hand is fantastic! However, I have found them to be a bigger frustration than a help. They seem to always be blocking the doorway that you want to walk through. In battle, they almost always seem to be standing between you and the guy you want to swing your sword at. They also constantly shout repetitive dialogue, and have a bad habit of fainting early on in combat. It’s a neat addition to be able to pick and choose different ones, but I really feel that the feature is lacking overall.

It's not the nicest place for a wedding, but the price is tough to beat.

Another new type of companion is a husband or wife. For the first time in the Elder Scrolls series, you can engage in the vows of eternal love with a partner. In my opinion, this feature was seriously half-baked for a franchise that prides itself on a deep and engaging world. Video game series that I consider to be mediocre in comparison to The Elder Scrolls have presented much deeper and more satisfying marriage mechanics. For instance, marriage in Fable II involved wooing a prospective partner, buying them gifts, making love, and even having children. In Skyrim, you can win the love of your partner simply by wearing a special amulet, and once you are wed, they serve as a glorified general goods merchant.

Although I have all of these problems with Skyrim, it is still one of my favorite games of all time. The sheer joy that having a new Elder Scrolls game brings to me vastly outweighs any issues that I’ve run into. I can’t wait to explore the rest of the game world, and see what DLC and mods will extend my experience.

Looking for more Skyrim content? Check out our Skyrim Podcast Special and other Skyrim articles!

The persuasion minigame in Oblivion kind of sucked, just in my opinion.

@punkxblaze said:

The persuasion minigame in Oblivion kind of sucked, just in my opinion.

I agree that it was heavily flawed, but I thought it was better than nothing.

I understand why some people would not like the new leveling and skills systems, but personally I really like them.

In regards to the difficulty, if you read some of what Todd Howard was saying before release, a lot of it is by design. The mountainous areas are meant to be incredibly challenging and not for the ill-equipped. The dungeons are also sporadic in difficulty but become level-locked so that you have a challenge to go back to once you've gained a few levels. Now, your opinion of this design choice is totally yours to own, but don't dismiss it as nonsensical. Also, you're complaining about the pacing of an open world game? You either have a scripted experience with excellent pacing, or a wide-open world with tons to do and a very unreliable pace. You can't have it both ways. The developers literally cannot dictate what you will be doing at any given moment in a game like this.

The difficultly part is something I totally wanted, in morrowind you could totally run into shit that you were Just not ready for, it makes the world seem like not such a safe place if everything was easily defeated then there would never be any challenge, and personally (36 hours in) I have yet to encounter anything I couldn't kill, a few tough spots yes, but never unbeatable there is always enough potions and abilities at your fingertips to deal with any enemy.

The bug stuff I can't really comment on, after 36 hours on PC I have had two "crashes" where the game just closed for no reason with no message but that turned out to be the audio bug which is easily fixed, and I had some weird texture glitches on mountain tops but the newest Nvidia beta driver corrected that and the first time I encountered Falmer their pants had no textures which a reload fixed, besides that nothing, no broken quest, nothing even close to what I would considering game breaking but I understand that when it comes to open world games especially from Bethesda your experience on amount and frequency seems to vary Wildly, I heard so many horror stories about Fallout 3 bugs and in 75 hours I never encountered One, maybe something dumb like clipping or a braindead npc enemy but other than that it was a smooth experience.

Leveling stuff, disagree I find it open ended and flexible this may change when I get closer to 50 but as of now I love it.

Companions..never used them I like going solo and it seemed like a bad idea anyways so agreed there.

All my little complaints are constantly overshadowed by the 40+ quests in my log that I need to get to and my inabilty to organise them. The feeling of being ovewhelmed is awful but I'm still totally enjoying myself.

@punkxblaze said:

The persuasion minigame in Oblivion kind of sucked, just in my opinion.

I agree that it was heavily flawed, but I thought it was better than nothing.

The difficultly part is something I totally wanted, in morrowind you could totally run into shit that you were Just not ready for, it makes the world seem like not such a safe place if everything was easily defeated then there would never be any challenge, and personally (36 hours in) I have yet to encounter anything I couldn't kill, a few tough spots yes, but never unbeatable there is always enough potions and abilities at your fingertips to deal with any enemy.

@ypod: Man, you must hate tabletop RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons has an even more simplistic leveling system than Skryim. You don't even level skills, you just invest in perks! Although D&D calls them feats.

If you find the game too easy, set the difficulty level higher. I play on the PC and it has only crashed on me twice. One time I had the Jeff's Jar video loading in the background, so it might have eaten my computing power.
I have not seen any bugs or jank yet and I am 35+ hours in. I think you also must have skipped over some parts of the character creator. It has many depths of face customization. This time around they are not "crazy wacko Jones building machines". It's fairly hard to make your character look like an alien.

I'm with most people. I actually like the fact that you can't feel too safe wandering around in the world. A bit of sporadic challenge just ads to the sense of adventure.

But I agree that the game have a few problems. I can't say I'm all that fond of stumbling into three new quest lines while trying to finish one. Most of the times I can put all that aside, but then I've totally forgotten how it started once I come back to deal with it. This is off course a huge part of Bethesdas philosophy... but it's still frustrating at times.

Something I would have liked to have seen is blacksmiths and weapons/armor dealers being able to improve your equipment. I realize that smithing is a pretty vital skill and one that will serve you well, especially if you play a melee focused character, but I'd like the option to pay for a blacksmith to upgrade my equipment. Even if it's outrageously expensive, I would still be happy. Then if I wanted to focus entirely on combat and just collect loot I could do that. 

@Example1013 said:

@ypod: Man, you must hate tabletop RPGs. Dungeons & Dragons has an even more simplistic leveling system than Skryim. You don't even level skills, you just invest in perks! Although D&D calls them feats.

This^

@briangodsoe: Dude, you don't know what you're missing. I've only done the three main story quests and have been focussing all of my time on Smithing... Oh my god is it not only addictive but also will level you up fast. I just smithed 83 daggers and leveled up my smithing from 70 to 81 and leveled up once and a half.  It's so great.

@N7 said:

@briangodsoe: Dude, you don't know what you're missing. I've only done the three main story quests and have been focussing all of my time on Smithing... Oh my god is it not only addictive but also will level you up fast. I just smithed 83 daggers and leveled up my smithing from 70 to 81 and leveled up once and a half.  It's so great.

WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY DAGGERS

@ajamafalous said:

@N7 said:

@briangodsoe: Dude, you don't know what you're missing. I've only done the three main story quests and have been focussing all of my time on Smithing... Oh my god is it not only addictive but also will level you up fast. I just smithed 83 daggers and leveled up my smithing from 70 to 81 and leveled up once and a half.  It's so great.

WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY DAGGERS

That's nothing. The only weapons I've made are Iron Daggers and I just checked the stats page. Over the course of the last, ehhh, eight or so hours, I've smithed 326 Iron Daggers. And I'm about to spend the rest of my 3k on iron ore and ingots to smith about 200 more.  Also, I like daggers.

All the complains are certainly well justified, and I agree with some. If you all don't mind me rambling and responding...

Irregular/Varied "difficulty" of enemies - I actually really enjoy how they've done this in Skyrim, even though it certainly does add to my death count and can be a nasty surprise at times. While just fancifully exploring Cyrodiil, Oblivion never seemed that risky. Some things might put up a fight more than others, but there wasn't really anything I felt the need to run away or keep away from. Heh... now Skyrim is the exact opposite. I could be joyfully skipping along to a cave or dungeon not far from the "safety" of the road and a damn bear or Sabre cat can very much present a mortal risk. Giants and mammoths command respect and space, and even though thus far in my game I've been putting off most of the main quest to do other things, Dragons seem to pop up literally when I least expect them and present a much more exciting challenge than the Oblivion gates did. Yeah, it was impressive when they showed up around the landscape, but you didn't have to enter them. I've only managed to have a Dragon go away once since for some reason it showed up while I was within the walls of Solitude and I went back inside. Not knowing what will happen next at any point is awesome.

Lack of Speechcraft - I've got to agree with you here. Although I could never really figure out the mini-game in Oblivion, it was still fun to try and added a little something extra to the dialog options. Also, it just occurred to me that I don't believe you see anyone's disposition towards you in Skyrim. They could have definitely improved upon this, just like they did with the lockpick mini-game. Also with Fallout/FNV you could unlock special dialog options based on your skills, be it in medical or sneak or what have you... I haven't come across that in Skyrim either. IMO, it would be best to have disposition shown and special options based on skills in addition to persuade/intimidate.

Bugs - Luckily haven't had anything to offensive of game breaking here. It did crash once and freeze another time, though. On rare occasion, it seems to lock up for 2-3 seconds while outside.

Simplicity over Complexity - This one I'm really torn with because I totally get you in regards to how the lack of class/open-endedness kind of removes depth and immersion, but I also really like being able to concentrate on whatever I want. In Oblivion my favorite class was Battlemage, and for most of my combat in Skyrim I find myself using a one-handed weapon paired with spellcasting in that fashion... but I love how I can also level up sneaking and archery and use that style of play for certain situations. I like how you can level up and choose whatever perks you want, but the game also won't reward you for spreading yourself too thin. That said, I guess just for nostalgia's sake, I liked the variety of classes you had in Oblivion. The classic game introduction where you can answers questions to see what it generates for you... it does add something in my opinion - I ended up fabricating a backstory for my character anyway since the game didn't, haha. I find it funny someone made a thread about that on the forums... I added my brief story. =D

Companions - I rather like the addition of followers that you can find all over Skyrim to aid you in your adventures, although like many I've experienced their infuriating blocking of doorways plenty of times. I love how each adds their own flavor of commentary to what you're currently doing, it makes going through ruins and dungeons a bit less lonely that it was in Oblivion. If one annoys you, you can always send it packing. I haven't had a chance to really explore the marriage aspect of the game, but it does seem rather shallow. I like how in recent Bioware titles, you had to really work at getting your "romantic interest" to warm up to you. I realize TES games are in no way semi-linear like DAO and ME/ME2 were, but having to do a little more than wear an amulet and show up for a ceremony would be nice. Hey, this is where disposition and such could have worked nicely... perhaps certain love interests would initially gravitate towards your character vs. others due to class or race. Eh, just a thought.

Wow, this ended up being a lot longer than I expected. Time to get back to the game!

I respectfully disagree with every single point made, sans the bug one. But even then, that one is entirely forgiveable. Of note, I'd like to tackle your simplicity point by arguing that every task that you engage with is always relevant to your character getting better. If I love smacking things with a mace, but I decide to mix those flowers I've been picking up, it's still completely relevant to me as a mace-smacker. One of my largest complaints about Oblivion is that the game actually punished you for adventuring outside of your set skill path--at least with regard to efficient levelling. Now, you'll probably say that efficient levelling is min-maxing a game that you should play naturally. But unlike most role-playing games, you were outright punished if you weren't levelling with some degree of efficiency. Levelling up could, proportionately, make you weaker.

This is all to say that Skyrim is far more embracing of journeying off the beaten path. The fact that I was playing a battlemage character, and lockpicking wasn't discouraged from my playstyle... this is an amazing fact. By level 30, my lockpicking was around 60, and really helped to contribute to my growing character, despite having never invested a single perk into that skill. This freeform design is, ultimately, rewarding you for everything that you do (albeit it a smaller reward for increasing lower skills than higher skills). And I think the 280 perks in the game not only leaves more room for Bethesda to expand things in the future, but also leaves the game with infinitely more complexity and less filler than it's predecessor (like, say, that mercantile / speech separation in Oblivion, which was arguably unnecessary congestion that only exists to overwhelm new players).

@snowballingblood said:

Also with Fallout/FNV you could unlock special dialog options based on your skills, be it in medical or sneak or what have you... I haven't come across that in Skyrim either. IMO, it would be best to have disposition shown and special options based on skills in addition to persuade/intimidate.

Fallout has a very different design philosophy than the Elder Scrolls series. Despite the fact that Fallout 3 was essentially 'Oblivion with guns,' the design is radically different. Fallout has significantly fewer quests and content, but each and every quest can be approached in so many different ways. In The Elder Scrolls series, this is not the case. They give you a wealth of well-written quests, but each quest is typically designed to be tackled in a single way. I think the most telling visual representation of this is how the Fallout: New Vegas official game guide was designed. Each quest had an 'overview' web that split and curved based on the possible decisions you could make throughout the quest. If your demolitions skill is 55, you can choose to do this. If your speech was 75, you could avoid this encounter. This seems to have been a design philosophy that Bethesda respectfully attempted to keep true to. This is why Skyrim doesn't have these skill-checks. They generally don't want the player's chosen play-style to affect the core experience (within reason, obviously a non-stealth character is going to have a bit of a tough time in the Thieve's Guild, for example). Whereas, in Fallout, the player's chosen play-style is always going to affect the core experience in drastically different ways.

Although, that isn't to say that there isn't delightful filler dialogue in Skyrim that comments on a player's affiliated factions or ability. Typically people tell me to control my magic power.

the game stole my life.

My biggest issue I have with the game is that nothing you do have any impact what so ever. You'd think the dark brotherhood questline would have some world impact, instead guards just mention it when you walk by. I never felt immersed in the world at all pretty much. It felt like a singleplayer MMO which I understand why people would love, but I want way more story immersion out of my games, personally.

I'd Take Dragon Age 1 over Skyrim any day of the week.

Difficulty: Did you experiment with the menu slider for difficulty? It seems like that might help you out a little (I'm playing on my default adept which feels good for my first run although it's leaning towards too easy some of the time). Other than that you speak of an interesting design problem that doesn't cease to fascinate me. I personally really enjoy some "jumps" in difficulty to keep up the tension and some level of fear and respect like the old Gothic games handled it. What you call good pacing just leads to boredom and everything feeling the same for me in many modern games. On top of that I usually think that some inconsistencies are based on your character choices because no player will be equally well suited for all challenges. Think about the effortless dispatching of slow & huge enemies by lightly armored ranged/ magic character builds. A melee guy might have significant issues and strength in other areas etc. I personally consider this to be a good thing.

Speech skills: I hated the Oblivion variant after a short while. Way too early in fact, which led to me not bothering with it much. Morrowind was excellent in this field but purely based on dice rolls which the majority of players apparently hates so we're not getting that back. Skyrim is perfectly fine with potential to be expanded in future games in my opinion.

Bugs: are bugs, were bugs back then and will always be bugs. I'll take a slightly flawed ambitious game over a streamlined, boring and generic one any time of the day. In every complex game I've played and enjoyed that meant enduring some bugs. I can deal with it but of course I'd prefer to fix that one day.

Simplicity: I was pretty afraid of this and to me the fears turned out to be unfounded. The lack of old-school attributes is exceptionally unusual for a game like this but once I understood it and got into the new perk-tree mechanic I was won over very quickly. To me it's the best character building system since Morrowind since it's superior to Oblivion and Fallout 3 in my book. The lack of complexity in some areas is more than made up for by a very cleverly designed and very fun perk system that is beautiful, full of choices and generally a lot of fun.

Companions: Yeah, they suck donkey balls. The implementation of escort missions is very unfortunate and a legitimate flaw, some scripted events with AI work well enough (like a certain multi-character on monster fight early in the main quest that was in Greg's marathon) and the companions are as shit as in Fallout 1 & 3 but easily ignored. I consider TES a single character game anyway so I'm not that bothered but if you had hopes for this system that sucks for you unfortunately.

And that would be my 2 cents on the matter. Generally I understand where you're coming from and you argue your points very well even where I personally disagree. Skyrim absolutely has some criticism coming in the face of some seriously crazy fucking hype even though quite a bit of it is deserved due to quality and uniqueness.

I do find the scale of difficulty annoying some times (i.e. when I die), but I think it's necessary to make the world more immersible. Why would every enemy in the game be of the same difficulty at all times? That would lead to a very dull and remedial game experience.  
 
In terms of character customization, I think they stripped out the unnecessary elements. I was still able to make my character look the way I wanted and had an easier time doing it. I remember hating the customization options in Oblivion. 
 
As for the level system, the current incarnation makes sense. I never understood the arbitrary allotment of points in Oblivion and found myself frustrated when I couldn't level up the way I wanted to. I understand that developers want to branch out to wider audiences, but in this case, I feel it was an improvement on the system, rather than dumbing it down. 
 
I'm okay with lack of Speechcraft since it was very arbitrary. And I found it inconsistent with the world and atmosphere by randomly telling jokes, threatening, etc, people so they would like you better.

It's been almost 10 years since Morrowind, but I vaguely recall the ability to enchant the absolute FUCK out of anything provided you had enough money. I would have liked to see that in this...Also, enchanting arrows and smithing arrows would serve to make those skills a bit less redundant late game...

You're point about leveling makes no sense since the more you do a specific thing the better perks you unlock in it's tree. This game is not as buggy as Oblivion either. At least in my experience with the game.

@jayjonesjunior said:

the game stole my life.

Valid complaint. But they wont patch that soon.

@N7 said:

@ajamafalous said:

@N7 said:

@briangodsoe: Dude, you don't know what you're missing. I've only done the three main story quests and have been focussing all of my time on Smithing... Oh my god is it not only addictive but also will level you up fast. I just smithed 83 daggers and leveled up my smithing from 70 to 81 and leveled up once and a half. It's so great.

WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY DAGGERS

That's nothing. The only weapons I've made are Iron Daggers and I just checked the stats page. Over the course of the last, ehhh, eight or so hours, I've smithed 326 Iron Daggers. And I'm about to spend the rest of my 3k on iron ore and ingots to smith about 200 more. Also, I like daggers.

Drop them all in a pile at the top of High Hrothgar and use Unrelenting Force to make it rain daggers on Skyrim.

Regarding the persuade mini-game... yeah, you might miss it but not having it is just an outright improvement. The idea of "Hey, I'm going to insult you, boast, tell you a joke and admire a complete stranger, but in a different order depending on an arbitrary 'wedge' of a circle". Speechcraft now is more like a passive way of adjusting prices and persuade attempts over play time to reward you for either playing a lot or by being smart and selling a lot of things to get the skill up or wearing stuff that gives you bonuses. It isnt terribly engaging, but it is a much more natural and less 'gamey' system.

The difficulty of enemies makes sense. A little bandit dude is going to be a lot weaker than a crazy muscle bound frost troll.

Persuade got to be so tedious in Oblivion after about 5 tries. I appreciate that the mini game is gone. However, the fact that my speechcraft stinks bothers me. Especially since its a skill I always like to have.

"It doesn’t feel at all like the reward is tailored to your experience at all"

If you are grinding alchemy and use alchemy and want alchemy to get better, you would put your points in alchemy. Like "hey i just grinded alchemy to 70, now im excited because I get this awesome level 70 perk!" Why is this a problem? If you are putting points into something besides alchemy, then you must really want that other perk right? I mean I use destruction, light armor, one handed weapons, enchanting, and smithing. I put perks into those things. I don't see how thats not tailoring to my experience.

@jayjonesjunior said:

the game stole my life.

Valid complaint. But they wont patch that soon.

My only complaint is that you cant steal everything from a merchant anymore, admitedly it was kind of game breaking, but checking out a stores wares and then casing the joint at night was one of my favorite things to do.
 
Also I really dislike that pickpocketing is its own skill and think that pickpocketing / lockpicking should be under some umberella utility thief tree.
 
I think some of the mob types have inordinate amounts of health also, especially some of the later bandits and forsworn.
 
All of these complaints are pretty trivial though and the game has easily surpassed my expectations, especially with regards to content.

@ajamafalous said:

@N7 said:

@ajamafalous said:

@N7 said:

@briangodsoe: Dude, you don't know what you're missing. I've only done the three main story quests and have been focussing all of my time on Smithing... Oh my god is it not only addictive but also will level you up fast. I just smithed 83 daggers and leveled up my smithing from 70 to 81 and leveled up once and a half. It's so great.

WHY DO YOU NEED SO MANY DAGGERS

That's nothing. The only weapons I've made are Iron Daggers and I just checked the stats page. Over the course of the last, ehhh, eight or so hours, I've smithed 326 Iron Daggers. And I'm about to spend the rest of my 3k on iron ore and ingots to smith about 200 more. Also, I like daggers.

So, you kinda answered my followup question, and I pose this to anyone leveling skills like Smithing or Enchanting: How are you leveling it? Just making a base-level item over and over, or do you make better stuff as you gain the ability to make that better stuff? Also, where are you getting the materials to make the stuff? Are you buying them off of vendors? And if so, have you noticed a pattern for when vendors seem to restock?

Honestly, the only way to efficiently level smithing is to do what N7 is doing. I do the same. If you were to only use smithing when you NEED something, you'll never get the skill leveled up.

"At points in the game, I found the difficulty of enemies to be very sporadic"

thought it might have been just me or spending my points wrong, but agreed.

now what seems to happen to me sometimes on reloading a hard battle i lost, a subsequent try can turn absurdly easy.

i shrug and move on.

Someone explain the Ice Troll thing to me. I've completely walked over every Ice Troll I've found.

I really like the New Vegas approach to skill checks, where you could influence conversations with a huge variety of different skill checks, or gain more rewards in conversation, unlock merchant "special inventory," etc. Most of the simplification in Skyrim is welcome, but after playing a lot of New Vegas, the speech skill and persuade/intimidate system is woefully simplistic.

Being spec'd in fire destruction helped me out with the trolls. It was the sabercats that really messed me up. So, your mileage may vary, as it should.

I agree with almost all of your points here. The removal of the persuasion mechanics is pretty lame. I liked taunting and admiring people in Morrowind. The minigame in Oblivion was okay at best. The companions are just dumb. It seems like a janky carry-over from the Fallout games, and they were pretty dumb in those games as well.

The bugs range from funny to game breaking. The PS3 performance issues are atrocious and disheartening. I, too, have found the difficulty to spike, and have been forced to cheat the game to beat certain enemies. I've found that, as a thief, I have to hide behind rocks or trees while fighting dragons and just pelt them with arrow after arrow. It's not fun, and makes my character feel weak. I understand that daggers wouldn't do much to dragons, but there really seems to be no other way to take the things out other than using non-thief weapons paired with heavy armor, or magic.

As far as the leveling system goes, I found it to be a mainly positive experience. I really miss the acrobatics and athletics skills, because it allowed me as a dedicated hopping lunatic to earn something for my troubles. The way the perk system works seems like it could have just been done in the original Elder Scrolls leveling system. A lot of them are: you move faster with this, you have X percent more damage with that, or your accuracy is better with this. The perks that actually give unique abilities could have just been unlocked at certain levels. I also hate how the races don't have or show their base stats anymore. It's what made the races feel distinctly different. Now the lizard man is just a Nord, but with lizard skin and a couple abilities.