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.
Bethesdabros when someone says their favorite bibeo gaem is ass:
Me when someone says my favorite game is ass:
Fr, like if I got my undies in a bind every time someone said, Idk, Dark Void was bad, I would not sleep.
God, dad could drive a silt strider
It’s amazing how Morrowind was just a breath of fresh air in terms of fantasy settings and writing
Then we get Oblivion, which tossed out everything interesting in lieu of casting Patrick Stewart (for five minutes) and Sean Bean, with even the high points being fairly cookie cutter nonsense that only seemed good because the rest of the game was so bland
Now Skyrim on the other hand, immediately went to Epic Dragon Viking Town, but stripped the game of even more depth and even made the dragons some of the easier enemies in the game
Like, what fucking game designer goes “Dragons should be far and away the most annoying enemy to fight”?
Then we get Oblivion, which tossed out everything interesting in lieu of casting Patrick Stewart (for five minutes) and Sean Bean, with even the high points being fairly cookie cutter nonsense that only seemed good because the rest of the game was so bland
Didn’t Skyrim get rid of the dynamic npc conversations? That was like a highlight of Oblivion which was a pretty bad game overall.
“Hello!”
“Oh it’s you.”
“Have you heard of the high elves?”
“I saw a mudcrab the other day, horrible creatures!”
“Good bye!”
“Bye.”
There’s a nip in the air, cold won’t be good for my crops
i would say they fixed them. like yeah Oblivion’s are iconic in that janky way, but skyrim crossed the pale into fairly convincing which helps for immersion, but is less funny
Yes they are utterly gone. Lots of NPCs do not even move anymore lol.
Major downgrade. The very limited dynamic stuff that npcs did was good and it felt a bit like Shenmue to me.
For real, just like going to someone’s house and they aren’t there, they’re at the alchemical shop or whatever slapped. It gave the faintest sense that the world continues to turn when you aren’t in frame.
Also some random behaviours like Ma’iq the Liar shooting off in search of caliper tongs was very funny. They coulda built on this!!
He always said, “You can’t trust that Almsivi Intervention! Why walk when you can ride!”
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…
i also couldn’t figure out how to level up in oblivion (i was 12 or something), so skyrim was an improvement there.
Same. I just ran around and did quests forever, then got a quest where i finally had to sleep to advance it and then i leveled up like 20 times and all the enemies were in daedric when i maybe had some mithril.
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.
Okay, we share the same spicy game takes it seems.
Redditors are so cringe but it’s funny watching them flail around and fail at basic reading comprehension
Symphony of the Night were catastrophic game design mistakes
Yeah I wrote an essay (scroll down) about why I hate it to death and it bores me!!
Seven out of 10 isn’t bad, goes downhill once the castle inverts.
Why do we have to do this thing every few years where we decide something people used to like is actually dogshit?
I hate when people say this. Your fave was dogshit from the start fucko, you were just so swept up in the hype that you ignored all criticisms.
Sonic Adventure 2
I will not hear this disrespect for the game that came attached to Chao Garden.
I played Skyrim for like a week straight when it released. After like 60 hours I realized I didn’t really enjoy any of it. Haven’t played it since
Realest Skyrim Experience
I spent like 400 hours across four save files desperately coping trying to find enjoyment in it, lol.
I had basically the exact same experience. I got super hyped for 11/11/11, stopped going to school for a week and spent all day every day playing it to the point where I was solving puzzles in my dreams and then I beat it and never really touched it again. I kinda woke up from the dream back then and have been watching the rest of the world catch up. I did put a lot of hours into FO4 but that was solely for the base building aspect, never touched the main plot after the first time through.
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
I like Skyrim (as well as older Elder Scrolls games) but I’m also basic enough to enjoy most Ubisoft open world games so my opinion should probably legit be discarded
Depends which, some Ubisoft open worlds were okay…
Yeah, don’t get me wrong there are some open world games that even I don’t consider worth playing but I enjoy vegging out and liberating portions of a map sometimes, what can I say
but I enjoy vegging out and liberating portions of a map sometimes
I totally feel that. Its such a soothing experience. Completely mind off - climb viewpoints, go to incons on map, grab collectibles - it’s all i want sometimes.
Hell yeah
Not at all proud of my 70 hours in Far Cry 3, which I accrued resetting the map a couple times while playing the game mindlessly and listening to podcasts
I don’t do that shit anymore though, feels bad.
I’m baffled that Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag was made, and Ubisoft didn’t just pivot to make better and better pirate games. Or us all as a society generally.
Like I should be sailing my customized privateer interceptor around the Caribbean with my crew of lesbian love interests, while maxing out a pistols build that lets me shoot 6 times at the start of combat from 6 pistols hanging off my character.
Skull and Bones was meant to be that, but joke company lmao. I guess they worried it was too far out from core series appeal?
Also
There’s still AssCreed Rogue, even if the cool piratey bits fell off
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.
deleted by creator
Avowed is going to be terrible and it’s going to be a stain on the PoE world.
Yea… I posit we replace Skyrim with something else tbh.
deleted by creator
But I like Skyrim, the place, and want to go there, and other places in Tamriel, and it’s got better graphics than other elder scrolls games and probably isn’t the worst one I’ve played. It’s good enough in a lot of ways. Not my favorite Elder Scrolls game, but dogshit? No.
I never saw appeal in the world myself, the Stomcloak-Imperial conflict is so lifeless Idk. Towns so tiny, I miss Skingrad Idk…
I miss it too
I literally didn’t realize the stormcloak-imperial conflict was the main story on my first (and only vanilla) playthrough. I just ran around hitting dragons with big 2 handers
That’s the intended experience I think, lmao
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
I think a lot of it is that we’ve been conditioned to filter our thoughts through the lens of explosive and quick hot takes. Something can’t be middling or be flawed it has to be either an afront to god or a gift from god himself.
No I just actually think this. It legit surprised me that this thread blew up so much.
The language I used is spicy in retrospect, but I’m just a vulgar sweary person. I have nuanced flaw-acknowledging takes, on Oblivion and Fallout 3. I was hyped for Skyrim and it was bad, so bad. I’vebeen cooking my Skyrim thoughts ever since. I have also never posted on twitter.
I guess what i’m trying to say is that people should examine and disect things not through trying to create sound bites. Like skyrim’s writing is bad but how? Is it just self evident or that it is worse then mega man x? Is it a worse game of thrones in that they’re both fantasy and skyrim is worse in what game of thrones is attempting to do?
I have also never posted on twitter.
You don’t need to ever post on twitter to be exposed to the attention economy.
deleted by creator
Yeah I didn’t mean to come off as hostile or invalidating I guess the way people can sometimes talk about art regardless of medium on the internet can kind of annoy me.
I try not to just be stupid, like I could spend several days posting my GAMING HOT TAKES!! but this thread happened by accident. If I tried to purpose-build a hot take it probably wouldn’t even work, I am too autismy. I’m more prone to writing 4000-10,000 words about why something is bad, or good, and often people don’t wanna read that which sucks. It’s kinda lame that this post got a ton of engagement just for “skyrim bad” tbh.
I’m more prone to writing 4000-10,000 words about why something is bad, or good, and often people don’t wanna read that which sucks
Yeah that’s the consequence of so much content being shoved in our face all the time making it what does get the most attention is the most immediately understandable and eye-catching (think buzzfeed articles with inflammatory headlines) so when someone does sit down and write something that is carefully thought out it gets blown by the wayside.
It’s been a while since I played it and I’d need a comb to go over it, but the scene where you absorb a dragon soul and everyone stands around gawping “wowee, the protagonist! you are the player in this power fantasy game! what a big guy!!!” is eyerolling. I hate it. I also do not like Game of Thrones fwiw, but the Stormcloak-Imperial scuffle is small scale and half baked imo.
I am in the business of writing ridiculous, lengthy examinations and dissections, but a lot of people missed that this post is not a review of analysis of Skyrim, it is about opinions shifting.
I don’t think so Idk, like RPG Codex nerds never make videos for instance. Most of these people who make the “eh skrim bad” videos are themselves the normals who never played Oblivion or Morrowind. Also how dare anyone put hundreds of hours into a game and not like the sequel, how abnormal!
Personally it’s because the world is worse, again, after Oblivion’s was already generic high fantasy. World simulation elements like scheduled NPCs have just vanished, any attempt at a real dialogue system or prcedural chatter (however clownish Oblivion’s was) has disappeared. It is a buncha generic brown grey fields and some snow. Its NPCs spout even fewer poorly voiced dialogue lines than in Oblivion and the writing of those lines, as well as everything, has gone down across the board.
buncha generic brown grey fields and some snow
i’m going to take umbridge with this and echo somebody else in the thread: juniper, aspen, pine, high plains, and snowfields are all distinct, but i suppose continental biomes. as opposed to Oblivion ‘marylanders impression of sherwood forest’ i found it much more convincing, but maybe that’s cause i’ve actually seen those things but not the english countryside
Yeah I guess, I dunno, I like the marshy and the plains and the mountainous bits of Oblivion’s world. Both pale compared to Morrowind ofc.god i hate marshes. first thing to do in morrowind is get the fuck away from that malarial coastline
Morrowind elitists don’t understand morrowind was a pretty shit role playing game itself
there’s shitty things about it and stuff that yes, even skyrim did better. but part of being an agonizing scold is also having to couch that in the context of its time, so a lot of it wasn’t as bad as it looks now.
Yeah I know. Just people who worship morrowind generally don’t realize it’s mainly their nostalgia that makes the game legendary in their heads.
Just like oblivion was my first elder scrolls so that’s the one I gravitate towards
deleted by creator
started catering towards people who enjoy (multiple concurrent) linear stories more.
Linear stories that are awful, to boot. Describing Skyrim as a “single player mmo” is so enlightening to me, it’s like Borderlands and I hate both, lol
If I want to play a full rpg. I’m not going to be playing a post daggerfall Bethesda game.
It’s just not that good of a role playing experience
Better than Skyrim or Oblivion? Sure. But it’s not some masterpiece of rpg gaming Bethesda games have since morrowind and todd Howard been far more about the exploration than the role playing
If you’re trying to gatekeep rpgs with Morrowind. I’m sorry but that’s laughable to me
Keep in mind these are video game treats people. Please don’t go insane because I’m not a morrowind fanboy
deleted by creator
I didn’t think you were trying to gate keep my friend
I just meant some Morrowind fanboys do and it’s irritating whenever I bring up enjoying Oblivion. Morrowind fanboys pop and tell me how my tastes are shit or how in supposedly a casual (whatever that means)
absolutely, i just want to be fair on both sides [filthy centrism] since i think there’s cool experiences in all three
Can you tell me any experiences you’ve had with the orange order?
none but Orangists in Belfast is hilarious as a concept holy shit. can Sinn Feinn just finish the job already?
These old fools are self hating gaelics. They don’t realize even lowland Scots have substantial Gaelic ancestry lmao
deleted by creator
Compared to a lot of the isometric rpgs like planescape torment that came before or new Vegas and baldurs gate 3 that came after’? It’s dog shit. Wikipedia npcs are not immersive to me friend
People getting defensive about favorite treats
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
i wasn’t trying to say they’re immune, just explain the narrative at large. systems critique for games or say, costume critique for movies, are not invalid directions to look at things, but if they don’t matter to a large portion of the audience we gotta acknowledge that
Just because someone enjoys a game doesn’t make it immune to criticism.
Lol tell the gamers, quick! This thread should have been ten replies and done, who cares if some dork hates popular game? And yet!
Agreed, even when it first came out I was clear the depth had been removed from the series.
I really wish corporations would stop trying to dumb down RPGs, but money talks.
The longevity and nostalgia for Skyrim largely comes out of the extensive modding community that developed around it. That blinds people to the reasons the vanilla game needed such modding.
Game is good because I make it basically a different game
Unironically yeah. Let’s say there are two games that are in all other ways equal, with multiple ways to softlock them. One is left unpatched forever, the other has a large userbase that puts out community fixes. The latter is a better experience. I’d also argue that most of Skryim’s competitors are actually worse.
And before you say “ah but Morrowind is a better game!”, if you were going to play it, would you run it vanilla or using OpenMW?
Yes, as we can see with New Vegas, it helps to have bug fixes and little tune ups. But many mods for Skyrim tear out the magic system entirely, or like replace all the game’s content I guess. Core game Skyrim is nongood in a way that Oblivion even, isn’t.
I find it weird that Skyrim is thought to have “competitors”, like no other games really do the sandbox western RPG thing. Bethesda games are still basically unique.
if you were going to play it, would you run it vanilla or using OpenMW?
are you takin the piss, I play on original Xbox. It has the best controller support. OpenMW is cool but none of its additions are necessary. Vanilla is also fine. Wat u doin?FWIW I do mostly agree with you re: Skyrim, was just pointing out that a dedicated modding community does make a game better. It doesn’t necessarily make it good!
Re: competitors, it’s mostly other Bethesda games (which I agree have been going downhill since at least Oblivion though I haven’t really dug my teeth into Morrowind), but I’d also throw in stuff like Kingdoms of Amalur, Two Worlds (which IIRC pitched itself as a competitor to Oblivion), or some of the Gothic games.
I’m shocked and impressed that you have an original Xbox in 2024 tbh. How’s it look at higher resolution? Or are you using a CRT?
Yea true, and I mean if good viddy game content is made in skyrim like Enderal then rad, ig.
Kingdoms of Amalur
I think Two Worlds is closer to like Gothic or something, but yeah I guess they’re in the same category ish. Quality of Bethesda games is a linear trip downward.Hell yeah I put UnleashedX on that thing
I have the Advanced AV pack and it looks pretty bad on an HDTV, better on a CRT but spending the money for the component HDAV pack or an HDMI device would be good. Also looks decent on a CRT.People have this tendency to think Morrowind is a mechanically bad game in need of fixing, but I happen to greatly respect Morrowind as it is. Some of the changes they make in OpenMW I don’t even like. Morrowind is bugged up the ass in ways and could do with patching in some respects, but mostly
I mean, yes. Being easy to mod and having lots of mods available and community support does add value to the base game on platforms where modding is possible. Not every game is easy to mod or has community documentation on how to do so.
Tell me about it, I’ve always wanted modding for Jet Set Radio Future to be real. Skyrim is, I find, more like an engine or platform than a game though, like it has a core game but it’s not any good, so mod it.
And a few games have even started as skyrim mods! Like The Forgotten City.
Now that is based.
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.
