Watching G*mers slowly realise Skyrim is dogshit has been an experience
Watching G*mers slowly realise Skyrim is dogshit has been an experience
I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
i've played hundreds of hours modded and unmodded. whiterun is a safe place for me. well, and windhelm a bit. i love the vibe of the world (maybe because i grew up in a very cold place) and i can turn my brain off when i'm exploring caves (since they're all very similar, or i've already done them). i even like the easy-ass cave puzzles since i don't play the game to think.
to me, skyrim is like modded minecraft, it's chill and familiar and i can just wander around and listen to the soundtrack (also i just learned about the 42 minute Skyrim Atmospheres track on the OST and now I measure my activites in "number of Skyrim Atmospheres")
but i have trouble with the combat. i think most recently i had fun with a 2h weapon. i hate the magic and while i used to be able to stealth archer everything when i was young nowadays its super frustrating because the stealth system gets more "realistic" and less fun if you do any kind of modding of the combat system, and actually clearing a room as a stealth archer even in vanilla can be an exercise in quicksave/reload (maybe i'm just bad idk)
tbh, the most fun I had was on the switch when i bought it again (damnit todd), and i'm not sure modding was really worth it. i got starfield for free with a cpu i bought and didn't make it past the elevator because the game ran so badly on my computer. i did watch a semi-playthrough of it and it didn't seem like something i'd like. i kept trying to get into no man's sky and i bounced on it for some reason, and i think it would be the same for starfield.
idk, it just clicks for me every couple of years and i get obsessed with it. when i was young my dad surprised me with a copy of oblivion one day randomly and i played the crap out of it but hated the level scaling etc. skyrim improved on that in some ways - the level scaling feels less punishing in skyrim. i also couldn't figure out how to level up in oblivion (i was 12 or something), so skyrim was an improvement there.
oblivion was still better than ultima 9 though for me (though i still have a cloth map for that), ask me how i lost multiple days to the tutorial tower in that game...
Okay it's over everyone, the R*dditors have found the thread here.
Choice cuts:
The "Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002" gives it away as yet another case of sour grapes from a Morrowind stan.
People really do think I'm like, a Morrowind purist, but frankly it was too complex for me at the time, I played Oblivion and Fallout 3 way more. I like Morrowind the best other than NV but I do think F3 and Oblivion are decent games.
We can't just casually enjoy or dislike or criticize something anymore. We have to make sweeping statements that leave zero room for nuance.
NUANCE! CONTEXT! CIVILITY!!! I guess "dogshit" was kinda spicy of me to use, but I really do not like Skyrim at all lol.
Mom says it’s -my- turn to post the controversial take about one of the best selling games of all time in order to garner engagement and make money
Tell me how to make money from hexbear posting right now! But anybody who thinks this is like a controversial take for clicks, 1) why "karmafarm" on fuckin hexbear, 2) no I actually do think this. I also think Sonic Adventure 2 and Symphony of the Night were catastrophic game design mistakes, fwiw.Update: oh man I am so not looking at r*ddit comments anymore. "Im not gonna stop enjoying it just cuz some youtuber said so" okay nice! Literally go for it!! R*dditors are fuckin built different.
Skyrim is a great entry-level RPG/open-world game for people who haven't really explored the genre. Normies absolutely loved that game and I know many people who got into much better games after getting enamored with Skyrim. It's honestly fine and does certain things really well.
A hotter take (and one that more people need to accept) would be that Oblivion isn't good and never was. I actually think Skyrim is better as an overall game lol
there's basically no other first person, open world, fantasy RPG out there. the closest i can think of at the moment is like, kingdom come: deliverance, which aside from not really being fantasy (other than its idealized racially pure christian ethnostate version of europe) has garbage inaccessible combat you have to grind hours of being a racist czech peasant to even access the tutorial of. also it has no playable cat bois. skyrim is mediocre at best but it fills that niche of first person, open world, fantasy RPG with accessible and simple combat mechanics, and has the khajiit on top of that.
only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness
so like now that the only people left talking about it are the nerds who were/became genre aficionados? normal people who didn't put 100s of hours into morrowind and oblivion were like 90% of skyrim's playerbase, and complaints about 'systems' and writing are no more salient with those casual players today than they were in 2012. they just aren't still talking about it
i know everybody 'gets' the idea of being able to watch/enjoy a movie with poor writing that has other virtues, idk why its so hard to imagine people connected with skyrim on the basis of the (at the time) sophisticated and lived-in feeling world
Why is there a 300+ comment thread on such an obvious and uncontroversial truth? It's like having a 300+ comment thread on why Diablo 2 is better than Diablo 3 or why Doom is better than Wolfenstein 3d or why Sonic 1 is the weakest of the Genesis Sonics. Bethesda's last good game was Morrowind just like how Blizzard's last good game was W3:TFT.
Hexbear is not ready for your "Fallout 1 is better than Fallout 2" take.
That's a lotta comments. I always thought most people enjoyed the sandbox nature of skyrim and said the main story is mid even way back when it came out.
Anyway last time i played and enjoyed it was om ps3 until I bricked my save leaving too many watermelons and cheese wheels on the floor which I didn't realise would cap out the slim amount of memory the console had. Lost so many hours i simply never went back.
There is one fun way to play vanilla Skyrim, be a stealth archer and explore the world at your own pace and not follow the questlines at all except when the next quest marker happens to be the next place in your exploration pattern. Those two things happen to work very well for me, so I enjoy vanilla Skyrim.
But that doesnt make the fact that theres no other viable playstyle than stealth archer remotely acceptable. Or the fact that the questlines lack depth acceptable (I dont think the writing is as bad as you do, but I'm also fairly tolerant of bad writing and love CONTENT so I'm kind of just a shallow uncritical baby). And even in a game they sort of designed to be explored, most people arent going to do that and they have quest markers on your screen so obviously a lot of people are going to follow them. And while I've never done this, my understanding is that following quest markers to do the main quest kinda sucks ass because it takes away from a lot of enjoyment. (though based on the games overall popularity I guess it worked as slop for a lot of people).
Also even when the game came out I never accepted the "the game is big of course there's a ton of glitches!" bullshit lol. Fuck that. Bigger games since have not been anywhere near as broken and people working for free managed to largely fix the broken ass game for them.
I think that Skyrim was good for it's time and I say this as someone that could never get into Skyrim, I mean even you said in another comment that you've played 400 hours of Skyrim. You don't do that unless there is something enjoyable about the gameplay loop.
But the thing is you can't keep making, re-skinning and releasing the same game you made a decade ago, as much as gamers say they just want companies to remake their favourite games from their adolescence and update the graphics with some quality of life improvements, this isn't what gamers actually want. Such a game would appear very dated on release and get harshly criticised by gamers. Old games always had their flaws that would be very apparent nowadays. And I think that's exactly what's happened with modern open world Bethesda games, ever since Fallout 4 actually. They keep making a similar type of game, and it feels old on arrival, with the same flaws as games from a decade ago.
Currently re-visiting Fallout 4 and reflecting on Skyrim, it's kind of weird how much work goes into them, to then make their stories terrible and have other problems.
I think about how when I played Skyrim without fast travel I really appreciated the way the land rises and falls and there's clear changes of biomes, with travelers on the road and inns about a days walk in between towns. Then you can just fast travel wherever ignoring that.
In Fallout 4 provisioners don't walk in a straight line from Settlement to Settlement, they tack cross country to the nearest road and then follow that as close to the settlement they can then again go cross country. It's such a nice realistic touch that 99% of players will never see.
Personally I've found that if you just install the unofficial patch, 5 of the unofficial patch-patches, 30 bug fixes, 300 model fixes, 8 NPC AI overhauls, 3 perk tree mods with their cross compatibility patches, 10 magic rebalancing mods, your economy mod of choice, all of Jayserpa quest extension mods, DYNDOLOD and all its requisite resources and tools, the mod that let's you adopt more than 2 kids, one of the three rival lighting mods, an autopatching framework, and at least one mod that nerfs Draugr deathlord health, then Skyrim becomes a pretty passible RPG.
Plus there's plenty of optional mods you can install!
Whoever linked this to reddit, show yourself!
https://www.reddit.com/r/SocialistGaming/comments/1el473v/better_late_than_never/
checks if 2002 was when morrowind was released Christ morrowind fanboys on this site are insufferable (why are there so many?)
I loved oblivion, I loved Skyrim and I loved fallout 3 Fallout 4 and 76 weren’t that great, and starfield was better than those two but still not up to snuff.
A few video essays on YouTube do not the consensus make. You can crap your pants in nostalgia all you want boomers, most people preferred oblivion and Skyrim to morrowind.
i can somewhat agree. skyrim wasn’t a great game, but i had a lot of fun playing it. that being said, 95% of the time i spent playing it was with intense modding. without mods i dont think it has much replay value, or even play value. but mods can make the magic system better, make combat more challenging, make skill trees more complex, etc.
but the plot sucks, the lore is lackluster compared to every other TES game, they took out p much all RPG mechanics, combat is mind-numbing, characters are flat (i want a mage with dementia to tell me she wants a bow that smells like yams only to say never mind when i bring it to her). it is objectively a worse game compared to morrowind by a long shot, but morrowind was a masterpiece. skyrim is fun and if you have 100 mods can even be a good game
Time is usually a clarifying lens. Skyrim has always been hard-carried by mods, to the point that my prediction has been that Starfield will be entirely saved by mods due to having a better platform for modding than even Skyrim, assuming people don't give up on it entirely.
Seeing such a tame take become this hot though is unfortunate, I thought we had advanced beyond Skyrim.
I'm not reading 250 comments fucking insanity.
But you're right, absolutely right. Skyrim was never good. Bethesda was carried by the modding community. Always was and would continue to be if they weren't so fucking incompetent because apparently the space game can't be modded or the modders gave up idk I saw this affirmation in a YT tittle so it must be true.
But yeah, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. That was the peak, a mound hill compared to NWN 1 and all the custom shit in that game
even though I was too young to appreciate it so definitely no rose tinted glasses there yep definitely 100% nods.Some of you all really need to worry less about what other people enjoy. Yeah I see the usual comments line why bother trying to convince others. Why is there ant need to convince others? Why do some gamers treat this crap like proselytizing some religion?
I also think some people have an inability to just shut off their criticism and have some damn fun.
I agree Skyrim had issues and flaws. Most games do. I was pissed at how flawed it was on PS3 origonally and how long I had to wait for patches just to ginish my game. But it'salso still got tons of great varying gameplay. It's a great sandbox. There's lots of good dungeons and quests.
People also love Witcher and that game is garbage to me. Slow, boring gameplay. I don't get the appeal, but you do you. Some people now think Cyberpunk is the greatest RPG ever, yet it was pure garbage at release.
This thread is weird. So much weird hate for something specific.
I started with Skyrim modded it to hell, had a lot of fun and then I played Daggerfall Unity and realised what they had take from us.
As a big fan of the first two Fallouts and Daggerfall/Morrowind growing up, I do still like Oblivion. It's the right amount of jank and entertaining, with the bizarre voice action, the Dark Brotherhood quest line. Never played the main quest. Fallout 3 less so but still passable.
Skyrim was trash though, I did play the day 0 build and early patches only but I found a game-breaking combo of some sort early on and just ran thru the main quest to see what it was about since I never bothered with oblivion. I was pretty close to finished, but one of the last quests having a totally deflated final showdown between two factions where a dozen guys showed up and hit each other with poles in a courtyard just made me do the other stuff but none of it really landed for me. SO MANY RUINS.
it has a place in my heart like the star wars prequels where I know it's really bad but kinda love it anyway and revisit from time to time for kicks and to explore what makes it interesting
I like Skyrim the same way I like a plate full of chicken nuggets smeared in ketchup
I really enjoyed my first playthrough, well after launch. I hadn't played an ES game before so I got to enjoy a lot of things for the first time. Especially the worldbuilding. Towers and so on.
I also didn't know you could fast travel on my first playthrough and in retrospect I think that made it better. Quests were more organic in that it was annoying to go all around the map, so I'd clear regions more than with fast travel. I also encountered more random-ish events on the road and they were more novel because basically none of them came from chasing down quest markers. Walking into and between areas also created a sense of scale and made it easier to appreciate the characters of different regions.
On that playthrough I ended up as a two-handed mace Nord, real basic B hours, and it was very fun to go through a good set of side quests, some secondary storylines, and the main questline.
Subsequent playthroughs were nowhere near as good and I think I only completed the main questline on one of them. I got small reminders of the fun of the first playthrough but mostly felt the grind. And discovering fast travel, in retrospect, sucked a lot of fun out of it. I did resurrect my first character's saves to play the expansions and preferred the one that takes you to the island up north.
I'd say it was a pretty decent game for its time that benefitted heavily from the worldbuilding of Morrowind, some nice vibes (nighttime sky and music), and hype. Oh, and being a dummy that didn't know how to fast travel.
PS there are thousands of bland Skyrim listicle videos on Youtube that are great for mild insomnia. Nothing more somnorific than a nerd talking about the top 10 most drunk things about skyrim vampires or whatever.
I played about an hour of it and I knew it wasn't for me. Still gotta try out Morrowind.
I played Skyrim up until the quest where you had to unite the leaders of the warring factions. I got bored, haven't picked it up since. This play through was this year in 2024, it was the anniversary edition, first time I had played it. The combat is boring, the armor got too good too fast, and it wasn't a challenge, so then go back to story, the story is not good either. Just not a fun game, no reason to keep playing.
They should have enforced a much more rigid class system, warrior, ranger (or thief), or spellcaster, and not allowed you to be anything you wanted. Elden Ring suffers the same, you can start as any class, but become anything you want. It defeats the purpose of class based systems. Also, there should have been much more armor and weapons choices for each of the classes.
Path of exile excels at class based choices and goes even further with ascendancy, so much more replay value.
A big part of all good fantasy games is the specialization and discovering new gear, abilities all the time, and fighting bad guys, not running around all the time doing boring quests, and then fighting boring dragons.
I really don't fucking care. When I originally torrented it and played this I burned through bunch of story. It seemed fun but tedious. I have never used or played any mods. I still only play generic.
When I played it originally I just wanted to cheat and fuck around. I just gave skill points to whatever magic thing and just did the magic school missions. With some of the magic it just becomes dragon ball z.
After a while I stopped playing. I haven't played in like a long time. I'd rather play saints row 4. I guess.
I'm more of a shitty old shooters person.
At launch it was novel and fun to play the new fancy open world game with graphics for around probably 40 hours. The writing was trash and the gameplay was shallow, and this became clear the more I played. However I'd argue that opinion had started to turn on it in the mid 2010s.
Finally, I'll say this: in my main playthrough where I beat every questline, I had fun sometimes. When I did the same in Fallout 4, I had fun in two quests and was desperately waiting for it to get good for the other 60 hours. Starfield is never fun, and also weirdly shorter.
making another stealth archer with conjure bow so I don't have to bother with arrows and 360 no scoping everythingTo put this thread into perspective, there are YouTube channels dedicated to Starfield content with more subscribers than this sub. The edgelord take is seldom representative outside of its bubble.
The worst thing about those games is that they are filled with so many edgelords complaining about all the wrong things, that things like the steeping predatory monetization practices that began with Oblivion and have drastically increased since then no longer get called out as they once were when they tried to shove them again in early Skyrim. But outside of that, stop playing gatekeeper and let people enjoy what they play to enjoy and if you don't like it, maybe spend your time being positive about what you do like instead of negative and berating for people liking what you don't like.
spoiler yes
emoji.