Skyrim will be declared on its release to be Game of hte Year by critics, despite its buggy freeze-prone engine, unbalanced gameplay, a counter-intuitive leveling system that prompts you to avoid being good at skills you need for your class, and a keynote highly regarded stage actor to do the voice acting for a pivotal but short-lived main character who dies really quickly in the main storyline, or after 100 hours of gameplay because the main quest is not compelling enough to bother with until you get bored of doing the side quests granted to you by clones of that one guy who constantly informs you to Stop Right There Criminal Scum.ten.to.ten said:
Bethesda has a history for making mistakes like these, and if they show the same care and attention to the glaring issues like 'how do levels work in an rpg' or 'make the rendering engine work during times that aren't standing still' or 'how not to erase savefiles' then you can make a case for 'Game of the Year.'
They have yet to show they are capable of doing this on a fundamental level. As much as I love Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Fallout: NV, it isn't because of the polish that Bethesda put into them, and there are games that have comparable enjoyment but considerably greater polish. Unless you have no sense of pattern recognition, or the memory of a retarded chihuahua on weed, there's absolutely no indication that Skyrim will be the perfect, top of the heap, polished game that a 'Game of the Year' would indicate.
Bethesda. They make FUN games, they make HUGE games, but they have NEVER made a game even close to perfect. Or, if you want to save some mana, $Perfect.
