So how do you enrage a bunch of people with your honest opinion? Actually, now that I think of it, it might be long enough in this game's lifetime that talking about my true feelings won't get me backlash anymore. When Skyrim first came out, people praised it like the second coming of Jesus Christ but with swords and dragon shouts. However, over the years people have found they can enjoy the game while still having criticism, which is a perfectly acceptable reaction you should always have by the way.
By this point, if I point out what I really don't like about this game, the fanboys will come out of nowhere just to pat me on the shoulder and say "Hey I feel ya buddy, game gets rough some times". Hell a bunch of them might even say "Yeah It's a Bethesda game, it's part of the reason we love them." and admittedly, I've come to have a fondness for the company in roughly the same aspect. That I can still heavily enjoy what they put out, even if it is riddled with so many problems. Especially bugs.
Alright, let's talk about Skyrim.
I bought Skyrim when it was relatively new. You see, the game came out when I was in college and only bought games on Steam. I liked Steam a lot back then as games tended to be cheaper, and I didn't need to bring a console into my dorm, my laptop worked just fine. Skyrim was either full price, or fifty bucks, and to me back then I had to wait for a sale. When it did go on sale that December, I bought the game and tried it out.
I'm not fucking joking, the very first time I started the game I got a game-breaking bug. I rode down with Ulfric, Ralof, and the other two, created my character, and was ready for the chopping block so Alduin could accidentally save me. HOWEVER, when the priest or whoever starting giving us our last rights, what is supposed to happen is that the non-important guy just tells her to shut the fuck up and walks over to the block first.
He walked to the block, but did not say his dialogue. The game did not know what the fuck to do because of that. We all just stayed there, doing nothing. It was like a high school play when someone forgets their line, and everybody is in that weird mix of professionalism where they think skipping a line means you have to wait for them to remember it instead of roughing it, because they all just waited for him to say his line, not letting the game happen.
I exited the game and this glitch just kept happening. I complained to Steam and they didn't have an answer for me at all. I don't know who was working the complaint desk that day, but if I remember correctly they acted like they didn't have time for my shit, and this was before the refund policy so I was completely boned. I was probably ruder than I needed to be, considering I was roughly 19, but hey, it was my hard-earned money and the thing fucking broke five minutes in.
HOWEVER, I deleted the game and re-downloaded it, and that thankfully fixed it. (I'm sure most of you thought my glitch was going to be the wagon doing a million cartwheels down the mountain. Don't worry, I got that glitch eventually too. It even murdered the horse a couple of times. It kept happening every time I launched it and I had to download the mod that lets you choose a new opening).
I encountered a lot of bugs in this game, and this was the PC version mind you, which had the least amount of bugs. I still had to carry quest items that I supposedly gave back after the quest, some quests never vanished off my list, and then there was the weirdest one, where every time I entered Breezehome, the game exited out. That one may have been because of mods, but hey, I honestly don't know anymore.
But it's not the bugs that got on my nerves in this game. Now, I'm going to get something off my chest first before I get into some other details. Some of my dislike is legitimately from personal preference, and I'm enough of an adult to admit that. I have some complaints that only apply to people like me, so they are nitpicks that don't ultimately matter all that much to you personally. However, bare with me, I've played this game a fucking lot so someone is going to hear about this. No matter how I felt about it, this was a game I bought in college, I had to make my investment matter. Don't believe me? Here's my Steam hours:
If you're wondering why it claims a 2016 time, I wanted to double check how well the game ran on my computer. It ran like a snail, even with graphics on low. My new laptop hates video games for some reason.
So now, here are my personal nitpicks that don't matter:
High fantasy doesn't sit with me that hard. I don't hate it, but it doesn't grab my interest. So, yeah, there's that.
Well now that that's out of the way, time to discuss some things that personally rubbed me the wrong way that I can see someone else having a big problem with:
Your character is just way too bare bones. I understand the appeal of filling in the gaps for yourself, since my original playthroughs I have played another Bethesda baby, Fallout 3. I expected little, but I loved it. The setting, the characters, the combat, the story, everything was great to me. What I especially loved was how much you knew about the character despite the fact they were a blank slate. They never actually spoke, but we literally saw them grow up. We knew facts about them.
The name of your father, the fact your mother died giving birth, you father's secret past and obsessions, the people from his past life, your childhood friend Amata, your childhood bully Butch. Sure, you can also disregard all of that because the game gives you free will to just murder almost all of those people and instead do what you want instead of tracking your missing father down. BUT, they are still facts given to you by the game, and anything you do is related to these things.
Hell, take DOOM from last year. Another Bethesda game, although this time it is mostly an Id Software game. Doom Guy also stayed silent the entire time, but had massive body language to tell you exactly how he felt. If you chose to read the optional lore, you learn a lot about the game's story and also about the story of Doom Guy himself. Whether or not you read it, you know a lot about this character who refuses to say a Goddamn thing the entire time. You can see he's pissed off, hates demons and especially the corrupt organization that allowed them access to Mars. If you do read the lore, you learn that he had past dealings with these things. The demons are not screaming just because they are demons and demons tend to scream, no, they are screaming because they personally know the Doom Marine and they are terrified of him.
I've played Skyrim dozens of times, have made at least five different characters, and I can't really tell you a single fucking thing about any of them. Let's see, one of them was a companion. The other one a thief and mage. Another a Stormcloak, assassin, and Dragonborn. And two who did everything. Those are not personality traits, they are just things they did. Sure, I can also say they were a Wood Elf, Imperial, Argonian, Dark Elf, and Orc respectively, but that's just their race. Race does not denote personality, in real life nor in fantasy video games.
Hell, most of them got married and I couldn't even tell you their sexuality, they all had such little personality for me to go on I just didn't give enough of a shit to decide if they went both ways or if they were only attracted to the sex they had married. I do get the appeal of building a personality for your character, and there are many games that allow you to do so, and they bother to give you a template.
I grew to feel bad for my evil playthrough Fallout 3 character, because I could feel like he was simply a lost young man who went off the deep end due to a harsh world and personal tragedy. I could connect to my good playthrough of the same game because of how many dialogue options let me be not only be an honest to goodness anti-hero, but let me choose dialogue that reflected her high intelligence but still let me make her situationally stupid if it sounded funny to me. My Digimon trainer in Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth came across as all-loving, brave, compassionate, and she only had a max of three dialogue options, sometimes all of them being roughly the same. Also lesbian because they didn't change up the flirting dialogue to be any different from the male's options and I honestly found that both very cute and very hilarious.
My five Skyrim characters? Nothing. If I wanted to make someone entirely from scratch, with no help at all, I would open up Microsoft Word and just write a book. I don't think I'm alone on this, blank slate characters are less popular now that gaming has gotten bigger, and if you are going to do them, just a few simple things to make them not entirely blank helps a lot for players to connect.
Okay, now for the main quest lines. God, I fucking hate the majority of the storylines in this game:
Companions? Blood-soaked glory hounds who need some humility.
Thieve's Guild? Fun for the most bit, but I wanted all of them to shut the fuck up after a while. No Delvin, you sit down and 'ave a drink!
Dark Brotherhood? It's more fun to kill them than it is to join them.
Mage's College? Snore fest filled with the dumbest characters in the game. Seriously, Ancano couldn't be more obviously evil if he tried, put a fucking leash on him and none of the world destroying bits of the plot would have happened.
Civil War? Could have been interesting with the gray versus gray morality they had going. However, Ulfric comes across as a racist dick and the empire is too flat for their own good, so I ended up not caring who won or not instead of feeling like neither side was perfect.
Main Story? Had it's moments, was too short for it's own good, and there wasn't a single person in the land of Skyrim with enough personality to make me care that Alduin was going to eat all of them unless I did something. Especially since you can just ignore the quest and somehow Alduin doesn't eat anybody at all.
You see, funny thing about the main story. If you ignore the main story and the civil war, you can play the whole game without having to fight a single dragon. Yeah, the thing they marketed to you as the big reason to play, you don't have to concern yourself with it. Hell, I did this a couple times, because I hated fighting dragons so much. Try it. Do every quest line aside from Main Story and Civil War, do everything you can with no dragons in sight. It's kind of great to know you can fast travel without going "Ah fuck a dragon's attacking. Gonna reload the last save, I'm tired of these fuckin' things".
Now, I'm going to do a quick plot synopsis of one of the faction quest lines, and you tell me which one it is. You start out talking to someone in charge of the organization. The group doesn't trust you, but that one person sees something in you and they take the risk despite everyone thinking it's a bad idea. You do a few ambient quests, and everyone starts trusting in you. Suddenly, tragedy strikes and someone is dead. You have to do more quests to fix things, and then the leader is killed as well. You defeat the final evil, and you are then crowned the new leader.
So which faction quest line is this? The correct answer is: fucking all of them. Now, the Thieve's Guild does offer some slight variation, hence why I found them the most fun. You kill the leader yourself because he betrayed you, you are the one who got killed (obviously you survive), and you still have to do many more quests before you are just crowned the leader. A few too many quests, but hey, it's something different.
When it does come to quests I liked:
I liked the random ones you'd get just from walking around and exploring.
I really liked the DLC. I found it to be well crafted, added a lot of great content to the base game, and the storylines were a vast improvement and added some of the few characters I cared about.
And the Daedra. Holy shit. I used to hate the Daedra quests, but I love them now. I love how many of them give you free reign to do what you want in order to finish them. I love the rewards, the subtle change in reward depending on if you said "Yes lord Daedra I'll do this" or "No fuck you, you're evil". Sure, some don't offer the freedom, Molag Bol being the most notable example of this for me. Still, the rest make up for it.
Besides, again, I don't care about anybody in Skyrim. If you tend to be the kind of player who doesn't like being evil, you may want to wait a little bit and get to know something about each character first. Because everyone is Skyrim is kind of horrible. For such a flat-personality-infested world, Bethesda did go out of it's way to make unpleasant personalities shine through. Anyone you kill, you probably did someone a favor.
The next time I play this game, because let's face it, it's part of my previous life in college, I will almost subconsciously get the urge to play this game again. I can't shed this game no matter how hard I may want to.
Next time I play this game, no main story, no faction story lines. Just my favorite Daedra, and some miscellaneous quests. I never need to do anything else ever again. You see, if you're wondering why I'm talking about Skyrim in April of 2017, I bought the Xbox One version of Special Edition and just finally got every single achievement ever in the game.
Before you ask why I would buy this game a second time, I never bought the last DLC on the PC version. Always meant to, never did. So between that, the fact my laptop can't run this game very well, and that I'm a completionist and yet never got all of the achievements in this game before, yes, I re-bought Skyrim even though I don’t genuinely like it. Hey, I beat it. 141 hours for every achievement isn't bad, and remember that any mod use on console disables achievements, so I did this all legit. I did download some mods after I finished up, but I only played for like an hour after that. Likely less.
Also, mods on the PC version basically helped me keep playing during college. Who cares if the story is weird if Sheogorath is the one giving you the loading screen text? And the blood filters. Man the base game does not have enough blood. Even the vampire DLC, which added loads of blood, didn't have enough delicious blood for me. Vanilla Skyrim's blood is a joke once you start using the mod.
This is the picture the modder uses to show off their mod. Yes, this amount is MORE than the base game uses.
Speaking of that, this game is rated M, and it does not do enough to feel like it. This teeters on personal preference again, but how come there's barely any blood or swearing in an M rated game? Also practically no sexual content. I'm not saying we needed titties galore in Skyrim, but any sexual reference is basically hidden away or only slightly hinted at, instead of outright said, despite the fact it's a game marketed for adults and there's a fucking God the characters believe in who is supposed to represent sexuality for fuck's sake. You never even have sex with your spouse. You get a "Lover's Comfort" perk when you go to sleep and they're in the same area, but there's nothing to hint that you did anything other than fall asleep. It doesn't need the lovably cheeky remarks from your partner that later Bethesda game Fallout 4 had, but any hint that you partake in what married couples do in fact do would be nice.
One thing I can respectfully negatively compare is that in Fallout 3, you can hire a prostitute in the very first town. Nowhere else, but still. Yet Skyrim is a fantasy game that does not have this feature at all. Where are the fantasy wenches? We know this was a thing in the distant past (and yes also now but bare with me), and high fantasy loves using them. So yeah, why no wenches and whores? It does seem like a misstep, or at the very least very weird when you think about it compared to many, many other high fantasy settings, and especially when again there is an in-universe God of sex. Characters claim they have rituals and worships but there is only one character in the whole game who is openly stated to have sex as part of their rituals do the sex God. Oh, and that quest has you slut-shame her, which gives off a harsher vibe in a game where other sexual mentions are seemingly banned.
Back on the swearing, for a while I didn't realize the swearing lack was because this was a fantasy game. I just thought Bethesda didn't like using them. The worst you can hear is "This war. This Goddamn war." and that's it. I only realized that they were just being more like an ancient fantasy world after playing Fallout 3. The first time I played that and heard someone tell me to go fuck myself, I practically flipped over backwards in my chair from surprise. Bethesda had a potty mouth after all.
It's basically an M-rated game you can let your kid play. Which, yeah, that's not always a bad thing. It’s something I’ve always liked about the Halo franchise. It's just noticeably jarring in this game, and I can't be the only one to think so when there's a mod to make the blood more prevalent.
Before I forget to say it, yeah the animations are kind of weird. This is not an uncommon complaint, but you know what, I actually think the game looks graphically good. Which is not a common thing to hear. Lots of people who love this game think it looks kind of ugly or outdated, but I think it's perfectly fine. Some stuff you shouldn't get too close to it, other stuff looks Goddamn beautiful. Granted, that clapping animation is the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen. Other than that, didn't bother me, just thought I'd both say what everyone had said and what not everyone has said. :P
Now, there's one thing that I need to say. Something that bothered me, and I don't completely think is Bethesda's fault. When this game was new, someone told me it was a game where you could do anything. I don't remember who said that, but they fucking lied to me. You see, when you tell me that, than I will try to prove it wrong. And I did, unfortunately.
Bethesda really tried to make the game super smart, and they did do it. It's just that I outsmarted them, even though they didn't ask me to. Some marketing asshole did. Don't believe me?:
When Astrid captures you and tells you to kill a captive to be part of the Dark Brotherhood, you can just kill her instead, and then you start a quest to slaughter the rest of them. But you can't kill the Thieve's Guild. You can kill Maul (thank God because I fucking hate him), and the people who start selling shit when you get better, and a lot of the minor thieves like Sapphire and the ones I don't fucking remember the names of. But not any of the important ones, even if you don't join them. Why let me wipe out one evil guild, but not the other? I understand wanting to keep the possibility alive for players that change their mind, and also giving them an outlet to sell stolen goods without earning the perk, but again, there’s a perk for the latter and with the former that argument dies when you realize the Dark Brotherhood is fully killable if you reject them.
If you are using a torch, you can still block with it. I did a shield bash because I was using them a lot, and found out that shield bashing with a torch lights enemies on fire for a few seconds. I figured "Hey, I bet I can shield bash the oil on the floors with a torch and light them up." I tried that and it didn't work. It should, but it didn't. I should be glad that lighting them on fire worked, and I was, up until I tried the oil.
Oh, and related, TVTropes told me you can kill Erikur after you do two quests where he is essential. I did both quests and I still can't kill him. Thanks TVTropes.
I have other examples, but honestly, I don't care all that much anymore.
Honestly, somewhere in my newest playthrough, I kind of got it. Skyrim is a lot of things, and it's not a lot of things. There's one thing that is especially is, and once you know this, the game gets so much better.
It's fucking stupid.
You want to know what my newest character was? A female orc who worked with a shield, a bow, and a pickax. Because I stopped caring long before I bought the Xbox One Special Edition, I decided I would beat the entire game with a pickax. I enchanted it, but the enchantment was the moon one where you only get ten more attack points "when the moons are out", whatever that fucking means. It sounds like it means during the nighttime but I genuinely couldn’t tell a difference in damage.
When I just sat back, made a stupid character and let the stupidity of the game wash over me, I had a blast. This isn't a game you need to take seriously, this is a game to just have fun doing practically whatever you want. I get the marketing now, even if I was an asshole who tried and succeeded in proving it factually wrong.
Skyrim looks like an epic grade-scale game. Something that demands a hard-hitting story and impactful characters, something to hit you hard and make you never forget how important everything was. Well, the appearance is a little deceiving. The game is grand-scale, but it's just a wide-open sandbox meant for you to ignore anything you want to ignore and just spend hours doing either everything, or straight up nothing. You can spend hours smithing, and nothing but smithing. You can spend hours killing dragons, and just killing dragons. You can do the quests, but you may find you'll want a break to go do something more meaningless but fun, or a different quest line alongside the one you were doing, or just banging out quest after quest until it’s time for bed.
So yeah; for driving me crazy, for crashing, for flat-characters, for weird animations, repetitious faction story lines, a setting that doesn't grab me, for being too weak in it's M-rating, I do have a hate on for Skyrim.
But; for being a dumb fun time, where you start a weakling and end up someone who could punch out a Daedra, where you can beat Alduin with a fucking pickax in your hand (And yes, I struck the killing blow. Almost felt bad for him. To be the biggest badass in the world and a puny pickax is what ends you), for having much better DLC than the Vanilla game, for Sheogorath giving me helpful hints while the game loaded, for smithing being surprisingly fun and easy to understand (didn't mention it but yeah I fucking loved the smithing), and for being a game that I have put a combined total of over 600 hours over two versions. Yeah, I kinda like this game as well. But only just like, and only kinda.
By the way, this game is The Elder Scrolls V. I'm sorry for any big time Elder Scrolls fans who hears when people say "When are they going to make Skyrim 2?" instead of the very much correct "When is the next Elder Scrolls game?". Also for my money was on Elder Scrolls Online being Elder Scrolls VI but hey I turned out to be wrong and the next one is VI, when it stops being just a title card on E3 stages.
Maybe I'll even play it. Probably not, but you never know.