Bethesda ... stick to Landscape Design. Let someone else do the Games for you.
- Too easy.
- Too clunky. (where's the great melee feel I had in Oblivion?)
- Too superficial.
Superficial is left at 3rd place because obviously people don't care.. otherwise these games wouldn't be so popular. Anyway.
- Too easy.
This might get you thinking I'm a total hardcore gamer who spends hours building its character.
Actually, "too easy" is wrong. Poor design made it too easy most of the time and impossible at other times.
And with a game as flawed as this, I play through it once and I'm staying away from it.
I played heavy armor, one-handed + shield, smith. Straightforward so I couldn't get it wrong (and was hoping for the whole satisfying melee I remembered from Oblivion.. remembered wrong, apparently.)
So before I realized the most horrible levelling mechanics ever, I was playing at adept (that's mid-range difficulty) and finding everything a bit too easy, quickly adjusting to the maximum difficulty. That was ok. For a while.
Because I realized how it works: you do whatever you feel like, but your skills increase as you do whatever. So you fight, you get fighting skill exp, you sneak, you get sneak exp, you cast spells, spell exp, etc etc etc.
All fine and good... except that skill exp leads to levelling up. And in these games nowadays (for whatever reason...) when you level up, the world becomes more dangerous. (and yes, I do realize they changed it so some areas don't level up with you, and I won't even mention how that does not solve anything..).
So, conclusion: unless you focus on some skills, you're quickly gonna get your ass kicked because your enemies are specialized and you are not! Or you play at novice difficulty and then they're all cannon fodder anyway.
Final comments on "difficulty" or game mechanics: with my heavy armor (which is a pain to level up, anyway) I was pretty much invincible end-game, except when someone with magic showed up. In that case, combat was nearly impossible (even after I found out how easy to abuse enemies with shield bash is) unless I got something like 90% resistance to whatever they were throwing at me. And sometimes there were frost and shock mages, so yea...
Sometimes I dealt with that by throwing my follower or summon something via scroll, other times... **** it, just lower difficulty, slaughter them (in novice, because others are still a challenge) and then proceed to master difficulty again so melee opponents have some kind of chance.
And the real final comment: other times, I wandered through dungeons, encountering groups where 2-3 enemies I could kill with 2-3 hits and one enemy that I had to hit probably 20-30 times, and caused slightly more damage. The "boss", however, could kill me in 1-2 hits and needed probably +100 hits. Wow bethesda, you HP pump! even ignoring any sort of realism, this just makes dungeons boring and throws strategy out the window...
alriiiight, so enough with mechanics, or I'm sure I could complain about the meaningless skill trees and quests and whatever...
- Too clunky!
Ah well, not much to say there. Already described how irritating combat is.
Makes hitting someone with a mace as hard as if you were a 5 year old.. and then again.. I'm not so sure.
The whole stagger mechanics just make no sense, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Crappy animations don't help, I suppose. In the end, I just made sure I was only seeing opponent pixels while clicking away.
And hah! Another ridiculous thing I remembered: being surrounded by HP pumped guardians, I just made them follow me into a 3-store high ledge and use my fully upgraded dragon shout to make them fall. Because YES, falling 3 floors down will kill you. ALWAYS. In comparison, to kill you or one of those baddies, expect 100-200 hits with your best weapon.
and on clunkyness, I couldn't be bored to not jump down the mountains, which was possible because most of the time you can just slide down the different ledges. Maybe i'm being too generous by allowing bethesda full landscape design control...
- Too superficial.
Oh yes. So first off: I didn't run it with proper graphic settings (well, everything was 90% maxed except antialiasing.. at zero). Sure, ok, I don't get the full experience, I suppose.
But the animations were the same. The "cutscenes" were the same. The voice acting was the same. Want a good example of what I'd be comparing this to?
Witcher and Dragon Age. That's a good example of GREAT presentation. They look great (the sequels, mind you, even if they are much more superficial in story and game design) and are some of the best example of cinematography in games that I've ever seen. Pretty cool voice acting too, etc etc.
So that's it for looks and fancy stuff. I did enjoy getting up a mountain and seeing some cities and so on. But really, if you can't interact with these things ... there's not much point. And I have seen it all before.
On story and questing and everything else... it's painful. real painful.
Few things are as empty as these games. I fought for the Stormcloaks, so managed to liberate a small country from the grasp of the Empire. How was that done? 3 invasions to castles that looked pretty much the same and worked EXACTLY the same: % meter kept going down as I fought the same soldiers over and over again from random spawnpoints, no territory control, no managing our forces vs theirs, no nothing. If they told me that I just did random quests and somehow managed to cheat my way to the end of the "storyline" I would've believed it.
And mind you, you invade a city, cool, they make an effort, barricades and fires raging and all that. Hey, the Jarl of Whiterun even had something to say to his sucessor! But do you think that matters at all to anyone else in the game? Nope. Not really.
Game immersion for these designers is filling up the comments that random passersby throw at you. You're a werewolf? The only people that are gonna mention that to you are the guards commenting on your "wolfish grin" or hairy whatever. No characters that you might think you were having a conversation with. What do they care about you being a werewolf, right? Well, apparently as much as their government being toppled and getting married to you.
Yes, because marrying is the matter of satisfying some kind of quest parameter that is beneficial to your "target" and wearing the amulet of the goddess of love. Then you proceed into another event where everyone acts like they're paid to act like awkward statues and you get a ring (didn't I get a ring for slaying a random troll before too?). Hurray.
If this was the only game around, I would be afraid for society. But thankfully, it's not.
My point is: forget choices, forget immersion. You will never FEEL anything with this game.
Enough ranting! If you actually read this, congratulations and thanks!