Dan Vavra presents: "100 reasons, why I hate Skyrim."

This. There are tons of truly bad shit in Skyrim, many of them perfecly valid grounds for hate.

Personally I quite like it, because it's overall way better than Oblivion, has some actual atmosphere, character and, well, structure to it, and unlike Oblivion it pays more than lip service to the prequels, but there is no hiding that in terms of a lot of things (mechanical mostly) it declined even further.

Meanwhile, other than the criticisms of horrible UI (and not even all of them being valid!) the guy just herpaderps while completely missing the point.

For instance redoing the wagon ride would require reshaping a sizable chunk of Skyrim's geography, because Helgen happens to be situated in mountainous region, or re-recording all the NPC speech and re-scripting it to take part in some other part of Skyrim, dropping the content created for that settlement, then design actual content for Helgen. All this because esteemed Dan Vavra dislikes the camera. No, fuck you.

Another thing would be graphics, which I consider quite gorgeous. Sure, there is not disputing it runs on dated engine, designed to run on 7y.o. hardware, and cuts in terms of the amount of polygons and such are evident, but the game makes astonishingly good use of its resources, especially compared to oblivious which used all its raw graphical power to effectively place a giant shiny turd on your screen. Apart from water Morrowind wasn't praised for its graphics because of special effects and amount of polys pushed around either.
Animations may be buggy, but there are new and refreshing procedural elements to them and they are still better than what could be expected based on Beth's track record. :insert video of MW and oblivious characters running around here:

For me among the worst things about Skyrim is how well would some of the discarded mechanics work in it. For example:

You can cast runes that activate when the enemy gets close on various surfaces?
Awesome! Let me create rune spell that drains willpower and fires off AoE paralysis, or maybe deals AoE damage instead, then raises everything it killed as zombies under my command to finish the rest!
MUAHAHA... oh.

Wait...

BETHESDAAAAAA!!!!

 

Skyrim is praised cause it was released after Oblivious not Morrowind... but Now I don't don't give a damn enough to Their setting the can rape it at their leisure.

 

That's true. If it was released after Morrowind it would be responsible for both its own dumbing down and dumbing down introduced by Oblivion, either directly (quest compass, lack of levitation) or in a way that made Skyrim's own dumbing down the logical conclusion (cutting attributes and spellmaker after Oblivion made them redundant).

 

True but mine main point is stopped to care for AAA Games. Bethesda will never allow to make another Morrowind cause they want TES games to sell to unwashed consoltard masses. What was the number of backers for W2 and Numenara? 60 000? With good Marketing it might sell 1 million copies but not 10 in critical first few months.

 

Everything that is bad in Skyrim is the result of: 1)misguided attempts to balance a single player game, 2)pandering to Bethesda fanbase, 3)Making the biggest area possible for marketing reasons instead of concentrating attention on a smaller world. The rune example that DraQ gave, the use of runes could be made very fun but they tried to make it balanced by limiting the number of runes that you can maintain to 1 and allowing only elemental damage runes(this makes runes useless). There are alot of retards from bethesda fan base that have the fallowing thinking: "It is an open world game I should be able of goint to any place I want with level 1". Bethesda try to appeal to those morons making almost all enemies level scaled (not as extreme as Oblivion but still very annoying), if all enemies are level scaled, if the loot isn't, then a player can easily brake balance by getting a very powerful item while all enemies are scaled on a low level, so loot become level scaled too.

There are alot of morons on Bethesda fan base that think character customization is playing Barbie doll and getting pretty dresses for their Barbies, but there is a problem: "I don't want to use this ugly Dwemer armor, I want to be able to use that pretty armor that I found on the beginning of the game because it suits my character better.". Bethesda try to appeal to those morons and all weapons feel like reskins of each other , having almost no difference in terms of damage, the same for armor.

There are 150 handcrafted dungeons in Skyrim, the entire New Vegas had 88 places that you could visit. It is obvious that each Dungeon couldn't have enough attention. They decided to make the Dungeons linear for three reasons: 1)Take less time to make 2)they feared that the Bethesdards wouldn't find they way. 3)Didn't wanted to make the player "wasting time", you know, there this supposed mature men with kids with no time to waste demographic to appeal to, so "wasting time" exploring dungeons had to go and that is why they added an exit in the end of every dungeon.

I don't think the next Elder's Scroll game (If the MMO is really successful, you can say goodbye to the single player version) is going to be much better than Skyrim, there are limits when you have a fan base of morons for the most part.

 

Fucking this.
This is the single most annoying, atrocious, abominable thing about Oblivion/Skyrim.

 

Runes are actually pretty useful, but they would be far more useful AND fun if you had spellmaker allowing you to make runes utilizing any combination of effects you wanted.

I'm not sure about linear dungeons taking less time to make - having linear dungeon means you have to design player's every step through it, with a nonlinear one you throw a lot of shit in in somewhat logical manner and leave working out the route as an excercise to the player. It's a bit similar to the difference between linear and open world games - the former seem to cost more to make for less fun provided. This leaves us with 1) and 3) which are just completely moronic on part of Bethesda.

Still, linearity aside, most dungeons in Skyrim have some unique distinctive features as opposed to Oblivion.

Level scaling was also reduced, so it seems beth is backpedalling from some of design decisions they made in Oblivion.
If they only reversed all the pointless mechanical dumbing down and gave up on epic linear questlines they can't write for and that don't quite work in their wide open worlds.

 

Morrowind was exactly a game for unwashed consoltard masses.

 

Brolapsed.

Yes, with fire.

 

Face it, Morrowind's only redeeming qualities are setting & MK lore, all the rest is massive decline after Daggerfall. Oblivion had zero redeeming qualities.

 

Port. Dismissed by default. PC centric design is evident in Morrowind - from awesome interface to the fact that the X-Box port of GOTY is cut down.

Bullshit. Setting and Lore were, of course, important, but overall Morrowind mixed decline and incline in respect to Daggerfall in fairly even proportions.

That's true.

 

Perhaps I am biased because MW was the first ES game I played, but I really enjoyed it. I know there were simplifications and reductions in MW but I felt that they were counter-balanced by other things that Morrowind did well, like the lore and books and 'culture' of the world. I would group Morrowind with Daggerfall/Arena in the sphere of good games.

 

Morrowind although simplified, PC-ed and less ambitious than Dangerfall was playable from the box.

 

Actually, the "consoletards" complained heavily about the game as it was a rather half-assed port of the PC game. It's clearly visible that the game had been designed with the PC in mind.

Unfortunately, it's the last ES game where this is true.

 

My problem with Bethesda is that they have some of the worst developers in the business. Its one thing to be successful while making shit games that have mass appeal, but are at the very least somewhat professionally made. You look at a game like the last Assassin's Creed, and you can still sense that it was made by people who knew what they were doing. Sure its derpy, shallow and retarded, but that's the fault of the people in charge, not of the programmers or the artists who are for the most part just doing what they are being told. With Bethesda, its like everybody involved is as derpy as Todd Howard himself. I know that like attracts like, but Jesus Christ.

 

Engine was buggy shit no one can argue about that but assasin creed and rest of the new generation action games are no better.They are only bug-free because of less content and little interaction with the world.

Frankly only redeeming thing about ssasin creed was climbing on old historic landmarks and seeing majestic cities in their primes.

 

You may take my opinion as you like but Skyrim was a better game than Oblivion in every regard that matters to me.

Inferior to Morrowind (to me, because history, attention to detail, wanderlust, lore, world-building, writing, etc, etc, are all more important than gameplay conveniences). But still, an improvement over Oblivion.

 

I remember I loved Daggerfall but I never got far since the game kept bugging out on me. I put it on hold and waited for patches but then a whole bunch of stuff happened and I never got around to play it again. During the years I wanted to go back but it was not playable anymore and all sorts of vaporware rehauls kept being announced so I waited and I'm waiting to this day. Althought I heard there's finally a promising rehaul in the works so I'm hopefull.

So I'm curious, what it was exactly that Morrowind declined/inclined compared to Daggerfall?

 

+lore
+art direction
+unique content
+overworld actually served purpose
+better integration of mechanics (characters are described using the same character system as player, have their own inventories they actually use, their spellbooks, and are generally governed by the same rules, etc.)
+better integration of mechanics and presentation (WYSIWYG - if you see a character in awesome plate wielding awesome sword, they will have those on them when killed).
+presentation being relevant to in-universe stuff (you can infer a lot by just looking at people and things, for example many groups have characteristic clothing styles).
+environmental storytelling
+integration of fluff with gameworld (you can actually obtain useful information from just reading seemingly random fluff)
+AI (still horrible, but way better)
+spears
+wide assortment of ranged weaponry
+conjuration
+development of material lore and its presentation in gameplay
+richer and less exploitable combat (whatever you might say about it, it's true)
+no weapon material to-hit modifiers
+quests aren't just pretexts to send you into a %dungeon_name nearly as often
+less repetitive needlessly convoluted dungeons
+works out of the box
+strongholds
+more permanency

-poiltics (still plenty of it, mind you)
-less involved legal system
-less hardcore diseases
-no banking
-no climbing
-PG ness (often cleverly circumvented *pierces ESRBs many apertures* )
-dungeons are smaller
-dungeons aren't as confusing
-less factions and worse faction system
-smaller gameworld
-no holidays
-no horses and carts
-no buyable houses and ships
-no daily schedules
-no summoning days
-simplfied and worse chargen
-simplified and worse enchanting
-no weapon type dependent damage modifiers for different enemies
-no generated quests

So one may see Morrowind as scaled down and dumbed down, less hardcore version of Daggerfall, just as well as seeing Daggerfall as bloated homogenized, messy version of Morowind where everything is the same and there is no point seeing anything.
Both approaches are equally valid and equally flawed.

 

To me Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind are pretty similar.

Quest compass, spear/crossbow, spell creation, fast travel, persuasion etc. just do not matter. Minor quibbles.

The meaningful points of decline seemed to basically be unkillable NPCS (very annoying), no negative rep in guilds, no stat check in guilds, ridiculous EPICNESS in quests (even Thieves guild), and level scaling.

That actually is a lot of decline now that I think about it and Oblivion doesn't have anything that is better than in Morrowind but the point stands: Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim are very much alike. In my opinion it's a bit ridiculous to say MW is great and Oblivion shit as the difference is more like the difference between somewhat good and average.

Combat is shit in all Elder Scrolls games and it really doesn't matter much just how bad one piece of shit smells like when compared to another piece of shit. At least in Skyrim you have continuous spells that you can actually hit enemies with.

I do think that Morrowind is easily the best ES game. Daggerfall feels very different compared to the MW and later. Daggerfall is pretty much all about the dungeons and for those that like
that sort of thing it is probably the best of the bunch. I don't like the dungeons and I abhor the random quests (which Skyrim reintroduced in a limited capacity).
Guilds are pretty much the thing I play ES games for and Daggerfall just sucks the life out of them. I haven't tried Arena because to me Dagger is the worst of the Elder Scrolls and I won't make apologies for it.

The character creation was much more interesting in DF though. Especially the weakness/strength business.

You actually want dungeons to be confusing? I guess there are all kinds of people in this world...

 

It worked for Daggerfall, which was much better game than "I want to be an Ultima" Blowawind

 

#1 Reason why I hate Skyrim:

It becomes banal shit boring after awhile.

 

One of the few people outside of the codex makes some good points against Bethesda's many design vices; everyone in the thread angsts because he didn't criticize in the right way, or because he supposedly can't say anything since he plays the game (on a PS3 at that, lololo)

Really, guise?

edit: oh god, one of you actually said he should try making his own game instead of criticizing. I'm not even gonna quote it so I won't know the username.

Er, that's the entire point of a dungeon. It has to be confusing, hard, intimidating. You have no idea where to go, and you can't just mechanically probe the place because the entrances and exits aren't clearly visible. That's why the peasants need a hero to go inside, and why it feels like you achieved something when you finally escape with the loot. A dungeon that is easy to navigate feels like an amusement park's haunted house.

 

Huh. I guess this is why I've never really liked dungeons. I understand hard, intimidating, and big but I don't understand why confusion is good. I don't mean that it should be immediately clear or even after a while. Simply that after you explore somewhat thoroughly the layout should be logical. But perhaps this is just something I will never really get even if I can understand that some people will enjoy it better that way.

 

Opinion from someone who never liked any of the TES games much: Morrowind is a good deal different because it's an exploration game where exploration is meaningful. Skyrim and Oblivion (and Fallout 3, but that's literally an Oblivion mod with all money spent on marketing and Liam Neeson voice overs) are exploration games where exploration is made completely pointless through conscious design decisions which makes them basically hiking screen savers.