The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

I feel like there's a pattern to how people enjoy Elder Scrolls games.
Your first Elder Scrolls game is absolutely breathtaking and amazing. It's a vast world that you get absorbed into, and you remember it very fondly.
The games before it feel very archaic and borderline unplayable.
The games after it remove everything you loved about the game, and dumb down every possible thing "to appeal to a broader audience". Each game seems to sell better than the last, so maybe they're onto something.


My first Elder Scrolls game was Oblivion, so all of my comparisons will be against that game. Is Oblivion perfect? No, but I love it to death.


The most important thing in an RPG is the quests. You can set aside mediocre gameplay if you're engrossed into the world and what you're doing.
In Oblivion, you had to claw your way up every single guild and faction. You may have found the Emperor's son and stopped the Oblivion crisis, but what have you done for me lately?
Here is a direct comparison of each and every equivalent faction in the two games:

Fighters Guild/The Companions:
Oblivion: Your boss does not respect you in the slightest until you've proven yourself by completing many contracts and cleaning up after your guild buddies.
Skyrim: Clear out two draugr/bandit dungeons and you're let in on the Companions' deepest, most tightly-kept secrets.

Mages Guild/The College of Winterhold:
Oblivion: You have to work your way from below the bottom to even get into their headquarters. You have to do favours for all the important people before you get access to the good shit.
Skyrim: Cast one spell and you're in. Then from then on, you're the chosen one once again. Note: You do not actually have to cast the spell if you pass a speech check.

Thieves Guild:
Oblivion: You have to meet them at midnight in the "Garden of Dareloth", and you really have no way to know what that is. You're invited by a mysterious note after you're done serving time, or you have to bribe a beggar. You go through, steal a bunch of shit, on your own and for people, and the final mission is to steal a Goddamn Elder Scroll. This was a big deal before Skyrim handed them out like candy.
Skyrim: In broad daylight, some guy walks up to you, regardless of your reputation, and says "you like to steal stuff???? me too". There is one quest that requires you to steal something, one that requires you to plant something, and the rest are draugr dungeons. Wow.

Dark Brotherhood:
Oblivion: You kill a man, and you're approached in your sleep by a dark figure who invites you to join their brotherhood of assassins.
Skyrim: In Windhelm, you hear rumours of a boy trying to contact the Dark Brotherhood. You enter his house, kill the old lady he wants you to kill, and then you're kidnapped in your sleep by the Dark Brotherhood's 'leader', Astrid. This doesn't work for a variety of reasons.
1. Most characters who would get to this point would just kill Astrid and leave.
2. If you do kill Astrid, you're given the location of their Sanctuary via a note on her person. With this, you can choose to wipe out the entire Dark Brotherhood. However, the most likely character type to want to wipe out the Dark Brotherhood would never be able to, as a good character wouldn't have killed the old lady to begin with.
Also to note: You can wipe out the Dark Brotherhood, a shadowy organisation most people insist doesn't exist, but you cannot wipe out the Thieves Guild, who operate brazenly in broad daylight.


Outside of factions, Oblivion's sidequests still shine way brighter than Skyrim's.
In Oblivion, one quest takes you inside a painting to rescue its painter. One quest has you go to an island and run through a death gauntlet some guy is kidnapping people to run through for money. Another has you enter the nightmares of a guy and conquer all his fears.
Skyrim has draugr dungeons.



The dungeon enemies in Oblivion were pretty varied. Depending on the quest, you could fight goblins, skeletons, bandits, ghosts, trolls, daedra, you name it.
In Skyrim, every dungeon is a draugr dungeon. Sometimes you need to solve the same door puzzle using a claw over and over.


Both games have terribly ugly character models, but Oblivion's character models are unique and memorable in how terrible they are. Skyrim's are just bad.
Skyrim also removed attributes and spell creation, meaning you can't up your magic and speed to go fast like Sanic or walk on water* any more.
*Unless you buy the DLC and wear the proper boots.

This was my first fantasy RPG back in 2015 and I have given it many chances over the years.
With several characters with different playstyles: Stealth archers, warriors, mages. But every playthrough I got bored in between 10 to 30h. The biggest issue I had was the combat. Every playstyle has its own way to cheese the stronger enemies, since, even in early dungeons, the difficulty comes from the bosses just doing massive amounts of dmg even through heavy armor.
So the difference in playstyles is just figuring out how to cheese the dungeon bosses. As a stealth archer it's easiest since you almost oneshot every enemy anyway but as mage or warrior you have to get your companion to tank and just dish out the most damage you can. Regular enemies are on the opposite end of the spectrum where you just use you strongest dps attacks and spam that and that is enough for 99% of enemies.
The incorporation of potions and consumables is really awkward as well, with the whole "time stops and you consume a small fortune of foodstuffs in between bear paw attacks to heal"

Beyond the lacking combat that makes the dungeons a chore to get through, the quests and characters don't feel memorable either. Every character is his typical archetype with little depth and speaks in such an unnatural overacted way, that you feel like in a C-tier DND session. The quests are also mostly fetch quests where you have to get some important item that is at the end of a draugr dungeon or inside a bandit camp.
The biggest depth, the game can muster is the civil war, which is supposed to make you decide between the lesser of two evils but which still feels really inconsequential since it only changes the color of the guards that roam the land at the end of the day. I would've wished for some harsher consequences that lock you out of some NPC's or locations or sth.

Even the much hated Fallout 4 managed to better create memorable locations and characters that actually felt human and not like lotr background characters.

What you have to give the game though is, that it's an excellent modding platform. I spent many hours playing around with them and am actually looking forward to playing total conversion mods like Enderal, hoping that they address the weaknesses of the game.

Just the thought of starting a new vanilla playthrough and slogging through all those early dungeons like bleak falls barrow or running up to high hrothgar for the first time is giving me a headache

This game has so many dogshit bugs, has a very shallow and mediocre story, tedious quests, etc.

But for some unknown reason, I played this game for over 3000 hours without modding and another 1000 hours or so modded.

This game has a special place in my heart

Speaking as someone who devoured this game back in 2011 and continued to revisit over the next decade, Skyrim is difficult to look back on and assess in 2022. The game has been rereleased countless times, there have been multiple story-addition DLCs, the modding scene is huge, and the discourse around the game has constantly shifted ever since the release date. I came into Skyrim as a huge fan of Oblivion, and my first experience with the former was probably closer to awe than just appreciation. The game world was huge, beautiful, and engrossing, and there was always something new to discover on your way to a quest marker. I eventually made it to the end of the game, killed the big baddie, and then the credits rolled.

Then I started a new playthrough, and the flaws in the game became a little more obvious. The RPG mechanics are paper thin. The way that two completely different characters interact with the world will be remarkably similar and produce the same results. Build variety and viability is lacking. Stealth archer builds are a meme for a reason. Probably the most meaningful choice you make in Skyrim is picking a side in the civil war, and even that hardly changes the game world in any tangible way. The guilds--typically one of the best features of the Elder Scrolls games--are half-baked: do like 5 missions and then you become the leader. Questing was shifted to the radiant variety, allowing for a potentially limitless source of... fetch quests.

Skyrim is a great game, but it's also not a great game. On the surface, it promises a vast and immersive experience, but there is very little to find below the shiny veneer. I think perhaps the best metaphor to explain Skyrim is related to its dungeons. There is a quite frankly overwhelming amount of ruins and crypts and whatever else scattered all across the map. They appear impressive and intriguing, and you want to excavate them for whatever secrets they hold. But when you break the seal and venture underground, you find copy and pasted environments, the same handful of enemies, and unrewarding loot. The locations exist just to exist, just to be more content, just to fill space in the overworld.

After 10 years, I am finally done playing Skyrim. And to be fair to Todd Howard and all the employees who undoubtedly grinded out years of their life on this game, 10 years of entertainment is more than anyone could reasonably ask for.

i play this game every like 3-5 months with a new goal in mind on how i want to fuck with the npc's

At some point we surely have to stop pretending like Bethesda games past Morrowwind are enjoyable for anything other than fucking around, right?