Skyrim is Addictive and Annoying
Skyrim is my first Elder Scrolls game and, in fact is probably also my first western rpg aside from Diablo and Diablo 2. Like many people who purchased this game, I am highly addicted. At time of writing I'm up to about forty hours with no end in sight and will probably eventually double, triple or even quadruple that play time.
My original reasoning for buying this game was because I needed something to distract me from my increasing impatience while waiting for Half Life Two: Episode Three and The Last Guardian; two games I've been anticipating and two games that will most likely not be seeing the light of day any time soon. Skyrim was meant to be a bsing game for me, something to kill time when I'm bored. Usually the games I play for this are third person action adventure games like those god awful Castlevania games for the PS2 or Devil May Cry, but unfortunately newer games in this genre have failed to interest me and the newest Castlevania game, while improved in graphics, has also managed to lose any semblance of fun, while still maintaining it's godawful storyline and character dialogue.
Skyrim has filled my bsing game niche well...a little too well. Like many people who pick up Skyrim I haven't got around to doing much of anything else apart from going to work, sleeping and occasionally remembering to eat. Still, despite being lost in the world of skyrim, I have also amassed a good ammount of complaints.
Now, because I'm not well versed in the world of western rpgs, I'll not be making any comparisons to other games. I don't know whether Skyrim is better or worse then other big names in the genre. I've heard it's better then Oblivion...but considering Oblivion was it's predecessor then it had damn well better be.
Firstly the stuff I like. The initial storyline seems pretty average to me, at least in terms of fantasy and you can't get much more fantasy then dragons and god knows there are plenty of dragons. The civil war can be interesting, but once again isn't a particularly innovative tale, but I did not play this game for the story, and it's certainly better then the story in most of the games that I play for fun, so not many complaints there.
Side quests can vary from dull to fairly interesting and creative and at least to my mind there is alot of variety in the quests. It can vary from doing someone a favor like delivering a letter to going into the head of a dead king and sorting out his inner demons so that you can escape. I think my favorite quests so far is the House of Horrors quest and the ones given to you from the Guild of Thieves. Planting evidence on people, stealing certain items, pickpocketing, changing ledgers and so on has kept me fairly occupied for the last ten hours of gameplay I must admit, but boredom in quests is fairly rare, at least for me. The only one I've found really irritating is the one where you try to get rid of the nightmares in Dawnstar, not because it was a bad quest but because the guy who leads you in the quest is SO DAMN SLOW. It tends to take any sense of urgency or fun away from it. But for the most part I've gotten pretty invested in the quests and they do a good job of sucking me in and making me feel like I am in fact in the world of skyrim.
I love games with lots of stuff, like weapons and armor and I admit I can get a bit...perhaps girly is the reight word. More then once I've changed armor, not because it was better but because I wanted to see my character in it and run around for a while. I also admit to changing into regular clothes while in town. I like the weapons too. My only issue there is that I really was able to find the best weapons fairly early in gameplay and so any rewards for quests involving weapons and stuff is fairly useless.
The scenery is fairly beautiful. Some of it can get kind of samey, but there are moments of brilliance. I admit to being captivated while riding across the mountain roads at night with snow falling around me or running through a forest with the sun poking through the trees, coming across camps and farms dotting the landscape. It's interesting enough so that I am still excited about having plenty more yet to explore, so in that sense it does it's job.
Now my complaints. I'll go through these in order.
1. Selling nice things is practically impossible.
It's realistic to have a base price for merchants, but it could be a little higher. What's the use of taking the bones off of a dragon, or all of those necklaces and rings if you can't sell them anywhere? I think the highest I've seen is a little over 1000$ which really is not much.
2. Autosave
For some reason, at least on the xbox360 the autosave function seems flawed. It keeps about three saves at a time, which is all right. What not all right is that the saves get progressively larger. I'm up to over 9mb per save when the back of the box states that it should only be 8. I keep having to delete old saves in order to progress because skyrim keeps needing more and more space. It may seem like a small problem, but if it progresses it may render the game totally unplayable...at least with the autosave function, which is a shame because usually autosave can be a real blessing.
3. The loading time
At least on the Xbox360. The loading times are loooonnnggg and at least on two occasions my game has crashed durring them. On those occasions it took me a while to figure this out...because the loading screens take so much time as it is.
4. My god, the glitches
This is the biggest problem I have with this game. The little glitches aren't too bad and are sometimes funny when they don't break the game. Flying mammoths, for example. I also once sall a goat walking around under water. What isn't fun are some of the big glitches. The largest one and the biggest cause of annoyance for me yet is the Markarth glitch. Allow me to explain.
While in either Solitude or Whiterun I bought a dwarvish axe from a merchant. Immediately after I recieved a letter from a man named Calcelmo asking for the axe, so I traveled to Markarth. As is usually the case, I was immediately swept up by various quests and this particular quest is hard to miss, as it's activated as soon as you enter the city when a Forthsworn spy kills a woman in the townplace.
One of the observers of the murder slip you a note telling you to meet him in the Temple of Talos and believe me, save youself future woes and just ignore it. This quest is filled with bugs. It basically requires you to find evidence of conspiracy which goes all the way to the Jarl, who's involved with the forthsworn. After finding all the evidence, your contact is killed and you're framed for several murders. The gurds of Markarth will confront you in the usual way and your only option is to be captured and thrown into Cidna mines, where you escape by talking to the king in rags who wants to escape and start a rebellion against the nords. All of this plays out fine and the forthsworn king promises you, upon leaving that your name will not be sullied.
This is where the bug comes in. From here on, the guards of Markarth will continue to attack you upon sight despite the quest being over. Paying the fine doesn't work, bribing them doesn't work and if you ask to be taken to jail the conversation just loops around because the Cidna Mines are no longer a prison and the Jarl is dead. This has been a major thorn in gameplay for me because there are TONS of quests that I have yet to do that involve Markarth. Not only is it hard to navigate the town while guards are constantly attacking you, but it majorly breaks the illusion of rollplaying as the goal just becomes to finish the quest as soon as possible so that I can get the hell out of there and move on. There are other glitches like this that I have run into but none of them quite break the game like this one.
It's still a fun game, but it is by no means perfect and probably could have benefited with a little more work especially in the fine details. I'm sure there will eventually be patches, but with a game like this it's probably going to be a while before everything that causes considerable damage is fixed.
Over all I'd give it a 7.5 or 8 out of 10.