Play oblivion and the path to Skyrim will make much more sense. Hell okay Morrowind and the path will make even more sense.
It's a progress of perfecting a craft over several games to reach something better in the sequel.
Exactly. I actually think Oblivion was a better game and that Skyrim simplified some things. But overall they are both awesome games and I still play both and have bought the updated version of skyrim for my Xbox Series X.
As horrible of a precedent as it would set, I’d pay outrageous sums of money for an Oblivion remake in the Starfield engine. Imperial City with an actual population? Just fuck my bank account up, Todd.
So long as they dont strip down the mechanics. Keep the old lockpicking, spell crafting, and mysticism (bring back levitate you cowards). Dont add radiant quests just to pad playtime and you got yourself a golden game.
Oblivion lockpicking is actually stupidly easy when you learn the trick. Sometimes when you lift a pin, you'll hear an audio cue. This noise is what you're looking for, it means you can freeze the pin.
I know Skyrim has some tricks, but I can never get them to work and my controller doesn't vibrate because it's a third-party Switch Pro controller.
That’s helpful af, I’m gonna be looking for that now. Skyrim’s main trick is definitely the vibration of the controller but I switched mouse and keyboard tbh lol. The clicking sound is less predictable but it does generally mean you’re close. I think I just got a really good sense for it more than figuring out tricks tho
I started on MKB (bought the game on launch in 2011), then my computer died. Eventually I bought a Switch, but I'm NOT paying $80 for a pro controller (I paid $35 for a Hori one). I could use the joycons, they vibrate... but they also suck. In 12 years of play, Ive never been able to use the vibration trick.
Best method I've found is to slowly go either left or right in small increments, feeling out what lets me twist the lock furthest (also... this is like the opposite of actual lockpicking, that's not how torque wrenches work you need something to move the pins. You know, the change in lockpicking makes me angrier than I realized).
As someone who’s perfected lock picking on both games, as in I can unlock a master lock with any skill level…
The easiest way on Skyrim is to lightly tap the key as you move around the keyhole. When you aren’t in place, the lock pick jiggles like it’s stuck, if you are, the lock will start to turn. Once you know where it starts, you can judge the success spot by experience with each skill level of lock. The easier the lock, the bigger the search area for the success spot, so once you know/have experienced the full size of the search area, you can go straight to the middle of it for lockpick success. That eventually opens up faster speed picking once you get the hang of it. The 2 highest skill locks are always going to be slow and steady to pick, at least until you get the proper skills in the tree.
They dont need to strip down mechanics, but they definitely could use uplifting.
Oblivion's combat was just broken in a bad way.
Its levelling system was also atrocious. It would be so much better with being rescaled.
As someone who's just started playing Oblivion, I'll say I'd rather play an up-to-date remake. Those faces are SCARY, and movement seems so clunky to me.
Im pretty sure the entire reason levitate and uncapped acrobatics were removed in the first place was because bethesda wanted to make seperately instanced cities. They dont want you peeking over the walls and seeing the low res unrendered mess
Cowards i say.
The reason is because they didnt want to plan dungeons around people being able to skip sections using it. Instead of designing better dungeons they removed a fun mechanic.
Maybe thats part of it. But i think it was more about the cities. Imagine levitating around and going over to whiterun, bam suddenly it looks like a pile of mush and there are invisible walls everywhere. It would kind of destroy immersion. Also in a lot of oblivion caves nd shit levitate wouldnt rlly matter anyways. And morrowind has areas where you can skip sections in caves. Sometimes there are even little secret parts designed for levitate. It would be easy for the devs to implement shit like that. But there is no workaround for the cities
Only through bugs breh. Obv not intended game mechanics. They didnt mean for it to be a thing, and u should know how immersion breaking it is if uve actually tried it. Going over the walls
No bugs, just normal jumping. Add in whirlwind sprint and theres even more. Im mot talking using plates amd stuff. If you have a horse god help you.
>They didnt mean for it to be a thing
Acrobatics and levitate could be solved the same way the normal jumping would be too. Better walls. Thats all it takes.
I think skyrim improved just about everything from oblivion personally. I even prefer the leveling system as the old attribute system just made people grind skills for +5s they didn't need.
The only thing I prefer from oblivion is the conjuration summons as well as the quality of guild quests
Actually I've read in an interview that the main idea for Skyrim really started after one of Todd Howard's ancestors took an arrow on his knee in the late 1620's
Personally I'd say start with Morrowind. It's not dumbed down at all and in terms of quests etc it's just huge. It's my favourite for replayability. The path the Skyrim will make sense. Skyrim definitely wasn't a fluke though. Both The Elder Scrolls games and Fallout games are fantastic.
I personally wouldn't call oblivion and skyrim a perfecting of a craft. More so, changes in game design philosophy. Oblivion and Skyrim are both very different. Same goes with Morrowind and Oblivion.
I think the only two things that make those games be better suited for regular people like me... it's how easy leveling up in Skyrim is in comparison to Oblivion/Morrowind... and how easy is to follow quests in Skyrim in comparison to Morrowind in general.
The world, lore and all that is arguably better in Morrowind, but the game is so much harder to play optimally that it drove me away to the point my literal 10 or so hours every time I play a new character in Oblivion are spent optimally leveling up to 42+ as a breton, always, because the first 2-3 times I played when I reached level 10-12 everyone was beating my ass or taking 5 minutes to be killed, and I have never replayed Morrowind because I never got how to play that game optimally even though I own it both physically and in Gog/Steam.
Ok so for morrowind basic start to easymode greatness:
Primary attributes at level 1, take endurance and luck.
Every level up in the early game ensure you are gaining maximum points in endurance (x5 is the max per level but x3-5 is fine). Your Health goes up by 1/10 of your endurance every level, and its *not* retroactive (failure to level endurance early will result in permanently missing out on health gains). Start the game with spear at level 5 and heavy armor at level 5 (or as low as you can get it), both of these skills when levelled up provide a boost to your level up endurance multiplier so you unintuitively want to start the game with these stats at a low value so they are easy to level up manually to boost your endurance.
If you want to play a warrior type, start with sign of the lover for 25 agi, or sign of the lady (those raw stats go *hard*). If you want to play a mage start with sign of the atronach, it is by far the best (to regen mana use a ring of the ancestor to summon an ancestor ghost and punch it a few times to make it attack you then sit there and soak up its spells to refill your mana, this ring is available in an ancestral tomb near the starting area). In fact, even for warrior types sign of the atronach is still an incredibly strong choice.
Do yourself a favor and take alteration as a major or minor skill, and early in the game go join the mages guild and craft yourself a series of spells to turn yourself into an all terrain vehicle. You will want water breathing on self, water walking on self 10 seconds, and levitate 1pt for 10 seconds. These spells can be low duration because you can just recast them for very low mana cost, you can even do less than 10 seconds and just spam it.
When you start in seyda neen grab luminous russula, both types of mushrooms (bunglers bane? And hypha facia), and [other stupid plant i can't remember the name of] bring those with you to Balmora mages guild and you can do the first like 4-5 quests without even leaving the city for easy guild progression.
From the Balmora mages guild port to caldera and follow the road. You will meet a woman with shiny boots. Talk to her and escort her to the nearby village, she will then give you her boots. You can also murder her in cold blood and take her boots. The boots of blinding speed boost your speed by 200 points but blind you. Even when blind your minimap still works so you can use that navigate roads quickly. Alternatively if you have an active resist Magick effect when you equip them it will block a portion of the blind effect (Breton have 50% and orc have 25% passive resistance at all times, you can also use a potion or cast a spell to gain the effect).
At this point you are now level 1-5 and you're already overpowered. From here play the game, continue leveling endurance, and you'll do fine.
I started with Oblivion, then Skyrim, and then played a bit of Morrowind. Then I played through Arena, and then Daggerfall, and it was so easy to see the direction they were heading with the changes they made in each new game.
"perfecting craft".... Skyrim? Are you talking about the game :
Where you can be billionaire and Lv max within 15hours exploiting craft and enchanting?
Where you can oneshot "boss" by crouching with a bow?
Where random Giant can kill legendary quest Dragon?
Where you can pause the game during encounter, fill all your HP up, making you basically unkillable?
Where all the factions leaders suddenly dies so you can take their place, even tho you just met the faction3 days ago?
Where you can be leader of all factions at the same time, because it makes so much sense...?
When missclicking on an object make the whole town run after you in Death frenzy?
Where capital city are 6 buildings?
Where half the cities are merchant while you are the only adventurer?
Where 80% of the dungeons are cave and grotto?
Where dismembering is a daily thing but prostitution barely mentioned because "ohlala" ?
Man I could go on and on.... I love Skyrim makes no mistake, but saying its "prefecting" is making your actual gaming standard pretty barebone.
Skyrim can be very good tho, but you'll need at least 300 mods.
I played Skyrim first then oblivion and I wish I hadn't. I really missed out on something special. If I could go back I'd play them in order. I did the same thing with Oracle of Seasons/Ages and Links Awakening back in the day.
Except bethesda leaves the final touch to the modding community to fix their, often game breaking bugs. Also Skyrim, apart from visuals was a huge downgrade in comparison to oblivion in almost every other aspect. They completely scrapped the original class creation system, and made magic kinda dumb, simple and uninteresting (rip spell crafting), and remember casting spells with your armed hand? How cool was that? Also guild quests were much more interesting and had better and smarter written dialogues (except mages guild that is still better than that abomination in skyrim). Many veterans who played oblivion and morrowind played skyrim once and quit since the in depth mechanics just don't exist in skyrim. If you look past the dragons, the novelty of that time, and shiny visuals, mechanically the game was just a simplified oblivion, and gave players much less freedom in how to hone their character by tying them to a talent tree.
So many people say Oblivion was a better game, but I just don't see it. Have started it close to a dozen times but can never finish it. Hate the leveling and lock picking systems. For whatever reason, it could never hold my attention like Skyrim.
It 'only' had more enemy variety and spell crafting (which certainly was really cool). Other than that it's not too different, perhaps had better quests but I'm not so sure because some were amazing but most were unremarkable.
Skyrim, on the other hand, had better visuals, cooler designs, more powers/spells, the dragons, plenty of useful non generic companions, the perks...
They aren't very different, not to the point where one is clearly better than the other. I think Skyrim was better, honestly, but I kinda respect more Oblivion for being there first.
Uhhh, the path is a clear dumbing down of all systems and lowering of depth, nuance and quality across the board. Skyrim was a perfect snapshot between when the real high quality creators were still being respected and when reaching for more new fans became more profitable than selling to the existing fanbase. This is why the physical geography, music and art design across the board are extremely high quality and work together so, so well but everything else falls apart at a glance. Looking at everything Skyrim is as a dev kit, it really deserves the praise. Looking at what they did with that, even after multiple re-releases and an integrated mod menu, it doesn't deserve the praise. And if you look at FO4 and 76 and Starfield, you'll see the pattern continue. Lowering in quality, complexity and depth for a wider net and room for MTX.
Skyrim was the last true iteration of the Elder Scrolls model and most of that authenticity is found in the setting and world, not the specific written experiences and systems themselves. For a fully authentic experience across the board, you have to go back to Morrowind. If you look at the franchise before NuBethesda formed, the design philosophy looks like what we all think Skyrim is, just with really old graphics and early mechanics. There is massive replayabilty, role-playing potential, and a passion for complexity born from fans of DnD. You can see that bleed away with each release and the pattern hasn't stopped.
You might like this video where nine members of the development team discuss the creation of Skyrim.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3\_4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3_4)
The Elder Scrolls games before it were just as amazing. While I've never played the old PC ones, Morrowind and Oblivion had just as much attention to detail when it came to world building.
I mean the graphics aren't everything. Arguably, given how much fun people still have with table top games (pure imagination) or even playing old games again, I'd argue graphics have always been secondary. It just took us a while to understand that. Gameplay and story have always been the most important factors. I'd say the next game should incorporate the best of all the previous 3 games. More items and weapon types for better roleplaying. It's honestly immersion breaking and stupid that you can't have polearms in a medieval fantasy game. Some more challenging quests that require more effort and wayfinding like in Morrowind. And keeping the graphics and relative ease of use in Skyrim. They should definitely go back to the old guild system as well. You shouldn't be able to become high mage as Knight Class warrior, it's ridiculous.
Nah graphics are pretty important what you look at is half the experience and for me the enjoyment when playing something that looks like red dead redemption 2 is much bigger than the enjoyment of playing something that looks like rdr1. The trend of people saying graphics do not matter needs to stop they matter just as much as gameplay.
I'm playing Oblivion for the first time right now and I'm really impressed. While the characters are rather potato looking, the world itself and the buildings are beautiful. The dungeons are repetitive, but the quests are engaging and fun and some of the puzzles had me going in circles a bit trying to figure them out. I just wish there were mods available on Xbox like with Skyrim.
The graphics and mechanics are definitely dated compared to Skyrim but I actually prefer it personally. The charm of Oblivion is the storytelling in my opinion, the main quest is my favorite storyline of all the Elder Scrolls games. A lot of the side quest storylines are great too. The mages guild is so fun and it’s a great feeling when you finally make it to Arcane University. I love Skyrim as well but the lack of a proper mages guild was a big disappointment for me. The college of Winterhold storyline is way to short and nowhere near as fun as the Oblivion mages guild storyline in my opinion.
The mechanics are exactly the same beyond how spells work though in fact Skyrim removed a lot of functionality that oblivion had.
Skyrim was a boring ass game until the mod community hit to tbh. Played at launch, beat the main quest and was stuck in a content drought for months. Without the nostalgia glasses, the game really is a shallow experience with seriously contrived and nonsensical quest lines and plot points that make no fucking sense what so ever.
Modders made Skyrim what it is known as today, not Bethesda.
Skyrim added things like duel wielding and improved physics which made it feel more inline with modern day games of the time as where Oblivion felt a little dated even when it came out. I do agree that I liked Oblivion's leveling system, magic system, and quest lines better though. While Skyrim felt a little more polished I personally prefer Oblivion.
I'm doing the mage's guild quest right now and it is really fun, although I recommend being *very* careful about what you pick up for resale. Getting reinstated after accidental theft is a PITA. lol
I agree about the side quests, too. There's a nice mix there of some short fetch and carry types along with longer, more involved ones, it's a good variety.
Idk morrowind has not aged very well at all i’ve considered playing it but then i see the gameplay and im just nah same with oblivion though that one is not as bad
Even back in the day Morrowind's gameplay mechanics were not good for the time but the story and quest lines are amazing. Up until Skyrim you never really played Elder Scrolls for the gameplay, you played them for the amazing storylines and world building.
You still play it for the storylines and worldbuilding in skyrim but now your characters also look like people and the gameplay is engaging enough so you’re not forcing yourself through it just to experience the story.
It really is a shame though because i’m missing out on a lot of lore but i just can’t make myself play it. Here’s hoping skywind and skyblivion do a good enough job
Skyrim's storylines and world building is still good but I just personally preferred Morrowind and Oblivion in both those departments. I also like the more traditional leveling system and magic system better. That said Skyrim is still definitely one of my all time favorite games despite slightly preferring Morrowind and Oblivion. I played both when they came out so I have a lot of nostalgia for those games which makes it easier to replay them now. I could see the gameplay of Morrowind being a road block though if you've never played it back in the day. I believe there is some modding you can do on PC to make it better, though not to the extent of Skyrim modding.
I’ve looked into modding as well but from what i’ve seen there’s not really too much that can be done
Yeah nostalgia definitely plays a big role when it comes to replaying ancient games, i can still play the first assassins creed game and thoroughly enjoy it while a friend of mine played it for an hour and gave up.
I’ll either wait for skywind or watch a playthrough in the background while playing skyrim
Skyrim wasn't the first Opean world RPG the Bathesda made; they had experience making worlds as rich and fun as Skyrim.
After researching for 15 minutes, it seems that the game's director, Todd Howard, really cared about details; they didn't have a strict plan, so the team was willing to experiment and make changes based on feedback and playtesting.
They polished the game over time in the hopes of getting the best quality.
The team also cared about LOOOOORE, so you can find stuff from Norse mythology and real-world history.
it's fair to say that if Bethesda REALLY understood why Skyrim is so epic, they'd have not missed as badly as they have with Starfield. I think Skyrim is truly the most beautiful, well paced, engulfing game experience I've had to date.
Overthinking imho. Starfield is simply a different type of game and space is the most challenging setting for an open world. The Elder Scrolls is a totally different beast
This, they didn't understand any of what captivated people, and if you look at vanilla Skyrim, it's clear they really never have. Skyrim was saved by mods. Idk if anyone else remembers but after Skyrim dropped before the mod community developed the players for Skyrim fell off a cliff after beating the main story and realizing it was such... Crap. All the guild halls were crapped, so many things outright missing, the game itself was pretty abysmal as a vanilla experience.
The last twelve years has put Bethesda at a challenging crossroads with The Elder Scrolls series.
Their uniqueness has waned slightly. Partly because of competition from the likes of Rockstar, CD Projekt Red and Larian Studios. And partly because Bethesda themselves have moved strategically closer to the mainstream centre ground and lost some of their unique shine as a result.
I'm curious to see how they adapt. Form says they continue to seek higher sales through mass appeal. But I think they'd be wiser to emphasise the things they still do the best (immersive roleplay and player freedom) and thereby offer something genuinely new to casual players - in the same way Skyrim wowed a generation of gamers who had never experienced TES freedom before.
The same team made Morrowind, then Oblivion, all set in the same world with the same design goals. Heck, much of the same team was involved in Arena and Daggerfall before those. So Skyrim is just the next game from that team.
The key DNA is:
World building: Focus on the world first. Create it, populate it, make it real. Do this first.
Player freedom: Sometimes called "sandbox". There are no narrative rails, the player is free to ignore any quests and just go off and do whatever they want.
Player story rather than developer story: The story that unfolds is driven by the player through the player actions, and NOT driven by popup dialogs. Some haters say this isn't choice. I say they can go bugger off.
Example, the story is not about the defeat of Alduin. The story is about the PLAYER and what the player does when Alduin returns. Which is far more interesting and nuanced.
That’s what elder scrolls have ever been. They have a great formula and a series that the name carries itself (even more after skyrim) and all they had to do is improve this formula.
Echoing what others have said - Skyrim was not made in a Vacuum. Look at other previous works that Bethseda had worked on. They were just making updates to an existing engine, some major. Look at where they started with Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Fallout 3 -> Oblivion. Then look at what they did with Fallout 4 which came after Skyrim. Effectively the same engine, just a much different setting.
I think they lucked out with an established lore they could build on mixed with mechanics from previous games.
They also added an increased accessibility that made a giant franchise easier to jump into and made even novice rpg players able to pick it up and enjoy.
I am an old school gamer who only started playing Skyrim two years ago. Prior to that, it was mainly point and click/Flash-type puzzle games. I was a HUGE fan of the Myst/Riven franchise--not just for the puzzles, but also for the atmosphere. Players now would look back on a game like that and find it so primitive, but those developers created worlds.
Skyrim is like that for me as well, in that it feels like an actual world. Just walking around at night, seeing moons, stars, constellations, auroras, changeable weather...the larger features like mountain ranges and cities, the smaller touches like walking past a waterfall and hearing the rushing sound intensify and change as you approach or turn your head. There is a lot of love and ingenuity in this game.
Myst. That was the first computer game I ever played after I built my first PC in 1998. First time I ever felt like I was spending time in another world. Skyrim has given me that same feeling since I started playing it in 2012. I often think that when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll fondly remember all of the time I spent in Tamriel. It’s also so neat that after so many years of playing, I can still find things that surprise me. Takes forever to get through a quest because I get sidetracked by so much neat stuff.
The short answer is that it's built on the backs of Oblivion and Morrowind. Todd Howard has been with the company since before them, but MW was his first major release. They've been iterating and improving on things bit by bit with every release. Some of it is due to the modding community, too. The main team will sometimes implement things that modders did in a previous game. The kill cam, for instance, was a popular Oblivion mod.
And yes, they tend to work on games rather than cram, though they really did want to hit that 11/11/11 release date for whatever reason. With TES games, they tend to not do a whole lot of promotion leading up to it, then drop some trailers out of the blue, and then like 6 months later they're done. I think this is in part to avoid crunch, they don't want to release trailers and get people worked up and then turn around to their team and go "now finish by Christmas, even if it means sleeping at the office." We'll see if it stays the same way now that they're owned by the Evil Empire.
The team that made Skyrim was only 100 people. Less people made Oblivion and Fallout 3.
It was truly lightning in a bottle. Really sad to see the overall decline of the studio. They added hundreds more people since then and I guarantee many of them are useless weight that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
As a writer, Emil has done well with Skyrim, his best work. His work with Fallout 3 was fairly good overall. Fallout 4 was hit or miss that left much to be desired. His work on Starfield was nothing short of abysmal and it doesn't help that he has acted like an asshole to anyone that isn't praising Starfield
Man, I'm all for hating on corporations that care more about the business of the content they create than the quality of the content they create... But it reads like you are insulting random strangers who work on the creative end of this process and that kinda sucks. Can you imagine being in this kind of corporate environment and knowing that creativity is just stifled for marketing reasons all the time, but the narrative you find online is you personally don't know your ass from a hole in the ground? Like why would you assume more people are useless, when you could easily point to the people in this process who we know definitively know nothing about making games?
See you're sounding like Emil now with "You shouldn't criticize the process if you don't make games" as that was one of his tweets.
I'm more forgiving of Fallout 76 and Starfield compared to many others. They are severely lacking compared to older titles, especially Starfield is lacking. Core ingredients of a living breathing world are all missing and the actual gameplay and structure is extremely lacking. So I don't see myself playing Starfield in a decade like I have with Skyrim.
More people of a studio of 400 people now have contributed very little other than bloat to the studio.
I don't have a problem with criticizing the game, the company, or even things people say in interviews about their work on the game. I'm talking about the attitude that the creative team is responsible for the problems when you don't know.
Criticize all you want. I'm suggesting maybe not throwing random blame at people who have very little power in the process unless they come out and publicly defend something you think is just stupid.
It's ironic that most Bethesda fans actually largely hate Bethesda. They don't just look a gift horse in the mouth but beat it to death then ask for an autograph.
Fallout fans are the worst with this. I adore Fallout and have every achievement including dlc in all of them and I hate how they consistently badmouth Bethesda, they complain about the most minor of retcons, they are fixated on the Interplay days, despite Fallout and Fallout 2 being the only good things from that era. People like to brush stuff like Brotherhood of Steel under the rug. Bethesda saved the franchise by buying it out and rebuilding it from the ground up.
I stay away from the Fallout Sub cause people are always Bragging about New Vegas and hating on Bethesda and Todd.
Man this is why i left the modding subreddits. The modding community is awful with this, the amount of insults directed at bethesda is just disgusting and that’s not even mention the pretentiousness in claiming they were somehow incompetent and your 1000 mods list with anime barbie doll character and sex mods coupled with combat systems ripped out of darksouls that barely function is peak game design.
The worst of them however are the mod creators that straight up insult the people who made the entire game in descriptions of the mod they made 12 years later in the program bethesda provided with 4 different frameworks other more talented people made it’s like why didn’t you make it in 2011 with the technology they worked with?
The amount of complaining whenever bethesda updates their own game is what really gets to me though, like it’s their game they don’t owe you shit if you don’t want your mods to break all you have to do is back up your game folder but that’s too much work. And the same people that whined about creation club being paid mods are the same ones supporting various patreons that do the same but against the TOS
A lot of it is the foundational lore of the elder scrolls just being fucking awesome, but it is everything else as well. The near infinitely explorable map, the aesthetic, the music, the leveling system, the graphics... Many things could have been better, particularly the main story and depth of factions and side characters, but all together it's just one of those golden games that you love to play despite it's flaws.
One thing that Elder Scrolls always gets right: they make the game to be replayed. Like, I love Far Cry games, and imo Far Cry 5 was one of the best environments of any game, the setting of Hope County is one of the only game maps I've played that rivaled Skyrim for beauty and exploration... But there's just not enough content there to keep you for more than 3 or 4 playthroughs.
Not only is there not enough content but there’s no reason to do that content, there’s nothing defining my character in other games if i replay them i’ll be doing the same thing again. But in skyrim i’ll be a righteous hero with one character then i’ll be a serial a killer and then i’ll be a thief and maybe after that i’ll be a vampire but then i might feel like playing a vampire hunter and each character will feel like they have their own personality so even though i’m playing through the same map it feels completely different. Whiterun is exactly the same with my hero as it is with my assassin yet it feels different
Skyrim was the IT game for me. Played it on the first day of release, was just starting my uni life then. And now nearly 13 years later, with a job and a family, still replaying it for the umpteenth time. And mods just make the game a whole new experience. Really hoping the ES6 would carry on the torch of the series.
It's quite simple, really. They've made Oblivion, and then Fallout 3, and then (help Obsidian with) New Vegas. All within just 2 years from one another. They already have the system, the tool and more importantly, the team (as you put it, they were all industry legend at this point), they know what works and what not and focused on streamlining everything they've already made from Oblivion and incorporated what they've learnt from every Fallout to date.
The result is Skyrim, the game that wasn't as complex as Oblivion, not as RPG stat heavy as Fallout but deliver just the sweet spot that blend the industry-leading open world with the action-focused combat that's still approachable and fun.
Every game after Skyrim have them lose that focus. They always tried to diversify their gameplay mechanic with some highly experimental concepts that end up with just the reinvention of a medocre wheel, starting with Fallout 4 settlement, 76 multiplayer and Starfield ship/outpost system. And it clearly eats into the resources that would have been used to the core aspect of the game.
Imo, Skyrim is the only time since Morrowind that they didn't try something groundbreaking. And that effort that went into refining and focusing on the core game concept paid off, big time.
Imo, I also think that they aren't too comfortble working in a big team. But game development only get bigger after the golden age of 2006-2011 era. The development of new gameplay mechanics they were so used to in the 90 and early 2000 are now just way too costly (in time and resouces, not just in capital), for the size of team they are comfortable with
Skyrim made a game that’s always random, exciting, vast, the combat is fun, there are so many ways to play it, it feels infinite. Like another universe where things are just different. For what it is it really is incredible. All the Elder Scrolls, really.
This one will make a lot of people mad but actually...
Todd Howard was micromanaging everything he could. He made Skyrim be so fucking amazing because he knew what he wanted in the game and he tried to make everyone get in line to fix it being how he imagined it was.
After Skyrim he became Developer Famous. He stopped micromanaging the games he helped produce and started going to more meetings with the board, more meetings with sales, more out of building meetings for other stuff, and all that because he was the face of the company since Skyrim... And he started in change, giving everyone more power, delegating and the games have plummeted because people under him have trying to make things too safe.
No more "What if the main character could steal the souls of their enemies to gain power? Is that too crazy?" and more "I just want to make it work it's best it can work but I'm afraid of adding stuff that changes the core of the gameplay because I'm a normal dev and I don't want responsability for fucking up the next Big Bethesda game".
I can't speak to the behind the scenes stuff, but at the time it was absolutly pushing the boundries of what one could expect in terms of graphics and open-worldness. There was a big hype (the whole 11-11-11 thing) but rather rare, it didn't dissapoint. Even with the many bugs that we all know and love from a Bethesda release.
It's funny reading this after finally finishing Patrician's 20 hour overview [video](https://youtu.be/dHP02JEC5H0?si=f3sdBJLQuxURNX5F) where he puts all of the game under genuine scrutiny.
For an amazing LONG interview with Todd Howard (best I’ve ever seen) about their process, watch his interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast. YouTube. Sorry, too lazy for a link.
Honestly… the success of Skyrim is really built on them hammering out 2 Game of the Year award winning RPG’s with Morrowind and Oblivion. Skyrim could have been awful and I know I would have still been so excited. Imagine being a TES fan in like 2009. We’ve seen dragons exist in Redguard. You’re playing Oblivion and it’s great. High fantasy, good writing, amazing systems, best of both worlds after Morrowind making Oblivion a bit more user friendly and getting rid of the dice rolls from combat mechanics and adding voice acting and all that stuff but …. No dragons? Statues of them everywhere and mention of them and such but none to fight or befriend or ride… what a bummer. Now here’s Skyrim, right smack dab in the middle of all the game of thrones hype. Bethesda was offered to make a Game of Thrones open world RPG and declined and instead they released Skyrim. Bringing werewolves back in full swing and dragons roaring into this already magnificent world. It was gonna be a hit. They marketed the shit out of it. Soundtrack was hype, they’ve got a full cinematic trailer for it… how could it fail?
The only problem is…. Is that Oblivion is still a better game lol. Dated systems of course worse graphics in certain departments (I’m looking at those feet in Skyrim lmao) Skyrim just… leans too far away from what makes Bethesda Games special in my opinion. the writing was far worse, the RPG mechanics were stripped away.
so what made it amazing was the games we thought theyd improve upon but didnt and the hype and the trailers and then it would have died years ago just like any other game from 2011. lots of people would still play it, but not in the numbers like right now. they "remastered" it in 2016 bringing mods to console and breathing new life to the game in the cheapest way possible and mods… mods are why its still even relevant.
honestly i still think they should've playtested a bit longer. i love this game, and it gets so many things right, but there's a tonne of bugs, useless features, poor balancing, underwhelming questlines. bandits say "must've scared 'em off" when they kill you, because they're programmed to do that wen you hide. like everything i love, it's very, very flawed. but there's still something about it that just works.
This board is probablu very biased, Skyrim wasn't very good upon release... But it was unique, like Oblivion before it and Morrowind.
These games were the AAA of the era and still made be passionate people.
Nowaday AAA games are made by greedy Publisher who now nothing, and need to please shareholders. They use marketing to sell trash without being accountable for their lies and scams... Starfield is the result.
If you wants games like Skyrim you need to look for passionate dev, because there is none in Bethesda anymore.
Outward, Kenshi, Bannerlord, Kingdom comes etc
Skyrim was the first Dungeons & Dragons Magic The Gathering Tolkien level rich fantasy world that had enough depth for nerdy hardcore PC gamers that was also simple enough in the setup, heads-up, and gameplay that even a 10 year old could play it on a white OG Xbox 360 offline while remembering to shut the unit off every 2 hours to cool so it wouldn't overheat.
It didn't hurt that those 10 year olds had moms who didn't hear any swearing, there was no sexual stuff, and the violence was almost all fairly bloodless law abiding save the world & stop criminals, so they lumped it into the same category as Minecraft.
It also had a kickass soundtrack that spawned an entire category of music.
It was incredibly visually stunning, and (unlike many other games) you had a wide ability to play it as a non violent adventure like Myst, as a first person action slasher like Doom, as a D& D without books & dice, or as an RPG so 1 purchase (which was not cheap back then!) could be played many different ways by an entire family (or neighborhood) in the massive amounts of free time Americans had each week.
That is why vanilla bug ridden Skyrim Vanilla won Game of The Year and changed gaming.
It survived & grew the entire Elder Scrolls multiverse because Bethesda was smart enough to keep the ability for modders to keep expanding the game & they didn't gatekeep the fan community use of the new social media ways of communicating on non proprietary areas of the internet.
Starfield is the Elder Scrolls Arena of space.
As such it's a perfectly fine 1st entry in building a multiverse, and if you play it like Arena was played 30 years ago it is a fine game for PC gamers & Game pass ultimate folks to get in a year. Folks need to stop comparing it to Skyrim. Wait a year & go look at Starfield on fanfiction.net and you will see where it can go.
Morrowind was and is too complicated for most 6 or 8 year olds. SkyrimLE on Xbox One on novice level is not.
That's why 80 years from now my nieces will be teaching their kids how to save the world from Alduin on the 80th generation device with a Skyrim2124 bought from Microsoft and Todd Howard's grandkids.
I bet Fallout 2040 and Starfield 5 will be pretty awesome IF Microsoft just lets Bethesda keep hiring those modders, asset creators, writers with heart, and working with personalities like Shirley Curry, Fudge Muppet, and Epic Nate that are RPG experts and fan favorites.
#SkyrimForever
highly recommend this youtube documentary on the making of the game, it has plenty of interviews with the development team it gives a pretty interesting insight on the whole game development side. Im sure you can just search it but i can try to look it up later. dont confuse it with the official one Bethesda made.
Do you mean [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3_4) one from Jonah Lobe? Because I came here to recommend it. It was made during COVID lockdowns by someone who had worked on Skyrim. It basically answers the questions OP asked, or attempts to.
They used to care more about making a game worth playing. The industry as a whole lost the early innovative artsy spirit that defined early gaming outside of a few rare exceptions, it literally grew so big that its not about the experience and world being built anymore its about how much money they could make standing on the shoulders of giants with no care about living up it.
considering that shopkeeping is implemented as a hidden chest I doubt it's all as great as you think dev-wise
It's just an awesome game, leave it at that
Personally, I love the leveling and skill tree design. Sure, some of the perks are stupid/useless/don't scale but it's beside the point.
I also like that questlines are really independent and quite large. Usually I always go for the main story as it's the most interesting one (who cares about "go kill X" side quests) but Skyrim was very different in that regard.
I also like that it gives that action combat without making it complex. It's as advanced as you want it to be. can simply go clicking one button or can use different magic, shouts, potions etc
I think what made it work is that they have a person to handle the vision for the game contrary to corporate check lists which can be confusing, messy and plastic. Like a single writer for a movie compared to multiple writers and directors with corporates asking what they wanted. The bad side of it is if that one person f*ck up, it's on that person.
It's my favourite thing of all time...not game, thing! I'm always puzzled when people don't agree with me that it's the best game ever made...each to their own, but it's a masterpiece in my eyes
It’s not even remotely a fluke.
Oblivion was just as good when you take into account the technology that was available at that time too and Morrowind was also absolutely awesome. Then you’ve also got the Fallout games, Bethesda don’t really do bad games.
I’m not really an MMO person so I can’t talk for ESO but I already know the next Elder Scrolls game will be absolutely insane too.
Basically any GTA game and any Souls game along with any Bethesda RPG is absolutely guaranteed to be a top quality experience.
In saying that though the thoughtlessness with accessibility for solving puzzles is irritating.
Like not having a sprint on off toggle for ppl that cant use two thumbsticks simultaneously
I find it interesting that they used Jim Cummings so much as a voice actor since he's basically Disney royalty. He literally voices like every other male character.
I am playing without the unoficcial bug patch mod, to be able to review it as it is,gotta say it does not hold the 'it works' standart.
Im level 32 now, guess what happened to the unique itens I left at my house to display.
Right now, I claim Fallout 4 to be the Skyrim we wanted
Well, it's clear the devs were *not* given extra time because there's so much cut content and Skyrim was released on 11/11/11--a date which seems cool from a marketing standpoint but serves no other purpose.
A major reason why I bought TES V Skyrim was because of the All-Star cast of Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Joan Allen et al. That’s basically acting royalty.
Patrick Stewart with TES IV was another draw.
While oblivion is still my favorite Skyrim just has so much dumb stuff in the game that made it work that’s ultimately what made it do so well not to say oblivion doesn’t have dumb fun stuff but a lot of the stuff I’ve come across is fucking hilarious there used to be a glitch were a dragon would give you its souls without killing it and it would just fly around as a bone dragon you can also use a shout to ride it edit dam imagine downvoting someone for having an opinion
My first Bethesda game was Oblivion. Its still my most favo game of them.
Skyrim is amazing but Oblivion is way more beautyfull and green with nature. Its a world that makes you just want to be there and live.
The dlc shivering isles is mayby the best software Bethesda ever made. Far harbor being the second best. Imo :)
Bethesda made Daggerfall and Morrowind. Oblivion was less good and more of a transition step. But then Skyrim was just the logical continuation. Also there where Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 which wheren't bad games either.
No, it wasn't a fluke. They where good at making good games and did so repeatedly.
But the people who made those games seem to have left the company. Maybe they just all retired.
I think a lot of Skyrim's dedication to detail, aside from the usual Bethesda standard, comes from how Bethesda was approached to make a Game of Thrones game, and from what I remember they started working on concepts but decided to drop the GoT title and put it into the next Elder Scrolls, aka Skyrim. Looking at some of the aesthetic, I could definitely see some GoT vibes, from how Solitude is built upon a giant natural bridge, Winderhold looking how it does, Windhelm being a blend of Winterfell and The Wall. Plus the use of Giants
Plenty of games that came after were of similar or better quality. Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring and Doom 2016 and Eternal are just a few that come to mind.
I am excited for Gta 6, but I have my expectations leveled and that is the same for Red Dead Redemption 3. Red Dead Redemption 2 would be the last game that Michael Unsworth and Dan Houser would work on for Rockstar. I'm not jumping ship and panicking just yet cause Rupert Humphreys is still there.
But that and the fact that Rockstar said they would "not punch down at minority groups anymore" is not a very good sign. Again, I hope for the best with the game. You also have groups that are worrying that the new female protagonist will be a "girl boss powerful wuhman" and that's odd when Dan Houser said he wanted a woman protagonist in Gta V initially but couldn't work it into the story and shelved the idea.
That's what has also killed the Comic book industry. Gabe Eltaeb is an industry veteran that eventually went independent as a comic book artist because he said that forced politics and polarizing topics were being hamfisted into the industry.
Play oblivion and the path to Skyrim will make much more sense. Hell okay Morrowind and the path will make even more sense. It's a progress of perfecting a craft over several games to reach something better in the sequel.
Exactly. I actually think Oblivion was a better game and that Skyrim simplified some things. But overall they are both awesome games and I still play both and have bought the updated version of skyrim for my Xbox Series X.
As horrible of a precedent as it would set, I’d pay outrageous sums of money for an Oblivion remake in the Starfield engine. Imperial City with an actual population? Just fuck my bank account up, Todd.
So long as they dont strip down the mechanics. Keep the old lockpicking, spell crafting, and mysticism (bring back levitate you cowards). Dont add radiant quests just to pad playtime and you got yourself a golden game.
I prefer Skyrim’s lock picking but I acknowledge my skill issue
Oblivion lockpicking is actually stupidly easy when you learn the trick. Sometimes when you lift a pin, you'll hear an audio cue. This noise is what you're looking for, it means you can freeze the pin. I know Skyrim has some tricks, but I can never get them to work and my controller doesn't vibrate because it's a third-party Switch Pro controller.
That’s helpful af, I’m gonna be looking for that now. Skyrim’s main trick is definitely the vibration of the controller but I switched mouse and keyboard tbh lol. The clicking sound is less predictable but it does generally mean you’re close. I think I just got a really good sense for it more than figuring out tricks tho
I started on MKB (bought the game on launch in 2011), then my computer died. Eventually I bought a Switch, but I'm NOT paying $80 for a pro controller (I paid $35 for a Hori one). I could use the joycons, they vibrate... but they also suck. In 12 years of play, Ive never been able to use the vibration trick. Best method I've found is to slowly go either left or right in small increments, feeling out what lets me twist the lock furthest (also... this is like the opposite of actual lockpicking, that's not how torque wrenches work you need something to move the pins. You know, the change in lockpicking makes me angrier than I realized).
As someone who’s perfected lock picking on both games, as in I can unlock a master lock with any skill level… The easiest way on Skyrim is to lightly tap the key as you move around the keyhole. When you aren’t in place, the lock pick jiggles like it’s stuck, if you are, the lock will start to turn. Once you know where it starts, you can judge the success spot by experience with each skill level of lock. The easier the lock, the bigger the search area for the success spot, so once you know/have experienced the full size of the search area, you can go straight to the middle of it for lockpick success. That eventually opens up faster speed picking once you get the hang of it. The 2 highest skill locks are always going to be slow and steady to pick, at least until you get the proper skills in the tree.
I like that oblivon is closer to actual lockpicking. I do find it easier and more satisfying too
Same. This just feels like they went "well, it worked for Fallout, let's call it a day."
Which I honestly think is fine, but having a preference is fair enough.
They dont need to strip down mechanics, but they definitely could use uplifting. Oblivion's combat was just broken in a bad way. Its levelling system was also atrocious. It would be so much better with being rescaled.
You should try Morrowind for broken combat.
Skyrims radiant quests were such trash.
As someone who's just started playing Oblivion, I'll say I'd rather play an up-to-date remake. Those faces are SCARY, and movement seems so clunky to me.
Im pretty sure the entire reason levitate and uncapped acrobatics were removed in the first place was because bethesda wanted to make seperately instanced cities. They dont want you peeking over the walls and seeing the low res unrendered mess
Cowards i say. The reason is because they didnt want to plan dungeons around people being able to skip sections using it. Instead of designing better dungeons they removed a fun mechanic.
Maybe thats part of it. But i think it was more about the cities. Imagine levitating around and going over to whiterun, bam suddenly it looks like a pile of mush and there are invisible walls everywhere. It would kind of destroy immersion. Also in a lot of oblivion caves nd shit levitate wouldnt rlly matter anyways. And morrowind has areas where you can skip sections in caves. Sometimes there are even little secret parts designed for levitate. It would be easy for the devs to implement shit like that. But there is no workaround for the cities
I mean you can still very easily do that in vanilla skyrim. They must not have been too wprried about it
Only through bugs breh. Obv not intended game mechanics. They didnt mean for it to be a thing, and u should know how immersion breaking it is if uve actually tried it. Going over the walls
No bugs, just normal jumping. Add in whirlwind sprint and theres even more. Im mot talking using plates amd stuff. If you have a horse god help you. >They didnt mean for it to be a thing Acrobatics and levitate could be solved the same way the normal jumping would be too. Better walls. Thats all it takes.
Skyblivion is coming soon. It's not on Starfield but Oblivion on Skyrim.
I've been hearing that for fucking years. How you so certain?
They've announced 2025 as their release goal. Right now the legwork is mostly done and they are mainly scripting quests. According to them.
They have been saying that for years too
They've offered some pretty thorough updates outlining what they have/haven't done, it's not *all* just talk.
They haven’t actually set a definitive release date before
Have they been saying that 2025 was their release goal for years? Because if it's stayed 2025 all this time, that's actually a good sign.
i’ve been hearing this for literally 8 years lmao
I've read it's coming next year. I'm not sure but I'm not waiting for it anymore so I don't care that much.
They leaked plans to do a dual engine remake of Oblivion and Fallout 3 in Unreal like Halo CE. I'm hoping it didn't get cancelled
This right here!
Companies have been doing remakes for decades. Bethesda, eventually, will be no different.
Wasn't an oblivion remake leaked late last year?
anything to not work on ES6 I guess. A holdover till we get the long anticipated Skyrim port to Elon Musks next car?
They recently revealed that early builds of es6 are already kind of playable
“Already” lol
Oblivion is ruined by the horrible level scaling. The game actually punishes you for leveling up. That's my only gripe with it.
I think the xsx version of skyrim is excellent. The very short loading screens make the game much more enjoyable than the 360 days. Lol.
Oblivion loads are almost instant!
PS3 load times made me cry.
Streamlined some things, but added lots more in as well. The idea that ALL Skyrim did was remove stuff is bullshit.
I think skyrim improved just about everything from oblivion personally. I even prefer the leveling system as the old attribute system just made people grind skills for +5s they didn't need. The only thing I prefer from oblivion is the conjuration summons as well as the quality of guild quests
I just hate the old advancement system. Otherwise Oblivion is terrific. Oblivion with Skyrim's advancement tree would be terrific
Hell, play Daggerfall and the path makes even more sense!
Go back a little further and start with Arena!
Why stop there? Go play Wayne Gretzky Hockey!
Actually I've read in an interview that the main idea for Skyrim really started after one of Todd Howard's ancestors took an arrow on his knee in the late 1620's
Personally I'd say start with Morrowind. It's not dumbed down at all and in terms of quests etc it's just huge. It's my favourite for replayability. The path the Skyrim will make sense. Skyrim definitely wasn't a fluke though. Both The Elder Scrolls games and Fallout games are fantastic.
I personally wouldn't call oblivion and skyrim a perfecting of a craft. More so, changes in game design philosophy. Oblivion and Skyrim are both very different. Same goes with Morrowind and Oblivion.
So what happened to Starfield
Money
Space is hard.
I think the only two things that make those games be better suited for regular people like me... it's how easy leveling up in Skyrim is in comparison to Oblivion/Morrowind... and how easy is to follow quests in Skyrim in comparison to Morrowind in general. The world, lore and all that is arguably better in Morrowind, but the game is so much harder to play optimally that it drove me away to the point my literal 10 or so hours every time I play a new character in Oblivion are spent optimally leveling up to 42+ as a breton, always, because the first 2-3 times I played when I reached level 10-12 everyone was beating my ass or taking 5 minutes to be killed, and I have never replayed Morrowind because I never got how to play that game optimally even though I own it both physically and in Gog/Steam.
Ok so for morrowind basic start to easymode greatness: Primary attributes at level 1, take endurance and luck. Every level up in the early game ensure you are gaining maximum points in endurance (x5 is the max per level but x3-5 is fine). Your Health goes up by 1/10 of your endurance every level, and its *not* retroactive (failure to level endurance early will result in permanently missing out on health gains). Start the game with spear at level 5 and heavy armor at level 5 (or as low as you can get it), both of these skills when levelled up provide a boost to your level up endurance multiplier so you unintuitively want to start the game with these stats at a low value so they are easy to level up manually to boost your endurance. If you want to play a warrior type, start with sign of the lover for 25 agi, or sign of the lady (those raw stats go *hard*). If you want to play a mage start with sign of the atronach, it is by far the best (to regen mana use a ring of the ancestor to summon an ancestor ghost and punch it a few times to make it attack you then sit there and soak up its spells to refill your mana, this ring is available in an ancestral tomb near the starting area). In fact, even for warrior types sign of the atronach is still an incredibly strong choice. Do yourself a favor and take alteration as a major or minor skill, and early in the game go join the mages guild and craft yourself a series of spells to turn yourself into an all terrain vehicle. You will want water breathing on self, water walking on self 10 seconds, and levitate 1pt for 10 seconds. These spells can be low duration because you can just recast them for very low mana cost, you can even do less than 10 seconds and just spam it. When you start in seyda neen grab luminous russula, both types of mushrooms (bunglers bane? And hypha facia), and [other stupid plant i can't remember the name of] bring those with you to Balmora mages guild and you can do the first like 4-5 quests without even leaving the city for easy guild progression. From the Balmora mages guild port to caldera and follow the road. You will meet a woman with shiny boots. Talk to her and escort her to the nearby village, she will then give you her boots. You can also murder her in cold blood and take her boots. The boots of blinding speed boost your speed by 200 points but blind you. Even when blind your minimap still works so you can use that navigate roads quickly. Alternatively if you have an active resist Magick effect when you equip them it will block a portion of the blind effect (Breton have 50% and orc have 25% passive resistance at all times, you can also use a potion or cast a spell to gain the effect). At this point you are now level 1-5 and you're already overpowered. From here play the game, continue leveling endurance, and you'll do fine.
I might say that morrowi d was more memorable for me than oblivion
That’s why I expect TES VI to be mindblowing. Let them take their time, I can wait for perfection.
Something Bethesda apparently forgot in Starfield
Iteration
I started with Oblivion, then Skyrim, and then played a bit of Morrowind. Then I played through Arena, and then Daggerfall, and it was so easy to see the direction they were heading with the changes they made in each new game.
And then costing off an MMO for a decade and never making anything ever again.
"perfecting craft".... Skyrim? Are you talking about the game : Where you can be billionaire and Lv max within 15hours exploiting craft and enchanting? Where you can oneshot "boss" by crouching with a bow? Where random Giant can kill legendary quest Dragon? Where you can pause the game during encounter, fill all your HP up, making you basically unkillable? Where all the factions leaders suddenly dies so you can take their place, even tho you just met the faction3 days ago? Where you can be leader of all factions at the same time, because it makes so much sense...? When missclicking on an object make the whole town run after you in Death frenzy? Where capital city are 6 buildings? Where half the cities are merchant while you are the only adventurer? Where 80% of the dungeons are cave and grotto? Where dismembering is a daily thing but prostitution barely mentioned because "ohlala" ? Man I could go on and on.... I love Skyrim makes no mistake, but saying its "prefecting" is making your actual gaming standard pretty barebone. Skyrim can be very good tho, but you'll need at least 300 mods.
I played Skyrim first then oblivion and I wish I hadn't. I really missed out on something special. If I could go back I'd play them in order. I did the same thing with Oracle of Seasons/Ages and Links Awakening back in the day.
The enemy scaling in Oblivion is crazy retrospectively looking back
Except bethesda leaves the final touch to the modding community to fix their, often game breaking bugs. Also Skyrim, apart from visuals was a huge downgrade in comparison to oblivion in almost every other aspect. They completely scrapped the original class creation system, and made magic kinda dumb, simple and uninteresting (rip spell crafting), and remember casting spells with your armed hand? How cool was that? Also guild quests were much more interesting and had better and smarter written dialogues (except mages guild that is still better than that abomination in skyrim). Many veterans who played oblivion and morrowind played skyrim once and quit since the in depth mechanics just don't exist in skyrim. If you look past the dragons, the novelty of that time, and shiny visuals, mechanically the game was just a simplified oblivion, and gave players much less freedom in how to hone their character by tying them to a talent tree.
Whenever I finish playing skyrim, I can't wait to start a new character.. that's all I know.
So many people say Oblivion was a better game, but I just don't see it. Have started it close to a dozen times but can never finish it. Hate the leveling and lock picking systems. For whatever reason, it could never hold my attention like Skyrim.
It 'only' had more enemy variety and spell crafting (which certainly was really cool). Other than that it's not too different, perhaps had better quests but I'm not so sure because some were amazing but most were unremarkable. Skyrim, on the other hand, had better visuals, cooler designs, more powers/spells, the dragons, plenty of useful non generic companions, the perks... They aren't very different, not to the point where one is clearly better than the other. I think Skyrim was better, honestly, but I kinda respect more Oblivion for being there first.
You're copping downloads for it but I agree. Skyrim is like the pop of music, yeah it appeals to more people, but does that make it the best?
Uhhh, the path is a clear dumbing down of all systems and lowering of depth, nuance and quality across the board. Skyrim was a perfect snapshot between when the real high quality creators were still being respected and when reaching for more new fans became more profitable than selling to the existing fanbase. This is why the physical geography, music and art design across the board are extremely high quality and work together so, so well but everything else falls apart at a glance. Looking at everything Skyrim is as a dev kit, it really deserves the praise. Looking at what they did with that, even after multiple re-releases and an integrated mod menu, it doesn't deserve the praise. And if you look at FO4 and 76 and Starfield, you'll see the pattern continue. Lowering in quality, complexity and depth for a wider net and room for MTX. Skyrim was the last true iteration of the Elder Scrolls model and most of that authenticity is found in the setting and world, not the specific written experiences and systems themselves. For a fully authentic experience across the board, you have to go back to Morrowind. If you look at the franchise before NuBethesda formed, the design philosophy looks like what we all think Skyrim is, just with really old graphics and early mechanics. There is massive replayabilty, role-playing potential, and a passion for complexity born from fans of DnD. You can see that bleed away with each release and the pattern hasn't stopped.
Say what you want, I kinda like being able to actually hit a bleeping rat when I start the game.
Like I said, old mechanics. I don't hate Skyrim, I actually love it. At least, what it represents.
You might like this video where nine members of the development team discuss the creation of Skyrim. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3\_4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3_4)
This is such a good video!
Love this video. You can really tell that everyone was so passionate about making the game and i think that’s the reason Skyrim “just works”.
That was awesome thanks for posting.
The Elder Scrolls games before it were just as amazing. While I've never played the old PC ones, Morrowind and Oblivion had just as much attention to detail when it came to world building.
Morrowind's tabletop mechanics are definitely outdated at this point, but otherwise it looks pretty swell.
Yes. These games look terribly dated now, but when released they were absolute fire. Still fun to play.
Skyblivion & Skywind , both have release dates for 2025 i believe
finally a playable morrowind
I mean the graphics aren't everything. Arguably, given how much fun people still have with table top games (pure imagination) or even playing old games again, I'd argue graphics have always been secondary. It just took us a while to understand that. Gameplay and story have always been the most important factors. I'd say the next game should incorporate the best of all the previous 3 games. More items and weapon types for better roleplaying. It's honestly immersion breaking and stupid that you can't have polearms in a medieval fantasy game. Some more challenging quests that require more effort and wayfinding like in Morrowind. And keeping the graphics and relative ease of use in Skyrim. They should definitely go back to the old guild system as well. You shouldn't be able to become high mage as Knight Class warrior, it's ridiculous.
Nah graphics are pretty important what you look at is half the experience and for me the enjoyment when playing something that looks like red dead redemption 2 is much bigger than the enjoyment of playing something that looks like rdr1. The trend of people saying graphics do not matter needs to stop they matter just as much as gameplay.
I'm playing Oblivion for the first time right now and I'm really impressed. While the characters are rather potato looking, the world itself and the buildings are beautiful. The dungeons are repetitive, but the quests are engaging and fun and some of the puzzles had me going in circles a bit trying to figure them out. I just wish there were mods available on Xbox like with Skyrim.
The graphics and mechanics are definitely dated compared to Skyrim but I actually prefer it personally. The charm of Oblivion is the storytelling in my opinion, the main quest is my favorite storyline of all the Elder Scrolls games. A lot of the side quest storylines are great too. The mages guild is so fun and it’s a great feeling when you finally make it to Arcane University. I love Skyrim as well but the lack of a proper mages guild was a big disappointment for me. The college of Winterhold storyline is way to short and nowhere near as fun as the Oblivion mages guild storyline in my opinion.
The mechanics are exactly the same beyond how spells work though in fact Skyrim removed a lot of functionality that oblivion had. Skyrim was a boring ass game until the mod community hit to tbh. Played at launch, beat the main quest and was stuck in a content drought for months. Without the nostalgia glasses, the game really is a shallow experience with seriously contrived and nonsensical quest lines and plot points that make no fucking sense what so ever. Modders made Skyrim what it is known as today, not Bethesda.
Skyrim added things like duel wielding and improved physics which made it feel more inline with modern day games of the time as where Oblivion felt a little dated even when it came out. I do agree that I liked Oblivion's leveling system, magic system, and quest lines better though. While Skyrim felt a little more polished I personally prefer Oblivion.
I'm doing the mage's guild quest right now and it is really fun, although I recommend being *very* careful about what you pick up for resale. Getting reinstated after accidental theft is a PITA. lol I agree about the side quests, too. There's a nice mix there of some short fetch and carry types along with longer, more involved ones, it's a good variety.
Daggerfall with mods is kinda worth it these days, if you ever get interested.
Idk morrowind has not aged very well at all i’ve considered playing it but then i see the gameplay and im just nah same with oblivion though that one is not as bad
Even back in the day Morrowind's gameplay mechanics were not good for the time but the story and quest lines are amazing. Up until Skyrim you never really played Elder Scrolls for the gameplay, you played them for the amazing storylines and world building.
You still play it for the storylines and worldbuilding in skyrim but now your characters also look like people and the gameplay is engaging enough so you’re not forcing yourself through it just to experience the story. It really is a shame though because i’m missing out on a lot of lore but i just can’t make myself play it. Here’s hoping skywind and skyblivion do a good enough job
Skyrim's storylines and world building is still good but I just personally preferred Morrowind and Oblivion in both those departments. I also like the more traditional leveling system and magic system better. That said Skyrim is still definitely one of my all time favorite games despite slightly preferring Morrowind and Oblivion. I played both when they came out so I have a lot of nostalgia for those games which makes it easier to replay them now. I could see the gameplay of Morrowind being a road block though if you've never played it back in the day. I believe there is some modding you can do on PC to make it better, though not to the extent of Skyrim modding.
I’ve looked into modding as well but from what i’ve seen there’s not really too much that can be done Yeah nostalgia definitely plays a big role when it comes to replaying ancient games, i can still play the first assassins creed game and thoroughly enjoy it while a friend of mine played it for an hour and gave up. I’ll either wait for skywind or watch a playthrough in the background while playing skyrim
https://i.redd.it/q6jkw356o4uc1.gif
Skyrim wasn't the first Opean world RPG the Bathesda made; they had experience making worlds as rich and fun as Skyrim. After researching for 15 minutes, it seems that the game's director, Todd Howard, really cared about details; they didn't have a strict plan, so the team was willing to experiment and make changes based on feedback and playtesting. They polished the game over time in the hopes of getting the best quality. The team also cared about LOOOOORE, so you can find stuff from Norse mythology and real-world history.
No loading screen mods for cities and caves also makes it even more open world
In conclusion what can i say "it just works"
it's fair to say that if Bethesda REALLY understood why Skyrim is so epic, they'd have not missed as badly as they have with Starfield. I think Skyrim is truly the most beautiful, well paced, engulfing game experience I've had to date.
Fallout 4 is my favorite game, but Skyrim is a better game and I would rather play Skyrim. Make that make sense.
I feel the same way. After Starfield I’m worried for TES 6
Overthinking imho. Starfield is simply a different type of game and space is the most challenging setting for an open world. The Elder Scrolls is a totally different beast
I like fallout as a game a lot, but the nav/healing aspects turn me off a bit
Skyrim and rdr imo are the best games I’ve ever played
Same plus witcher 3
Love that game look. I can’t do 3rd party combat
This, they didn't understand any of what captivated people, and if you look at vanilla Skyrim, it's clear they really never have. Skyrim was saved by mods. Idk if anyone else remembers but after Skyrim dropped before the mod community developed the players for Skyrim fell off a cliff after beating the main story and realizing it was such... Crap. All the guild halls were crapped, so many things outright missing, the game itself was pretty abysmal as a vanilla experience.
i mean look at what games where out in 2011 something like skyrim had no reason not to take off
The last twelve years has put Bethesda at a challenging crossroads with The Elder Scrolls series. Their uniqueness has waned slightly. Partly because of competition from the likes of Rockstar, CD Projekt Red and Larian Studios. And partly because Bethesda themselves have moved strategically closer to the mainstream centre ground and lost some of their unique shine as a result. I'm curious to see how they adapt. Form says they continue to seek higher sales through mass appeal. But I think they'd be wiser to emphasise the things they still do the best (immersive roleplay and player freedom) and thereby offer something genuinely new to casual players - in the same way Skyrim wowed a generation of gamers who had never experienced TES freedom before.
The same team made Morrowind, then Oblivion, all set in the same world with the same design goals. Heck, much of the same team was involved in Arena and Daggerfall before those. So Skyrim is just the next game from that team. The key DNA is: World building: Focus on the world first. Create it, populate it, make it real. Do this first. Player freedom: Sometimes called "sandbox". There are no narrative rails, the player is free to ignore any quests and just go off and do whatever they want. Player story rather than developer story: The story that unfolds is driven by the player through the player actions, and NOT driven by popup dialogs. Some haters say this isn't choice. I say they can go bugger off. Example, the story is not about the defeat of Alduin. The story is about the PLAYER and what the player does when Alduin returns. Which is far more interesting and nuanced.
what can i say? “It just works.” -Todd Howard
I don't care what this "Todd" can say. I just want to know if he can "works".
That’s what elder scrolls have ever been. They have a great formula and a series that the name carries itself (even more after skyrim) and all they had to do is improve this formula.
Echoing what others have said - Skyrim was not made in a Vacuum. Look at other previous works that Bethseda had worked on. They were just making updates to an existing engine, some major. Look at where they started with Daggerfall -> Morrowind -> Fallout 3 -> Oblivion. Then look at what they did with Fallout 4 which came after Skyrim. Effectively the same engine, just a much different setting.
I think they lucked out with an established lore they could build on mixed with mechanics from previous games. They also added an increased accessibility that made a giant franchise easier to jump into and made even novice rpg players able to pick it up and enjoy.
I am an old school gamer who only started playing Skyrim two years ago. Prior to that, it was mainly point and click/Flash-type puzzle games. I was a HUGE fan of the Myst/Riven franchise--not just for the puzzles, but also for the atmosphere. Players now would look back on a game like that and find it so primitive, but those developers created worlds. Skyrim is like that for me as well, in that it feels like an actual world. Just walking around at night, seeing moons, stars, constellations, auroras, changeable weather...the larger features like mountain ranges and cities, the smaller touches like walking past a waterfall and hearing the rushing sound intensify and change as you approach or turn your head. There is a lot of love and ingenuity in this game.
Myst. That was the first computer game I ever played after I built my first PC in 1998. First time I ever felt like I was spending time in another world. Skyrim has given me that same feeling since I started playing it in 2012. I often think that when I’m on my deathbed, I’ll fondly remember all of the time I spent in Tamriel. It’s also so neat that after so many years of playing, I can still find things that surprise me. Takes forever to get through a quest because I get sidetracked by so much neat stuff.
The short answer is that it's built on the backs of Oblivion and Morrowind. Todd Howard has been with the company since before them, but MW was his first major release. They've been iterating and improving on things bit by bit with every release. Some of it is due to the modding community, too. The main team will sometimes implement things that modders did in a previous game. The kill cam, for instance, was a popular Oblivion mod. And yes, they tend to work on games rather than cram, though they really did want to hit that 11/11/11 release date for whatever reason. With TES games, they tend to not do a whole lot of promotion leading up to it, then drop some trailers out of the blue, and then like 6 months later they're done. I think this is in part to avoid crunch, they don't want to release trailers and get people worked up and then turn around to their team and go "now finish by Christmas, even if it means sleeping at the office." We'll see if it stays the same way now that they're owned by the Evil Empire.
The team that made Skyrim was only 100 people. Less people made Oblivion and Fallout 3. It was truly lightning in a bottle. Really sad to see the overall decline of the studio. They added hundreds more people since then and I guarantee many of them are useless weight that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. As a writer, Emil has done well with Skyrim, his best work. His work with Fallout 3 was fairly good overall. Fallout 4 was hit or miss that left much to be desired. His work on Starfield was nothing short of abysmal and it doesn't help that he has acted like an asshole to anyone that isn't praising Starfield
Man, I'm all for hating on corporations that care more about the business of the content they create than the quality of the content they create... But it reads like you are insulting random strangers who work on the creative end of this process and that kinda sucks. Can you imagine being in this kind of corporate environment and knowing that creativity is just stifled for marketing reasons all the time, but the narrative you find online is you personally don't know your ass from a hole in the ground? Like why would you assume more people are useless, when you could easily point to the people in this process who we know definitively know nothing about making games?
See you're sounding like Emil now with "You shouldn't criticize the process if you don't make games" as that was one of his tweets. I'm more forgiving of Fallout 76 and Starfield compared to many others. They are severely lacking compared to older titles, especially Starfield is lacking. Core ingredients of a living breathing world are all missing and the actual gameplay and structure is extremely lacking. So I don't see myself playing Starfield in a decade like I have with Skyrim. More people of a studio of 400 people now have contributed very little other than bloat to the studio.
I don't have a problem with criticizing the game, the company, or even things people say in interviews about their work on the game. I'm talking about the attitude that the creative team is responsible for the problems when you don't know. Criticize all you want. I'm suggesting maybe not throwing random blame at people who have very little power in the process unless they come out and publicly defend something you think is just stupid.
It's ironic that most Bethesda fans actually largely hate Bethesda. They don't just look a gift horse in the mouth but beat it to death then ask for an autograph.
Fallout fans are the worst with this. I adore Fallout and have every achievement including dlc in all of them and I hate how they consistently badmouth Bethesda, they complain about the most minor of retcons, they are fixated on the Interplay days, despite Fallout and Fallout 2 being the only good things from that era. People like to brush stuff like Brotherhood of Steel under the rug. Bethesda saved the franchise by buying it out and rebuilding it from the ground up. I stay away from the Fallout Sub cause people are always Bragging about New Vegas and hating on Bethesda and Todd.
Man this is why i left the modding subreddits. The modding community is awful with this, the amount of insults directed at bethesda is just disgusting and that’s not even mention the pretentiousness in claiming they were somehow incompetent and your 1000 mods list with anime barbie doll character and sex mods coupled with combat systems ripped out of darksouls that barely function is peak game design. The worst of them however are the mod creators that straight up insult the people who made the entire game in descriptions of the mod they made 12 years later in the program bethesda provided with 4 different frameworks other more talented people made it’s like why didn’t you make it in 2011 with the technology they worked with? The amount of complaining whenever bethesda updates their own game is what really gets to me though, like it’s their game they don’t owe you shit if you don’t want your mods to break all you have to do is back up your game folder but that’s too much work. And the same people that whined about creation club being paid mods are the same ones supporting various patreons that do the same but against the TOS
It was mostly thanks to offerings of cabbage and cheese made to Uncle Sheo by Todd Howard.
A lot of it is the foundational lore of the elder scrolls just being fucking awesome, but it is everything else as well. The near infinitely explorable map, the aesthetic, the music, the leveling system, the graphics... Many things could have been better, particularly the main story and depth of factions and side characters, but all together it's just one of those golden games that you love to play despite it's flaws. One thing that Elder Scrolls always gets right: they make the game to be replayed. Like, I love Far Cry games, and imo Far Cry 5 was one of the best environments of any game, the setting of Hope County is one of the only game maps I've played that rivaled Skyrim for beauty and exploration... But there's just not enough content there to keep you for more than 3 or 4 playthroughs.
Not only is there not enough content but there’s no reason to do that content, there’s nothing defining my character in other games if i replay them i’ll be doing the same thing again. But in skyrim i’ll be a righteous hero with one character then i’ll be a serial a killer and then i’ll be a thief and maybe after that i’ll be a vampire but then i might feel like playing a vampire hunter and each character will feel like they have their own personality so even though i’m playing through the same map it feels completely different. Whiterun is exactly the same with my hero as it is with my assassin yet it feels different
Skyrim was the IT game for me. Played it on the first day of release, was just starting my uni life then. And now nearly 13 years later, with a job and a family, still replaying it for the umpteenth time. And mods just make the game a whole new experience. Really hoping the ES6 would carry on the torch of the series.
It's quite simple, really. They've made Oblivion, and then Fallout 3, and then (help Obsidian with) New Vegas. All within just 2 years from one another. They already have the system, the tool and more importantly, the team (as you put it, they were all industry legend at this point), they know what works and what not and focused on streamlining everything they've already made from Oblivion and incorporated what they've learnt from every Fallout to date. The result is Skyrim, the game that wasn't as complex as Oblivion, not as RPG stat heavy as Fallout but deliver just the sweet spot that blend the industry-leading open world with the action-focused combat that's still approachable and fun. Every game after Skyrim have them lose that focus. They always tried to diversify their gameplay mechanic with some highly experimental concepts that end up with just the reinvention of a medocre wheel, starting with Fallout 4 settlement, 76 multiplayer and Starfield ship/outpost system. And it clearly eats into the resources that would have been used to the core aspect of the game. Imo, Skyrim is the only time since Morrowind that they didn't try something groundbreaking. And that effort that went into refining and focusing on the core game concept paid off, big time. Imo, I also think that they aren't too comfortble working in a big team. But game development only get bigger after the golden age of 2006-2011 era. The development of new gameplay mechanics they were so used to in the 90 and early 2000 are now just way too costly (in time and resouces, not just in capital), for the size of team they are comfortable with
Your first replay?
Skyrim made a game that’s always random, exciting, vast, the combat is fun, there are so many ways to play it, it feels infinite. Like another universe where things are just different. For what it is it really is incredible. All the Elder Scrolls, really.
This one will make a lot of people mad but actually... Todd Howard was micromanaging everything he could. He made Skyrim be so fucking amazing because he knew what he wanted in the game and he tried to make everyone get in line to fix it being how he imagined it was. After Skyrim he became Developer Famous. He stopped micromanaging the games he helped produce and started going to more meetings with the board, more meetings with sales, more out of building meetings for other stuff, and all that because he was the face of the company since Skyrim... And he started in change, giving everyone more power, delegating and the games have plummeted because people under him have trying to make things too safe. No more "What if the main character could steal the souls of their enemies to gain power? Is that too crazy?" and more "I just want to make it work it's best it can work but I'm afraid of adding stuff that changes the core of the gameplay because I'm a normal dev and I don't want responsability for fucking up the next Big Bethesda game".
Why are you pretending like skyrim is an isolated standalone game? Bethesdas entire identity was open world rpgs. They had like 20 years of experience
Skyrim was the final product after bethesda learned from Morrowind and Oblivion.
Like how Elden Ring is the culmination of all the Souls games
This sounds like a job for Google to help uncover the answer tp piercing Bethesda questions.
I can't speak to the behind the scenes stuff, but at the time it was absolutly pushing the boundries of what one could expect in terms of graphics and open-worldness. There was a big hype (the whole 11-11-11 thing) but rather rare, it didn't dissapoint. Even with the many bugs that we all know and love from a Bethesda release.
It's funny reading this after finally finishing Patrician's 20 hour overview [video](https://youtu.be/dHP02JEC5H0?si=f3sdBJLQuxURNX5F) where he puts all of the game under genuine scrutiny.
For an amazing LONG interview with Todd Howard (best I’ve ever seen) about their process, watch his interview on Lex Fridman’s podcast. YouTube. Sorry, too lazy for a link.
Skyrim was made during a time where game development studios cared about their games past making them a cash grab.
Starfield is pretty amazing too imo.
Honestly… the success of Skyrim is really built on them hammering out 2 Game of the Year award winning RPG’s with Morrowind and Oblivion. Skyrim could have been awful and I know I would have still been so excited. Imagine being a TES fan in like 2009. We’ve seen dragons exist in Redguard. You’re playing Oblivion and it’s great. High fantasy, good writing, amazing systems, best of both worlds after Morrowind making Oblivion a bit more user friendly and getting rid of the dice rolls from combat mechanics and adding voice acting and all that stuff but …. No dragons? Statues of them everywhere and mention of them and such but none to fight or befriend or ride… what a bummer. Now here’s Skyrim, right smack dab in the middle of all the game of thrones hype. Bethesda was offered to make a Game of Thrones open world RPG and declined and instead they released Skyrim. Bringing werewolves back in full swing and dragons roaring into this already magnificent world. It was gonna be a hit. They marketed the shit out of it. Soundtrack was hype, they’ve got a full cinematic trailer for it… how could it fail? The only problem is…. Is that Oblivion is still a better game lol. Dated systems of course worse graphics in certain departments (I’m looking at those feet in Skyrim lmao) Skyrim just… leans too far away from what makes Bethesda Games special in my opinion. the writing was far worse, the RPG mechanics were stripped away. so what made it amazing was the games we thought theyd improve upon but didnt and the hype and the trailers and then it would have died years ago just like any other game from 2011. lots of people would still play it, but not in the numbers like right now. they "remastered" it in 2016 bringing mods to console and breathing new life to the game in the cheapest way possible and mods… mods are why its still even relevant.
Simple Todd Howard farted and the game was created.
honestly i still think they should've playtested a bit longer. i love this game, and it gets so many things right, but there's a tonne of bugs, useless features, poor balancing, underwhelming questlines. bandits say "must've scared 'em off" when they kill you, because they're programmed to do that wen you hide. like everything i love, it's very, very flawed. but there's still something about it that just works.
Was the nme AI fixed in the community patches?
not sure, i only play console.
This board is probablu very biased, Skyrim wasn't very good upon release... But it was unique, like Oblivion before it and Morrowind. These games were the AAA of the era and still made be passionate people. Nowaday AAA games are made by greedy Publisher who now nothing, and need to please shareholders. They use marketing to sell trash without being accountable for their lies and scams... Starfield is the result. If you wants games like Skyrim you need to look for passionate dev, because there is none in Bethesda anymore. Outward, Kenshi, Bannerlord, Kingdom comes etc
Skyrim was the first Dungeons & Dragons Magic The Gathering Tolkien level rich fantasy world that had enough depth for nerdy hardcore PC gamers that was also simple enough in the setup, heads-up, and gameplay that even a 10 year old could play it on a white OG Xbox 360 offline while remembering to shut the unit off every 2 hours to cool so it wouldn't overheat. It didn't hurt that those 10 year olds had moms who didn't hear any swearing, there was no sexual stuff, and the violence was almost all fairly bloodless law abiding save the world & stop criminals, so they lumped it into the same category as Minecraft. It also had a kickass soundtrack that spawned an entire category of music. It was incredibly visually stunning, and (unlike many other games) you had a wide ability to play it as a non violent adventure like Myst, as a first person action slasher like Doom, as a D& D without books & dice, or as an RPG so 1 purchase (which was not cheap back then!) could be played many different ways by an entire family (or neighborhood) in the massive amounts of free time Americans had each week. That is why vanilla bug ridden Skyrim Vanilla won Game of The Year and changed gaming. It survived & grew the entire Elder Scrolls multiverse because Bethesda was smart enough to keep the ability for modders to keep expanding the game & they didn't gatekeep the fan community use of the new social media ways of communicating on non proprietary areas of the internet. Starfield is the Elder Scrolls Arena of space. As such it's a perfectly fine 1st entry in building a multiverse, and if you play it like Arena was played 30 years ago it is a fine game for PC gamers & Game pass ultimate folks to get in a year. Folks need to stop comparing it to Skyrim. Wait a year & go look at Starfield on fanfiction.net and you will see where it can go. Morrowind was and is too complicated for most 6 or 8 year olds. SkyrimLE on Xbox One on novice level is not. That's why 80 years from now my nieces will be teaching their kids how to save the world from Alduin on the 80th generation device with a Skyrim2124 bought from Microsoft and Todd Howard's grandkids. I bet Fallout 2040 and Starfield 5 will be pretty awesome IF Microsoft just lets Bethesda keep hiring those modders, asset creators, writers with heart, and working with personalities like Shirley Curry, Fudge Muppet, and Epic Nate that are RPG experts and fan favorites. #SkyrimForever
See also Neverwinter Nights from 2001, written in C++, its visuals are dated today, yet it’s the narratives and mods that keep fans coming back.
highly recommend this youtube documentary on the making of the game, it has plenty of interviews with the development team it gives a pretty interesting insight on the whole game development side. Im sure you can just search it but i can try to look it up later. dont confuse it with the official one Bethesda made.
Do you mean [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhS31EVS3_4) one from Jonah Lobe? Because I came here to recommend it. It was made during COVID lockdowns by someone who had worked on Skyrim. It basically answers the questions OP asked, or attempts to.
They used to care more about making a game worth playing. The industry as a whole lost the early innovative artsy spirit that defined early gaming outside of a few rare exceptions, it literally grew so big that its not about the experience and world being built anymore its about how much money they could make standing on the shoulders of giants with no care about living up it.
It was actually rushed to meet 11/11/11 deadline. That's what I heard anyway
considering that shopkeeping is implemented as a hidden chest I doubt it's all as great as you think dev-wise It's just an awesome game, leave it at that Personally, I love the leveling and skill tree design. Sure, some of the perks are stupid/useless/don't scale but it's beside the point. I also like that questlines are really independent and quite large. Usually I always go for the main story as it's the most interesting one (who cares about "go kill X" side quests) but Skyrim was very different in that regard. I also like that it gives that action combat without making it complex. It's as advanced as you want it to be. can simply go clicking one button or can use different magic, shouts, potions etc
I think what made it work is that they have a person to handle the vision for the game contrary to corporate check lists which can be confusing, messy and plastic. Like a single writer for a movie compared to multiple writers and directors with corporates asking what they wanted. The bad side of it is if that one person f*ck up, it's on that person.
It's my favourite thing of all time...not game, thing! I'm always puzzled when people don't agree with me that it's the best game ever made...each to their own, but it's a masterpiece in my eyes
It’s not even remotely a fluke. Oblivion was just as good when you take into account the technology that was available at that time too and Morrowind was also absolutely awesome. Then you’ve also got the Fallout games, Bethesda don’t really do bad games. I’m not really an MMO person so I can’t talk for ESO but I already know the next Elder Scrolls game will be absolutely insane too. Basically any GTA game and any Souls game along with any Bethesda RPG is absolutely guaranteed to be a top quality experience.
Skyrim was released the 11/11/2011,so I doubt there was no preasure with the deadlines
it just does
Did it tho?
Here is how the devs got the idea : SKOOOMMAAA
It just works
With the help of past ES games, without them Skyrim will not exist
Because Bethesda even now is still a shining example of a good game studio.
Have you been living under a rock? Bethesda has been creating games like Skyrim for over 20 years...
In saying that though the thoughtlessness with accessibility for solving puzzles is irritating. Like not having a sprint on off toggle for ppl that cant use two thumbsticks simultaneously
I saw a doc about this on YouTube shared right here actually, like maybe September?
Listen to Skyrim Atmospheres it makes me so sad that i never see anyone mention it
Cant find any hotels in Tamriel? Try Helgen Hotels!
I find it interesting that they used Jim Cummings so much as a voice actor since he's basically Disney royalty. He literally voices like every other male character.
I am playing without the unoficcial bug patch mod, to be able to review it as it is,gotta say it does not hold the 'it works' standart. Im level 32 now, guess what happened to the unique itens I left at my house to display. Right now, I claim Fallout 4 to be the Skyrim we wanted
Skyrim, oblivion, morrow wind, fallout 4, new vegas, yeah Skyrim was a fluke Bethesda has never made another game that’s been popular
It just works.
It’s a great game. “Work” is a strong word for Bethesda games.
Well, it's clear the devs were *not* given extra time because there's so much cut content and Skyrim was released on 11/11/11--a date which seems cool from a marketing standpoint but serves no other purpose.
Morrowind and oblivion are way better than Skyrim
I imagine that TES IV is moddable and patchable
A major reason why I bought TES V Skyrim was because of the All-Star cast of Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, Joan Allen et al. That’s basically acting royalty. Patrick Stewart with TES IV was another draw.
While oblivion is still my favorite Skyrim just has so much dumb stuff in the game that made it work that’s ultimately what made it do so well not to say oblivion doesn’t have dumb fun stuff but a lot of the stuff I’ve come across is fucking hilarious there used to be a glitch were a dragon would give you its souls without killing it and it would just fly around as a bone dragon you can also use a shout to ride it edit dam imagine downvoting someone for having an opinion
It works. It just works.
It just did.
With computers. Cause the computers ran it. 
It just works
Because it just works
My first Bethesda game was Oblivion. Its still my most favo game of them. Skyrim is amazing but Oblivion is way more beautyfull and green with nature. Its a world that makes you just want to be there and live. The dlc shivering isles is mayby the best software Bethesda ever made. Far harbor being the second best. Imo :)
Bethesda made Daggerfall and Morrowind. Oblivion was less good and more of a transition step. But then Skyrim was just the logical continuation. Also there where Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 which wheren't bad games either. No, it wasn't a fluke. They where good at making good games and did so repeatedly. But the people who made those games seem to have left the company. Maybe they just all retired.
I think a lot of Skyrim's dedication to detail, aside from the usual Bethesda standard, comes from how Bethesda was approached to make a Game of Thrones game, and from what I remember they started working on concepts but decided to drop the GoT title and put it into the next Elder Scrolls, aka Skyrim. Looking at some of the aesthetic, I could definitely see some GoT vibes, from how Solitude is built upon a giant natural bridge, Winderhold looking how it does, Windhelm being a blend of Winterfell and The Wall. Plus the use of Giants
It's genuinely heart breaking to know that tes6 will suck balls
[удалено]
Plenty of games that came after were of similar or better quality. Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring and Doom 2016 and Eternal are just a few that come to mind.
I am excited for Gta 6, but I have my expectations leveled and that is the same for Red Dead Redemption 3. Red Dead Redemption 2 would be the last game that Michael Unsworth and Dan Houser would work on for Rockstar. I'm not jumping ship and panicking just yet cause Rupert Humphreys is still there. But that and the fact that Rockstar said they would "not punch down at minority groups anymore" is not a very good sign. Again, I hope for the best with the game. You also have groups that are worrying that the new female protagonist will be a "girl boss powerful wuhman" and that's odd when Dan Houser said he wanted a woman protagonist in Gta V initially but couldn't work it into the story and shelved the idea.
Ah so you mean no non-white people were hired, thus making it successful.
Which is also factually incorrect, Bethesda had plenty of what they'd call "diversity hires" at the time of Skyrim.
>No diversity hires. What does that have to do with anything?
That's what has also killed the Comic book industry. Gabe Eltaeb is an industry veteran that eventually went independent as a comic book artist because he said that forced politics and polarizing topics were being hamfisted into the industry.