Scars Unseen said:
Any other role playing experience you've had is you stepping outside of the bounds of the game and using your imagination to make up for the deficiencies of the game you were playing. Which is pretty much what role playing is all about. So guess what? Everything I just said? Comeplete and utter bullshit. If you believe you had a role playing experience, you did. I don't get to decide, and neither does the OP.
So everything is a Role-playing game, meaning nothing is. Equal parts deep and meaningless.
Since we've decided that Skyrim isn't an RPG any more/less than Joust is an RPG, I suppose it's up to us to figure out what Skyrim truly is, at its core.
I believe that Skyrim is a Bigfoot pizza from Pizza Hut. Do you remember that pile? It was a massive pizza, like the size of a bathtub, made with the cheapest ingredients anyone has ever dared use in a consumable product. But, this Skyrim pizza, you eat it alone, in a room, for hours and days. Every piece of it sustains you, only so that you can continue on to eat the next piece. Every piece tastes bland, and offers you almost noting in the way of nourishment, but it's still pizza, so you're not upset to be eating it. Pizza is inherently good, but, god damn, the more you eat this pizza, the more you come to hate the taste of it. After a time, it becomes a punishment. "Oh god, not another slice of that same stale-ass shit. There's so much of it, and none of it makes me happy! All this time and not once have I felt satisfied!"
This is the experience of playing Skyrim. It is an exercise in tedium that leaves you numbly continuing forward not for any meretricious reason, but only for its essential nature. TES games are always good in their nature, if not for what they offer. You will never feel as content to remain unsatisfied as you feel playing an Elder Scrolls game.
But, let's look to how and where it failed each gamers primary impulse so that such tragedies can be avoided.
The Storyteller is unsatisfied because there is no evidence growth or meaningful change, so there is no story. The hero does not change. The world does not change. The world-eater is banished, and the game continues on with little more than 7 extra lines of dialogue. There are no revelations or revolutions. You snuff the empire/rebellion and the new boss is the same as the old boss. Every now and then you'll get a piece of dialogue where someone will comment on how they don't care who's in charge. That's your revolution. And how they tried to make it "a world" is an insult. Just because the quest-and-money dispensers go to sleep for 8 hours a day, that does not make it any less robotic. They are just robots that are programmed to be unhelpful.
The Power Gamer is unsatisfied because the system is too simple and broad. There is a single perfect path, as obvious as can be. Max out all crafting skills and make unstoppable weapons, accessories, and armor. Grind BS until every skill is maxed. Every character can be perfect given enough time, regardless of skill or expertise. But there are no rewards worth having, no powers worth acquiring, and no one who gives a crap that you've done either. If you concentrate on a few key skills, you can top out in effectiveness so early on that you will spend the next 90% of the game wearing the same armor and using the same weapons to 1-hit kill every enemy in the game, and only bother with other crap to break up the tedium of being a perfect killing machine.
The Butt-Kicker is unsatisfied, because the combat is crap. Here's how bad the combat is. Adept, the "normal" difficulty setting that the game starts on, has enemies taking 70% of the damage that your weapons are advertised to do and dealing 130% of the damage you would with an equivalent weapon/spell. That's how they decided to challenge you, by making you half as effective as your enemies. So, that spell you have that does 60 damage, really does 42 damage when you cast it, and 78 damage when you get hit by it. Beating a bear to death with a nerf bat is not the key to The Butt-Kicker's happy place.
The Tactician runs into the same problem as The Power Gamer. Every situation is best solved by a sneak attack with a Daedric bow for 3000 damage. That's the best way to clear every dungeon and win every fight, as well as the most realistic way for a person to survive.
The Specialist is out of luck, because while he can totally create that character that he plays in every game, even if that character is a catman acrobat, he still can't play that character. Or, more accurately, the world doesn't give a shit who or what his character is. Race and gender barely even matter for fluff. Can you really play a character when the essential nature of who your character is has no impact on anything?
The Method Actor has no audience and {multiple choice - same outcome} syndrome. It's "But thou must!" from here to eternity. Nothing to play off of and minor amusement only within the confines of what's possible. You could role-play a schizo-prophetic thief who believes that he exists in a boring world full of useless automatons and he must steal all their keys in order to turn them all off. You could even have a decent time of it. You could also glue silly eyes onto your penis and chase the cat around the house with it. I don't think the latter would really be less fulfilling, artistically.
The Casual Gamer might not really have much to complain about since, when the game needed to compromise or choose, the spinner always landed on The Casual Gamer's side. Don't really wanna pick a class? Well, your class is "blah" You're a level "meh" "blah" who "so-sos" in everything. Have fun doing or not doing whatever. Thing is, they made the game too daunting for The Casual Gamer. Causal Gamer doesn't want to spend 180 hours getting attacked by frostspider and sassy nord at random. Casual gamer wants to put the controller down after an hour to check on his laundry before House starts.
