All Skyrim needs is...

[Proverbial Jon]

Ahh yes, The Elder Scrolls. Just give any new release enough time and all conversations will turn to how the franchise has never been the same since Morrowind. Brilliant.

I challenge you to find another current gen game as expansive and time consuming as Skyrim. Sure, it's not perfect but it's a damned fine experience all the same and a template that's not replicated nearly enough for my liking.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Ahh yes, The Elder Scrolls. Just give any new release enough time and all conversations will turn to how the franchise has never been the same since Morrowind. Brilliant.

I challenge you to find another current gen game as expansive and time consuming as Skyrim. Sure, it's not perfect but it's a damned fine experience all the same and a template that's not replicated nearly enough for my liking.

Elder Scrolls is the only game I have ever seen have people hate it, yet still put 100+ hours into it.

 

[SajuukKhar]

I don't know how anyone can think a bunch of manly men chanting bullcrap that sounds a bit like the Elder Scrolls theme can be as good as - or maybe even better than - those lovely swelling orchestral themes from Morrowind and Oblivion - especially Morrowind.

Maybe because the entirety of Oblivion's soundtrack was, while good by video game music standards, terribly generic.

Oblivion's soundtrack was the same overused classical music that you hear almost everything else that uses classical music use.

Skyrim's theme has so much more impact, and force, behind it. It was far less... generic, and far more interesting.

 

[Soopy]

Ahh yes, The Elder Scrolls. Just give any new release enough time and all conversations will turn to how the franchise has never been the same since Morrowind. Brilliant.

I challenge you to find another current gen game as expansive and time consuming as Skyrim. Sure, it's not perfect but it's a damned fine experience all the same and a template that's not replicated nearly enough for my liking.

I would love to see it replicated. Perhaps we might see some innovation or at least competition to raise the bar on quality.
Imagine if another company made a TESesque game, that had no/few bugs and a competent storyline.

On the music topic. I liked Morrowinds intro and didn't mind Oblivions.

Skyrims was awesome when I first loaded it up, but its gotten annoying now. Dunno what it is, the "hur hur hur" at the start does my head in.

 

[SajuukKhar]

Maybe it's because I like wandering around windswept, grassy cliffs while listening to soaring orchestral tunes rather than listening to The Rock having whooping cough in my ear in a echo'ey cathedral.

Probably.

I enjoyed Skyrim's landscape because it wasn't everything that every other fantasy game had done before, though admittedly it had been done before just less often, and it's music wasn't the same thing I had been hearing for years in fantasy settings.

I never found wandering the exact same midevil-esque landscape I had seen in literally hundreds of different movies/tv shows/games before while listening to the same classical music that every B-Rated movie used to be particularly fun. I never felt like I was in Elder scrolls while playing Oblivion, I felt like I was in just some other generic fantasy game.

Skyrim brought Morrowind's magic back for me, although in a different way.
-Morrowind had they very new world, undiscovered country, feel to it. Exploring it was fun because it felt like something were no man had gone before.
-Skyrim has the exact opposite, it has a very OLD world feel, the most ancient of ancient. Exploring it was fun because I wanted to discover the lost secrets of the farthest farthest past.
-Oblivion on the other hand, it felt to old to be new, and to new to be old. Oblivion was like the land were people were everything was just... there.

 

[shasjas]

the secret to all tes games is use of mods. they are alright games without that, but they become really good when you find the right ones

 

[O maestre]

I think the worst part about (as a fan) Skyrim is the familiarity. It looks exactly like Norway, and with some modifications could look very familiar to most of Canada and Scandinavia and some of USA. With those being substantial game markets, I think people need a bit more "alien" in their fantasy games.

That said, I still rank Skyrim higher than Oblivion (but obviously not higher than Morrowind)

i know exactly what you mean in regards to familiarity, when the game came out last winter, it was easy to get immersed, but i was never swooned by the environment like so many others. All i had to do was go out side and i was still in "skyrim". lol it was kinda dumb if you think about it, the point of playing games is usually to provide escape and fantasy, and the whole northern planes and wastes and pseudo-scandinavian culture was not really fantasy.

i wish they had given skyrim a more alien feel like you wrote, besides the dwemer ruins, skyrim is so incredibly.... vanilla fun vanilla but still vanilla