Skyrim fanboys, chill out. . .

[hawkeye52]

Still, it's fun to imagine with all the hype surrounding the game that somewhere this song is playing out in someone's head as they wait to pick up their copy.

Was it sad that it was for me while I have been waiting for my delivery this morning

 

[The Funslinger]

its ok...it will die down..eventually

though I may in fact join the darkside..I palyed some of it in the store...it looked really good

I don't begrudge anyone for buying and enjoying Skyrim--I likely will--but goddamn it, the hype has been suffocating, especially in a year with so much else to talk about.

Well, I've found that as of late there have been far more threads bitching about Skyrim, to be honest.

 

[Afterglow-]

its ok...it will die down..eventually

though I may in fact join the darkside..I palyed some of it in the store...it looked really good

I don't begrudge anyone for buying and enjoying Skyrim--I likely will--but goddamn it, the hype has been suffocating, especially in a year with so much else to talk about.

Well, I've found that as of late there have been far more threads bitching about Skyrim, to be honest.

Indeed. Look at the first page, "who didn't buy skyrim today", "skyrim and why im ALREADY sick of it", "In my mind Skyrim has already failed on one level.", "So What about Skyrim?".

 

[MoNKeyYy]

Skyrim fanboys really need to stop with their consensus GOTY proclamations. Because the fact is, right now it has around 95 on Metacritic, on all three platforms. Like Portal 2 (which is smarter). And Arkham City (which is more streamlined). And Uncharted 3 (which is more cinematic).

Have you played it? Fully? Or even for more than a few hours? I noticed you're from Toronto and that you posted this around midnight Calgary time roughly when I was recieving my copy so you can't have played for any longer than a couple hours before posting. So I guess my question is: How would you know?

The Elder Scrolls series in general is a pretty intelligent series, maybe less so in Oblivion but Skyrim has seemed pretty smart in the 3 and a half hours I've played it.

Can you define streamlined for me? The Elder Scrolls and Bethesda games in general have a reputation for open, non-linear gameplay, so critisizing Skyrim for not having streamlined gameplay structure is akin to critisizing a calculator for using too many numbers. If you prefer a streamlined experience cool, but using a personal preferance as a general critisism of a game as opposed to using it as a reason you don't like it seems quite silly. If we're talking about a streamlined experience or presentation, the menus and UI are easy to use, the graphics are sharp and faffing about is almost totally optional.

Cinematic is again, a fairly subjective thing to base critisism off of, and the comparison isn't even particularly apt becasue Skyrims opening scene is pretty jaw dropping. I haven't played Uncharted 3 so I can't really make the judgement, but even if 3 surpasses 1&2 (which I have played) it'll find some competition in Skyrim.

I'm a Skyrim fanboy, don't get me wrong, midnight release and all that, but I've never considered anything to be above critisism even if I'm a fanboy and I've never just blindly loved something. It's too early for me to call, but if Skyrim continues to astonish me the way it has for the next 400 hours then there's no doubt in my mind it deserves game of the year from everyone. Not becasue it's the best game I've played this year, but becasue I can see it being the best game I've played ever.

 

[Vanguard_Ex]

-snip-

This is the problem though, you say you're making a valid point and all that but overall it's just your opinion being put against other peoples' opinions. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but everyone's just pissing into the wind.

It's a good game and the fans have been waiting a long time for it. Let them have their fun.

 

[Therumancer]

Despite it's simplification with each installment it's one of the few holdouts of real "serious" gaming, since as many reviews point out, it doesn't hold the hands of players

Doesn't this game have a quest compass leading you around by the nose and health regeneration ?

Like most RPGs it has healing spells and such, it's a genere staple ever since the PnP days and part of the overall balance, as opposed to the way how shooters were set up, with that added into them later to make them more approachable.

I can't commet on the quest compass since I am waiting for my copy of Skyrim to arrive, but it might.

As I've said, the games HAVE been becoming greatly simplified over time, but they haven't yet reached the level of other games. Right now, even with a quest compass your still looking at a situation where the size of the world, the number of quests, and extremely non-linear nature of the game make it very daunting for casual players, or those used to enviroments where you follow one specific chain of quests or missions linearly until the end credits roll, like GTA, or a game where you have one single quest "hub" at a time that you exhaust before moving on to the next one.

It's very true that in their quest for more money, we might see Elder Scrolls becoming a casual game, in the next installment or two, it's already well on it's way there, but it hasn't gotten to that point yet.

Healing in RPGs isn't a big deal, but I have mixed opinions about quest arrows depending on the game. When I first started playing RPGS on the computer you had no automap... I still remember that when it was a new and revolutionary idea. To be honest I've been of the opinion that games might learn from say "Etrian Odyssey" (for the DS) and require players to actually draw their own map in the game as they continue to play, much like old RPGs before them, instead of automatically recording everything step by step. One of the best uses for a Stylus, perhaps something similar could be done with a mouse cursor on a map screen.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

Here's the feeling I get from this forum... you're all this fat chick

<youtube=DVnhTO-A-2E>

Thank you! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing that video, I REALLY needed that!

Now I can see that, at the very least, my fanboy squeals of glee are proportionate to the amount of awesome in Skyrim. Because damn, no matter how good Skrim is... I'm sure it doesn't warrant THAT reaction. And that was only a trailer

 

[Zeh Don]

*Shrugs*
Skyrim is my Game of the Year. And, frankly, I don't really give one single fuck what anyone else has to say; Skyrim lived up to the insane hype in my books and, frankly, gave me something I haven't had since Oblivion, and Morrowind before it.

It surpasses Dark Souls and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the only other games that I'd even consider for the title. For all the stuff we've seen in 2011, nothing has actually delivered the fucking goods like these three.

Dark Souls dropped, and was exactly what was promised; a solid old school RPG in modern wrappings from start to end. An instant classic, and one that knows what it is: brutally difficult in every regard, and happy about it.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution did the impossible, and not only didn't suck, was good enough to revive the franchise killed off by one of the worst sequels ever made. Not only that, it was beautiful, thought provoking, fun, exciting and incredibly well executed from a first timer studio. It did what no one thought possible in an industry were Call of Duty rules the roost: it brought back Deus mother fucking Ex and sold like hot cakes, to boot. Oh, and the PC Version stands as the best example of a PC Port of a Console Title I've ever seen. Period.

For all of that, Skyrim delivered a fucking world. An interesting world that you want to explore. It's not about gear, or Facebook Coins, or Ladder Placement, or progression, or Michael Bay explosions, or lowest common denominator, or multiplayer, or DLC: it's about having a fucking adventure. Any one who's ever looked out at a vast rural area and thought "Man, I wish I lived back when..." had their wish granted with Skyrim. Go and explore. See what you can find hidden away in the secret corners of this world. And, it made it so damn exciting that anyone who buys into it's magic gets goose bumps. Nothing else this year even comes close. Considering it's a terrible fucking port of a console centric title, and that it still bests the single best PC Port I've ever seen, should tell you something. Instant classic. Instant GOTY. And, who knows - maybe a few "Best Game Ever"s once the dust settles.

 

[Crazy Zaul]

Skyrim will definitely be GOTY cos even if it doesn't actually win GOTY they still always call The last version of it the GOTY edition anyway like they did with Morrowind and Oblivion.

 

[Zeh Don]

...Any reviewing service where The Book of Eli ranks higher than Sucker Punch should be put before a firing squad of MW3 fanboys armed to the teeth...

Er... The Book of Eli is better than Sucker Punch. Eli is a solid tale, if a little slow, that has a nice "WTF?" ending that we just don't get enough of these days. It's well told, well acted, well written, well directed and a solid all round movie.
Sucker Punch is you trying to look up Babyface's skirt till the credits roll. There is no danger, no suspense and no real tangibility to anything: it's the film 14 year old boys would make - too busy trying to be "da coolest movie evah!" to actually be a good movie.

Having said that, Metacritic is the fire that is going to burn the world. It's horrendous.

 

[Coldster]

I really do hope it is an outstanding game, but I agree with you. Skyrim isn't the only great game to come out this year, and even if it does win GOTY, for me, it really doesn't effect my personal opinion of it. Its just an extra title.

 

[BleedingPride]

i got it today, its good, even great. but not worth writing epic poems over. seriously? i mean i know its a great one but its still just a game

 

[Phisi]

So I saw the "You get more gameplay hours" argument so I thought I should counter it with my lovely new game; Granite Boulder vs. Garden Hose. The game is to use a garden hose to defeat a large granite boulder and has centuries of gameplay hours. Long gameplay isn't always good is what I'm trying to get at here. Portal would have lost its charm if they put in some puzzles for puzzles sake and Minecraft has infinite gameplay hours but you eventually get bored of it.

 

[Titan Buttons]

I'm not trying to instigate a flame war here--rather, I think this is a valid point to raise in an ongoing discussion--but Skyrim fanboys really need to stop with their consensus GOTY proclamations. Because the fact is, right now it has around 95 on Metacritic, on all three platforms. Like Portal 2 (which is smarter). And Arkham City (which is more streamlined). And Uncharted 3 (which is more cinematic). Heck, Skyward Sword could easily top Skyrim's metascore--anyone with a firm grasp of gaming history shouldn't count Nintendo out, even if Skyrim has become to an increasingly isolated demographic of 'hardcore' taste-makers what MW3 is to the frat crowd.

I use Metacritic simply as a communicable benchmark, though, in illustrating a broader point--2011 has been a fertile year for blockbuster, AAA games, and without an Ocarina of Time-like critical smash there's no single title that's likely to unify the press and gamers at large in unanimous GOTY praise. What's ironic about this is that the hype for Skyrim has been so deafening that it's likely to tarnish the critical perception of the game--perversely, anything less than roundabout 10.0 scores for Skyrim (which it has its fair share of, to be fair) almost seems like a bit of a letdown; unlikely as its current reception is to automatically catapult it to the leading position of this year's releases. Instead, we seem to be getting a game on par with Arkham City. Bigger isn't better, folks--in 2002, Morrowind's approach was truly novel. A decade on, Skyrim's size still commands a level of interest, but it's unlikely to reshape the game industry as we know it.

I'll probably pick up Skyrim in December--seems apropos, with the snow and all--and I hope to enjoy it. Even if I'll have to combat the notion, while playing it, that the game is a disappointment if it can't cure malaria and make me a goddamn sandwich.

P.S. No pun intended with the title.

You're failing to consider the fact that Skyrim has far more gameplay than any of these titles. Even without mods, people have spent literally hundreds of hours on its predecessors. You can't do that on Arkham City or Portal 2, even if you do all the achievements.

More gameplay does not equal a better game. For evidence I precent Final Fantasy 13.