LogFAQs > #939948029

Metalsonic66 posted...

Hipster :P

Nah. I don't dislike those things because other people like them. I'm just pointing out that other people's criteria isn't necessarily mine.

As an example, the greatest platformer game of the last 20 years is still going to be a shitty game to me, because I don't like platformers. You may think it's the greatest game ever made - I'm still going to dislike it.

And it's far easier and more likely to dislike something for not being what I want, as opposed to it being something I do want, but somehow not being good enough at what it does to impress me while somehow everyone else absolutely loves it.



Zeus posted...

If there's something that's like it but better, I'd love to know about it.

Nearly every other WRPG released in the last 20 years, for starters.

Being an open sandbox doesn't really make up for mediocre combat mechanics and incredibly weak writing. Especially since the open-world is itself the reason why the narrative tends to be so disjointed and weak - they essentially can't write strong story structure because they have no idea where the player is going to go and when. Over-reliance on mission markers means they handicap exploration to some degree (in spite of that being one of its main selling points), and most missions are pretty interchangeable overall (as most of them just consist of clearing nearly identical dungeons and occasionally fighting a boss, occasionally broken up by fetch quests). It's part of why ESO managed to be a pretty effective MMO - a lot of Skyrim's framework was tailor-made for MMO style of play (this is not a compliment).

I'm also personally annoyed by the "nearly any NPC can die" mechanics, since they tend to cause far more annoyance and frustration than they ever do inspire a feeling of immersion or personal empowerment (especially when combined with bugs or poor coding that wind up killing NPCs for no good reason entirely outside of your control, locking you out of things with no recourse to fix it unless you're playing on PC and can cheat with console commands). Worse, that feeling of expendability (combined with the aforementioned problems with open-world narrative) means that most NPCs are incredibly generic, because they have neither the time nor the inclination to really delve into any character's personality or story (and the constantly repeated voice sets don't help with that either). It's not quite as bad as the cardboard cutout NPCs in Fable, but it tends to become obvious for much the same reason, when you're thinking about getting married (probably just to get the Achivement/Trophy), only to realize that it's barely worth bothering and there's very little difference between the potential partners anyway.

Combined with just how damned buggy the game can be (and how often you may need to check a FAQ or wiki to find ways to bypass quest-breaking bugs and glitches), and a lot of the Skyrim experience basically boils down to a lot of busywork punctuated by occasional frustration (from bugs, poor design, shit coding, or outright game crashes). For some people none of this matters because they think the scenery is beautiful and just enjoy looking at it, but that isn't going to be a selling point for everyone (and some people will be too distracted by the fact that 99% of the people in Skyrim look terrible unless you're using mods).

Speaking of mods, they're the main reason why people praise the game so much - because there are so many mods out there to tweak things in different ways. But that doesn't really change the fact that the base game is kind of mediocre (and says more about the creativity of the audience than it does about the worth of the developer).
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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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