It's been 12 years and countless releases. What do you think of Skyrim today?

[Rand]

Since there seems to be an... interesting... mix of personalities here on our site, I'm curious what people think of Skyrim at the end of 2023.

Not so much the complaints about "creation club" DLC ********, etc, but what do you think about the game and gameplay itself?
Especially in light of the subsequent games Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield.

[Vlajdimir Ermenović]

Mediocre open world game

[GhostCow]

Awful combat. Boring writing. It's ****.

[Emphyrio]

It's fine, but with the passage of time and no successor it has worn thin. The dungeons and combat are dull compared to Fallout 4. Part of that is because the post-apoc scifi setting allows more variety of weapons and locations than Tamriel. If Beth had any imagination they could put more effort into the magic for TESVI. Imagine spells like Dishonored, for example. Fireballs and **** spells that don't work on anything above "level 13" whatever that means aren't going to cut it. TESVI needs borrow heavily from the better-polished "immersive sims" if Beth wants to get goodwill back. Of course there's little hope of that.

[Slavic Sorcerer]

I enjoyed it about 10 years ago, but I couldn't do second playthrough
That's a red flag for me
If I don't have multiple saves with different characters in a game like that, that means I didn't really enjoy it

E.g. Baldur's Gate 3. I passed 700h mark since the premiere (never played EA). Would be more if not Genshin, Honkai, job, and life stuff. I didn't finish it just yet. Around 7 characters as of now, another one is in the plans

Now Skyrim is just porn category for me. Just like Overwatch is

I think the main reason is that the choices you make have 0 impact in the world
Not to mention dry line delivery; no emotion, no acting, nothing. AFAIK those lines were recorded alphabetically and out of context

Dungeons are also very much repetitive, to the point it's not fun to explore them after seeing 20 of those

My Khajit mage was the head of Winterhold, the big guy in Thieves Guild, the Dragonborn, and many other things
Aside from 2-3 NPCs directly related to the quests completed, no one else recognizes it, nor any changes in the world were made, no doors were closed etc

I think that's why I've got bored so much to the point I didn't touch the DLCs I bought right I finished the game, thinking I will want more

[Segata]

Never played it, I learned my lesson with Oblivion.

[Rand]

AFAIK those lines were recorded alphabetically and out of context

Not quite, but sadly yes.

[Oyster Sauce]

I respect it as a vessel for user created content. Playing mods created by passionate individuals is something I enjoy more than most soulless AAA releases, and few games have a modding community as expansive as Skyrim. Wouldn't ever want to play the stock game though.

[Acrux]

what people think of Skyrim at the end of 2023.

I don't think about it at all.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It was a great game. It addresses a lot of the issues that put me off from Morrowind, such as the clunky combat or screwing your character over at creation. The factions aren't anywhere near as deep as Morrowind's which is a little disappointing, and the world isn't as imaginative, but it's overall fun. Probably my biggest complaint is that the game is a little grey and desaturated. Mods improve the visuals a lot, but modding Skyrim is an extremely time consuming, laborious, and frustrating process that puts me off from replaying the game. It isn't fun spending a dozen hours looking up mods, reading compatibilities, slowly downloading everything from nexus, trying to figure out how to navigate Nexus/Vortex/whatever, and then you play and the game crashes 6 hours in. I think at one point someone uploaded a stable all-in-one modpack but I can't find it anymore. If I replayed Skyrim I would use that, though the issue is that I've already sunk a few hundred hours into Skyrim and have had my fill.

The rest of the games industry turning everything into open world slop for the next decade was unfortunate. Even Final Fantasy jumped the shark into becoming an open world game with FF15.

[maidenhaver]

Its a great game.

[wndrbr]

I had adhd and asbergers as a kid, I had trouble at school due to this and was bullied alot. I didn't have much as a kid, when I was at my father's house I'd play Oblivion alot, the music, the artistic scenery to it, the story and everything really helped me escape reality for a while. When skyrim came out I was so excited I made it the topic of a speech we had to do, no one cared and some people made fun of me for it but I still was so excited for it. Skyrim was the same deal, great music and a great escape for a 10 year old kid. I still play both games to this day.

Even made a tattoo. Not skyrim tattoo, but still.

► Show Spoiler

[SiMtRy]

i was still fairly young when Skyrim was released. i was about 10/11 at the time if i recall. Skyrim was the first "proper" Western RPG i've ever played. i played it on console together with a bunch of friends and it gave way to many fond memories i still cherish to this day. it was my gateway into exploring many other rpgs. but now with years of experience playing many other and older rpgs, i have to say that the gameplay in skyrim is really lackluster. Combat is flashy but manages to be really boring and mindless. The Roleplaying aspect of the game is a major downgrade from previous entries in the series. the main quest has a ton of ******** plotpoints.

overall its a fairly mediocre experience.

[Rand]

asbergers

It's Aspergers. P, not B. Put a B in it and you're asking for "assburgers" which is a sadge "joke". Also capitalized because it's someone's name and therefore a proper noun.
As for the story: that's nice and wholesome, dude.

[wndrbr]

As for the story: that's nice and wholesome, dude.

Thanks, I copypasted it from reddit.

[Element]

Could never finish it. Never understood how it was so highly praised for 'immersion' - I found the vanilla environments too drab to ever get excited about exploring. Dungeons are stale, and the trash mobs + primitive combat make them a pain. At least the lore was pushed forward somewhat with the Thalmor and the Aldmeri Dominion. Other than that - meh. 7/10.

[Emphyrio]

aspergers isnt real

[asf]

****** theme park cutscene simulator with copy pasted enemies

[Ratcatcher]

What's a skyrim?

[rusty_shackleford]

Didn't understand the appeal, it's all-around worse than Oblivion which already wasn't a great game.

[SoLong]

Overhyped. I might be biased though because I absolutely loathe Bethesda. Their games tend to be buggy as **** and they rely on their fanbase modding and repairing their games for them. They even have the exact same bugs in their fallout games over and over because they don't import their modder's fixes.

So they're exploitative and inept. In my opinion they're as bad as EA if not worse.

[Sweeper]

i was still fairly young when Skyrim was released. i was about 10/11 at the time if i recall. Skyrim was the first "proper" Western RPG i've ever played. i played it on console together with a bunch of friends and it gave way to many fond memories i still cherish to this day. it was my gateway into exploring many other rpgs. but now with years of experience playing many other and older rpgs, i have to say that the gameplay in skyrim is really lackluster. Combat is flashy but manages to be really boring and mindless. The Roleplaying aspect of the game is a major downgrade from previous entries in the series. the main quest has a ton of ******** plotpoints.

overall its a fairly mediocre experience.

Fr, fr on God no cap.

[Tweed]

Its greatest weakness is also its only strength, total blandness. You can imprint whatever kind of mad world you want on Skyrim with mods because it's so dull. Bethesda expects the community to make the game for them, and they do.

[Falksi]

It's ******* wank. First 20 hours I had a good-ish time with it, probably a 7/10 game up until that point, but after that the flaws which several mention above really drag it down. For a game supposedly about freedom of builds, the fact that every build has a progression bumpier than Fred West's back garden other than stealth archer shows just how bad Skyrim is at doing anything which it sets out to.

It's ******* criminal that a game so shallow and lacking snagged so many gamers, and thus ushered in an age of trash open-world wannabees. Games like Witcher 3 could have actually been good had the OW trend not forced it's way into everything.

i was still fairly young when Skyrim was released. i was about 10/11 at the time if i recall. Skyrim was the first "proper" Western RPG i've ever played. i played it on console together with a bunch of friends and it gave way to many fond memories i still cherish to this day. it was my gateway into exploring many other rpgs. but now with years of experience playing many other and older rpgs, i have to say that the gameplay in skyrim is really lackluster. Combat is flashy but manages to be really boring and mindless. The Roleplaying aspect of the game is a major downgrade from previous entries in the series. the main quest has a ton of ******** plotpoints.

overall its a fairly mediocre experience.

Refreshing to read someone recognize this. To this day I still read loads of ******* worship it as a masterpiece. It's the Chrono Trigger of the 2010's, overhyped entry-level RPG-ing which casualized the hobby far too much for the time.

[SpellSword]

Games like Witcher 3 could have actually been good had the OW trend not forced it's way into everything.

What is the meaning of "OW"?

[Oyster Sauce]

Games like Witcher 3 could have actually been good had the OW trend not forced it's way into everything.

What is the meaning of "OW"?

Open world

[wndrbr]

Games like Witcher 3 could have actually been good had the OW trend not forced it's way into everything.

it was CDPR who made the decision to copy skyrim's surface level gameplay elements, no one forced them to do that. CDPR are to blame for the open world ****. BTW it has more in common with Assassin's Creed (which came out in 2008) than with Skyrim.

also judging by TW2, without skyrim's influence TW3 would've probably ended up being a worse game.

[SpellSword]

I do agree that the open world genre has been causing some bland gameplay in some of the newer games but I don't think that it is a problem with the concept so much as the implementation. They start to feel more like a check list of small minigames to be completed than a single game. Like Grand Theft Auto with its event icons littered across the map.

I'm curious what people think of Skyrim at the end of 2023.

As for Skyrim I've heard the phrase "Wide as an ocean but shallow as a puddle" a lot and I think that best describes it, also as has previously been mentioned the Stealth Archer dilemma can't be understated.

I recently fell victim to Todd Howard's siren call and repurchased Skyrim to obtain a DRM-Free copy from GOG. It had been a while since I last played it and as @Falksi mentioned the first few hours were pretty fun. The new Anniversary Edition's extra DLC also spiced things up for a bit... but eventually encountering countless bugs related to almost every quest I touched had me playing with a FAQ website open not for a walkthrough but to check ahead if there was a potential bug I needed to work around just to complete that section.

The endless bugs really are what hurts Bethesda's games even more than anything else, and I'm not willing to download a community patch to try and fix them. As a platform for mods the game may be much more fun, otherwise the longer you play it the more it fights with your ability to enjoy it.

... At least the lore was pushed forward somewhat with the Thalmor and the Aldmeri Dominion. ...

This may have been the best part of the game's story and they did almost nothing with it!

Especially in light of the subsequent games Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield.

After the disappointment of Skyrim Anniversary Edition I can't bring myself to purchase Fallout 4 from GOG. Maybe I'll forget about my experience with Skyrim and give into it eventually... but, perhaps for now I've learned my lesson.

[aweigh]

"It's been 12 years and countless releases. What do you think of Skyrim today?"

Played Skyrim for the first time in 2021 for about 90 hours but didn't finish it.

Was alright.

[maidenhaver]

Skyrim was so great nobody can stop talking about it.