I know it's bit of a late review since I got the game on release day, but my thoughts are pretty easy to sum up; it looks great, and the gameplay is much improved, but a lot of it is
really boring.
Specifically, the guild quest lines are all pretty rubbish, in particular the thieves guild are really unlikeable, lacking the robin hood style of oblivion which means it's hard to engage with their story line, plus the stealth missions are all really bad. Likewise the Dark Brotherhood's quest-line is really bad as well with the ridiculous Cicero and a bunch of really uninspired missions which, when compared to the first half of the Oblivion Dark Brotherhood quest-line, is really disappointing. The mages college is likewise pretty boring; tons of visual flair, but you can do the entire quest line without any mastery of magic whatsoever, and it's possibly my candidate for worst quest ever, as the story and missions are just really dull; I mean, big powerful artefact of doom? I was hoping for something a bit more intelligent personally.
The Companions aren't so bad, but even so all the guilds just feel like something to do, rather than something that I
want to do. I'm pretty bored with the formula of arbitrarily gaining ranks, culminating in leadership of the guild, by simply doing some missions that don't demonstrate any of the abilities that the guild is meant to aspire to. I'm also not so big on the tired theme of "save the guild"; I'd much rather see guilds with two separate quest-lines, one that tests your skills and encourages you to get better as a warrior/mage/thief/assassin while rewarding new ranks, and one that's a story mission anyone can do, but you need to do both to gain prominence in a guild. On the latter note though; does anyone really feel the need to be the head of every guild? I think anyone should be perfectly happy with a decent home and a grand, if not head, rank, being guildmaster of everything is becoming formulaic. The other thing that is sorely needed is choice; wiping out the dark brotherhood feels tacked on, and there was so much potential for a destroy the thieves guild mission to save Riften (though there is evidence it may have been planned but abandoned). Still; Skyrim was at least as buggy as Oblivion, so Bethesda is going to have to get it's act together and come up with tools for preventing buggy quests before they try branching quest-lines, but moral choice is something I think all players would like to have, rather than rigid story lines; especially ones as boring as the guild storylines!
The civil war was likewise very disappointing; there is pretty much no reason to fight for one side or the other as the outcomes are boring, and pretty heavily bug-ridden. The fort-battles were a dull way to take an entire province for one side or the other; the peace-treaty path is actually far more interesting, and a lot shorter (travelling to each capital aside). I dunno, I'd have happily waited an extra 6 months or even a year just to see the civil war handled properly, with more battles like the walled city battles, but with more interesting objectives, political wrangling, and so-on. I mean, there are a bunch of possibilities that aren't played out; Skyrim could instead push to become a vassal state of the empire, effectively a close ally, which would give them the autonomy to claim they can worship Talos without it being a breach of the White Gold Concordant (since they're not
in the empire anymore) while still able to help the empire and trade with them etc.
I was also pretty disappointed by the stealth elements; slitting throats is endlessly entertaining, but there seems to be no real option for a pure stealth character as enemies are seemingly hyper-aware and even at night any stealth outdoors is impossible. It basically requires you to use invisibility in cases where arrows and/or throw voice aren't enough, and it feels like a big cop-out to me. Also the general lack of any good stealth missions didn't help either, as noted above. They could also do with elements like how enemies behave in the Arkham series of Batman games (permanent states of alert, becoming more and more agitated with each takedown) and Deus Ex as well for the ability to move bodies to avoid detection.
Don't get me wrong, I love the game, and it's better than oblivion in many ways, but at the same time it's actually not that much better than Oblivion when it's all tallied up, and I'd hoped for it to be a bigger overall improved, but many of the same problems are still there; while we now have more variety in even dungeons of the same type, there is less variety in the quests, with all the same bugs and problems to go along with them. Plus the inability to actually sell the stuff you accumulate is a pretty big issue, I've started up the game to play for an hour only to realise that I've all done is try to sell the stuff I'm carrying! In a loot heavy game it's a bit rubbish when you avoid picking up valuable items knowing you'll never sell them! Oh, and random dragon encounters can become annoying after a while too; I've taken to not speaking to the Jarl of Whiterun for the bulk of a new game, as while I love dragon battles in cities and at dragon walls, the random ones elsewhere become a pain after a while.
Skyrim has great graphics, and great warrior and mage gameplay with stealth gameplay that could do with a little bit more. I think Bethesda now needs to look toward making great missions to go along with and take advantage of these things, and maybe ditch some of the formula in favour of new ideas when it comes to guilds and daedric quests, which are becoming tired and only adding to the pool of fairly boring missions. Visually the game is miles ahead, and the character of the world makes it hard to even think of going back to Oblivion, but we need quest lines that quality, and the confidence that we can receive these things without a hundred bugs to go along with every quest :p
Rhabdo wrote:I would say Bethesda relies heavily on post consumer feed back to fix their games (arguably too much).
The main problem is that they don't seem to have any kind of toolkit to help them prevent bugs in the first place; they need an editor that can tell them when conditions within a quest are in conflict (to prevent the many levelled weapons that don't level properly), or conflicts between other quests in which case one makes an NPC non-interactive while another quest may be active. This is what I thought the point of the Radiant quest engine improvements were supposed to do, but if anything they've made quests buggier as you now you might get a quest to a location that's no longer reachable!
I think the ability to make Daedric and Dragon weapons/armor should be taken off the table entirely. Keep the ability to improve them as part of your perk, but no making the original items themselves. How much happier would you be to find them? 
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