It’s kind of an SP MMO isn’t it? It’s less demanding of the player than say The Witcher 2, endlessly serving up content that is a bit more engaging than the MMO version would be.
Actually I find it the antithesis of a MMO, which is what I like so much about it.
EDIT: To elaborate, you have a huge world you can roam and explore. In a MMO, you’re on a level-restricted themepark ride from A all the way to Z. In Skyrim you can be a noble knight who slays for the good cause, or you can be an assassin. Or a thief that does nothing but steal from good townsfolk and slips them poison. Or you can be a pure mage, or a spellsword, or a battlemage, or my last guy I played - a guy who relied on Sneaky, Alchemy, and Illusion, with no direct combat skills.
All those varieties would never happen in an MMO. You couldn’t play a thief, because it wouldn’t be “balanced” in PVP or raids, and heaven forbid you could stay in town and get money - exploit! A spellsword would need to do 30% less damage with weapons than a warrior to make up for the 30% damage he/she gets from spells. A sword and board warrior would need to lose any real ability to inflict damage, because his defense is high with a shield.
On and on, ad nauseum. MMOs are the anti-worlds, for me. They’re created as spreadsheets first and then given a graphical overlay, all with the primary design goal of milking $15 a month as long as possible. Oh, and absolutely, everyone and everything must be equal and must be played as designed. Heaven forbid if you’re an Archer who finds a nice cliff where you’re able to kill the Big Baddy down below you. In Skyrim you pat yourself on the back for finding a way to overcome the challenge, in a MMO you’re served a 3-day suspension for exploiting.
I have a friend who told me that, for his first play through, he is completely ignoring the main quest. He has no desire to be the hero of the world. Instead, he wants to be the master criminal of the world, and he is role playing in that mode, making decisions with that perspective, etc.
And what is totally cool is that the game completely allows him to play that way. He’ll enter a city as a stranger, and then make it his goal to rob the city blind. If he has to kill someone with his dagger, with no one seeing it, he will do so but only if required. His goal is to get rich, build and furnish homes, and live like a master criminal.
He said next play through he will play a noble and highly moral hero of the land, and in that mode play the main storyline. No stealing, only helping everyone he can.
Very few games would allow such freedom, and not only allow it, but adapt and accommodate it.
And it’s that openness that makes it so successful, IMO. I have 130+ hours in the game and haven’t gone beyond the initial Meet & Greet with the Greybeards in the main quest line (I’ve played multiple characters to around L40 or so).
Your friend is having a blast playing a master criminal, but it’s not a thief/heist game. Someone can have fun being an assassin, but it’s not an assassination game. Or you can just follow the breadcrumbs and hammer out the main quest, and you’ve still got more hours of enjoyment than a lot of games these days.
To me Skyrim is probably the best crpg I have ever played due to the fact that it constantly piques your curiosity without artificially doing so. There is always some ruin on the horizon to explore, or some conversation you overhear while visiting a tavern or in the street that will start you on a grand adventure.
While the game presents you with many choices along the way, you are never compelled to make a specific choice. You make the choice you want and the world reacts. Also, you are never really caught up in the minutiae of character management. Your character improves naturally through your adventures, but I have never found myself staring at the level progress bar.
Skyrim is full of instances like this (in the spoiler tag) that continue to blow my mind. (from a very early mission in the main quest.
…
Early in the game, soon after you report to the Jarl in |Whiterun, you are asked to help kill the Dragon. The Jarl asks you to follow his Dark Elf thane outside the town to engage the dragon. The quest pops up, and usually you might file it for later, complete some other quests and then come back to it later by travelling (fast or otherwise) to the waypoint. I noticed that the Jarl’s thane started walking toward the exit of Dragonsreach, so I said, hey why not follow her. She proceeded to walk through the town, rallied a bunch of troops, gave them a bit of a speach, and I then marched out with the group to the tower where we met the dragon.
Actually I find it the antithesis of a MMO, which is what I like so much about it.
I agree 100 percent. MMOs have focused on moving on from your current point to some endgame or content on the horizon. Skyrim wraps you in meaningful content from the beginning and continues to do so throughout the game.
Seriously? I think The Witcher 2 is the antithesis of an MMO. The Elder Scrolls share the MMO’s algo-driven systems, managing more depth by virtue of not having 10,000 other players to entertain alongside you… but only a certain amount more. They are by far the most MMO-like of any of the WRPGs, just by design.
People like MMOs -> People like Elder Scrolls games.
Dunno. For me, WOW was kinda fun at first, but it felt like the goal was purely to level up. I played on and off for a few months and then just quit. It held nowhere near the “pull” that Skyrim provides me.
Of course, the first time through is always the best in an Elder Scrolls game as the sense of discovery is so much a part of the game. But it still provides a lot of motivation to try the game as a different character, taking different paths (i.e. amoral thief vs. moral good guy hero of the people.)
The TES games aren’t exactly known for reacting to player choice very much though. Probably the sole exception being the evil assassin quests which require some things of the player (generally stealth).
Anyway, Skyrim is a high budget sequel to an established mainstream series with a huge advertising budget. It is also part of one of the more popular genres these days (open world rpg). It also isn’t terrible (although the pc port is). It also greatly appeals to explorer type gamers which is probably why i don’t think think it is TEH BEST GAME EVER.
You might as well ask why modern warfare 5 is such a success.
Personally I enjoyed the last three Tes games much more (Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Oblivion: Nehrim), but maybe skyrim gets better later on.
Oh and i take offense to calling skyrim a crpg when the port is so damn shitty. Nobody is going to mistake the fact that skyrim for pc is barely an afterthought to bethesda.
My prediction: the next TES game will not even start up on PC AT ALL, no matter what hardware you have. It will still sell millions of copies and still win nearly every award.
Ok, so I typically just lurk here but I felt I had to chime in. I’ve played Bethesda games since Battlespire and I have yet to find one I actually like. Oh, I tend to enjoy games like F3, Daggerfall, Oblivion, etc. for a little while but they invariably leave me feeling disappointed with them. I’m not exactly sure why but I suspect I just need a more directed story telling experience. For instance I’m a big fan of the Bioware model of RPG-ing. So yeah. Just wanted to say “meh” to all the Skyrim buzz around here. :)
If you think Skyrim is a bad PC port you haven’t played many PC games. It runs beautifully on most rigs and merely suffers from a few interface idiosyncrasies. If you want to take a gander at truly horrific PC ports, pick up Alpha Protocol or Saints Row 2 next time Steam has them on sale.
I agree with this.
It is funny you say this because i am playing saints row 2 now and the skyrim port is just as bad. Yes, the saints row 2 port is quite bad though. It is similar to skyrim in that the mouse doesn’t work on about half of the UI elements. The main difference is that saint’s row 2 has vehicle driving which as with most GTA style games doesn’t work very well with mouse/keyboard and vehicle driving in saints row 2 is even worse on mouse/keyboard than other similar games (including saints row 3 which is a really good port). The game also crashes randomly (sometimes it will crash every couple hours, sometimes i can leave it on for days at a time, minimized half of the time with no crashes), but then so does skyrim.
I will agree that skryim has better optimized performance than saints row 2 though. Funnily enough i started playing SR2 because i liked SR3 a lot and SR3 not only has much better graphics than SR2, it also has better performance. Luckily i finally got around to upgrading my computer recently so being super optimized is a bit less important to me than it was in the past.
I also played alpha protocol and while it had some issues (the ui of certain minigames wasn’t properly translated to the PC, some advanced mouse settings needed to be set in ini), it wasn’t as bad as skyrim. Performance could have been a little better though.
Is it that it’s the biggest (the only big?) alternative to the military shooters this holiday season?
Not really. Batman Arkham City and Assassins Creed Revelations are pretty big, so is Skyward Sword on the Wii. I’ve probably forgotten something else, too.
i think the game is success because there is no competition on RPG market
in terms of open world and open ended (or free roam) gameplay
otherwise the game would not be able get such score with
using the same yet re branded engine (same source code, some little touches e.g. ‘shadows’ and new name)
they dropped SpeedTree (which btw. wasn’t that bad and in fact in recent years improved a lot but i guess Bethesda decided to save money even on that)
as result the tress in Skyrim look all but believably e.g. spruce , total fail on recreation
when we ignore the amount of bugs what’s really bad is the small amount of voice actors used and the repetitive dialogs and tasks (which gets really annoying considering the game claims to be erm lol procedural)
also the visual art often shows huge lack compared to todays standards (i assume this is again result of console-fication of the titles)
Starting to get a “this can’t end well” vibe from this thread. Too many “Skyrim schmyrim” and “Skyrim is the new Ultima IV” people in the same room.
I don’t give a shit how the trees look in comparison to real actual trees. I just want the trees to look like trees… and I think they did a damn good job with the trees.
I would like to think that Skyrim is so popular because it provides so many hours of quality gameplay as opposed to the brevity that has become the norm in tent-pole games. At least that is the lesson I hope other publishers take from Bethesda’s success.
I find the complaints about identikit dungeons baffling. In 40 or so hours I’ve not once thought I was in a place I’d been before.
There are commonalities between them but how could there not be?
Feels like people scrabbling for things to complain about tbh.
Yeah that confuses me as well, since it’s really the inns and houses that are copied and pasted. Every single dungeon I’ve been in has felt different. They may copy+paste a certain hallway design (draugr crypts with those small burial rooms, for example), but otherwise I’d say each place has felt 90% unique, which leaves me 10% to rag on repeated textures (although the texture of dirt is pretty much the same everywhere, not exactly a fault of design).
Hell I can even recall every single dungeon/cave/barrow I’ve been to so far. None of them really mix together. I’m sure the barrows will confuse me by the end of the game, but not yet.
edit: You know, he hasn’t even played the game. Waste of time responding to him.