I kind of agree on what
DraQ is saying, as Skyrim is indeed a massive improvement over Oblivion in many ways, but at the same time I can't really recommend it. It does resurrect some of the more interesting elements of Morrowind's lore, brings back politics, has much better writing and world-building than Oblivion, even the simplified character system has its merits etc. etc., and I suppose that it manages to do what it tries to do adequately enough. In many ways Oblivion was like Morrowind except diluted with piss (
lots of piss), whereas Skyrim drops all the signs of pretense and embraces its aRPG nature and the fact that it's mainly a game about killing things. In general this makes it better than Oblivion, even though it initially comes off as dumbing down the game even further. Still, at the end of the day playing it just kind of feels like a chore because it's so streamlined in many places, so heavily focused on crawling in linear dungeons and so devoid of actually interesting content.
While the writing is at times decent (by Bethesda standards), pretty much every storyline in the game is irredeemable shit where you're the Chosen One and have to find ancient artifacts because of reasons and blah blah blah. Every NPC is provided with a Bethesda
™ voice actor that speaks with a fake Scandinavian accent that makes you want to put a broadsword through its skull the moment you meet it, regardless of what it actually has to say. Quests have even less variety than before, and the guild questlines are a joke because every single one of them essentially comes down to just killing draugr like every other quest in the game, making it pointless to try to actually play a thief or an assassin or a mage, especially when those questlines are like two hours long each. You do get to do some Radiant Quests
™ if you want to, but really, why would you? Whenever the game tries to do a quest that does something original or unconventional, it instantly collapses under its own stupidity (see the big Markarth side quests, the Windhelm murder mystery, or pretty much anything involving the Thieves Guild, for example).
The magic system is completely castrated, with pretty much all of the interesting forms of manipulating the game world removed. It's mostly just about shooting lightning and fireballs, i.e. the stuff you get to do in every RPG ever, and even though you can shoot lightning and fireballs in more varied ways than you could in Oblivion, it's still generic as fuck and massive disappointment compared to the more complete system of Morrowind. The perk system does arguably make specialization more important than before, which is certainly a good thing, but with the removal of attributes it still comes off as a really shallow system considering that in the past nearly everything you did in TES was governed by a stat or two or three. The dungeons have their moments, and there are some that are actually pretty good (even some of the more linear ones provide a nice amount of combat options), but the linear layouts, repetitive "puzzles" and certain over-used enemy types make all of them seem pretty much the same after a certain point. The combat system is functional but, as vanilla, doesn't provide enough depth to carry the game, especially when the combat AI is nonexistent and the HP mechanics are all sorts of fucked up. In the end you'll just find yourself working on autopilot, picking up a quest and entering a dungeon and clearing the dungeon and returning to the questgiver and receiving the reward and moving on to the next quest without giving a shit about what it is that you're actually doing or what happens to all these people or the game world.
Upon realizing this I tried to go on a murder spree and kill the world, but the first hobo I attacked turned out to be immortal, so that was the end of that scheme.
Personally I never found the strength to try out Requiem (partly because it requires Dawnguard, and because I had already become bored out of my skull when trying out other, probably inferior mods), but I could see it making the game fun for a while, increasing the lethality and the survival aspect of the game and making the dungeon crawling more enjoyable as a result. After all, dungeon crawling
is the game, and outside that and the exploration there really is no meaningful content in the game. Whether the game is worth it or not probably comes down to your enjoyment of that kind of stuff.
compared to both Dagerfall and Morrowind.
