What happened, Bethesda? A review from a HUGE fan of Bethesda.
Let me explain myself, before people decide to thumb me down for the score that I'm giving this game. Skyrim is a game that hasn't improved much from Oblivion, given the time that it took to get this sequel out. There are minor differences, like Magic being tweaked, better character models, and so on; but these differences are improvements that we would've found in a series that has annual releases, not this. I'm not saying that I don't appreciate these subtle differences, I do, but what chaps my ass is the fact that this game does more wrong than it does right with these new improvements. There are a lot of variables to this game, more so than any other single-player RPG on the market for that matter. The problem is, a lot of these variables don't mesh together well. For example, as most of you know, this is a huge, huge game, that is supposed to offer well over 200 hours' worth of content, right out of the box. What is most of this content, you might be asking? Well, it's nothing but the same few dungeons, re-skinned over and over again, with minor differences spread throughout. I'm not condemning the game on the grounds of these repetitive dungeons, I'm calling it out because it's such a huge world, and I rightfully expected more.
How does that sound to you? Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of the same dungeons over and over again, with a half-baked combat system, child-like difficulty, a set of bugs and glitches, and generic fantasy RPG scenery. On paper, this wouldn't pass, at all. Yet, Bethesda, this company with so much experience with RPG's like this, somehow made the execution even worse. As I said before, with all the variables in this game, this game both suffers from an identity crisis, and a role of being a jack-of-all-trades.
By definition, a jack-of-all-trades is someone/something that can do many types of work. Skyrim is just that, a game that attempts many different things at once. It's a dungeon crawler, it's an adventure game, it's an RPG, and it's one of those old typing games that let you type in a command and watch what happens next. Of course, with these jack-of-all-trade type games, they never usually master one single thing. Again, this fits Skyrim to a tee: a game that has flaws in virtually everything that it does. I've already mentioned how this game is monotonous in its wealth of content, but that repetition is further stapled in the ground by the fact that this game feels rushed in just about every aspect that you can closely inspect.
For starters, there's the story, a corner stone to any nutritious gaming experience, especially for RPG's. The stories in Bethesda games have never really been anything but sub-standard, but this game just goes above and beyond to make sure that you care about absolutely nothing in this games universe. It's a spiel about some prisoner (just like the last 4 games), and you find out that this prisoner is the last in a long line of people known as Dragon-born. They can speak in roars, which do a number of different, generic things, like shoot fire, make your weapon move faster, and let you create a giant force of wind that pushes everything back. For one thing, these shouts aren't anything we haven't seen before, as I've said, but this plot is way generic, even by Elder Scrolls standards. A person who is that "chosen one" who must rid the land of evil? This is a game from 2011, and came out the same year as games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and The Witcher 2. Narrative and plot structure in this game is flat-out naïve by itself, and is especially so when compared to other RPG's. Oh but that's okay, nobody ever gives a hoot about the story in an Elder Scrolls game, so it's fine here, right? No.
When you're actually going along with the story, you run into a lot of people. These characters are usually never interesting, and offer little in the ways of personality or substance. As an example, the first real town that a player would usually visit is Whiterun. With games like this, people in these towns are usually in need of assistance, or have a special deal they want to throw your way, but it feels like Bethesda really just didn't care about any of that. They figured that since people never really paid attention to aspects like this, it would go completely over everybody's head. When you get right down to the nitty gritty of what this game offers, as far as story (and everything else, for that matter), it's an ultimately shallow experience, offering little in the ways of innovation. I'm generally fine with no innovation as long as the game itself is fun, but Skyrim fails in this category too.
As for the quests that are constantly being shoved down your throat by NPC's who obviously have stuff to do, they lack in quality too. The miscellaneous quests in the game are little more than constant fetch quests that usually lead you to dungeons that offer little in the ways of new things, and treasure. You're not expected to complete these quests, thank god, but what's being offered in the main-quest isn't really compelling either. Most of the quests that you partake in offer very mediocre ingenuity. For example, one quest has you crashing a party in order to find out where all of these dragons are coming from. It's pretty much you, being led by the hand by some NPC while the shallow dialogue gets out of the way first, before you slaughter everybody in the building with ease with nothing but a sword and some party-cloths. The concept of this quest is dumb enough, but what ruins its execution are not its poor planning, but the games on-rails AI that seems more intent with spurting the same line of dialogue 14 times over. I could take a lousy set-up like this, but when the characters in the game are trying their hardest to ensure that I don't enjoy myself, that's when I start writing a review about the game, describing how piss-poor the computers are in this game, while mentioning how all other elements are lackluster too for that matter.
I said earlier in this review that this game is a re-skin of Oblivion with a few changes thrown in for safe measures, and I mean this especially in the combat in this game. Fighting anything in this game is, for lack of a better word, lame. People like to consider this the "Whack-a-mole" of the RPG world, and I can see why they'd think this. Combat is little more than constantly mashing the right trigger, with a few left trigger squeezes to throw off the opposition, hoping that you hit your target when the weapon actually comes into contact with the enemy. Strategy is not one of the traits that this jack-of-all-trades attempts, and it's fairly obvious once you get to the point where all you do through the game is whack everything with your mace and just call it a day. Problem solving is something that isn't necessary when fighting the generically designed trolls, dragons, and giant robots. People act like this is such a huge improvement over Oblivion, given the visual flare that Skyrim has acquired, and the masses of stupid people who bought this game just because of its 96 on Metacritic right now. Anybody who's played any game in the series prior to Skyrim, even if it's just Oblivion or Morrowind, will tell you that there is nothing to get excited about when you get right down to the bones of the games weak mechanics.
Not only is fighting in general just a weak display of a game that you can find at your local arcade, but Bethesda also decided to add elements from the Fallout series to the equation. I wouldn't mind so much, had they actually taken the elements that actually mattered in the Fallout games (like the V.A.T.S.). Instead, they give us finishing moves this time around. These finishing moves detract from the already poor game-play by severely slowing the game down, and sometimes making the game stall. I don't understand why it was so hard to leave such an obtrusive element out of a game like this, but Bethesda thought that the game should've definitely been easier than it already was by adding a needlessly friendly executing move that can kill your weak opponent when he's at half of his original health, when you could've just as easily let me kill him with my sword without risking the whole games performance on something that shouldn't have been included in the first place. I know that was a long sentence, but when something as simple as a finishing move is giving me problems, it should come as no surprise that I think the games combat is utter trite.
The combat didn't improve much at all from Oblivion, nor did the amount of customization that is present in this huge, open world. Given my 50 hours that I've stocked into my current character, I've almost unlocked everything as far as smithing and enchanting go. I have over 200 hours' worth of content to breeze through still, are you sure that there isn't anything else for me to build or anything? I mean, I kind of expected a game with this amount of time put into it to have at least more than like 10 types of armor to make. There are games that have less than this, sure, but those games aren't attempting to make a world that has mostly nothing but grass and rocks. It's almost a joke that Bethesda thinks that all we need to satisfy our crafting needs is just a few presses of the button, without us realizing that skills only go as far as 100, with that level cap being reached very, very quickly. Aside from being able to make practically nothing worthwhile for people who are 100 hours in, what you loot from these repeated dungeons isn't exactly note-worthy either.
Dungeons in this game are the equivalent to checking your mailbox. Every day when you play this game, you inevitably walk into a dungeon and fight a few badies, and collect some "treasure". In real life, I have to climb through the 2-foots' high worth of snow in my yard so I can get the same type of mail that I've been getting ever since I decided I wanted to get mail for my parents so I could see if I got my mediocre copy of Game Informer yet. What you find in these dungeons is entirely predictable, and it's not worth all the trouble of experiencing the mediocre combat of this game so that you might find a weapon that is useless to you, or learn another generic shout that acts in the same ways that your regular magic acts. If you're still reading at this point, does any of this sound entertaining to you? Sure, there's an addictive nature to the whole experience, but you might as well get addicted to Peyote buttons instead, given the fact that the addictive nature in this game is just a waste of time, and that you could brag to your friends about the spiritual journey that you took with The Fonz while playing Dark Souls.
To top it all off, the graphics in the game aren't really anything special. How much better does this game look than a game that came from 2008, like GTA IV for example? It's such a huge world, and the game looks average at best, with a constant hue of grey to keep with the games nature of being the blandest form of fantasy possible. Textures are rough, and the animation, while not as stiff as other efforts from Bethesda, still begs for a complete over haul. Also, the pop-in is downright atrocious in some spots of the game, and at times makes Rage seem like a normal-ass game. To top the technical fertilizer cake off, the frame-rate suffers, constantly. I'd understand if we were loading some high-tech sh*t here, but this game has only one thing that people just can't seem to get pass: scale; large, unoriginal, and very dissatisfying scale. Not only that, but this game has a goal of making you wish the creative director had played Dark Souls a bit and wanted this game delayed to THIS YEAR, where they could've put a lot more creativity into what would other-wise be an average game that I'd still recommend. Instead, I can say with sadness that this game really isn't worth your time, not for the combat, not for the story, not for the RPG elements, the quests, or for the graphics and art. This game is a mess.
I can't believe Bethesda released this game in its current state. And I'm most definitely not talking about the bugs and glitches (which there are plenty of). I'm talking about the poor execution of just about every aspect that even comes close to contact with this over-hyped filth. I wanted to like this game, I really did; I enjoyed Fallout 3, New Vegas, and most of all, Oblivion. But I expected so much more out of a game that took 5 years to get out of the window. New Vegas took little under two years to make, and it somehow turned out to be a better game than Skyrim, bugs and everything. Which leads me to ask the question again: what happened Bethesda?