Skyrim's Dawnguard Confirmed; E3 Announcement Promised
It is always darkest before the dawn…
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Players: 1 Offline Player
Publisher: Bethesda Game Studios
Genres: Adventure, RPG
Publisher: Bethesda Game Studios
Genres: Adventure, RPG
Release Date: November 11, 2011
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
MSRP: $59.99
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
MSRP: $59.99
Set 200 years after the events of Oblivion the Nordic god Alduin, is coming to destroy the world - right in the middle of Tamriel's Civil War! The Elder Scrolls saga continues with Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
Posted By AngryJoe about 5 months, 4 weeks ago
But there is one they fear….The Angry Dovahkiin!
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Angry Joe finds out!
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E3 - Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Andy give a quick recap of the new edition to the Elder Scrolls series. Will it live up to the hype?
Angry Joe Interviews: Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Angry Joe lands an interview with his #1 Most Anticipated Game of 2011, Skyrim! Watch as Joe geeks out while asking about dynamic questing, crafting, exploration, and dragon riding? Check out the interview after the jump!
SKYRIM in 5 seconds
There is one particular reason why SKYRIM is gonna be the game of the year !
Skyrim is AWESOME!
FUS RO DAH! A fantastic new world awaits... so let's KILL SOME VILLAGERS! Our first foray into Skyrim is one of frighteningly powerful, unrelenting, sociopathic delinquency! You can do anything to these people and they BARELY fight back! It's AWESOME!
Angry Joe Plays Skyrim - Talking Dogs & Werewolves!
Talking Dogs? Werewolves? Interior Decorating with Joe? With Skyrim its all possible! Angry Joe shows you how engaging Skyrims dynamic quests are and still has time to decorate his new house!
RAD episode 222: The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Are you ready to face your destiny Dragonborn? Enter the world of Skyrim as Birdman dons his orcish armor and dwarfen warhammer with this review of the Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review
Manacles, fur lined clothes, cold snowy nights, and you're certainly going to see stars. Now that we've discussed what it would be like to go out on a date with Johnny, his review for Skyrim is written, and of all things, right here on the site for you to read.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Video Review - ZGR
Well, it's finally here! But was it worth the wait? Daniel from ZGR checks out Skyrim!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin, Angry Joe, in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Find out!
Editorial: Five Grievances Against Skyrim
Skyrim is a damn good game and deserves praise for the type of game it is, a free-roaming RPG that allows players to fulfill their inner desires of what a fantastical hero can be. But it’s not that good, I am sorry to say. The biggest problems I have with Skyrim can be summed up into five general grievances.
Skyrimming Alone!
Fraser's Home Alone for Christmas! Instead of setting up an elaborate series of traps and awaiting the wet bandits inevitable attack, he's Skyrimming himself through the holidays!
Rumor: Snow Elves, Crossbows, and Vampires Hinted as Possible DLC for Skyrim
Will the Falmer come back in their former glory, or are they truly a dead race like the Dwemer?
Interactive Map of Skyrim Now an App with Microtransactions
Time to re-trace the world of Skyrim in the palm of your hand, for a price.
Skyrim Creation Kit, HD Texture Pack Released
It’s a party in my Skyrim, and everybody’s invited – Steam Workshop, free HD texture pack DLC, and the Creation Kit. Ain’t no party like a Skyrim party, ’cause a Skyrim party is friendly user generated content oriented.
Skyrimming Alone!
Fraser’s Home Alone for Christmas! Instead of setting up an elaborate series of traps and awaiting the wet bandits inevitable attack, he’s Skyrimming himself through the holidays!
Skyrim Mods Database Expanding
Like a fine scotch, wine, or ninth season episode of CSI Miami, Skyrim is getting better with age. Its mod count continues to expand with additions from ENBSeries and an authoritative tweaking guide from Nvidia.
Bethesda Addresses Continuing PS3 Skyrim Problems
After weeks of continuing issues, Bethesda has updated their blog regarding the current PS3 Skyrim situation and, unfortunately, the response is one that will likely not be of much comfort to PS3 owners still struggling with said problems.
Editorial: Five Grievances Against Skyrim
Skyrim is a damn good game and deserves praise for the type of game it is, a free-roaming RPG that allows players to fulfill their inner desires of what a fantastical hero can be. But it’s not that good, I am sorry to say. The biggest problems I have with Skyrim can be summed up into five general grievances.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin, Angry Joe, in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Find out!
Rumor: Snow Elves, Crossbows, and Vampires Hinted as Possible DLC for Skyrim
Will the Falmer come back in their former glory, or are they truly a dead race like the Dwemer?
Interactive Map of Skyrim Now an App with Microtransactions
Time to re-trace the world of Skyrim in the palm of your hand, for a price.
Skyrim Creation Kit, HD Texture Pack Released
It’s a party in my Skyrim, and everybody’s invited – Steam Workshop, free HD texture pack DLC, and the Creation Kit. Ain’t no party like a Skyrim party, ’cause a Skyrim party is friendly user generated content oriented.
Skyrimming Alone!
Fraser’s Home Alone for Christmas! Instead of setting up an elaborate series of traps and awaiting the wet bandits inevitable attack, he’s Skyrimming himself through the holidays!
Skyrim Mods Database Expanding
Like a fine scotch, wine, or ninth season episode of CSI Miami, Skyrim is getting better with age. Its mod count continues to expand with additions from ENBSeries and an authoritative tweaking guide from Nvidia.
Bethesda Addresses Continuing PS3 Skyrim Problems
After weeks of continuing issues, Bethesda has updated their blog regarding the current PS3 Skyrim situation and, unfortunately, the response is one that will likely not be of much comfort to PS3 owners still struggling with said problems.
Editorial: Five Grievances Against Skyrim
Skyrim is a damn good game and deserves praise for the type of game it is, a free-roaming RPG that allows players to fulfill their inner desires of what a fantastical hero can be. But it’s not that good, I am sorry to say. The biggest problems I have with Skyrim can be summed up into five general grievances.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin, Angry Joe, in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Find out!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review
Posted By Johnny Maloney about 6 months ago
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review
As the bones of the dragon tumbled to the ground, the stranger sheathed his weapon and started to move towards the townsfolk. Amid cries of relief and shouts of joy, the mayor approached the stranger and exclaimed “Amazing! You truly are a gift from the divines to fight off so fearsome a beast with no help at all!” “That?” the stranger asked, motioning to the carcass with his thumb, “that’s nothing. I’ve killed at least fifteen of them this week. Goddamn dragons are like rats in this country. You want a real challenge, can you help me find twenty nirnroot? I’ve only got fifteen and I’ve been looking for them forever it seems.” Sadly, the townsfolk could be of no help to their new hero, and he ran off into the distance, into legend as ‘the man who would find twenty nirnroot.’
| PROS | Excellently designed world, reworked magic & smithing, plot & acting, sheer volume of content |
| CONS | Clunky UI, draw distance/texture detail, sometimes wonky difficulty |
| WTF?! | Anybody else want to see a giants baseball league? Home run! |
I don’t think there’s been any game with so much at stake in the past five years as Skyrim. Whether or not Bethesda Game Studios could re-work enough of the problems in their last outing into the Elder Scrolls would influence not only their future as a company, but indeed the future of purely single player games altogether. That appears to be a non-issue at this point though, as at the time of the writing of this article, Skyrim has shipped 7 million launch units, with at least half sold within the first 48 hours of launch. It’s also toppled records on Steam, with a high of 280 000 people simultaneously playing the game at one point, peaking today at just over 200 000, which certainly is put in perspective when the next highest figure, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 topped out at almost 72 000.
That’s got to be one of the more creative ways to kill someone with a warhammer. I usually use the other end.
It’s certainly not surprising either, because as far as hand crafted, detailed, rich content (and an insane amount of content) goes, Skyrim doesn’t look like it’s going to be toppled anytime soon. At the end of my sixtieth hour, the ratio of unfinished quests to finished ones stood at 21:45, not counting any miscellaneous bits and bobs. What’s more is I count only two of the major cities that I feel like I explored exhaustively, putting seven more directly in my path, two of which I didn’t even visit at all. I rather objected to an interview Todd Howard did some time ago where he opined that games were certainly getting too expensive, but not Skyrim. His comments smacked of a “we’re special” attitude, but after digging into the latest Elder Scrolls offering, it’s increasingly easy to agree with him.
What an offering it is too, with more than just a few things reworked and tweaked to fix problems in the unfortunately flawed Oblivion. With every specialization much easier to dabble, tweak or focus in, the ability to play exactly the kind of character you want to create in Skyrim is seemingly without fault. Gone are the class based major/minor skill progression, with every single skill contributing to a greater level, and fallout-like perks unlocking based on your rating in a specific skill. As your overall level increases, you’ll find it requires more and more skill advancement to level up, but progress maintains a steady pace, and you never feel quite like you’ve plateaued. This new system is only complemented by the complete overhaul that smithing, enchanting, and alchemy have all received, putting a much higher value on what were notoriously secondary skills in previous Elder Scrolls titles. Magic in general is much more immediate and combat friendly as well, giving players the option to either dabble in it, or fully commit to it, with plenty of perks to increase your effectiveness.
Flowers? Chocolates? If you want to impress that special someone of a Nord lady, nothing says I love you, like Dwemer armor.
These adjustments to the Elder Scrolls formula do nothing but shine, especially against the backdrop of Skyrim. Gone are the vanilla forests and townships of Cyrodiil, replaced by a richly designed hostile and alien environment, dotted with foreign looking crypts and caves, or the strange returning architecture of dwemer ruins. The clothing and accoutrements of nordic life similarly present themselves as meticulously designed, and singularly local. The weapons and armor you’ll find yourself equipping accentuate the cultural differences from imperial life, and it becomes much easier to get wrapped up in the world. This is also largely due to the redesign of the character models, with many plot-important characters having distinct physical presences, no longer just different heads fixed onto the same body types.
I think I saw this place in an issue of ‘Better Homes & Inscrutable Deathtraps.’
The characters serve an excellent purpose as narrative aides as well, with certainly the best voice acting any Bethesda Game Studios product has ever seen. Many of the plot problems from their previous games appear to have been fully addressed as well, with decently written dialogue. While not giving anything of the story away, the very fact that you enter the story as the hero, rather than the hero’s lackey (I defy anyone to justify to me how the player character is the hero in Oblivion, rather than Martin) makes the general experience of Skyrim the most rewarding Bethesda game since Morrowind. I even found the beginning an entertaining nod to their somewhat tired ‘start-in-prison’ mechanic, with the main character going to prison in the beginning, rather than being released from it. I will say however, that catching up on what happened in the couple hundred years since the events in Oblivion was somewhat shocking; the fact that so much epic drama was only explained in brief dialogue snippets and books laying about felt like wasted potential.
8/10
E3 - Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Andy give a quick recap of the new edition to the Elder Scrolls series. Will it live up to the hype?Angry Joe Interviews: Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Angry Joe lands an interview with his #1 Most Anticipated Game of 2011, Skyrim! Watch as Joe geeks out while asking about dynamic questing, crafting, exploration, and dragon riding? Check out the interview after the jump!SKYRIM in 5 seconds
There is one particular reason why SKYRIM is gonna be the game of the year !Skyrim is AWESOME!
FUS RO DAH! A fantastic new world awaits... so let's KILL SOME VILLAGERS! Our first foray into Skyrim is one of frighteningly powerful, unrelenting, sociopathic delinquency! You can do anything to these people and they BARELY fight back! It's AWESOME!Angry Joe Plays Skyrim - Talking Dogs & Werewolves!
Talking Dogs? Werewolves? Interior Decorating with Joe? With Skyrim its all possible! Angry Joe shows you how engaging Skyrims dynamic quests are and still has time to decorate his new house!RAD episode 222: The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Are you ready to face your destiny Dragonborn? Enter the world of Skyrim as Birdman dons his orcish armor and dwarfen warhammer with this review of the Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim!The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review
Manacles, fur lined clothes, cold snowy nights, and you're certainly going to see stars. Now that we've discussed what it would be like to go out on a date with Johnny, his review for Skyrim is written, and of all things, right here on the site for you to read.The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Video Review - ZGR
Well, it's finally here! But was it worth the wait? Daniel from ZGR checks out Skyrim!The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin, Angry Joe, in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Find out!Editorial: Five Grievances Against Skyrim
Skyrim is a damn good game and deserves praise for the type of game it is, a free-roaming RPG that allows players to fulfill their inner desires of what a fantastical hero can be. But it’s not that good, I am sorry to say. The biggest problems I have with Skyrim can be summed up into five general grievances.Skyrimming Alone!
Fraser's Home Alone for Christmas! Instead of setting up an elaborate series of traps and awaiting the wet bandits inevitable attack, he's Skyrimming himself through the holidays!- December 05, 2011 at 02:41am
After the 1.2 patch for Skyrim my PS3 version is unplayable and before the patch it was almost unplayable. That plus the PS3 version has problems that may never get fixed. Skyrim looses my vote for GotY. Epic fail Bugthesda. If the next patch doesnt fix alot of things then im getting my money back and never buying another Bethesda game ever. I’d give Skyrim a 4/10.
- January 18, 2012 at 09:26am
Bugthesda is right. How can they even sell this broken shit on the PS3? I’ve never played a game that made me so angry and I loved these guys after spending countless hours on Fallout. I’m used to playing bad ports on PS3s but unplayble buggy mess of a game is new and 60$ for this is just BS.
- November 27, 2011 at 04:33pm
I really got to wonder about our community. Really, 62% of you found it overall dissapointing?
- November 29, 2011 at 12:51pm
I think I can answer this: I never got into Oblivion and Morrowind or even Fallout, (I do have friends who played them hours on end thought) because I am not often a fan of RPGs plus watching someone play these games is boring. Then I heard that Skyrim fixed the pacing of the game so I caved into the hype and bought the game. So far, if I didn’t have other matters to attend to I would be playing this game hours straight. The game is great…but there are flaws.
1) While NPCs are full of life, they still don’t draw me into the game. Why is this a problem? Look at Mass Effect 2. When you talk to NPCs in that game, you are engaging in full conversations complete with cutscenes and real-life movement unlike Skyrim which still has the NPCs standing still with one emotion. For example, after committing crimes, guards just stand there in battle stance. We are in new age of gaming, we expect developed characters.
2) The user interface IS clunky, plus they took out armor previews.
3) The game has Bethesda bugs, but those can be patched
4) Traveling, while a staple, does piss me off.Overall, I find that while there are many changes to the game, looking at it from a broader perspective one could see that the game has not changed that much from Oblivion. Do I dislike this game…FUCK NO THIS GAME IS AMAZING AND I’M GOING TO LOSE MY SOCIAL LIFE BECAUSE OF IT! Does it deserve it’s praise…to some extent yes, Angry Joe I think did overrate it though. Would I call it GOTY…You can but I’m not because other games there were games this year that I felt had a greater overhaul than Skyrim. Skyward Sword, while many argue that game hasn’t changed don’t realize that they are playing a more immersive Zelda game with it’s controls. Uncharted 3, where my biggest fault with is was Uncharted 2 set in the desert, I still found to be more cinematic even though I was still playing the game. Finally, L.A. Noire out of all them was probably the best experience I had with a game all year being that it excelled in technology and overall gameplay.
I hope this gives you a better understanding. If you love Skyrim, then more power to you. I love it too, but I’m not a crazed fanboy like everyone else especially Angry Joe.
- December 03, 2011 at 09:22pm
Probably the same crowd that thought MW3 was a good game (I know I’m a broken record on that game and it ain’t something to bring up here, I still go insane every time I see or hear its name just when i try to forget about it.)
- November 19, 2011 at 01:34am
The biggest graphical bug I have found, exists only on my boyfriend’s save file, where the first dragon he killed, which we both saw burst into flame, randomly appears throughout town, fused into buildings and cabbage gardens, twitching and breaking into pieces at random. The latest sighting of this dragon involved it fused into someone’s barn roof, its head on sideways, and its tail sticking towards the sky. This does not affect gameplay at all. It is just incredibly bizarre and often hilarious.
- November 20, 2011 at 03:23am
I have a very similar situation with a dragon I killed in Solitude. It’s skeleton keeps appearing in different places throughout the city all the time anywhere between the bard’s college and the main gate. Sometimes its not there at all only to show up in an extra bizarre position another time.
The weirdest cases were it being completely underground, but its head sticking up through the floor in front of the Radiant Raiment’s door and another when it was just stuck to the side of one of the guard towers tail toward the sky. - November 19, 2011 at 01:27am
There are plenty of bugs, but they are usually fairly harmless. My biggest issue, as far as bugs go, is the inconsistency of the audio. I only have the 360 version, so this could be an exclusive case, but when you turn away from a speaking character, their voice will sound echoey and far away. Even though, realistically, they are still right beside you. This doesn’t always happen, however… It is more common in the first 5 hours of gameplay. I would not be bothered by it, but I am slightly hard-of-hearing, and when the characters’ voices start warping back and forth or echoing, it is a nightmare for me to understand what they are saying. Thank God for the thorough subtitles.
- November 19, 2011 at 07:52am
I rather think that’s a sound mastering choice, honestly. I found the game to be quite quiet on my PC in general, but if I was standing too far away from characters that were talking without the dialogue window being open, I found their voice dropped off quite quick if you weren’t standing RIGHT in front of their projected sound. I didn’t mention it, because I found it could be easily adjusted by either moving closer to the dialogue, or turning the volume up, but I did find the master volume level rather curiously low.
As far as the bugs go, most of the complaints I’ve seen have been unusually small in number, and quite harmless in comparison to their previous titles. I was really quite impressed with how playable the game was (after the day one patch, of course).
- November 19, 2011 at 11:31pm
It might just be the version as well. As long as I try to stand facing them directly, it’s not a problem. I just have trouble hearing lower sounds, so when the male characters would start mumbling, I had no idea what was being said. And the problem seems to go away after a while, much like how a lot of minor bugs seem to right themselves. Except the dragon, he’s still having seizures in people’s cabbage patches.
- November 18, 2011 at 03:50pm
Johnny, now that you’ve finished Skyrim, it’s time to return to the chair and play Nehrim: Fate’s Edge for the next five days straight.
- November 19, 2011 at 09:04am
I can’t, man! I need a break! I did all that Elder Scrolls modding article stuff, and then force fed myself skyrim for practically a week straight… I did download Nehrim though, and after I get a little bit of break time with Arkham City (PC version drops on the 22nd), Saints Row 3, all while keeping L.A. Noire cases on the side that I can knock one off every now and again, I’ll make the choice to go back into Skyrim, or hit Nehrim up.
I still have to thank you for pointing me at it though, it’s exactly the kind of mod I like to use as an example of why I’m a PC gamer. Rest assured, I will be letting you know what I think after I finally dig into it.
- November 18, 2011 at 03:22pm
Good review and respectable score.
I want to say 10/10.
I can’t. It has a few small but crippling bugs in the game that will need a patch asap. That being said, it’s forgivable given the sheer scale of this game.
Right now I’d say my biggest two complaints are incomplete quests that can’t be finished because you ‘found’ the quest item early and that on the PC version, when you read a book or note and go back, you have to exit and reload your inventory to be able to properly scroll through and make specific selections again. That one wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t enjoy reading most things.
That being said – 9.999999999…No, not really… 9/10.
If I had to rate it off the experience alone? It’d be perfect…Not gonna lie. Good lord this game is freaking addictive. 80 hours and CLIMBING!! Not even a fraction of the game done with SO much more to go.
Is this game perfect? Hell no. It’s got its own problems that keep it from getting there but ask yourself this? Is there a single perfect game out there on a scale like this? Is there a single game with literally hundreds of hours of game-play content (not counting completion and ‘trophy bs that pads out so many SHORT 5-10 hour games) that is even remotely as satisfying as Skyrim or enjoyable? No, there isn’t. Or at least, none that I know of.
Given the scale of this game, I can wholeheartedly forgive it all. And even better? I play on PC so I know that patch is coming, one way or another. God I love Bethesda.
————
As far as difficulty goes I’ve found very few troubles on master mode. Stealth Archery? Yeah…I rock that. I wish I’d recorded downing that Blood Dragon (granted, the weakest of the dragons) in three shots…ON MASTER MODE!! And I haven’t even finished maxing enchanting yet for the dbl bonus. Just made Archery boosts for all applicable pieces and good lord…the dmg! Right now at level 39 my glass bow does over 220 base damage. Throw in sneak attacks and critical hits?I’ve gone through enter fortress gates Prince of Persia style fast drawing the bow and notching the arrow only to zoom for slow, fire, release zoom, rinse, repeat. The results with my sickening damage output is pretty much everything save bosses and a few select NPCs essentially being one shot before they even come close.
Now if only I didn’t have so much trouble with those damn cave bears -_-
————————————-
On a side note:If you don’t want an OP tip – Ignore the next line –
Enchanting is god-mode for money making by the way. Banishment weapons turn an absurd amount of profit. Just make Iron Daggers of Banishment with a petty soul gem and they go from about 25 value to 1400-1600. My advice is invest in speechcraft for investment bonus because you’re gonna need it if you enchant for the $$.
- November 18, 2011 at 03:19pm
And here I am finally putting some time in playing Dragon Age II. That’s a great game, too, isn’t it? It’s not as large as Skyrim, but it’s got its unique perks. I swear, once you start f*cking an elf, your acrobatic stat goes up.
- November 18, 2011 at 02:14pm
I’m currently sitting at 88 hours played for Skyrim.
Oh god. Someone help me.
- November 18, 2011 at 03:32pm
You don’t want help. You don’t need help.
Don’t fight it James! Search your feelings! You know this to be everything your heart desires.
JOIN THE DARK SIDE! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA *cough*
- November 18, 2011 at 01:50pm
I’m certainly enjoying the hell out of the game and I didn’t even like Oblivion all that much. For some reason, Oblivion never clicked for me and Skyrim fine tuned or removed alot of things I didn’t care for, making it a much better game overall. I’m like 35 hours into the game and I’ve only done like an hour and a half of main quest line lol
My only complaints would be how terrible the companion AI is. It’s possibly worst than what I saw in New Vegas. They really didn’t try to improve companions at all as it looks like they used everything from the previous engine for the game. Also some of the animations are pretty stiff looking, but really, they don’t detract from the game too much, which is easily a 9 for me, cause I had no problems with the UI, which was much better than previous games.
- November 18, 2011 at 07:20am
I believe one of its biggest accomplishments is creating a cohesive and organic world the likes of which have never been seen before. People will react to you and your endeavours, whether short-term or long-term. With dragons being able to attack at any time, there’s no shortage of interesting moments to be found. The Radiant AI also makes things really immersive. In this game, moments which would be scripted in any other game can happen at the drop of a hat. It’s quite an accomplishment.
I’d give it a 10 if not for the god awful menus. You have no idea how frustrating it is for the directional controls to lock up for a second when opening up your favourites menu. Patch that and the perfect score is yours, Bethy.
- November 19, 2011 at 07:53am
That is weird. Several of my friends and I love the menus and the way they are handled. We all have the XBOX 360 version since our computers cant handle this game. And i have played for around 12 hours. Skyrim could be one of my favorite games of the year.
- November 18, 2011 at 04:55am
As others pointed out: seriously man, learn your keyboard shortcuts. Especially since you were playing on the frikin PC where you can Keybind every favorites (or just use Q for favorites menu). Likewise each menu has it’s own shortcut(I,P,M,/).
As to dragon fights fo rme now 48 hours in it’s gotten to the point of: “come down here you where I can at least shoot you, you coward”
- November 18, 2011 at 05:21am
I do know about the shortcut keys, but that’s a workaround for the PC only. When dealing with the UI, it still requires you to exit screens, reopen other ones, and other problems.
If you’ve leveled up, and you accidentally run into the skill menu you’re *forced* to upgrade your health, stamina or magicka without being able to go into your active powers menu to check and see how each stat is specifically augmented. If you could switch between the menu screens on the fly, and see how your magicka is bolstered, that would help.
The point is that in order to navigate between the pause menus, you’re still required to move in and out of screens instead of having it all there in front of you, because god forbid I want to check my skills and inventory without having to move in and out of pause/unpause or screen submenus. - November 18, 2011 at 09:18am
Unless Console versions don’t support key bindings (witch would be the problem of console options), as far as i know consoled do support keyboards (I do know PS3 does, not sure about xbox360).
“instead of having it all there in front of you” it it was all in the same menu you’d have 30ish menus in there, and it would be incredibly unvieldy (and would be just as bad or worse).
- November 19, 2011 at 09:08am
I don’t mean having EVERYTHING open at the same time, but the opportunity to switch between them from the inventory screen without having to do a go-between, being able to look at your health and magicka numbers without having to go into the skills screen.
It succeeds in a lot of areas I HATED the Oblivion UI for, but that doesn’t make it good… it doesn’t even make it better. It just makes it different. There could have been a way to somehow hybridize the systems, and let me go back and forth between my map (which was pretty, but also pretty useless), my journal, and my skills screen without having to deal with all these middle-men uber-menus.
- November 18, 2011 at 03:35pm
I don’t quite understand the argument about multiple windows to see stats, etc. while leveling up but maybe that’s because the level up really only effects the three basic stats? Well, I guess it was just never an issue for me but to each there own.
You are right about the interface through, to a certain extent. It is a tad glitchy but I’ve yet to be frustrated by navigation on it. Like they said, hot keys. You can immediate jump to any interface quick and simple with the keyboard and I haven’t had any of those problems so far.
Still, a solid review. Thx ^_^
- November 18, 2011 at 04:35am
i don’t find the ui that clunky sens you can just press i for inventory etc so once you get into the game it is not that big of a hassle it is atlest better than oblivions
and don’t get me started on killing dragons i had 3 dragons in a row pop into existans that i needed to kill that was kinda frustraiting
and as i said in angryjoes skyrim vid fuck the voice actor who thougt sounding like arnold schwarzenegger was a good idea
also condensing some of the skills of needed but it kinda nerfs beaing a ranger sens you would acrobatics your way untill you could run around full speed with a bow drawn, now this is a lvl 60 archery perk witch kinda sucks, meaning as an archer you are kinda of a sitting duck untill you get it, and it just feels odd getting speech for buying and selling stuff
p.s i saw skyrim top at around 380k ppl playing it at the same time :3
- November 18, 2011 at 04:31am
Hmm, what version of the game did you review? The PC version which I have, allows you to access the inventory, spells, skills, and others with just one button key. Plus exit menus with one press. I’ve pretty much never seen that submenu.
Hmm, sounds like you were playing the PC version, did you never check the control options?
I’m not accusing you of being wrong, just curious.
- November 18, 2011 at 05:17am
Oh, I did know that the hotkeys for the menu were there. That doesn’t excuse the overall design of the UI though. It also only accounts for shortcuts in the PC version specifically, not necessarily the console.
What’s more is (and I didn’t complain about this in the review, as it’s more a PC only problem) I found that the menus would conflict between keyboard and mouse input, with a keyboard highlighted dialogue or menu option being activated by a mouse click that was hovering over a completely different choice. Shortcut keys or not, the UI was pretty badly designed. - November 18, 2011 at 04:20am
I’m about 7 hours in and I’m loving it.
I’d probably give it a perfect 10 already.One thing that surprised me though, but in a good way, the magic is tons of fun!
Magic was so damn boring in Morrowind and Oblivion, that I pretty much never used it at all.
Now I’m finding myself using it a ton more, while I’m usually a warrior thief in these types of games, guess I’ll be adding mage to that as well. And since the game removed classes, I can do that.I think I might end up with a man of many skills, but master of none.
- November 18, 2011 at 04:10am
I’m 80 hours+ hours in and still having a blast with it
This is easily my game of the year and I came in with ZERO expectations and even told the publisher “Impress me” and that they did.Good review man
- November 18, 2011 at 05:23am
It’s a phenomenal game, agreed. Thanks Mike, I just hope people don’t see it as me being “hard on the game.”
- November 18, 2011 at 06:51am
yes sens 8/10 is such a low score -_- 8 = a great game witch skyrim is the only thing that makes skyrim maybe worth a 9 is how much time you can spend in it without doing the same thing (sens the ammout of content should play a part in the score atlest in my mind)
- November 18, 2011 at 08:23am
*Ties Harith down in a chair, staples his eyelids open and makes him watch:* http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/4966-Hate-Out-Of-Ten
- November 18, 2011 at 08:42am
Thank you. It’s been a while since DToid got a positive comment from the community on this site.
- November 18, 2011 at 08:52am
renegadered seen it and i do agree with jim sterling that ppl expect 9/10 or 10/10, but the reason i think this has happend is that ppl who has reviewed for a long time use the same ruler they did as when they started but generally games improve in quality and controlls so you really need to change what an avarge game is over the years or you start handing out way to high scores
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Skyrimming Alone!
Fraser’s Home Alone for Christmas! Instead of setting up an elaborate series of traps and awaiting the wet bandits inevitable attack, he’s Skyrimming himself through the holidays!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Angry Review
The Greybeards train a new Dovahkiin, Angry Joe, in order to judge and review the newest Elder Scrolls Game, Skyrim. Does it live up to the incredible hype? Or fall from the sky in flames? Find out!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Video Review - ZGR
Well, it’s finally here! But was it worth the wait? Daniel from ZGR checks out Skyrim!
RAD episode 222: The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Are you ready to face your destiny Dragonborn? Enter the world of Skyrim as Birdman dons his orcish armor and dwarfen warhammer with this review of the Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim!
Angry Joe Plays Skyrim - Talking Dogs & Werewolves!
Talking Dogs? Werewolves? Interior Decorating with Joe? With Skyrim its all possible! Angry Joe shows you how engaging Skyrims dynamic quests are and still has time to decorate his new house!
Skyrim is AWESOME!
FUS RO DAH! A fantastic new world awaits… so let’s KILL SOME VILLAGERS! Our first foray into Skyrim is one of frighteningly powerful, unrelenting, sociopathic delinquency! You can do anything to these people and they BARELY fight back! It’s AWESOME!
Angry Joe Interviews: Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Angry Joe lands an interview with his #1 Most Anticipated Game of 2011, Skyrim! Watch as Joe geeks out while asking about dynamic questing, crafting, exploration, and dragon riding? Check out the interview after the jump!
Rumor: Snow Elves, Crossbows, and Vampires Hinted as Possible DLC for Skyrim
Will the Falmer come back in their former glory, or are they truly a dead race like the Dwemer?
Editorial: Five Grievances Against Skyrim
Skyrim is a damn good game and deserves praise for the type of game it is, a free-roaming RPG that allows players to fulfill their inner desires of what a fantastical hero can be. But it’s not that good, I am sorry to say. The biggest problems I have with Skyrim can be summed up into five general grievances.
RAD episode 222: The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim
Are you ready to face your destiny Dragonborn? Enter the world of Skyrim as Birdman dons his orcish armor and dwarfen warhammer with this review of the Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim!
Angry Joe Interviews: Elder Scrolls V Skyrim
Angry Joe lands an interview with his #1 Most Anticipated Game of 2011, Skyrim! Watch as Joe geeks out while asking about dynamic questing, crafting, exploration, and dragon riding? Check out the interview after the jump!
A Layman's Look at Skyrim's Tech
While Oblivion had its critics, its hard not to agree that it was pretty visually
What in the…the poll says 53% of Blistered Thumbs users found this game dissapointing? This is an April Fool’s prank, right? (Yes, I’m late on the ball. Sue me) WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?
To be fair though, this IS my first Elder Scrolls game. Still, there’s something wrong with that poll.
wow. 10/10 .
I don’t know if you ever did that but DANM. I had this game pre-orderd for months. The DAY it was available for pre- order I got it for pc. And I am happy with my purchase. It is the best game I ever played and I agree with your rating.
With the dragon not giving you the soul the one time, I had something even better happen. The dragon I fought went down to probably 20% or so hp, and as it was fighting me, it burned up as if it had died and I gained its soul. It continued fighting me AS A SKELETAL DRAGON!! I couldn’t do damage to it, and eventually had to run. It was awesome to see, even if I couldn’t kill it.
I hate to post again on the same review but even people that don’t agree STRONGLY with the 10/10 from you Joe don’t hate you. You have always said that you like this type of “RPG” it’s your personal 10/10 and it’s okay but there will be a ton of people who just don’t agree with it simply because TES: Morrowind had waaaaaaaaaaay better world interactions depending on your character actions.
stupid edit window time: Wanted to add it’s almost the same for TES fans for what SR3 was to Joe. He loved SR2 but SR3 disappointed because it has been shallowed (it happened in Oblivion but Skyrim suffers the same plague)… Morrowind was the best TES game so far (outside representing melee fights). You had to weigh your aliances to different guilds because you couldn’t be a master of every guild because tasks given simply excluded themselvs. And so on. Morrowind was overall a better crafted game (aside from fighting system that was mostly old school dice rolls)
After the 1.2 patch for Skyrim my PS3 version is unplayable and before the patch it was almost unplayable. That plus the PS3 version has problems that may never get fixed. Skyrim looses my vote for GotY. Epic fail Bugthesda. If the next patch doesnt fix alot of things then im getting my money back and never buying another Bethesda game ever. I’d give Skyrim a 4/10.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/kym-assets/entries/icons/original/000/000/063/Picture_2_c.jpg?1310882388 (overreacting much??)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU7XS__ElRU enough said.
Just to nitpick a little Joe, you can still be a “good guy” and work with a few of the Daedra princes. Namely Azura, Meridia, and Malacath. Their not necessarily “good.” But Azura has been considered the most benevolent, she was the main guiding force in Morrowind after all. Meridia hatred of the undead often coincides with those with noble goals. And Malacath, well as the Daedric Prince of outcasts, sometimes the underdogs deserve a break.
Others like Nocturne are good for bit more moral ambiguity, like thieving characters.
wow, too many guys writing walls of text trolling about how much “dis game sux!”.
guess what, guys, if you bothered to play the game for so long to analyze every single aspect of it, then nitpicked about all the negatives it might have and then spent half an hour in a website commenting about your observations, the joke is on you! because i don’t know a SINGLE person that would “torture” himself with a game he thinks is “stoopid”, only to write about it on the internet and claim how much it “sux”, it’s “overhyped” and “dumb”. unless you guys are masochists, deep down inside you liked this game, maybe not as much as Joe, but you liked it, so quit your “witty” complaints and continue your quests on skyrim. you know you will.
-A “brainwashed Bethesda fanboy”,
that’s how many of you call us, who like good games.
WARNING: A long quote incoming with a short sentence shooting it down:
pao126 wrote:
“wow, too many guys writing walls of text trolling about how much “dis game sux!”.
guess what, guys, if you bothered to play the game for so long to analyze every single aspect of it, then nitpicked about all the negatives it might have and then spent half an hour in a website commenting about your observations, the joke is on you! because i don’t know a SINGLE person that would “torture” himself with a game he thinks is “stoopid”, only to write about it on the internet and claim how much it “sux”, it’s “overhyped” and “dumb”. unless you guys are masochists, deep down inside you liked this game, maybe not as much as Joe, but you liked it, so quit your “witty” complaints and continue your quests on skyrim. you know you will.”
END OF QUOTE
Sounds like every bad movie/game review ever that has been published on TGWTG. I guess all those movies are masterpieces after all!
mind you, the reviews in TGTWG are satyrical and not entirely hateful.
many critics have even admitted to like some reviewed movies.
doing comedy and analyzing why a movie or game is bad, isn’t the same as saying “this game has dragons BEEN THERE DONE THAT”.
the difference is explanation. when you take time to analyze your opinions, while making people enjoy your work is nice. but writing boring walls of text saying 100 times that “this game has swords, OMG, be creative”, makes you look like you have no valid reason to criticize the game and just overstate some facts.
Ok, great news for Skyrim fans who want to keep themselves immersed while away from their PCs or consoles, all the games’ books have been made available as a free download for your E-readers/smartphones:
http://capane.us/2011/11/24/dovahkiin-gutenberg/
enjoy!
Why are there so many people disappointed by Skyrim? It was everything I expected and more from the sequel to Oblivion. I even told myself that if they even fixed a third of the problems from Oblivion, Skyrim would easily have been somewhere on my games of the year list. As it stands, Skyrim is my top contender for game of the year. Also MR_APE, you’re complaining about the number of bugs. Have you played Oblivion and Fallout 3 when they were first released? Because as everyone else has mentioned, Skyrim has been their most stable release in a long time. The PS3 glitch had also never happened to me yet.
I tend to regard reviews as a piece of entertainment rather than a collaboration of professional facts. I never check metacritic since most of my personal favorite games have been rated poorly or poorer with each port(which makes absolutely no sense to me, especially when the port is improved or the processor of the machine it is ported to increases the frame-rate or improves where the game’s original machine could not). *gasp* With that said, Joe’s reviews are always entertaining, which is why I always come back for more, even when my own opinion doesn’t meld with his.
At times, our opinions may clash with a popular media outlet’s editors that provoke us to voice our own opinion in extreme disagreement. This is fine, but not when people disregard blatant FACTS or understood mechanics of a game in order to make their opinion like-able in some way. With all this said, I’m going to call out some commentors below.
assenko: “..it did not live up to its hype. Its nothing near the game we expected.”
Speak for yourself, dude. I bought this game day one, am 70 hours in, and if my college wasn’t out for thanksgiving, my GPA would have plummeted. I’m enjoying every bit of this game, so I’m not sure who you’re referring to when you say “we?”
assenko: “And why oh why weapons had to have charge level for their enchants?” … “Its not even hard to recharge it, why even have this feature then?”
Why even complain about it if it’s not difficult to recharge in the first place? Weapons need relatively passive babysitting since the effects you enchant are actively used in combat. At least, that’s the reasoning I came to understand about Morrowind and onward. This is strictly your’s and my own opinion, but I just don’t understand why this is so bad to throw a tantrum about.
assenko: “Dragons added? You mean stolen from Bioware because people at Bethesda are whores?”
Oh, so did Bioware create dragons, now? You mean all that mythology surrounding these iconic lizard-like flying creatures was all handcrafted by Bioware? You mean.. wait, that Bioware was truly the harbingers of the infamous reptilian race featured in fantastic novels not unlike J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings!? I knew these guys were geniouses, but I could never imagine they were the originators of one of the most revered meta-medieval beasts in the literary world! Seriously dude.. platformers came before Mario, and f’ing burgers came before McDonalds. This argument holds no. value. NO VALUE! You can’t compare one thing to another without finding similarities, and no, it’s not just accepting a lesser evil over another, it’s a FACT, especially when dealing with one specific entertainment medium(videogames) in one specific genre(RPG). AND, further, incorporating elements seen in other videogames or even other mediums outside of gaming is nothing to be ashamed about.
I hate to sound disrespectful but I stopped reading at this point. Your arguments just don’t have the most solid foundation, and you sound as if you’re trying to find reasons to hate on a game with mass appeal and generally positive reception. Don’t get me wrong, I can completely alleviate and understand since this has happened to me before- a highly anticipated game comes out, I play it, find it disappointing, read the reviews, and am astonished at the 10′s. But in this case, given your ‘ammunition,’ I just think your argument is a joke.
MR_APE : “My life long dream was to become one and now I cannot exercise this fantasy in skyrim… ”
I’m done here. Yeah, I can see the enjoyment of doing things in private that you can’t in real life. But there’s a reason why Bethesda can’t sell a game that allows the most casual of gamers to kill a child. It’s unethical. Truly you were being satirical here?
MR_APE : “Todd (the face for skyrims crew) lied about so many things..
Just to mention a few:
Skyrim has infinite quests
Skyrim is not a console port
Skyrim has radiant AI
Skyrim has beautiful textures
Bullshit.”
Yeah, I would agree with all that actually- not that it’s b/s, but that Todd didn’t lie. The transition between console port and PC gaming as it stands of this writing is becoming more and more distant. Though, as far as I can tell, while there are better looking games out there that Skyrim is not even close to touching, the scope of the world and all of the background RADIANT AI more than makes up for it. To deny radiant AI exists is to deny goombas in Mario. Dude, come on, you can’t not fast travel and walk 10 meters without seeing a sabre mauling a wolf or a hunter getting caught up in a fight with a thief as his intended target, the deer, runs off. Beautiful textures, well, that’s a matter of opinion. That would certainly be achievable today on PC as evident in Crysis and mods for Morrowind to have a large open world that looks breath-taking to boot, and while it could look better, graphics are the farthest thing from determining my enjoyment in a game. There are infinite quests and these quests ALWAYS send you to a dungeon you haven’t fully cleared, so again, to deny this is to deny there are no rings in a Sonic game.
I can understand the negativity. I can understand the frustrations people will have with a game so longly and highly anticipated. But really, we have this crap going on? Are you all trolls laughing your asses off due to people like myself taking you seriously? What is up, internet?
Yeah the NPCs blocking our path is a pain in the ass. Should have said, “You are in my way, sir!”
Hehehe didn’t expect you to be that disillusioned when you were attacking Corporate Commander
funny stuff 
Your lightning looks better than Skyrim’s lightning. I also liked the camera-breaking shout effect. Good work, man!
From my 15 hours of playing Skyrim, its probably going to be my favorite game this year, although Minecraft and Batman Arkham City are very strong contenders, along with all the awesome games i have not even played this year like Portal 2, Shogun 2 Total War, Super Mario 3D Land, Assassin’s Creed Revaltions, Bastion, Saints Row The Third and a whole lot more I’m forgetting at the moment. Wow, I’m going to be broke by the end of the year.
Joe can sell me pretty much everything.
But I still really have no interest at all in this game. It all looks and sounds so super boring. I don’t like grafting, I don’t like finding the gold coin in a mountain of trash, I don’t like reading books in the middle of a game.
I like story and interesting characters that stay with you throughout the game, and Skyrim does not seem to have either by any review I’ve seen.
Neither has any Final Fantasy game in the last 12 years.
Here’s a fun fact. My last name is actually Red Eagle. I found that quest and I was like no fucking way!
It was a pretty sweet quest regardless. I have the sword and the book on display at my home in Whiterun.
dude i fucking love this game id be willing to pay 90 dollers for it and am on my tenth play threw dude u have got to friend me on xbox therepers13
I sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo want to play Skryim, but unfortunately my copy is basically unplayable. It crashes all the time. D: I can’t even play the game for 2 seconds most of the time since it crashes so fast.
Once I did get lucky and managed to get a couple hours of gameplay, and out of what I played this game was awesome!
Can’t wait for the patch to come out so that I can actually play it!
If it is freezing as much as you say I don’t think it’s the game. I think you have a bad disc.
Wall of text incoming.
Wow, Joe, i am sorry that you are so hyped up about this game. I guess some one has to. Because everything you pointed out in your review is actually quite the opposite, aside the music – it is good.
1. 2:28 it did not live up to its hype. Its nothing near the game we expected.
2. 4:20 The story is anything but involving. Cliched rebels vs cliched Empire? Please. Advanced (with magic this time) civilization nearly wiping out the Empire? Seen it hundred times. Cliched Evil Dragon who can ressurect other dragons and do his Evil Things? Been there, done that. About as many times as previous point. This idiot, the Evil Dragon #25295, even doesnt kill the protagonist while he had not one but two clear chances, in one of which he clearly knew the treat. Come on, its in the book, like right there on the first page.
3. 5:48 You can get weaker by leveling up. If you do anything aside combat. You can get to level 20+ in Whiterun before you even kill your first dragon by pickpocketing a bunch. Does it make you strong? Quite the opposite – you dont even get that much money, because you cant sell your stolen shit to anybody there. No, you need to either waste talent points in useless speech or explore a shit ton to find a proper vendor. And even then it took me around 15 (fifteen) vendor voyages to Riften to finally sell the last peace of goods because someone at Bethesda had a bright idea that vendors cant have a lot of money and are resupplied at who know what pace. Who does that? Thats idiotic and clearly a design flaw and stupidest idea ever produced by man.
Or you can likewise level say blacksmithing get 10 levels for example, craft yourself a set of whatever and get killed by next mage apprentice you meet because he already knows ice storm and hands your ass to you in two seconds. Or if you are a mage you meet a dreugr overlord in a random sidequest cave who kills you with one shout or, if happen to have stagger on your spells, lets you waste 3-4 mana pools before he gets tired and quits at life.
So basically, you can either combat and level slowly to have no problem with any enemy or you can craft andor steal and level quickly and have a shit ton of problems there you souldnt. Balance at it’s finest.
4. 6:00+ Crafting itself is beyond useless. You can get to 100 points in blacksmithing by crafting exclusively iron daggers since they are the cheapest and provide same if not better progress than anything else. Classy.
And why oh why weapons had to have charge level for their enchants? Why not all the gear? Did you see any and i mean any other game that does it like this? No, you havent, because its bullshit and better developers know how to balance things to avoid such incompetent, rushed and unthinked over decisions as depletable magic properties on anything aside wands. Because it is logical. But Bethesda doesnt use logic. Its not even hard to recharge it, why even have this feature then? Its unnecessary and stupid.
And why the hell all the enchant are so uninspired? I found so far exactly 2 (two) items with some sort of creativity put into them. They are still cliched as hell, but thats at least something. For so called open and presumably epic game Bethesda could not come up with anything but +random% to random stats? What. The. Hell.
5. 7:25. Dragons added? You mean stolen from Bioware because people at Bethesda are whores?
- Say, Bob, i played this, what you call it, “Dragon Age”.
- Yea, and, Steeve?
- Dragons are kind of cool, you know.
- But there are no dragons in the Elder Scrolls. Thats kinda our thing.
- Theres a lot money involved.
- Really? Fck the Elder Scrolls then, we are whoring out!
And dragon sighting are anything but dynamic. Every single dragon swoops around the player three times and then lands if he has the space of proper proportions, he breaths fire or frost in your face once and then takes off to make another three circles. Rinse and repeat until dragon is at about 30% health – he then proceeds to land and never takes off, waiting for player to finish him of, with occasional breath included. Not scripted, my ass.
Uninventive, boring and repetitive as hell and overall pointless. Even the last boss does the same thing. Thats just lame. And did i mention that they all look the same? Same size, same abilities, same lack of brains. Threee skins to choose from. Thats got to be something. Not.
6. 8:25. Shouts are as uninspired as everything else. Theres a haste buff to your swing that could be decent if it actually worked on enchanted weapons. What the fuck? Who ever thought this to be great idea should be sterilized and locked in a dungeon. Theres an iconic Force Push to show off their pretty ragdoll. Because its not really helpful. There is disarm which doesnt even work on stronger enemies. And thats about it. Everything else is pretty much a copy of mage spells and a lame excuse to give brawlers some sort of magic power. And guess what – you dont even need Dragonrend, because all dragons will land anyway. Yet again – design at its finest.
7. 8:50. There is exactly two activities you can get from Skyrim. You can either craft and steal shit in towns or you can go to cloned dungeons to kill some cloned enemies. And that is what they call questing in this game. You can go to random town and some guy there will want you to kill something in a nearby dungeon. You can go to random city and five guys there will want you to kill something in a remote dungeon. And you also get one guy who want you to bring one random object from the same remote dungeon. Also you can go to a random remote dungeon without any quests and find a quest inside to… You guess it – kill everything in sight. Unlimited possibilities and variation, if you ask me.
And dungeons are nowhere near handcrafted. Nowhere. Apart from three or four storyline locations all the other dungeon are build from preconstructed segments thrown together in random order. Yes, you are correct – just like they did in Daggerfall. With every single (every single one there is) dungeon having exit to the beginning of a place right at the last boss. What happened to good old running through all the way to the entrance? Maybe not every time, but i dont mind running once i a while. Why do you have to make every dungeon or castle or cave circular, why? For kids? For retards? For lazy bums? Whats the idea behind this reasoning, i want to know.
There is no story about these dungeons: there are either zombie inside, or humans, or constructs. With occasional zombie elves or animals. The design inside is linear. If theres a closed door to lockpick – theres a chest behind it. It you are at the end of the dungeon – there is a chest. If its a castle – it has alchemy lab, enchanting table and, of course, chest at the end. If its a zombie crypt – there is 1+ puzzle for mentally disabled involving turning pillars to match whats written on the wall right there or a claw. If a random book is worth around 50 gold – it gives you skill experience. And so on. Variation, yeah.
8. 10:35. Using both hands to wield? Clive Barker’s: Undying anyone? And im sure im forgetting a dozen of games there it was implemented. Been there, done that.
8,5. 10:20. Ye whole lot of killing animations. 1,5 for each weapon for humans: decapitation or weapon related. 1 for undead. 1 for mammal animals and 0,5 for spiders. And 2 for dragons. Sweet motherload of creativity, Batman!
9. 11:25. Oh come on, are you seriously mentioning “favorites” mechanics? Jesus Christ, thats a staple of gaming. I am surprised they even thought about it seeing had badly the rest of the game is designed.
10. 11:35. Like i said. All you do with a quest is go to a random location and kill shit. Bringing something back once in a while. Its boring, tedious, repetitive, uninspired, and so on. All the player has to do is find a script trigger to get a quest, either by talking to someone or stepping into certain location. At least they gave us this much of a choice. Oh yea, and developers intended that you go in and kill shit. That about wraps it up.
Everything else is pretty much on point. Except the werewolf part. But im tired of bragging and ranting. All i can say is the cannibalism part was ok, even if it lead nowhere. Everything else is as bland and boring as shit.
I pray to god that no developer will take this piece of garbage seriously, because the world doesnt need anything like this to be seen again, Too bad people are blind to confuse a mediocre at best game to a masterpiece. It earns 5/10 at best, with credit going solely to decently wast world without loading a bunch. Its boring as hell, thats all there is to it.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for spoiling the looks of a dragon armor set right when i got my blacksmithing to 95 – now i can finally stop forcing myself through this garbage and do other things for once, never to remember Skyrim again.
Nicely said.
All of it true, thank you for being a smart person that can accept flaws in their games.
I mostly agree with your points (not all) but even when a game’s great ignoring its faults is just plain dumb and many people fall for this game’s sleight of hand that makes you think you do what you want while there’s one response and outcome to all quests except where TOLERANT AND PEACE LOVING Empire or DOUCHY CARTOONY RACIST EVIL MOFOS Stormcloaks are involved. You have a choice between them then.
Anyway for people downvoting any criticism because it hurts your feelings and not because it’s just pure flaming is WRONG. Or if (now starting system criticism) that was the system’s point then don’t hide the unpopular posts if they aren’t rampart flames.
Just my 2 cents on I guess everything.
PS. Angry Joe: Not all RPGs have to follow the same pattern
Angry Joe#2: I’ll measure up every RPG to this one.
Decide
I’m just wondering if there are any RPGs that you think are better. I mean I played Oblivion and Skyrim is a huge improvement. Are you trying to compare it to another series? What would you suggest the quests be instead of killing things, fetching items, investigating government corruption, breaking out of jail, planting evidence, collecting debts, helping lovers, assassination, investigating ruins, reforging the legendary blade of a heretical cult, slaying dragons, kidnapping, cannibalism, revisiting your drunken adventures with a deadric god, fixing the shattered mind of a long dead man, going on a pilgrimage, hunting werewolves, sneaking your way into a dinner party, or rescuing a reincarnated goddess from natives? Would you prefer space battles or what? I’d honestly like to get your input.
PS: Oblivion had dragons first as son of the emperor turns into one to kill mehrunes dagon, though you couldn’t fight it.
Wow, that’s a butt-load of minuses he’s got just because he whole-heartedly disagrees with the reviewer. Everything this guys says is accurate, the only difference is that there are people who notice it, people who don’t and people who refuse to because they’re so into the game they can’t see it do any wrong, and that’s fine I suppose, but don’t mark someone down just because he doesn’t agree with the reviewer and is exercising his right to say so. It’s sad.
And to be honest, I have to say I’ve been a fan of Joe for ages, even when my friends swore off his reviews, because I figured that over all he’s a good guy with his finger on the pulse, he’s one of us. But it’s just become too questionable now. This game does not deserve 10/10. With so many bugs alone, points should have been taken off and it’s not accurate to ignore those things. People watch you, Joe, for the fun and for the review – to see the game and get a genuine look at how good or bad it is, which isn’t what we’re getting in all honesty. I always liked the way you’d get amped for a game, but now it’s clouding the issue.
You complain about lagging in games when you’re playing the half of them on hardware that is nearly seven years old, for goodness sake! You say that games like Deus Ex aren’t all they could have been because you would have liked to have explored the whole city, when the fact is that that one DVD disc that microsoft demands developers stick to (or pay them for going over… really, look it up if you don’t believe me – ID soft were pissed) likely isn’t big enough to accommodate that much extra data while making the graphics as good as they can.
Joe, I loved you, man. But you’ve reviewed too many games with the polar opposite opinion to many of views held by the gamers who watch you. And I unfortunately can’t ignore it anymore. As a reviewer, you need to more pragmatic, more professional. In a day and age where far too many big name reviewers and magazines have admitted to being paid for good reviews (IGN, Gamespot and PC Gamer magazine to name a few – again, the info is out there if you don’t believe me), in this day and age we need a reviewer we can trust to tell us honestly about the game, good and bad, not just gloss over the bad because you love the game and thought that the good outweighed the bad – tell us so, but still tell us the problems. To be honest, I was Harry Partridge’s Skyrim video through and through in the run up to the game’s release (check it out on youtube, you’ll get what I mean), but there are far too many bugs, glitches and just plain examples of laziness in the development of the game for this to be a 10/10 – over Deus Ex, over Mass Effect 2, over Arkham City, Witcher 2, Shogun 2… not a chance.
It’s a shame, screw the rating here, but if the comments here alone are anything to go on, I think you’ve lost a fair chunk of your trustworthiness, man. And for me… well, you’ve lost a subscriber. Let other’s cast their chips where they wish. It’s been a fun few years, bro. Take it easy.
…went through all the trouble to make an account just so I can respond to this comment.
First off, to the people who are wondering why this guy got so many negatives, even those he’s expressing his opnion and disagrees with Joe is simple: he’s coming with a far too harsh and negative attitude towards the game and Joe’s review. It sounds like you are trying to be angry and pissed off at something, no matter how justified, no one will find you all that credible if you sound like a troll. If you aren’t going to be civil about it and continue to sound like an a**, then no one will take you seriously.
2.) Dude, it sounds like you just flat out don’t like fantasy RPGs in general, and that you were deadset on Skyrim being a horrible game before it even came out. Otherwise, what would YOU want in a fantasy RPG?
And if you don’t like the main storyline, I got a simple solution for you man: DON’T PLAY IT. You are not forced in any capacity to play any of these quests. You can literally just wander around Skyrim and kill crap. The game isn’t forcing you to play these quests in any capacity, if you don’t want to.
3.) Well, of course you’re going to get weaker if you try to just flat out grind for leveling. I actually recall Bethesda saying something that they built the leveling system for Skyrim SPECIFICALLY TO PENALIZE GRINDERS. So yeah, in this game, your level number doesn’t mean crap when it comes to measuring how strong you are in combat if you don’t bother leveling up those individual skills.
So, I say that it’s your fault for trying to find a way to cheat the system and have it backfire on you.
5.) “Dragons were stolen from Bioware’s Dragon Age”?
………REALLY?!
First off, in DA:O, there was a grand total of FIVE dragons! Second of all, said dragons were all boss monsters and only boss monsters. The dragons in Skyrim are wandering creatures , just like any old frost troll or zombie, that will wander the world and attack if they see you. Unlike in boss battles where you HAVE to fight it in order to progress, in Skyrim, you could run from a dragon if you ever felt like it. I’ve done it before, and if I can do it, you sure as hell can.
7.) As for dungeons, well, while each dungeon has a similar theme to them, same layouts? Hell no. Out of the “floral cave” dungeon types that I’ve been to, I’ve come across one that starts with your standard “atrium” cave and the goes from there, while I’ve found another similar dungeon that started with a river near the mouth of the cave, with said river continuing throughout the cave. So yeah, I would say there’s some level of variety.
8.) Yes dual-wielding spells/weapons have done before. How often? Oh, that’s right, NOT VERY OFTEN AT ALL. Keep in mind that Clive Barker’s: Undying was a game that came out A DECADE AGO, and is a game that apparently no one bought when it was released, and that not a lot of people even remember. And guess what? Not many games did that concept after that. The only recent game that’s done this before Skyrim that I recall was Bioshock 2, and even then, it was only one weapon and one Plasmid, not two Plasmids at once.
Also: it sounds like you’ve never even played an Elder Scrolls game before, considering that some of the the things you are complaining about are all concepts that are carried over from the previous games. So the charge feature has been in the game in the start, and in my eyes, it stops the player from being too overpowered and killing everything he sees with that one enchanted weapon.
I’m sorry that you didn’t like the game; I really truly am. However, it sounds like you were setting up yourself to hate the game from the start, which is why your arguments seeme too overly biased in my eyes.
P.S. And please shut up about the complaining of the dragon armor. If the whole point of you leveling up your smithing was just so you could see what dragon armor looks like, well, that’s your fault for playing the game for all of the wrong reasons, so don’t blame Joe just because he spoiled your gaming experience.
PSS: Oh, and you want a game that’s bland and mediocre? Take a look at the entire modern FPS genre. All I see is in every single game in that genre is:
1.) Hide behind a piece of cover.
2.) Wait for a guy to pop out from behind his piece of cover.
3.) Pop up out of your piece of cover to shoot the other guy.
4.) Pop back behind your piece of cover and recover your health.
5.) Rinse and repeat.
Now THAT is bland and mediocre. Hence why I’m not going to waste my time with Battlefield 3 OR Modern Warefare 3.
1. That is completely false.
. Cliched empire and rebels that would imply a good and bad guy but really it is who you think sucks the least.
2. Cliched evil dragon that resurrects other dragon? Oh yeah that is right up their with bullet time and happily ever after.
3. So you are telling me if you don’t do combat your character doesn’t get better at combat. Wow what a broken game making me not be able to use cheap tactics to get strong super quick. You are saying that it is bad you can get cheap levels yet you complain that cheap levels bite you in the ass. You but thought into this I see.
You are gong to complain you can’t sell stolen items right to the town face. Wow you completely would have called it a good idea if it had been the opposite right and you aren’t pulling insults out your ass. You get all the major towns on your map at the beginning so what exploring are you talking about. And you really are going to complain about vendors not having a ton of money so you can get a lot of cash early After complaining about how you can get cheap levels.
4. How is crafting useless how does saying it is easy to level up make what you get from crafting worthless. Complaining about recharging weapons just makes you seem like you are searching for insults. It is very easy to give your items a ton of charges and just clickng on a filled soul gem isn’t difficult.
You want them to put in tons of worthless enchants so you can complain about it but you somehow found a way to make having a lot of useful enchantments sound like a bad thing. Nice job.
5. Dragon fights are the only thing you have and you don’t get it fully right. They land at the end of the fight because they are injured. They land/ float above the ground because strafing attacks are worthless against you and even Dragons have to aim. Really what exactly do you want them to do. Each do something random and ineffective so you can say they are retarded? Every enemy is predictable unless they have the ability to transform into other enemies. Oblivion ends with a Dragon fighting right next to you. Enough said.
6. Shouts. WTF do you want these abilities to be all enemies in the room explode into confetti? You have to level up your shouts, saying blowing your enemy away and getting free hits while they are on the ground isn’t helpful tells me you didn’t or barely did anything in the main quest or did nothing and never actually fought the final boss. Dragonrend is kind of worthless but if you are a tank with no ranged attacks it is a time saver.
You are complaining that stronger enemies are resistant to things. Wow
7. Saying that is all you can do is just false. Saying that the quests are all the same is mind blowingly wrong. Saying all dungeons are the same is just dumb. Their are many similar places but you can always tell a significant difference. Base on your comment it sounds like you want them to invent a new color of the rainbow so everything is different and random. But I can atleast see were you are coming from with the dungeons getting boring. Thats why you do quests though for the extra narrative.
8. You are right there the killing animations are cool but overall not very impressive to me.
9. The favorites mechanic is useful everything doesn’t have to be new. It isn’t a staple of gaming that is taking it to far but it is unorigional but complaining about that would be like complaining that their are guns in every WW2 game.
10. It is a masterpiece it just isn’t your game. You tried desperately to find game breaking flaws and all you found is that cheap leveling bites you in the ass and locations built by the same civilization are similar. For me it deserves a10/10 and is my pick for game of the year.
But my favorite gaming genre is RPG’s so I will tone it back and say that the classic Bethesda bugs, the the fact that a casual gamer may start to hate doing half of the side quests in the game by level 35 or so because of the amount of dungeons ( only counting misc quest which range from interesting to worthless), and that it is easy to spot flaws in characters ,and loose immersion into the game, because they simply wont react to what you are doing or who you are sometimes (not that the game isn’t immersive).
I will give it about a 9.4 knowing that you can’t but that many dialogue options in a game reasonably and MISC quests are put inthat category for a reason. The bugs vary from game to game but the fact that Bethesda is unable to release a mostly bug free game is unacceptable.
The biggest problem I had with this game is that, despite what Joe said, I found that Besthesa expected you to do things a specific way and when I didn’t I found myself as the Thane of Whiterun and the Guild Master of the Companions yet when I went to attack Whiterun with the rebellion no one questioned why I had betrayed them, the companions had no option to come with me and were hiding inside the guild hall (and I the guildmaster could not gain access) and most of all my housecarl did not stop me and say “are you sure about this, this is our home, you’re Thane, our Jarl is here, why are we attacking… are you sure about this?” Despite Bethesda promising well-rounded characters as your followers. Once you’ve finished the missions for a person they forget who the hell you are and that pulled me right out of the game. Nevermind the fact that one mission-giver actually forgets he’s seen and fought dragons before, in the prev missions he was with me on, repeating the same crap he told me for the first mission. After a few days of play, the awesomeness entirely wore off and I felt a complete detachment from this game and have since been unable to finish it. Shame. I’m a little shocked at the score Joe gave this. Personally, I thought Mass Effect 2 (even without all the dlc) was a far FAR better game. Deus Ex too, most certainly.
No one’s mentioned this one flaw yet, but the response list for your character sucks. I know most people don’t give a crap about that, but when your when your trying to play as the character you set out to be, be it hero or villain, it becomes a real hindrance. When Bethesda says you can be whoever you wanna be I expect it carry over to all aspects of the game, including the dialogue option.
Game is awesome, but it doesn’t get 10 from me, there are many faults that I find annoying.
For example:
Unnamed bodies in caves and wild disappear but blacksmith, store assistant, leader of rebellion and other named bodies just stay in middle of the street. This destroys the “living world” they were going for. I even had to hide the bodies from my sight hoping I will forget about them.
Also there are way too many dragons, first few are fun but killing 20+ dragons is just annoying.
Stormcloacks as racist towards elves as they are didn’t react to my dark elf as bad guy.
Shopkeepers haven’t got enough money to buy my loot.
Animation is not really great and as cool as finisher animations are they have no physics (sword clips thru bodies sideways, doesn’t actually hit or character uses sword like mace.)
and so on…..
I would say the game is 8/10 or 8.5/10
only found 1 game breaker. If your follower dies her corpse shows up when you try to get married, automatically failing that mission and scaring everyone away. thus I can’t get married and an achievement will not be triggered (until the patch comes out)
I haven’t encountered this glitch myself, but I have seen it mentioned on a couple of sites. Workaround mentioned was to drag her body into another room, well out of sight, then restart/re-propose marriage. From what I’ve read this should get you hitched =)
Nice, but you forgot a bunch of drawbacks.
And since I so want for everyone to hate me, I will list them like some kind of asshole.
1. “You can take any path you wish in skyrim”
The first thing I read in my quest log after leaving helgen, so naturally.. I started zapping ralof.
He turned out to be immortal. Why? Who cares if he might be important to some quest later on, make it so you just dont get to do that quest if you kill him (like in games like baldurs gate/arcanum/fallout).
Also on this, I cant become a childmurderer? My life long dream was to become one and now I cannot exercise this fantasy in skyrim… immortal brats gtfo. Remember the good old days in fallout tactics when you would take a jackhammer and target their groins? An explosion of soft supple brat-meat. mmm
2. The spells are uninspired and lame.
When I first heard about combining spells I thought it would be more like combining different spells into different effects. No? Well no biggie, I’m sure the spells in the game are fun enough… Oh look, sparks… wait this looks an awful lot like flames and frostbite…
Maybe the later spells will be better? Nah.. they are all pretty much the same: Lightning bolt = fire bolt = ice spear, just look a teeny bit different. Same goes for flame cloak, wall of flames, etc.
And to make it worse, the only useful spells so far are the bolt spells, since almost everything has frost resistance (makes sense in skyrim I guess) and Thunderbolt (which looks almost exactly like Lightning bolt) costs 6 times as much mana for 3 times as much damage… No thanks I would rather dualcast lightning bolt all the time, stunlocking anything into an easymode boring lame asswhore kill.
The same pretty much goes for the other schools. Some exceptions are the most worthless spells in all existence: Equilibrium and telekinesis (with the exception of that one time I used it to grab a key from behind bars).
Equilibrium gives 25 mana for 25 health.. Check the mana costs on spells and you will see how ridiculous this is, killing yourself for 3 lightning bolts..
Telekinesis would be fine, except for that it only works on items you can pick up, not including items that are inside a corpses inventory. This one time there was a trap that dropped a napalm urn on me, I just triggered it thinking I could telekinese the urn and throw it at some enemies. Wrong, you cant put the urn in your inventory -> you cant telekinese it.
3. I have seen better AI in pong.
It’s kind of silly when you just start the game, you’re lvl 2 or 3 or something and you can kill a master vampire or bandit chief without any effort.
This is because they tend to walk into a pillar (and keep walking into that pillar) while you blast them from afar, or you can just run around a table for a few minutes while zapping them/having your archer companion shoot them. Cue benny hills chase music.
This can even be done to the “mighty” dragons, just sit behind a rock and watch him land in front of it with his body exposed to you while his head is too low to be able to hit you with any attacks.
4. The number of bugs is astounding.
I would normally not mention this since it’s just been released and everything…
But the main reason for these bugs is just plain silly: They really wanted to release on 11/11/11 because that looks kewl or some apeshit. Really? Why the hell would the date of release even… what the hell… fuck. Give me a more finished looking game instead damn it the blackreach just looked unfinished like hell, with so many EMPTY places and rooms to explore. The AI there took a turn for the worst as my companion stopped moving and talking…
5. The menus and method of selecting spells in PC version
Well, not much to say except for the console-copy-paste lookingness (I know thats not a real word) of the menus. The way you equip spells in each hand almost made me think the game was broken for spellcasters, until I found out on a forum that you need to favorite the spell -> press Q to open favorites -> press a number key 1-8 to assign the favorite to a number (THIS IS NOT MENTIONED ANYWHERE INGAME (not even in the controls menu)). -> then press the button twice to equip it in both hands. So say I want to switch my right hand to ward while keeping sparks in my left hand: Not possible, I first need to equip ward in both hands by pressing the hotkey for it twice, then press the hotkey for sparks once to re-equip that in my left hand.
6. THE LIES.
Todd (the face for skyrims crew) lied about so many things..
Just to mention a few:
Skyrim has infinite quests
Skyrim is not a console port
Skyrim has radiant AI
Skyrim has beautiful textures
Bullshit.
Well thats it for my rant.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. It’s still a fun game, they pretty much made it a game worth playing for hours with only the sheer amount of quests and explorable areas alone. But that does not mean the rest should be ignored: 10/10, no.. more like an 8 or something.
Haters gonna hate?
Another fun little fact: The saves on the PS3 version for some strange reason grow larger and Larger AND LARGER until the game lags you into annoyance.
As demonstrated by :
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/video/1290037306001/unbelievable-skyrim-ps3-lag/
Now sure, they are fixing it as we speak. A fix might have already been made even.
But isn’t this kind of silly? A SINGLE playthrough can reveal a gamebreaker like this so I’m sure they were aware of it, yet they released it with the bug. 11/11/11 madness!
They say that they are working to fix the PS3 lag. I hope its soon because my file is unplayable right now. I feel bad for anyone with no internet to update the game.
you realize that it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE to have completely LIMITLESS AND INFINITE side quests right? that’s basically saying you could play the game for 24 hours straight for until you DIE literally DIE in real life. =/. not going to happen people. looks great, feels great.
It’s good to see I’m not the only one who isn’t brainwashed by Bethesda here. Everything you have written is true and it is a shame the fanboys thumb you down for telling the truth.
All of those things that you have pointed out can be modded on the PC version.
1. There is already a mod where you can actually kill children in the game. And not to mention the setessential command where you can set *most* essential NPCs to unessential where you are able to kill them. That or there should soon be a mod where all immortal or essential NPCs are made killable.
2. Wait until Midas Magic Mod from Oblivion comes to Skyrim, then magic will actually be awesome. If you don’t know what it is, http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=oblivionmods.detail&id=2502 (Sorry if it is illegal to post links to other sites)
3. Yes, I know the AI is terrible but, is it possible that with the Creation Kit that a modder can redo the crappy AI to make it better?
4. Just wait until Unofficial Skyrim Patches are made (Thank the modders who made Unofficial Oblivion Patch)
Lastly, if you don’t like the idea of modifications to Skyrim, then I don’t know what to do for you other then wait for Beth to patch those bugs, and or wait for DLC.
Game of the Fucking Milenium. Robert. E. Howard must be going “You go,dog!” from Asgard.
Off-Topic:
Joe,Are you going to review King of Fighters VIII?
I think you will enjoy it FAR more than the previous installment.
King of Fighters VIII? That came out nearly a decade ago, but it was called King of Fighters 2001. You probably meant KoFXIII, and yes, I am also looking forward to that review…should it ever be made.
I’m not expecting it, but it would be nice.
As for Skyrim, I think I’ll wait until that PS3 bug is fixed. I don’t see that game going away any time soon
Fun fact:
Kudos, Bethesda.
At the companions there is a character called Farkas, which in Hungarian means Wolf. Guess what he turns into. Loved that reference to our little country
I love the game to bits and it’s fantastic! Clearly one of the best games of the year. Only bigger flaw I can see in it, is that some quests are just overly linear and don’t really let you choose what is your stand on it. I’d love to see being able to actualy “RP” my character. Another thing they should do bit better is the “feel” of combat. The combat doesn’t have enough kinetic energy behind it and your screen doesn’t even “bob” as you run. Closequarter combat feels just a bit too… well it lacks a bit of feeling. Good thing I can still use bow and arrows or magic! So that’s all and fine!
Love the game.
Yesterday I fought a dragon near a cliff. The thing took off on an odd angle, caught an arrow and a fireball simultaneously in its undercarriage, clipped the cliff, and plowed a 50 foot permanent furrow into the ground where it crashed, sliding to a stop at my feet before struggling to get up while I mounted its head and brained it with my axe.
I am in love.
And then you got to the moment when you hit it while it has landed, it gets low hp, flies up, falls in midair and glides down while spazzing out. The dragons are the one that rlly have been treated the worst in this game and that is kind of ironic.
I follow the rule “awsome thing that happens infinately gets cheapened into mundane”. No one is amazed that movies even exist remember? It’s the same thing for Oblivion Gates…. Crap! I meant Dragons!!!!!!!
You want a better story? A frost dragon (for like 100th time and I was getting goddamn tired of them as hell) flew over my head and while I’m thinking “oh not again” it starts attacking some goats at LOD boarder (ultra everything on PC and bloody 4GB ram fix that Beth thinks is illegal [more about crappy Beth coding in probable future rant]), suddenly it literally gets confused and starts circling IN and OUT a mountainside at what looks like mach 8. I watch it for 30 seconds scrarching my head then I make a few steps forward, and I think collision detection kicks in at that moment and the dragon literally hits the mountainside so hard it launches his body 100 meters above. I start “absorbing my kill” before the carcass hits the ground.
So yeah it was the easiest and buggiest dragon ever.
My buggiest dragon fight was one that started normally, UNTIL he decided to sit atop the word shrine. The very moment his feet touched the top of the shrine he froze.
Damn destro trains slowly :[
So thinking this would make him an easy kill I started zapping a few mana bars at him until his hp got to 0.
But he didn’t die.. He didn’t do anything.. he was just sitting up there, immortal.
And then I trained some of my skills on him for an hour or two while cooking and eating until I got bored
Ah, I even forgot to mention the technichal faults. The game probably crashed about 30 times during my playthrough and it was frustrating as all hell. My computer is built for BF3 and I can play Skyrim on Ultra High so there’s no problems with my hardware.
Secondly I have to be the one who discovered most bugs and glitches out of all my friends because sometimes these bugs utterly ruined quests for me, making it so that I couldn’t complete them. Also alot of times dragons and once, trolls, lose their textures and just becomes a purple mass that attacks you.
And for gods sake if you have the courage to thumb me down because of me criticing a game atleast post a reply telling me why I’m wrong so we can actually discuss.
Once again, I didn’t hate the game, I liked it but you have to realise It’s not perfect. No game deserves 10/10.
Homeworld, in 1999, DESERVED game of the year, 10/10. Honestly. But no, Skyrim for me is an 8/10 right now, but only because Bethesda has said they are working hard to fix things. However I take that with a grain of salt and I would honestly rate the game 7/10 because of the ‘rushed ‘ way they pushed it out.
A game so anticipated as this, with so much money behind it, should have been pushed back in release date until 12/11/2011
I’m on PC and running on ultra with no problems at all in this game so i guess you just got a bad copy?
Played it for about 60 hours with two characters and it has crashed ONCE before they patched it… that’s it for now, so it could depend on the platform or something?
All I know is that it crashed twice a day atleast, I have no idea what could possibly have caused that.
Joe your enthusiasm is just like mine was for Oblivion and for a while I failed to see the faults in Oblivion just as you are failing to see a lot of short comings with Skyrim.
There are a large number of bugs, some game-breaking. When save files get too large for the console versions of the game, the game becomes very laggy. Also if you download the game to your console, it suffers a massive hit in textures. Try it out for PS3 you’ll see what I mean.
The PC version is very cumbersome as you can’t use your mouse to navigate the menus, and it suffers a lot of crash-to-desktop issues that haven’t yet been resolved. It feels rushed. IT looks fantastic and it is immersive at first, but those dragon fights get very repetitive and bandits become as impossible as goblins were in Oblivin at level 20+
The biggest problem I’ve had with the PC version is that the dialogue and menu options will sometimes fail to select when you click on them. End up having to click multiple times to get it to register. Not a big problem, just vaguely annoying.
But as for not being able to navigate the menus using the mouse… yes you can? I do. =\
The PS3 version is definitely buggy as all hell. I’ve had it crash 4 or 5 times now? Textures won’t load sometimes, the whole glitch with only being able to have 2 characters and lets not forget the lag.
All of that being said, Skyrim is still the best game I’ve played in ~10 years? 11/17 major reviews gave it a PERFECT score, the other 6 scored it within 5 points of perfect.
Oh, and I’m sorry, but if some of you are being wrecked by BANDITS at level 25+, you’re horribad at the game. HORRIBAD. I’m currently punching a Bandit Highwayman to death, at level 28. Punching her to death while typing this response. And she has a battle axe. There, now I’m taking all of her clothes. Go back to your dragon age and witchery and pretend they’re half as good.
Never said bandits were hard, just that they are stronger than dragons. And I also punch btw.
Some people are posting about the difficulty(check the final sentence three posts up.. bandits, impossible, hahaha). I fail to see it, really. But I guess I come from a time when games didn’t hold your hand.
I think possibly they’re coming down from Oblivion, which while fun got ridiculously easy much too fast. Was so glad to find a fight or two in this game that actually presented a challenge.
So…anyone here who hated Morrowind and Oblivion? Cause I did, with a passion and I’d like to know if this game could be of any interest to me. With the past games, my main issues were…I’m not fond of first person view, especially not in role playing games, cause I’d like to see my character and I hate first person swordfights. ut third person view was, well, not particularly good in Oblivion, to say the least. I also got lost in the world and not in the good way. It’s too much land that’s just boring bland nothing and it feels like the only purpose of it is to drag out going from one area to another. To me it’s not entertaining, even if others find it immersive.
I also didn’t like the fighting all that much and had a bit of a hard time fully undrstanding the system between all the aspects of gameplay…there was little “i play and come to understand how hings work”.
I like western RPGs…but I actually like them a bit more linear and storyfocused, like Bioware games. Dragon Age: Origins is to me just about the perfect mix of giving me freedom and limiting my options. With Elder Scrolls games I tend to be overwhelmed and, well, bored pretty soon. It’s similar with many Sandbox games, like GTA.
Any chance this would be different with this game or is it simply a franchise I’ll never get into?
(oh yeah, and I can only play it on PS3, so any glitches that may utterly destroy the game and make it permanently unplayable should also be taken into consideration, I heard nasty things about the console versions and generally keep hearing how Elder Scrolls games only get good after modders fix them)
Third person is definitely playable, but it’s probably still geared towards playing first person. Getting lost isn’t much of an issue once you get the hang of quest tracking and fast traveling via the map. If linearity is your thing, this might not be the game for you. The main quest is probably a little easier to, ahem, find than in the last two games, but after the initial how-to-play-this section of the game, you’re very much cut loose and told to follow it (or not) as you choose.
Can’t speak as to the stability of the PS3 version, regrettably.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll better keep on ignoring it then. Just doesn’t seem to be something I can be into. (not that that is a bad thing….it’s just not for me, but I’m of the opinion that neither linearity nor the opposite are inherently a problem in ANY game).
“10/10″
Oh wonderful. Now the Obsidian fanboys are going to be on a warpath for months.
Sorry Joe but I think you’re ignoring a couple issues with the game.
- Yes you brought up that the dragons were too easy but it is a way bigger problem than you made it out to be. They are worse than bandits and dont give me the crap that I have never met any elder dragons cus I have and they were kind of harder but still easy. Dragonrend just does it all for you but a few times that doesn’t actually bring them down OR they land on the other side of a mountain just to be dicks. I rlly hated dragons in this game tbh.
- Shouts are underpowered as hell, atleast most of them. The most useful ones are Dragonrend and Unrelenting force and you get both in the storyline.
- The UI is horrendous, you don’t get to see alot of stats and that’s pretty vital in RPGs.
- Loot sucks. Hard. You never get anything special outside of a few questlines wich still doesn’t give you very good things. There’s not enough armour either.
- The game gets so bland after 50 hours of gameplay. 150 dungeons and infinte quests yes, but man are these repetetive. The quests are, something appeared kill it, and the dungeons are wave after wave of tanky but oh so bad enemies and a dissapointing boss and in every dungeon there is the SAME GODDAMN PUZZLE. FUCK THOSE TURNING STONES, GOD!
I could probably bring up more but this is not 10/10, and even with theses issues I would give it 7,5 or an 8. I didn’t hate the game I loved my 50 hours to death but it was rlly dissapointing after that.
Oh and smithing is bullshit. (Iron dagger, iron dagger ooh lvl up)
Just to point out, Whirlwind is also an extremely useful word. Makes exploring the dungeons a breeze (no pun intended), leaping from platform to platform. Ditto Fade when you can’t be bothered avoiding/disarming traps.
Also, those turning stone puzzles… aren’t so much puzzles. The answers are written on the bottom of the claws you use as keys. Just rotate them to see the solution.
The puzzles were never particuralry hard, but the last ones I encountered was just dumb. Zero clues, just guessing.
I also found a few items that had cool names, looked pretty good, and were moderately good like “Dawnbreaker”, “The Pale Sword” and “Malog Bals mace”. I escpecially liked Dawnbreaker wich had a unique abilty and that is mostly what I miss in the loot. Unique stuff.
First off thanks for spoiling the fact that you talk to a dragon, Joe :/
But yes, while the game IS legendary, you really really should have mentioned its faults more. Here are some:
-Horses are near-useless. The fact that they’re not incredibly fast doesn’t bother me, the fact that you can’t fight, talk or do anything while you’re on them is frustrating, I have to get off my horse and fight wolves way too often, I think other gamers will agree. You can’t even store things in your horse (while it has pockets on the saddle, mind you) or tie your horse down somewhere so it doesn’t follow you into battle and get itself killed, so you have to park it somewhere away and go to a hotspot on foot.
-Like I just mentioned there are too many wolves.
-Smithing takes way too long to upgrade, none of us used smithing that much to level up to say lvl 60, we’ve all used that iron dagger trick to get there (something we should’t have to resort to in a game like this), this could have easily been averted by giving us smithing points for improving weapons and armour and smelting, which we all used on a regular basis.
-Biggest problem is the logic in killing dragons: why would a dragon land? It’s hard to hit with arrows it could easily kill you from the air, and why are YOU the greatest dragon slayer? Because you have great weapons and can do it? That’s not enough, it could have easily been improved by making it so you use your voice to knock the dragon out of the sky and then attack it on the ground, making sense why a dragon would be on the ground and why you’d have the edge over dragons.
I don’t realy understand the problem with the wolves, they were never that big of a problem with me. I am also not sure what you mean by smithing points, do you mean smithing exp? because you do get that when you upgrade your armour and weapons. I do agree that it is illogical for dragons to land, they likely did this to appease the sword and shield pures. O and yes horses are now more the useless, they are suicidal.
Today I got attacked by two dragons at once. My horse tanked one while I carved up the other. I don’t bother killing wolves, I let my horse do it, lol. As for not being able to store things on the horse.. I had quite the opposite reaction. For the first time I can have my character totally overburdened, climb up on the horse, and have it not only move at a normal speed carrying me and my loot, but enable me to fast travel with my pockets full of two handed battle axes. Also, horses will gallop if you press the dash button. They’re not as slow as they first appear.
Someone already pointed out that improving weapons/armor does up your smithing exp.
There is actually a shout that forces dragons to land, but regardless the logic behind the dragon landing makes sense to me as their chances of killing me improve dramatically when they can pin me down and breathe fire in my face. A dragon in the air might be good at setting a forest on ablaze, but I’m a tiny moving target throwing nasty great spells at it. Plus I heal to full health every time they let up on me for more than a second, so strafing is out, and I’m pointy and sharp enough that picking me up would be equally bad an idea.
my brother has this game, however isnt there a problem with the fact that you can only save one character at one time. At least that was he said.
You can save more than one character.
Lol, your brother is mistaken… or hogging the game XD
You can have as many characters as you have save files. It’s just a bit of a hassle keeping track of which is which. Too easy to save over your brother’s file by accident.
Oh the topic of stupid NPCs:
I was out adventuring with my buddy, my homeboy Kharjo, investigating a lead for a new word of power in a dungeon, and there was a trap with a pressure plate and one of these swinging spiked grates. The stupid cat ran over that pressure plate and got knocked down by the grate 9 or 10 times before he finally managed to pass it before the trap had completely reset, but he never learned. I tried to stand at the wall of the corridor hoping that he would miss the pressure plate that was right in the middle somehow in his tireless effort to walk directly toward me but it didn’t help.
It was funny for the first 3 times but then got frustrating, after 6 times it got funny again though.
How much did we all know that force lighting is going to make it’s appearance in this!!!
Love the opening scene!!!
I hate to say but I disagree with Joe on this one. Skyrim has terrible textures, extremely low shadow resolutions, horrible facial animations, recycled music from oblivion, suffers the same what I like to call “Clone Syndrome” where 5 NPCs within the same village will have the same voice, copied Fallout 3 with the over the shoulder 3rd person cam and exact same slow motion kill cam (just like the VATS). Although IMMENSELY better than Oblivion, it still didnt impress me much. One thing I noticed is there is no DOF effect (yet there is when the game is paused, odd) I personally think it would have looked alot nicer with a DOF effect like The Witcher 2 does (btw Witcher 2 is a completely better looking game).
Love all the videos you make but making fun of call of duty is hack at this point, otherwise keep up the good work.
You should’ve used this as an intro/outro or something
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDE2VQzghp4&feature=feedu
This is the greatest game i’ve played. Period. Nothing’s compared to this up until now really! =) GotY for sure!
I have to say that so far, I`m not very impressed. Witcher and Witcher 2 were amazing , but Skyrim, not so much.
I had few different experiences than AJ. True the bandits no more wear glass/deadric armor but they ARE AS TOUGH AS IF THEY DID. More times I had more trouble against bandits than bloody FROST DRAGONS as level 25. Didn’t get much better later on. Probably because I’ve been playing a thief character who rarely got into open fights (high pickpocket probably “helped” in making bandit encounters just a joke in terms how hard they were) but still…
The Empire vs Stormcloaks is vague who’s right untill you wisit Windhelm. The racism of Stormcloaks is so cartoonish it’s unbelievable.
Now lets go on to smithing. It’s basically summed up in “make bunch of leather bracelets to get so OP that there’s no challenge” (did that when bandits got ridiculous).
Now for the OMG Dragons. Yeah few first encounters with them are great but again as in Oblivion, making an awesome thing an infinite occurance cheapens the experience of stumbling opon one. I’ve been getting tired of fighting dragons at about level 10 let alone 35… the fact that each dragon fights EXACTLY THE SAME. Don’t want to go into detail but they have 3 modes:
1) Fly around doing nothing,
2) Fly-by/hover making a breath attack,
3) Land and do a breath attack coupled with few melee attacks if you’re in range.
As for combat itself then “hack and shash” part is exactly the same as oblivion with few “finisher” animations put in. I agree that the wapon + magic in different hands makes battlemage type character so much easier to do because it feels natural.
Now a very ,inor nitpick from the review itself “no ivisable walls” – you didn’t look hard enough. There are plenty especially in places called “Location’s X balcony” etc. But I get what you were saying so it’s okay.
Voice acting wasn’t exeptional. It was mostly okay. The lines were delivered flat. Every time.
It’s still the best Fantasy Open World experience out there.
Also you’re saying you’ll measure up all the RPGs to it. What happened to the standpoint from The Witcher 2 review “RPGs don’t have to be the same”?
Personal rating 8.5 + badass approval.
Great review Joe!
Love your enthusiasm <3
Yes, you can easily get lost in that game for 50+ hours, yes it is a pretty good game, but no, it doesn’t deserve all the hype.
The world is amazing.
But the sum of everything else really gets on your nerves.
Might contain spoilers.
The biggest point obviously is the abysmal UI (I have ~300 soulgems in my misc tab, about 280 of those have SINGEL ENTRIES, craft one dagger, yes no, craft one dagger yes no, craft one dagger yes no…..yes, I want to craft 50 iron daggers, not only do you have to hit yes every time, you also have to CLICK it, since no key command works, when you pick up quest items from quests you don’t have you can’t drop em, I was happy when I found a way to get rid of the bloody 20 weight elder scroll,…and so on).
There are only two commands you every need for the companions : “Wait here” and “Carry my stuff”. They will find every trap, they will aggro crap from nowhere, they will heroicly throw themself between the enemy and your powerattack mid swing, they will use whatever gear you hand them, when they want, no matter if it’s way worse (+20% alchemy hide helmet is waaaay better than my Dragonbone Helmet(legendary) !) and will dualwield staffs just to blow all the charges.
Balance issues and immersion breakers…like someone else said : When you max smithing first you are pretty much invincible to anything doing physical damage. Dragons are one of the easiest enemies in the game, it doesn’t take more than 5-6 Powerattacks with your weapon of choice, anytime. Later on you get the idea they are just there to keep you from fast travelling (btw: guess what Aldiun is). Yes they give dragon souls, but..the shouts are pretty much useless, you do more damage faster by just clicking randomly (Might be my build tho : twohanded, bound twohanded axe, heavy armor, lockpick/sneak). Which leads to another problem someone else mentioned : Sneak is way too good. I can lockpick a door, sneak up to the second floor, murder someone in their sleep with my axe (all while wearing heavy armor) and get out without anyone weaking up.
I assassinated a bard by stealthing behind a chair. Half the size of me. With my bright baby-blue glowing bound two hand axe drawn, while wearing full dragonbone heavy armor. He just sat down without taking any notice, and didn’t get up again.
You can kill famous persons, in bright daylight, in front of an audience, pay 1000 Gold to the guards and go shopping in the same town without anyone caring, but everyone lametating the loss of said persons.
It pretty much boils down to : Too much “and” and too less “or”. You can become the leader of every guild there is, with one char, and be the champion of every daedric prince, no matter if the have conflicting ideals. And most of the time noone takes notice of that. “Hey everyone this guy here is our new recruit, give him some small heist jobs” Archwhat ? Never heaerd of him.
Horses are the better companions, they fight better without any equipment needed, and you can ride up straight walls, they tend to break when dropped from heights, tho. When you sprint/silent roll into enemies to get the charge crit they play the “bumping into” soundbits, gets rather silly when you oneshot a necromancer and he tells you “be careful” while collapsing.
There are also quite a few technical issues. When you zone between areas with alot of fog or light effects your fps will drop down alot. Seems to be a memoryleak, relogging gets the fps running again. NPCs spawning in silly locations, like on top of poles. Your own horse will detect you and count as a witness (Well, horse=1000gold, murder=1000g bounty, sort of balances out i guess). Zoneing may also cause the duplication of dragons in the area…
…and this is already way longer than I intended it to be.
I’m already onto my second playthrough as well, and I’m loving it now that I’ve got a feel for how this game handles. In a lot of ways, I love this game because it combines some of my favorite stylistic elements of Oblivion ( among other things, the feeling of a living world full of people and places to interact with ) with some of the better mechanical elements of Fallout, though I do lament the absence of several of the spell effects ( I miss my chameleon spell/enchantment… sure it was broken, but I loved it! ). I had a very buggy first night of the game, including hordes of texture error alerts, and I’ve seen a few NPC’s sitting where they shouldn’t ( including hovering 30 feet over a canal ). All the same, I’m loving this game, from the returning elements to the rich new crafting system, it’s a delight and I cannot wait to see what Bethesda and the modding community bring to us in the years to come.
Well I will not argue that this is an amazing game (one of the best ever for me), there are some problems with it.
First the interface for the PC version is to put it lightly AWFUL but that can be fixed with a mod when one is made.
The mouse control is not that good either and you have to go in to a .ini file to turn of mouse acceleration.
Also that you cant see your total armor value and stuff like that in like a character screen is really annoying, and that you have to go in to the skill menu to see your total health, magic and stamina is annoying as hell. I mean come on, I think that every RPG player will agree with me when I say this: We like stats, we like to see things like “weapon swing time” “Weapon DPS” “Critical chance” “Magic resist” and all that stuff. Because, let’s be honest here, we are all nerds, we like numbers and statistics and all that.
And the skill menu is for me at least really really annoying, it is really hard to navigate that menu with the mouse and I know what you are going to say: “If it is hard to use your mouse then use your keyboard”, well I would… if you actually could do that, all keys are disabled in the skill menu. Also sure the skill menu looks nice and pretty, but we don’t want it to be pretty, we want it to not be annoying as hell.
Now I will end with saying that if I have convinced you not to buy Skyrim with all these things I have said then you better change your mind and go out and buy this game emediatly, because these things are nothing that makes the game unplayeble and If you buy it to PC (which you really should) then you can just get a mod to fix these problems.
You don’t need a mod. Just an Xbox (or similar) pad. Yes, I’m not used to play RPGs with a pad either. But it works so much better than kb/mouse. I was really surprised. (Same works for Dead Island btw)
Suddenly the menu and skill trees work just fine and fluid. I don’t like the fact that I’m somewhat “forced” to use my pad but it’s the game’s only flaw for me.
Already at 2:30 I knew this was going to be a really high score. I cant remember seeing you smile like that EVER. That smile said it all.
Just ordered this game online. When it arrives, I’m going to play the everloving shillings out of it.
Nooo! Commander finally got Joe and blinded him from Skyrims issues!
-Like totally unstable crafting. You can craft and enchant way too powerful gear taking off all challenge from the game. No treasure in game isnt even close as good than some created items are.
- Dragons are pussys. Even on highest difficulty, bears are more scary than most of the dragons are.
- Crappy UI
- Broken destruction magic.
- Most annoying children ever and cant even kill them.
- NPC’s repeating same sentences until you want to kill them, like how every guard has same leg injury.
And much more.
How in the world is a bear at all scary? Just shield bash it, whack it on the noggin, and enjoy your new fur rug.
Great review Joe! I’ve been looking forward to Skyrim sense it was announced, but I need to upgrade my PC before I get it. I might get it for 360, but only after they fix the serious graphic issues with the system. However, Bethesda is making it difficult for me at the moment. Something that may make me take drastic measures to play the game. Their latest patch (which didn’t fix any bugs) makes having a Steam account mandatory. I have to say this is a serious turn off for me. Bethesda, with one patch just alienated a good chunk of their demographic. There are many people who like Steam, but there are also many who hate it. I personally don’t like Steam, but if I want to play Skyrim I have to deal with it?
That is completely ridiculous! I’ll crack the game before I go through them. Steam is one the biggest scams and it boggles the mind how many people fall for it. You think you own those titles you’re buying? Sure you paid for it, but their if servers go down; too bad for you. I suppose I can understand this when it comes to downloaded titles, but Skyrim will be a Hard Copy (my preferred method of ownership) and I still have to run Steam to play off the disk? Screw that!
So yeah I’m a little miffed at this. When I buy a game I expect to be able to play it whenever I want. Not when Steam says I can. Way to drop the ball Bethesda.
Except ofcourse, for the fact that steam has an offline mode, ensuring that you will always have access to your games, there is a clause in their TOS that says if for any reason steam ever becomes completely unavailable they will release a patch to allow full access to your library forever, and have even publicly stated on several occasions that they have a contingency plan to release disc versions to every customer if for some reason they were completely unable to support the service.
Fact of the matter is that steam is the best gaming service on the market, bar none. Please, get educated.
You know what would make Steam better? Not charging more for a game than you can get the physical copy for.
Arkham City is £34.99 on Steam, but you can get a physical copy of the game, plus Batman Begins and The Dark Knight on Blu Ray for £24.85 delivered from an online store called The Hut.
When Steam doesn’t have to account for physical distribution, packaging and other associated costs, the fact that they charge more is pure greed.
They have great sales, and you can get some awesome bargains, but the price of new release titles is far too high.
…then don’t buy the new releases and wait for price drops and sales like any sane human being? It’s as simple as that.
I know about the offline mode. It doesn’t change the fact that you are forced to sign up for a service you don’t want. I’ve also had my issues with Steam. Offline mode doesn’t always work leaving you high and dry and it has habit of screwing Mods and Tweaks.
Calling Steam the best gaming service is your opinion. Please don’t state it as a fact. It’s an opinion I happen to disagree with. I consider Steam to be a glorified Gametap. Many others believe Steam is garbage.
This mainly stems from our dislike for DRM. If you buy a single player game, you shouldn’t have to have an online connection to play it. It’s getting to the point where companies are holding games hostage even though you already paid for it. I bought Oblivion not to long ago and you know what? I was able to play it right out of the box. There were no third party services to sign up for; just the game. What’s wrong with that?
Unfortunately I can’t fault Bethesda for this grievous error because they are contractually obligated due to their exclusivity to Steam. However I can fault them for getting into bed with Valve in the first place. I have nothing against Valve’s games, they are some the best games I’ve played. I just think their game service isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that’s my opinion.
Okay. What FACTS do you have to back up your opinion? Reaprar refuted you with facts, but you don’t really present any of your own. Let’s hear them.
As one that wasn’t pulled into Oblivion very much, I love Skyrim. It’s so well done, minor bugs and gripes aside. It’s really an entertaining game with so much content.
I felt the same about Oblivion for a while, blinded by the ‘shinny shit’ as I put it. Don’t wear those blinders and critically analyze the game.
When I did that for Oblivion, I found a lack-luster game under the pretty (if repetitive) environments.
So you were enjoying the game until you analyzed it with a critical eye? Whatever happen to playing the game for enjoyment? You do realize that if you apply that critical eye to most titles you’ll get the same thing right? Dragon Age was praised for it’s game play, story and choices; as was Mass Effect before it. If you analyze those games however, you’ll find that they are more of the same, just with a different skin. Quest consists of kill said baddie and collect said item. Once you get past the Ooh Shiny! You’ll see the same old same old. Bottom line, if you’re enjoying the game, then enjoy the game.
Actually there are a few gamekilling bugs. At least on the PC. If you hotkey your bow and some magic, if you switch from bow to magic, your hotkey has been forgotten/deleted. So you have to open your favorites again. And why do I need to favorite skills/weapons before I can hotkey them? Wouldn’t it be better if I could hotkey them in normal menu, and have the favorites in favorites. But the biggest bug I have found, is the goddamned autorun bug. Sometimes, if you pause the game or reload you run, instead of walking, and thereby giving away your position if you sneak. And this makes it kinda hard to immerse myself into the game. Plus if you choose other than the default keybinds, the game can go completely apeshit.
The only reason I haven’t bought Skyrim yet is cause I promised the family I’d stop buying games until after the holidays. In other words, they bought it for me and I have to wait for it. Been driving me so crazy, I went back to Oblivion to get me warmed up.
Yeah, you should never buy a game to your child/husband/wife or any gamer as a present, because we do not like to wait for games.
Lucky me, my birthday was November 17th! XD
Damm it why do all the good games come out at the same time leaving me with no money,or social life.
Social what now?
meh 9/10
2 game breaking glitches after about 75+ game hours. Lucky i play on PC so i could pull thru with the command console, however had i played on Xbox i would have thrown the game out the window.
mind explaining how you broke the game? be helpful if others know so they can avoid it.
I’m not totally feeling the epicness yet, maybe I have to play a few hours more.
My favorite is still Morrowind, and with the right mods Oblivion was pretty sweet as well, although those same mods made both games unplayable after a while.
I know what you mean. Though I haven’t played even a sizable chunk of the game (only 2 hours!) to form a mature opinion, I do understand the combat design.
And I must say, Skyrim does feel very, VERY familiar. It kinda feels like Nehrim: Fate’s Edge, except that Nehrim was the best Oblivion mod because it merged Morrowind and Oblivion’s design mechanics while aggregating all the good Oblivion mods after 5 years.
Check it out here, you are the exact kind of person this mod was aimed for:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/nehrim-at-fates-edge
English trailer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zmeYRxwngM
*chuckle* 60 hours Joe?
Take my 111 hours and counting!
At some point in the main story I just started trying to work through the endless pile of side quests the game had to offer. I think I have spent a good 150 hours on this game (give or take) and I haven’t even started to look for the elder scroll. As far as those two people I left in the dragon temple are concerned, I either left Skyrim, or got killed. When actually I am just fetching magic potion beakers, killing evil mages for long forgotten goddesses, and having tea with the deridic prince of madness in the head of a long dead king. (If you haven’t done so yet travel to solitude and look for the quest given by the guy in cheap looking cloths. He mentions his master in the blue palace.)
after reading reviews on blistered thumbs I decided to buy the game so I bought it online. it’s been five days and I can’t stop thinking about it. After watching Joe’s review I really can’t wait any longer. Now I’m thinking about mods and I haven’t even started 0_o. Plus this is my first Elder Scrolls games. I’m so HYPED UP.
I’m loving Skyrim, and one biiiig, HUGHEEEEE improvement for me is DUAL WIELDING ACTUALLY WORKING AS SUCH!!!!! It feels so natural to combat with two weapons at a time now, in Oblivion it was nearly broken as I remember, and now you actually have perks for it!!! no further comments needed XD
Peter Molyneux better be taking some notes from this game as how to “make the best RPG of all time”
yes! the second 10! i was so excited about this rating! though, even if you didn’t rate it so high, your beard gave you away, Joe!
I love Skyrim,like i did Oblvion and Morrowind before it.
However on PC the bugs,crash to desktop occurances and BSOD i experiance put me off playing for too long.Im aware of the tip to set your sound settings to 16bit 44100 hz and it helps somewhat,or it could a hardware fault or conflict with my Geforce 9800 GT.
with a 9800gt you should be playing on low to mid settings withouth any issues. I’m playing it, and I didn’t encounter any bug yet (just had one crash, and even then the game closed without any bug report or anything, so I’m cool so far)
I’m playing on a 9600 with medium settings and no problems. On a single occasion the game quit to desktop before reaching the title screen, but other than that it’s been surprisingly good to me considering I could never get Fallout 3 to the title screen.
might wanna try updating the driver to the latest release along with updating direct x
I done all that but the same problem persists..I have many newer PC games but Skyrim has been the only one to date to cause these problems.If you goto the STEAM Skyrim forums you will find many many posts reporting similar bugs and crashes.
Thanks for the advice though.
The second to last Western RPG? Oh God!
(Sorry, I had to do it. Penultimate doesn’t mean what you think it means, Joe.)
It doesn’t mean only what you think it means either, though. It can also mean second best.
So, Joe, you’ve been holding out on us? What’s this ultimate RPG?
Oblivion wasn’t my game. Like at all.
But good god do I love Skyrim. Never thought I would be really playing an Elder Scrolls title again.
This is my game of the year without a doubt.
I even said to the developers “Impress me” and its done that and beyond.
I’m 110 hours in and still no end in sight
I LOVE my Daedric armor and daedric warhammer
i was personally kinda let down by the main quest sens i think the darkbortherhood and thives guild quests where better than the main quest
and beaing a prisoner is getting old after 3 times -_- (morrowind, oblivion and skyrim)
also the hugh talking about the elfven/imperial war that endded with the banning worship of talos you know what i want to play that!!
and the ammout of dragons you need to kill gets kinda annoying, i have had to kill 3 dragons within 5 min. it dose take away the feeling of killing a dragon :/
Eh, to be fair the main quest has never been Bethesda’s strong point. The strongest they’ve ever done, for me and out of the games I’ve played in the series, was Morrowind’s – and even that was fairly lackluster at the end of the day. (And really the only reason I find it better than Oblivion’s, is Dagoth Ur who was quite compelling.)
It’s rather hard to write a good story when the player character is basically allowed to do whatever the hell they want in between main quest missions. That doesn’t excuse the poor stories for the most part, but it does explain why they have such trouble writing them. That, and you have to remember, that whatever happens in the main story becomes canon for the next game. Which is why they rarely, say, make the main character ‘king’ or even a ‘God’ unless they can reasonably explain them away like with what they did to the CoC. As otherwise they might be forced to assign a name and race to a character that can be essentially anything the player wants them to be.
As for the fight between the Thalmor and Empire, you’re not alone in wanting to see that happen. However, the Thalmor are such good and interesting antagonists – especially since they want to write man out of existence and return everything to Aetherius – that I’m glad they didn’t oneshot them. (Personality wise they’re not so interesting, I’ll admit, as most of them are pretty much just mustache twirling cliches – but their motives and how they have both Valenwood and Elsweyr under their control is interesting from a lore standpoint) Though I do hope they’re dealt with in the next game, to an extent.
the thing is that if you write a compelling story i won’t jump to the side quest rather i will play out the main quest first but if they don’t hook me in i am just gonna run off so your agruement dosen’t really make sens
Insane game is insane.
Awesome review Joe.
You could also do those darkbrotherhood/theives quests in your “good alignment” playthrough… afterall… you play it your way.
60 hours? Pfff… I’m on 110h and I still haven’t started the dark brotherhood quests. Only reached Markath yesterday.
talk about dynamic gameplay, was just about to attack an enemy and up behind me appears a fugitive and gives me all his loot before running off. My only responses to give were “wait, explain yourself” and “Umm…” XD I’m totally addicted to this game
This has happened to me a few times. It would be fine if the owner of the stolen goods would stop trying to talk to you in the middle of an intense fight and GET YOU KILLED! That fucking hunter forced me back a good four minutes just because he couldn’t wait for me to finish off the four bandits I was fighting to see if I knew where his fucking Fur boots of resist frost where. Next time I come across one of these fuckers who talk to you no matter the situation your in, I’m taking my deridic mace of soul trap straight to his brain. TAKE THAT YOU BITCH! YOUR SOUL IS MINE NOW!
I havent bought Skyrim and i guess i wont. Mainly because it seems like such a massive game with stats, armor, spells etc. I just find it kind of hopeless to get into to. Oh well, i guess you cant please everyone. The review was fun never the less.
Actually, the stats and magic have been extremely streamlined. Basically you get to choose health, mana and stamina when you level up, and the spells are pretty straightforward and few in each magic tree. It makes the game easier to get into, but I kinda miss the wealth of spells you could have in oblivion, and the enhancements you could make.
4 black souls = 100% chamlion, and that was just broken in oblivion just saying 13x dmg with dagger and they never beaing able to hit you breaks the game (and geting 4 black soul gems and souls isn’t that hard if you know what your doing)
streamlining it removed all the broken stuff, but now you have more of a unbalance in the option you can go, mage beaing the best sens you have ranged good healing and you can run while casting spells
It’s the first Bethesda game I’ve been able to actually play for extended periods, so it certainly does something right. It’s not interesting enough to be my GOTY though.
While the game is more stable than previous Bethesda works, one easily reproducible game breaking bug lies in the UI (which is absolutely shocking on PC). Try rebinding some keys; specifically the Use/Action or the weapon take out/put away key to a mouse button. Certain UI functions only recognise keyboard input, so actions like ‘drop item’ become impossible. Also, with keys rebound, you’ll notice a lot of instances where keys are hardcoded to the defaults anyway. A pretty elementary system whereby Bethesda made a LOT of elementary mistakes during its implementation. But at least the game actually runs.
A thing that’s a bit silly, which you didn’t mention joe, and which also was in oblivion, is the stealth/sneak system.
I play as an assasin using dual-wielded daggers, bow and light armor (nightingale armor). I’m totally loving the stealth, BUT there are many very very silly moments where you will be like “I’m right in front of you you dumbass!!” and then he starts searching for you by walking in the opposite direction of where i’m actually standing. But it’s actually more fun than it is hurting the gameplay.
When your sneak get’s lvl high enough the NPC’s won’t see you even whel you are standing right in front of them and only like 3-4 meters away in daylight. At best they will be like “Is someone there??” and start searching, but still providing you enough time to hide.
The stealth system is very silly, I’m not saying its bad though
But you didn’t really comment on the stealth mechanics Joe, so I thought I’d just mention it.
Other than that i completely agree
Joe, I love you!
You even look like you’ve been unable to shave because you were playing for weeks.
I have only one complaint, the game lags after you play it for 14 hour straight. LOL
Skyrim will defenetly be game of the year least on PC.
It really deserves all the praise it can get, it turned me, one who didn’t get the deal with Oblivion, to become a total addict. Well played Bethesda, well played.
Your intro was brilliant, too. Laughed out loud <:
Great review Joe. This game is definitely Game of the Year. I just hope they fix the PS3 lag issue soon because at 100 hours and a save file size of 10MB my game is unplayable.
I am very unsure whether or not to get it lets see if you can convince me
found
it
really
spectacular
too