I’ve been saying that for a while. Nobody to root for in the game. Not the Empire, not the Nords, not even the Forsworn. And the Forsworn thing is a whole racist trope of its own, holy shit. You have basically this blackface take of Native Americans, who’ve been wrongfully dispossessed of The Reach, but they had to make them all black magic worshiping, centered around the witch/hag hierarchy, every weird colonialist slur you could even dig up from the “Manifest Destiny” days. Skyrim’s great as like a fidget spinner for the ambience and the like, but man does it have problems.
I feel like I’m in the vast minority when I say that the game is heavily overrated
People make paragraph long rants on why skyrim is an amazing masterpiece, all while Todd sweats heavily behind the curtain, fearful for the day people realise he just bashed together a bunch of random shit to create a bloated mess
Skyrim is one of my most played games in my library. It’s a 6/10. Better sandbox RPG games in the same genre just do not exist.
As someone who kinda liked morrowind, and was disappointed with oblivion, skyrim just fell flat for me. The engine got better, but there just was less and less substance to it each game. Ignoring the content, just the base mechanics were stripped down to almost nothing.
I’ve got a friend who is experiencing oblivion for the first time after years and hundreds of hours of skyrim. They’re becoming increasingly upset at skyrim the more they learn about what was in oblivion but was removed.
You’re maybe in the vast minority of normies, but I think a lot of gamers have actually realized how lame Skyrim is. There’s certainly hours long rants on Youtube breaking down each little issue the game has, as well as examining it from the perspective of modern game design and as a failure of the Elder Scrolls brand, but beyond that; is anyone really holding up vanilla Skyrim as the pinnacle of gaming any more? Even Bethesda realized it needs mods to be enjoyable.
Eh… It’s boring…
Any decent DnD session or literally writing your own story surpasses it in my opinion
My first impression of Skyrim blew me away.
I came down from the hills early in the morning into a sleepy little village. Feeling peckish, I struck a nearby chicken to harvest it for meat, and was immediately made an enemy by the village. Without any weapons I ran towards a small bridge, but got surrounded on both sides. I jumped into the river and let the tide carry me all the way down away from the angry mob down onto a snowy plain where a blizzard was taking shape. I wandered through the blinding snow heading for the tree line, whereupon a met a frost troll herding goats. To my relief he ignored me, but as my hunger took hold of me, I decided to try to take a goat for myself. For the next 6 hours he stalked me across the landscape. I ran through woodland and mountain and lake to escape him and still he came in relentless pursuit. I ran upstream away from his lumbering stride, swam through parts unknown until I came to a town, where to my relief, there was an armed guard. I tried to beg him for help, but he recognised me from somewhere and took to arms instead, as the troll continued to stalk me from the otherside. Trapped between certain death, I jumped into the river once more, and to my everlasting relief I saw a fleet of guards attacking the troll. He made mincemeat of them, and then turned to me and smiled.
I think at this point it’s a lot of nostalgia. But the game does have a lot in it, so once the jank becomes endearing rather than off-putting, it is easy to lose yourself in my experience. There are still heaps of quests and parts of the game I haven’t finished. And if I want to replay something, I can approach it very differently each time.
I think it’s an okay game. I think it was the best available game with mass appeal (see overlap of marketing with early Game of Thrones) during formative years for a lot of people, which extended and amplified the volume of discourse.
100%
To be clear, I think the game is still fine, but like the worst kind of fine. Like mediocre fine. Like I find the vast majority of quests absolutely mind numbingly boring, even if they technically add to the experience and function perfectly well
People point at the fact that you can walk in practically any direction and stunble on a quest or landmark, but I really have to ask how many times they’ve actually done that?Let alone how many have gone on to complete the quest or dungeon once found
Almost all quests and dungeons, outside of the main story/side quests, felt practically identical. It gets to the point where you feel like you’re forcing yourself into cave number 196 just to get another level up so you can pick locks slightly easier, meanwhile all the enemies become slightly beefier, undoing all your progress
And don’t get me started on the levelling system. I hate how enemies don’t really get harder the further into the game you are, but rather they just have more health and damage. When you can barely go back to some bandits at the start of the game after 15 hours it really feels defeatist
Compare this to botw and elden ring. Yes, they have a similar problem where their shrines and catacombs started feeling samey towards the end (and on subsequent playthroughs), but each one still had a unique gimmick, making them stand out amongst their peers. I love replaying each one every now and then (gone through botw 6 times, elden ring 3, started skyrim 15+ times and completed 0)
The most fun I’ll always have with Skyrim is wistfully thinking what my next character should be, before playing for ~2 hours, and remembering all my problems with the game
Skyrim civil war in nutshell:
One side - ambitious and zealous racist who got fedup when species that have ages old beef with his people fucked Imperium, and then spat in the face of nords.
Other side - A scorned mother that got pissed old traditions resulted in the death of her child and became petty incarnate deciding that these traditions are yucky only after they fired against her.
Still on Ulfric’s side ideals wise, but the racism pisses me off x_x
They really could have used “Mr. House” and “Yes Man” equivalents. Like, Im 100% sure a Dragonborn can take over shit, or Talos’s name isn’t Tiber Septim.
Still on Ulfric’s side ideals wise, but the racism pisses me off x_x
Same here! I started a new game a few months ago and am actively ignoring both of the major factions, and it’s been the best playthrough yet.
TBF, whomever you escape Helgen with doesn’t lock you in to their side of the war.
You can choose to escape with Ralof and later join the Legion. I think there’s even some special dialogue when he recognises you during the fighting
Drag can see a completely clueless player escaping with Ralof, receiving instructions to go to Windhelm, obliviously walking past Segregation Lane, and swearing fealty to Ulfric without using any critical thinking or caution.
Skyrim was baby’s first RPG for a lot of people. Lots of people played it that didn’t really expect or were interested in engaging with moral complexity in their games, to the extent that it really existed in Skyrim.
I think the last time I played Skyrim, I walked up to Ulfric and shouted him to death. Rest in pieces, motherfucker. Then I turned it off and went on a years long Stardew Valley binge.
On the one hand, I sympathize with the Stormcloaks over the religious shit (the concordant banned Talos worship). I mean, the gods actually exist in this world so that’s kinda fucked up.
On the other, once I got to Windhelm, I kinda didn’t care about that anymore.
“Shit, maybe Talos is the reason these dudes are so racist… They only like him cuz he’s a human. And a Nord.”
Its rumored the aldmeri dominion tries to keep the war going. Both sides are mostly made up of nords from Skyrim. The civil war helps keep the empire weak while also pitting a group known to hate elves against each other. Many stormcloaks would glady fight along with imperials if they were spilling high elf blood.
And also Talos died and ascended to godhood a long time ago, so he isn’t around in person to cast holy smite upon any of the dipshits preaching war crimes in his name.
Basically, Talos is the in-universe Jesus.
Unless you prefer the other version of events presented in the game, in which case Talos was not a nord but instead a breton
I choose this version mostly because it is funnier, but if the in-game book that discusses it (the Arcturian Heresy) was written by who it says it was written by then it’s probably the truth
The game is great and all that, but god it is hard to fully remove all the junk it leaves behind on your system. You really need to check out that mod when the time comes to get rid of it.
