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

[Falksi]

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.

Of course CDPR were the ones who made the decision, by "forced" I mean it was a game which didn't need an open world. Witcher 1 & 2 were perfectly fine structurally, and the inclusion of an OW didn't nothing but drag Witcher 3 down, hence it was forced in there.

Regardless of what AC has more in common with, Skyrim making such big bank and creating such big waves were what turned devs to making games which would have been fine with a tighter structure into ones with more bloated ones instead.

[rusty_shackleford]

Witcher 3's open world is ubisoft-style, it's distinct from bethesda open world. You're given a map with objectives and you go around marking them off. Bethesda open world is go wander in a random direction and discover stuff.
It went full circle when Ubisoft copied Witcher 3 for AC Origins. Decent game, better than Witcher 3 in some ways.

Any game with batmanvision/witchervision should be hard capped to a 7/10 score btw.

[The_Mask]

I think that it set the standard for the 100 IQ RPG.

I enjoyed The Dark Brotherhood questline, and some of the Daedric quests. I enjoyed exploiting the game to level up. I enjoyed the Morrowind callbacks, especially the St. Jiub stuff from the Vampire DLC. I enjoyed that you could get married, and people would show up to your wedding, and you could legit start a family in a huge mansion.

But those are just the moments you hunt for in an otherwise flat game.

I don't know... Skyrim is just like Nickelback. It needs to exist as a point of reference. Unremarkable otherwise.