Torah Dreidelberg said:
I was so hyped for Skyrim a couple months before it came out. I had played and really enjoyed elder scrolls 4 as well as fallout 3.I even had it preloaded on steam for launch day and played it at midnight. I had a major skyrim weekend that week and got to 25-30 hours and beat the game. Ever since beating the game every time I try to play and do side quests I am underwhelmed and bored with in 10-15 minutes. Ive tried many mods they don't seem to help at all either, what could be the problem?
Unfortunately...yeah. You've got a valid point. Might as well lay down some bullets to make this easier to organize.
-The main quest is pretty good. It brings you to some great sights, you fight interesting/terrifying things, and all that good stuff.
-The guild quests are bad. Mostly just bad. I think I stole some legal documents during the Thieves Guild quests, a picked someone's pocket to get in, but that was pretty much it. Oh, and I framed an innocent man for murder. So technically I stole his happy future, or something like that. The storyline of it was absolute shit, but I'll leave that aside. Compare it to the Thieves Guild quests in Oblivion: you
stole a fucking Elder Scroll and
took on the mantle of the Gray Fox.
What did I get from Skyrim's branch of the Thieves Guild? Well, I had to sell my soul to a daemon prince, and then I got some mediocre light armor. And immediately afterward, I discovered that I'll wander a tomb for eternity as a ghost until I go insane and become a crazy ghost. What fun.
-The Companions were underwhelming. They had one of the best scenes (and threats) in the game when Farkas is surrounded by Silver Hand [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQrLRS75w-U], and then it built up to an amazing amount of nothing. A few dungeon raids, and then nothing. I was expecting some sort of duel with Hircine or something, or at least
seeing him during the questline. Nocturnal showed up to gloat during the Thieves Guild line, but no, Hircine was busy doing...other stuff, I guess.
-The College of Winterholm just kinda fell flat. It had all the components of an epic questline, but half of them happened off-screen, and there was rarely anything to show for it. Oh no, X character died? He was such a powerful wizard! Surely the battle that killed him reshaped mountains with the fury of his arcane m...oh. No, he just fell over. And everything else was fine. Yay.
-The Dark Brotherhood questline was actually pretty good. Any complaints are likely overshadowed by how much fun it was. But I guess some of it was rather uninventive. Most of the 'assassinations' were just going to the location, picking a fight with someone, and then killing them in plain view for all to see. It was basically just a normal encounter with a hostile NPC if you said the right thing. No sneaking required. Just insult him/her, then kill 'em in self-defense to make it look clean. I felt more like a cop on
The Shield than a member of the Dark Brotherhood.
-The Empire vs. Stormcloaks was kinda bland. It was mostly just knocking over fortresses, and the only variety was what the guys inside looked like. For all the "The Empire is being oppressive and tried to kill you!" stuff I hear to make the Stormcloaks look good, I played Oblivion. I saw the last member of the Septim bloodline sacrifice himself to save
the entire world, and in the weakness that resulted, half their provinces or neighbors responded by seceding or attacking, respectively. And the Stormcloaks just bang on about how they're meanieheads for not letting them publicly worship Talos, and that religious tolerance is good, and how Skyrim is for the Nords and not all those filthy lesser ra-
OH DEAR
-Fighting dragons was awesome. It didn't really stop being awesome later. So no complaints there.
-I guess the world just felt kind of shallow. It was a wonderfully diverse and expansive world, but it only went down a couple feet. It was a joy and a privilege to wade through it all, but the moment I tried to dive, I hit my head on bedrock.
-Sorta goes with the previous point: so many characters, all with names and stories, but none of them with character. It didn't use the Oblivion/Fallout method of zooming in on the person when you stop to talk to them, and that alleviated the issue of facial animations looking unnatural, but it led to the even worse problem of characters becoming indistinct, like the Dragonborn is in dire need of glasses. You were almost never close enough to get good looks at characters, and even then, none of them felt like they were main characters. One guy in the Thieves Guild even alludes to a quest that would explain his cryptic nickname, but it never happens. Ever. It's more of that 'vast yet shallow' thing: so much surface-area, but no depth to it. I can barely name a handful of characters out of a cast of hundreds, and that's a problem.
