I may never get around to playing Skyrim. Is this something I should feel bad about?

[stroopwafel]

None of the Bethesda games are very good if you only look at their disparate parts like combat, writing or quests but taken has a whole these games can have an irressistible charm. Exploring the map and discovering new locations and finding new gear and loot feels rewarding thanks to the kind of gentle flow and easy mechanics these games always have. Skyrim is by far the best game Bethesda ever made and their format just 'clicks' with this game and offers insane replay value. There is just something about those beautiful forests, dwindling lakes and snowy mountain tops. I also love the music in Skyrim. It is soothing and ambient and somehow always seems to hit the right note when you are exploring unlike for example Witcher 3 that just loops the same tune over and over.

You don't have to play Skyrim to 'complete' it which isn't something you should focus on with this game anyway. Skyrim's strength lies solely in just leisurely exploring that huge, multi-layered map full of lush nature.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Well, the likeliness of dragons depends on where you are at in the story and where you are traveling. Until you fight your first dragon for Whiterun, dragons just don't show up, then as you go through the story, frequency increases until you get to a point where it decreases. By the time you beat the main plot, it goes back down, though they still can show up.

But you also need to go places they show up, some places have higher chance than others.

It may not have been a bug, it may have been a combination of those two things...

I mean, it COULD have been a bug, but that is not the only possibility.

I'm pretty sure it was a bug. Like one time music cued, I could physically see the dragon in the distance, but apparently my character was wearing super-dragon repellant. Like it just pissed off, disappeared, tense music defaulted to slow, dulcet tones ... we're talking a good 30 levels from when they were attacking me to never once challenging me.

But the primary crux of my point is this ... it's kind of awful that in the back of your head constantly is the fear that no dragons will accost you again, and you have reasons--gameplay reasons, why you need them to.

And I wasn't levelling up that fast. I was doing my Lina Inverse thing of being Destruction heavy, and just wandering about the countryside, frying bandits and plundering random stuff. Basically how I always play Skyrim.

It's what I like to call'D&D-syndrome' ... where you can pretend to bea mighty hero, but in truth you're just an excessively violent homeless person, looking for an excuse for your psychopathy. You know, the cognitive dissonance that you get that the only reason your L1-L2 character is kicking kobolds in the face in an ancient dungeon is because some townsfolk told you about the location.

That not once do you remember there being proof that they were actually doing anything wrong. Just that you heard there were kobolds somewhere in someplace that adventurers routinely die in, and suddenly you're kicking in their front door.

And that's how you start your adventuring career, and nothing will clean off that actual act of murderous self-interest beyond you becoming more powerful and that circumstances, not actual personal agency to do good, becomes your only justification.Like a big bad kidnapping a princeling or the like as the threats become bigger and badder.

 

[sanquin]

Eh, if you have time problems anyone berating you for not playing Skyrim is stupid. Sure, it's one of the most popular games of the last decade. But if you prefer to put what little time you have to game into other games, then all power to you. In the end it's you yourself who should decide how to spend your free time. Not friends or random people who think you "NEED" to play Skyrim for some reason.

Also, if you do think about playing Skyrim in the future. Play some Oblivion first. The graphics and modelling are better in Skyrim, but overall it's a very similar experience. So better try a game you already have than buy a game you might not even like and waste money on it.

 

[Roguebubble]

No, of course not.

I would say not to be intimidated by those play hours as skyrim is a game where you can see only a quarter of all it has to offer and still have a satisfying experience. On my first play through I skipped the thief and dark brotherhood quests and still had a lot of fun. It's a game where you craft your own story within the framework of the game, the only comparison I can offer is to strategy games like Civ and Total War campaign where you a driving force while the game gives you some long-term objectives and challenges. That and I fell into a "one more quest" loop that would make hours disappear just like the "one more turn" drive I get from strategy games but that could just be my gaming habit.

I would agree to either play Oblivion first or another Bethesda game you already own or even to wait until Starfield and ES6 and go into them blind.

 

[Kerg3927]

I played Skryrim for about a week, and found it incredibly boring. I slogged all the way through Dragon Age: Inquisition, but ended up hating it. Then I played Witcher 3, and although it was the best of those three, I was ready for it to be overwith by the end.

Turns out, I just don't like massive open world games. I'm too much of an OCD completionist, and I get bogged down in tedium and bored to tears trying to explore everything and do all the quests. For me this also greatly distracts from and reduces the urgency of the main story, and I love a good RPG main story.

So now, no matter how good the reviews and popularity of a game, if it is described as "massive open world" or "sandbox" and/or if the marketing brags about the size of its world, I run the other way.

So I wouldn't feel bad. Sounds like really long games are not your thing.

 

[KingsGambit_v1legacy]

So I'll preface my post with this: I'm going to be biased because I am a TES fan since Morrowind's release, way back in the early Naughties. Morrowind was, and in some ways still is, a unique sandbox game that is unlikely to be matched for its scope, depth and immersion. While my last Skyrim playthru was some time ago, I am sure I'll return at some point. I have sunk several hundred hours into it over multiple playthrus: Stealth Archer (because obvs), Pyromancer, Druid, Werewolf, Vampire so far. It's very good, but it's probably fair to say if you were going to play it, you would've done by now.

I think I'll get the most important aspect of Skyrim out of the way first and other stuff later. What Skyrim has, that few others can match, is immersion. I described it to a friend once as being the first TES game to pass "the singularity", by which I mean when game technology (hardware, engine, scope, design, aesthetic, mechanics, visuals, story/lore, etc) are all at a point where the world can really suck you in properly. It doesn't have the jank of older games.

What do I mean by this? Well to clarify, I'm not saying Skyrim is the best game (or even the best in the franchise), but it is a great game and one where the player can genuinely spend many dozens of hours and have them be meaningful. Other games can also have great open worlds, I'm not denying this either, but anyone who's played Skyrim will still know the towns and cities, the roads, the levels, the characters. You can be so many different things and it's so easy to get lost in the living, breathing world.

This is such an important aspect of a good game, the immersion, and Skyrim manages it in spades. It's why it's so popular and still sports such a huge community of modders and fans. It pulls you into the "secondary world" (as Tolkein would put it) and you can play so many different types of character, each of which can work and keep you immersed.

Beyond that, there's the fact that it's moddable. You can have so many more weapons, armours, pets, spells, alter gameplay mechanics, graphics changes, you name it, there's a mod for it. There's also a *lot* of content. The main quest is about 20ish hours, with the Civil War secondary quest about half that. Then there are four faction chains (Warriors, Mages, Assassins, Thieves), two expansive DLCs (Dawnguard and Dragonborn), about 15 or so Daedric quests and a host of side=quests. All of these activities reward really cool and powerful items, mostly differentiated by how useful they are to a given character. Modders have created expansion sized mods as well, expanding the game further.

If you enjoy sandbox games, fantasy RPGs and open-world approach, you won't go wrong. But if such a large game seems daunting, understandable, don't worry. You are missing out but people have different tastes and it's entirely reasonable that TES isn't your cup of tea. I would recommend it; it's an expansive, immersive experience and, while I don't think it's as good as Morrowind, I suspect it's impossible for any modern game to live up to games from that era. If there are other games you'd prefer to play, it's your prerogative and power to you, but if you give Skyrim a go, a couple of hours in you'll find yourself sucked in and suffering from "I'll just do one more thing." syndrome

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

So I'll preface my post with this: I'm going to be biased because I am a TES fan since Morrowind's release, way back in the early Naughties. Morrowind was, and in some ways still is, a unique sandbox game that is unlikely to be matched for its scope, depth and immersion. While my last Skyrim playthru was some time ago, I am sure I'll return at some point. I have sunk several hundred hours into it over multiple playthrus: Stealth Archer (because obvs), Pyromancer, Druid, Werewolf, Vampire so far. It's very good, but it's probably fair to say if you were going to play it, you would've done by now.

Plus the fact that Morrowind actually allows you to be .... actually whimsical? I find it difficult to describe what I meanby that, but Morrowind lets you be like a wizard in a mage tower who is certifiably crazy and just a massive troll. The spell creation stuff in Morrowind is just great.

Like recreating the Icarian Flight spell where your wizard just basically magically meteors into the centre of a township and then just bounces off.

Like, the idea of it in your head will give you a chuckle. You're just your average market stall keeper, suddenly this mad hatter mage just slams into the ground right in front of you, buys a whole bunch of ingredients, and just bounces off into the sunset.

You can just levitate, fly, whatever. Morrowind is basically a vast improvement over everything else that came before, gave you everything you could want, and the game itself says; "lol, break shit to your heart's content... we're not even going to bother trying to balance stuff so go nuts..." and on top of that gave you a really interesting setting with interesting religions, divine plots, ridiculous number of places to loot...

If you want to invent the Dragon Slave that just destroys everything you can... Skyrium in comparisonfeels .... ehhh. You just don't feel likeyou can do as much as you could in Morrowind. You can't just speed run the game in about 5 minutes if you choose to, or take your own pace with things. It forces you to play the game how it wants you to play.

With Skyrim, you just end up playing one of three variants of stealth archer.... becauethe fights can be boring, and the spells never let you feel powerful. So you just want to kill stuff asquickly, easily, and efficiently as you can.

 

[Dalisclock]

So I wouldn't feel bad. Sounds like really long games are not your thing.

I liked the Witcher 3, but I also liked Witcher 2(Witcher 1 was the definition of mediocre) so I was rather invested by that point. OTOH, I didn't do everything by a long shot and I was quite happy when I finished the game knowing I could move on to something else.

But yeah, I've had a hard time really finding massive open world games I liked. The last I played was MGSV and while the moment to moment gameplay was great, the game overall had so many problems I was so glad when I was done with it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Funny that, I finally started playing Skyrim a month (?) ago and so far have clocked in about 80 hours.

I'd say it's pretty easy to fall into a very commonplace routine: you go out questing, purge the same goddamn catacomb of undead, load yourself and your NPC escort full of loot, return to wherever to peddle the wares, repeat. No quest has a satisfying reward (I'm worth $50,000 and still getting pitched $100 missions fairly late in the game; this on top of the fact that money is practically useless), and the quests themselves get pretty repetitive. As for character building, if you're just winging it you end up yet another "stealthy archer" plucking away at every enemy from a distance.

Having said that I have to admit the world gets really immersive and it's a lot of fun to explore and lose yourself in it. It's a perfectly good timesink if you're looking to unwind for a while and have good old fashioned sandbox fun. There's a decent balance of "do whatever you want" and tightly scripted adventuring. And despite the trademark Bethesda woodenness the world is effectively depicted as something living and organic. Also the music's fantastic.

 

[Dalisclock]

I would agree to either play Oblivion first or another Bethesda game you already own or even to wait until Starfield and ES6 and go into them blind.

I posted this earlier but apparently my post got eaten.

I've beaten Fallout 3 and generally liked it, mostly just for the feeling of wandering about and finding new vaults and encounters all over the place. I haven't played it since around the time it came out and went back for the first DLC(Operation Anchorage, which felt like a bad attempt to imitate CoD with an engine not designed to do so). I just haven't been able to bring myself to retry Fallout 3(or NV, which I liked more, though that's not Besthesa designed) for pretty much the same reason.

 

[Trunkage]

I'd say skip Skyrim. And Oblivion. And Morrowind. Play a real RPG... Daggerfall.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I'd say skip Skyrim. And Oblivion. And Morrowind. Play a real RPG... Daggerfall.

Where you trollop past random generated landscape and can actually be forced to go through 80 hours of non-stop travel because the game broke?

Call of Chernobyl mod build of the STALKER Franchise, with Warfare mod, weapons pack, and quest and fast travel fixes. There's a shooty fun pseudo sandbox that you can just mindlessly play until you get bored.

 

[Trunkage]

I'd say skip Skyrim. And Oblivion. And Morrowind. Play a real RPG... Daggerfall.

Where you trollop past random generated landscape and can actually be forced to go through 80 hours of non-stop travel because the game broke?

If you didn't add the word random there, I would have been confused about which game you were talking about.

But it all seriousness. Daggerfall taught me good save hygiene strategies

 

[wings012]

Setting aside the game in question, I don't think you should ever feel bad for not having played something. There's only so much time in the world and plenty more to do than just videogames even if it is your passion/hobby.

I personally find Bethesda game to be good timesinks, but not particularly fulfilling. The sum of the whole is great since there's really few other options for their particular brand of open world. But the writing is never really amazing, the gameplay is always somewhat shoddy, it's always buggy in some way or the other. Dragons may seem awesome at first, but for most part you're just lobbing spells/arrows or awkwardly swinging away at some snapping jaws and avoiding the odd breath - you'll get better bang for your buck if you played Dark Souls or Monster Hunter instead. The individual components are all kinda rubbish but come together to create something rather charming if you're willing to overlook the flaws.

It's like a cheap buffet where you can stuff yourself with huge variety at over a tastier but far less voluminous meal.

I think the main quest is definitely doable in under 20-30 hours if you really focus and don't fuck about. But simply blitzing the main quest is kinda missing the point of these kinda games, which is the freedom to generally muck about and the funky emergent things that can occur in a less structured environment.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Everyone's already said no. Leaving the honest reply of mine to be quite useless at this point. So that leaves me with no choice but to say yes. But only because it raises the chances of you feeling bad enough to drink, and then maybe enough to share a drink with me, then two then three, and then falling madly in beautiful friendship where numerous future frolicing adventures are had over time, until the jealousy starts to rear it's ugly head and one of us microwaves the other's African grey parrot over an imagined betrayal at that party when attention was given to somebody else more charasmatic, eventually culminating in a dramatic passionate murder and cover-up which will be documented in one of those typical late-night crime programs narrated by a sincere but indistinct American male voice.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I'd say skip Skyrim. And Oblivion. And Morrowind. Play a real RPG... Daggerfall.

Where you trollop past random generated landscape and can actually be forced to go through 80 hours of non-stop travel because the game broke?

If you didn't add the word random there, I would have been confused about which game you were talking about.

But it all seriousness. Daggerfall taught me good save hygiene strategies

Daggerfall also taught me multisave hygiene ... and that I am capable of being like this...

 

[Roguebubble]

I would agree to either play Oblivion first or another Bethesda game you already own or even to wait until Starfield and ES6 and go into them blind.

I posted this earlier but apparently my post got eaten.

I've beaten Fallout 3 and generally liked it, mostly just for the feeling of wandering about and finding new vaults and encounters all over the place. I haven't played it since around the time it came out and went back for the first DLC(Operation Anchorage, which felt like a bad attempt to imitate CoD with an engine not designed to do so). I just haven't been able to bring myself to retry Fallout 3(or NV, which I liked more, though that's not Besthesa designed) for pretty much the same reason.

In that case wait until you have more time or the itch for that "wandering and discovering new things" gameplay and then play Skyrim (or if they're out possibly Starfield or ES6). The music and visuals for Skyrim create an superb atmosphere and when you explore a Dwarven ruin it'll be like a new vault all over again.

 

[PFCboom]

Me and my family had always, always been about a generation behind the rest of gaming culture. In 1992, at the very edge of my 5 year-old memory, we had the NES; a few years later, the SNES; a few years later, the Sega Genesis 3, and when everyone was losing their damn minds over the PS2, I was hyped AF for Chrono Cross on the PSone (the smaller one). I got a Gamecube around when the Wii - then called the "Revolution" - was gathering hype.
Fast-forward to 2011. I had a then-bleeding-edge gaming laptop computer from OriginPC, the people who WERE with Alienware but thought they were too mainstream. One month later, the premiere PC classic RPG debuts its latest in its mega-hit franchise; I had spent the previous month losing my damn mind over ESIV: Oblivion, so of COURSE I bought and played ESV as soon as I possibly could. Make no mistake, I played that game from 68 hours on precisely ONE character, and every single hour was utterly magnificent.

But here's the catch:

A couple years ago from this day, I attempted to play Skyrim again. I couldn't. I tried playing vanilla, there was little charm; I tried modding, and when Skyrim refused to launch properly, well, at that time in my life, I didn't have the energy or tolerance for that kind of shenanigans.

I guess what I'm saying is: You have passed by that generation. In this day and age where many games from the past is readily available, you don't HAVE to play and love every game from the past. Wait for ESVI, play and love that; or don't. Play something else that catches your attention, something that you can play conveniently with the time and energy you have at that moment.

 

[Dalisclock]

I guess what I'm saying is: You have passed by that generation. In this day and age where many games from the past is readily available, you don't HAVE to play and love every game from the past. Wait for ESVI, play and love that; or don't. Play something else that catches your attention, something that you can play conveniently with the time and energy you have at that moment.

That's kinda what I've resorted to doing. Finish a game and figure out what game I want to play next based on what I'm interested in at the moment. I broke off in the middle of Hollow Knight to play Unavowed(partially since I'd been waiting for a new Wadjet game for quite a while and I'd hit a bit of a wall in HK). Now that I'm done with that, I'll either go back to Hollow Knight and see if I can finish it, or take a stab at Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

And I know what you mean about the "Moment has passed you by". So, among other things, I never played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. On one hand, it's one of those games I've heard is a classic forever and ever and I grew up on Link to the Past(beating that like a half dozen times), but I didn't have an N64 so I missed it. And while every so often I think "I would like to see what the fuss is about", there's the problem that it's a 20 year old game at this point and I suspect I probably wouldn't find it nearly as awesome as it's made out to be because I didn't play it around the time it came out.

 

[RaikuFA]

Depends. I personally love the game just cause I can explore and there?s meaning to it.