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.

The fact that so many websites still name Skyrim as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" video game ever only tells you how far gaming still is from becoming a serious art.

cRPGs critics have long recognized that the greatest games of all time from the genre are Baldur's Gate 2 and Fallout 2, who were not the most famous or accessible or best sellers of their times, let alone of all time. Horror critics rank the highly controversial Konami games over classical games who were highly popular in arcades around Japan. Open world action RPG core critics (OWARC), instead, are still blinded by commercial success. Bethesda has sold more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. cRPGs critics grow up playing to a lot of cRPGs games of the past, horror critics grow up playing to a lot of horror games of the past. OWARC critics are often totally ignorant of the games of the past, they barely know the best sellers.

I don't know if this is a masterpiece or complete dogshit, but I've loved it for years and don't see myself stopping anytime soon. Every few years it seems to drag me back in for another playthrough.

If you need an entry to the RPG genre, I don't think I could recommend anywhere better.

One way you can translate entertainment in French is divertissement. The word always made me chuckle - it's thick with this cliché continental moroseness. What would one be trying to divert their thoughts from? One's job? The unstoppable, unceasing passage of time? The unavoidable eventuality of death? That one's car needs its battery replaced?

Skyrim is, in my opinion, peak divertissement. It creates a space in time where being is suspended - not because you replace your self with a fictional character, but because you're simply not, Your reptile brain takes over, fed a steady and unlimited diet of randomly generated loot, checklist quests and steadily increasing numbers.

The game does not require any emotional or intellectual engagement from you. There are no complex interpersonal or political interactions. Characters are purely functional, and any more complex or inventive story ideas are pushed away to books and notes you can comfortably ignore. There are no complex gameplay systems that require thoughtful analysis and deliberate planning. By hour three four, you'll have experienced the full depth of the combat, crafting and trading systems - from there on, it's will just be about steadily increasing numbers. You do not need to make any strong choices, gameplay or roleplay wise. There is no complex character creation system that require you to define what your character can't do just as much as what they're good at - you can do anything by just grinding the relevant skill enough, join any guild regardless of your playstyle. But at any point in time, no matter how long ago your previous session was, you can just boot up the game, switch a quest on and get right back into that comforting loop of drip-fed dopamine.

There is a genuine appeal to Skyrim, and something of a mechanical beauty too - the game operates on a tight balance of actual artistry, mechanical incentives and general apathy. I think Bethesda's next title, Fallout 4, would push the incentives too far. Everything you'd do there would have an immediate XP reward, all the objects you could pick up would contain valuable components - eventually, that game would become an anxiety inducing slog, where you'd constantly fear missing critical opportunities. Here, it's just smooth, uneventful sailing, diving in and out of dungeons, becoming the baddest mofo in Tamriel, and cycling mad loot.

All in all, I think I can safely affirm that Skyrim is one of the videogames of all times.

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