Fourspaces said:
219 hours played so far, so I guess its held my interest well enough. I find it funny that a lot of the people saying its bad in some way are acting as though this game exists in a void - please, before mentioning how npcs have limited lines, name a Bioware npc with unlimited lines.
But yes, i'm still enjoying it - maybe because I didn't expect this game to be anything but an Elder Scrolls game with improvements over it's predecessors
Its not as much limited lines as it is VERY limited lines. Some have one line of dialogue, most have about 3. Get into the longest chain conversation you can in Skyrim with one person, so that in one conversation you get them to say as much as possible, I'll bet you my Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect conversation will last longer.
Much of the complaint will be with your companions in Skyrim. Though they are the ones you are meant to spend the most time around, they are the least characterised of anyone in the world. Compare them to Bioware companions and hell, Skyrim's suck.
I also don't think it was an improvement. Morrowind was more fun. Largely because you could do a lot of wacky things like jump over a mountain, make custom spells, and those cliff racers were harder to kill than these pathetic dragons.
Granted, it had less bugs than your average Bethesda game, but there were still a ton of quest, Main quest and game breaking bugs to be found spread across the platforms.
On to the 'bad in some way' thing, there is more I will criticise than lack of dialogue:
-World is static. Nothing you do changes anything (A change of guard and one extra line of dialogue from them does NOT count as a change. If people in the streets said one line of dialogue about SOPA 'I don't like SOPA' then kept on with their daily business, would that be reacting? No. It would be apathy), and the world will change nothing on its own.
-Combat is boring as ever. No skill required in melee, not much interesting in spells, and archery is just repetitive and boring.
-No sense of urgency. For anything. WHY am I trying to stop Alduin? WHY do I become Archmage of the college? WHY do anything? This connects to the static world.
-Bad levelling system. Look above at the 'Why'. WHY do you level? Does it accomplish anything? Other than changing the look of your amour if you do smithing? Not really. Level Scaling means that no matter how much you level, those bandits are going to level with you. Add to that the inherent ease of the game, and there really is no reason you'd want to make it easier.
-Lackluster AI. Not everything needs a good AI; wolves, bears, bandits and such will be fine without it. Things like Dragons though need a good AI. They don't have one. They also lack any effective combat abilities or a reasonable amount of health.
-Bugs. I cannot become Thane of Riften because I entered my house before I spoke to the Jarl. I could not get past the Esbern part of the main quest as he finished his dialogue in 1/2 second and would not unlock the door. I could not complete numerous radiant quests as I had been to that dungeon before, and done the quest objective, so then I was stuck with a ton of undroppable quest items and a ton of uncompleted quests. Dragons don't fight me. They just fly around doing nothing until I manage to finally hit them. PS3 users cannot play the game after X hours (Some anyway). More bugs, these are the major ones I come across.
-Very low res graphics, when it supposedly had 'Great' graphics.
-Very few characters are characterised, and those that are are generally the ones along the quest lines.
-90% of quests are 'Go to Dungeon. Clear out dungeon. Return to quest giver'.
-Very samey dungeons. There are only so many times that I can walk into a dungeon and know its exact layout without having ever been there before without calling them generic. Not all dungeons have to be amazingly awesome and cool, but a bit of variety would be nice. That Dwarven dungeon that had a tunnel section that was vertical instead of horizontal - cool. The one that had those gears and bones? Cool. The sheer number of ones with the same/similar layout - not cool.
-Several bad design decisions. When I have to collect 28 or so stones of Berenzia, weighing 0.5 each, I do not want to HAVE to carry them ALL around at all times and be unable to drop them, as one example. Many others will have been covered in my other points.
-Terrible UI
-Many, many useless perks.
-Though many will disagree with me, lack of replayability.
Those are some of my complaints with Skyrim. I have ways to fix each. I would post them, but it is too early in the morning and I should get some sleep.
