Why do people like Elder Scrolls games?

[bioject]

After hating Oblivion because every quest story was boring and uninteresting and the game required 100+ mods to be fun, I decided to give Skyrim a try. I will give it credit for being the most playable out of the box Bethesdia game I have ever seen. This time it only needed 10 essential mods and most of them just tweaked a few minor things. In addition the game actually had interesting quests for once. I probably did about 50% of them before I completed the main quest only to discover that there was no ending or even a celebration of my accomplishment. In fact the main quest felt like a side quest. Shoot the entire game felt like a game of side quests with no central story line tying anything together.

And I guess this was my core problem with Skyrim and why I will never waste another minute on a future Elder Scrolls game. None of the quests connected or really affected the world. If I become Archmage nobody cared. I was the leader of the Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, Mages Guild, and a member of the Stormcloaks and nobody cared. I thought Stormcloaks hated magic so why would they let an Archmage join them? Why are High Elves racist against you if you're also a high elf?
So in summary the core problem I have here is that none of the quests you do really matter, your race or sex doesn't matter either which ultimately makes the game kind of boring.

It would be a lot more fun if depending on which quests you did and what sex/race you where, they would either change or become unavailable which would increase replayability and fun. It feels good when your actions matter in open world games. Something that is seriously lacking from all Elder Scroll games.

So why do people like these games? Their crap!

 

[Lucem712]

*They're Crap!

Anyhooooooooooow, well, sometimes people like things you don't. Such as, I hate coffee, but everyone seems to love that stuff. What the Hell, Guys!

On a serious[er] note, they're fun games to play. They have no real competition in terms of freedom and doing whatever the hell you want. (At least that I know of)

Though, I love Bethesda games in general. So, I'm a bit biased.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

People like Elder Scrolls games because of the unequaled freedom, roleplaying opportunities, modding opportunities, and realized world they offer. To my knowledge there is nothing else like it and I double-dog dare anyone to prove me wrong.

EDIT: Don't say Fallout.

 

[eimatshya]

Personally, I think Fallout 2 gives a better open world experience than any game I've played in the Elder Scrolls series. Fallout 2 gives you a reason to care about the stuff you're doing. In the Elder Scrolls games, I never feel like anything I do carries any weight. The quests just feel empty. It's like playing a single player MMORPG. In Fallout 2, I find the quests to actually be fun, and I feel like I am actually a participant in a fictional world.

That said, the extreme modability of the more recent Elder Scrolls games is pretty cool, even if I find the vanilla versions to be mostly lifeless.

 

[Smooth Operator]

They do one thing noone else can do apparently, the "Uuuu, what's that" spark.
I haven't fished Skyrim simply because it is so damn fun to explore I can't keep track on quests, and when I just cleared one place I'll be drawn to another before I even get back to my shack to dump the loot.

Everything else I agree is subpar, but that world exploration... that is just beautiful.

 

[renegade7]

I like RPGs, and being in college I'm on a budget. TES gives you a lot of content for your money.

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

Because we find them fun. Why does anyone like any games?

 

[algalon]

Remember that article here,http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9391-The-Men-Who-Stare-At-Mountains ? This is why people like Skyrim as well as any other Elder Scrolls game. It's the ultimate sandbox game that encourages you to explore and not just complete this quest or that quest. The journey is often more important than the destination, which is why this game eats time so very easily. In a time when most triple A games' single player story may last 6-10 hours, we feel robbed if $20 Skyrim DLC falls anywhere close to that.

 

[Sangnz]

Because we find them fun. Why does anyone like any games?

This.
I don't like sports games, I don't find them fun, I don't go around asking people why they do like them because at the end of the day they play them because they have fun doing so.

 

[SlaveNumber23]

Because they provide a rich, huge open world to explore at the players leisure, with some nice character customization. They also give a whole lot of gameplay for their price in comparison with other titles.

 

[culpeo]

Your observations are justified, as little things like the examples you provide do compound to affect immersion negatively to an extent, but I still do like the Elder Scrolls games (and Fallout 2/3/NV) because the experience those games provide is rather unique. You're dropped into a vast world under extreme circumstances and just told, "Go." How you react to those circumstances is left to your discretion, which, in turn, produces a sense of freedom that most games lack (for better or worse).

The tradeoff - at least so far anyway - is that factions, NPCs, and such have not yet been made able to alter their behavior towards player-characters to account for all the possible variables that this freedom provides, and any alteration in behavior that is present is effectively black and white (e.g. an NPC entrusting you with an important and deeply personal task vs. that same NPC refusing to speak to you or becoming hostile at the sight of you). True, unbridled immersion in this sort of environment would require nothing less than programming each and every NPC with some manner of active personality that is both unique (to provide for individuality) and malleable (to account for changing circumstances in-game).

The most recent Elder Scrolls and Fallout games have made strides in addressing this issue of immersion. This is made evident by the tens of thousands of lines of dialogue that have been produced so as to imbue as many characters as possible with some measure of uniqueness. But dialogue is only one piece of the puzzle; the true limitation is more technical in nature and will require a programming solution of colossal proportion to solve.

 

[elvor0]

Oh for fuck sake. Not this thread again. Use that noggin of yours for the love of god. Why do people feel the need to make these threads? I can only assume they're (not their *cough*) in desperate need of attention in an attempt to help justify their views.

You don't see me making threads about why people like coffee instead of Tea do you? Even if I do think that when judgement day comes they will all be assigned to the firey abyss and are fundamentally broken human beings who should be put in isolation from day one as to not mingle with the far superior Tea Drinkers. And Green-Ts don't count, they're a misguided splinter faction who do not know the true way of our lord Monkeh.

Look if you want to know the answer to this question you've got this magic thing in front of you called the internet. On it are pages that have words on them. Some of them form reviews. Some of them form threads with things about Skyrim in them. Some of them are articles just about Skyrim. Some of them are even on this website.

 

[Contradiction]

Non-linear play. Exploration.
Those are the reasons I liked the earlier games (read not skyrim)
I never gelled with skyrim as much. Call me crazy but it seemed... emptier maybe?
What I loved about for example Obliv is that I could start the game and have an entirely different experience every time.
Can't do that in say New Vegas or Skyrim can you really? 'Course you can just walk off at the start of either but (New Vegas has death claws to rape you back onto the railroads) you have to play impeded like not having shouts/dragons for quite awhile which seems like something you should have to actually experience in full considering that's kinda the story. Obliv? Hell you didn't have to stop mehrunes if you didn't want to you could go off and explore the worlds ancient caverns just as well as you could at any other point in the games main story and have a great time.
Customization was fun and cheating was funner. I used to try and jump up the tallest towers for fun with console commands.
TES Lore is FANTASTIC but most people don't really get the dose they need from the actual games (I guess due to poor exploration or/execution on Bethesda's part, I dunno). I mean animal races to the east that have only rarely visited, an unknown to the west, elvish isle, underwater slug wizard towers, mere-elves, Earth bones, Nirn, Aedra. Good shit.

 

[Shocksplicer]

Because they're fucking good. Unlike your grammar...

 

[Zeren]

Here, take my flame shield. You are going to need it.

OT: I love them because I can explore anything I can see.

 

[Imbechile]

Im just going to leave my older argument here:

"I do like exploration. Heck, I've explore almost all of Morrowind (that's a lot of hours spent).
I did it because Morrowind actually had an interesting and unique world. First the Silt Striders, then the Redoran Shell-houses, then the Fantastic Dwemer ruins, then the weird Telvanni buildings, then ......

But Fallout 3 and especially Oblivion had none of those.
Fallout 3 was your standard post apocalyptic setting. Dull, colorless world full of uninteresting copy pasted buildings, non-existent atmosphere, lore that is wastly inferior to the older games (Brotherhood of Steel are now fucking white knights????)
Oblivion has even worse porblems. That world is the epitome of standard fantasy "shithole". I can recreate that same experience by flying to England and going to a nearby forest.

NOTHING is interesting in Oblivion. There isn't anything unique about the world, or the dungeons (Ayelaid and fort ruins look almost the same, the cave look the same).
And because of the level-scaling in Oblivion and Fallout 3 exploration is POINTLESS, since the items scale to your level.

So, since the loot is bad and the world is dull what exactly is my incentive to go out and explore? To admire the view or the graphics? Or to admire the nicely crafted landscape?

If that's my incentive then I will have a wastly better experience by going treking in real life."



Plus I'm going to add a sentence that Jon Van Caneghem recently said, that clearly explains why most Elder scrolls games are shit:

"they need to be focused on being games first instead of just being virtual worlds."