Bethesdabros when someone says their favorite bibeo gaem is ass:

Me when someone says my favorite game is ass:

God, dad could drive a silt strider

i've played hundreds of hours modded and unmodded. whiterun is a safe place for me. well, and windhelm a bit. i love the vibe of the world (maybe because i grew up in a very cold place) and i can turn my brain off when i'm exploring caves (since they're all very similar, or i've already done them). i even like the easy-ass cave puzzles since i don't play the game to think.

to me, skyrim is like modded minecraft, it's chill and familiar and i can just wander around and listen to the soundtrack (also i just learned about the 42 minute Skyrim Atmospheres track on the OST and now I measure my activites in "number of Skyrim Atmospheres")

but i have trouble with the combat. i think most recently i had fun with a 2h weapon. i hate the magic and while i used to be able to stealth archer everything when i was young nowadays its super frustrating because the stealth system gets more "realistic" and less fun if you do any kind of modding of the combat system, and actually clearing a room as a stealth archer even in vanilla can be an exercise in quicksave/reload (maybe i'm just bad idk)

tbh, the most fun I had was on the switch when i bought it again (damnit todd), and i'm not sure modding was really worth it. i got starfield for free with a cpu i bought and didn't make it past the elevator because the game ran so badly on my computer. i did watch a semi-playthrough of it and it didn't seem like something i'd like. i kept trying to get into no man's sky and i bounced on it for some reason, and i think it would be the same for starfield.

idk, it just clicks for me every couple of years and i get obsessed with it. when i was young my dad surprised me with a copy of oblivion one day randomly and i played the crap out of it but hated the level scaling etc. skyrim improved on that in some ways - the level scaling feels less punishing in skyrim. i also couldn't figure out how to level up in oblivion (i was 12 or something), so skyrim was an improvement there.

oblivion was still better than ultima 9 though for me (though i still have a cloth map for that), ask me how i lost multiple days to the tutorial tower in that game...

I played Skyrim for like a week straight when it released. After like 60 hours I realized I didn't really enjoy any of it. Haven't played it since

Okay it's over everyone, the R*dditors have found the thread here.

Choice cuts:

The "Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002" gives it away as yet another case of sour grapes from a Morrowind stan.

People really do think I'm like, a Morrowind purist, but frankly it was too complex for me at the time, I played Oblivion and Fallout 3 way more. I like Morrowind the best other than NV but I do think F3 and Oblivion are decent games.

We can't just casually enjoy or dislike or criticize something anymore. We have to make sweeping statements that leave zero room for nuance.

NUANCE! CONTEXT! CIVILITY!!! I guess "dogshit" was kinda spicy of me to use, but I really do not like Skyrim at all lol.

Mom says it’s -my- turn to post the controversial take about one of the best selling games of all time in order to garner engagement and make money

Tell me how to make money from hexbear posting right now! But anybody who thinks this is like a controversial take for clicks, 1) why "karmafarm" on fuckin hexbear, 2) no I actually do think this. I also think Sonic Adventure 2 and Symphony of the Night were catastrophic game design mistakes, fwiw.

Update: oh man I am so not looking at r*ddit comments anymore. "Im not gonna stop enjoying it just cuz some youtuber said so" okay nice! Literally go for it!! R*dditors are fuckin built different.

Skyrim is a great entry-level RPG/open-world game for people who haven't really explored the genre. Normies absolutely loved that game and I know many people who got into much better games after getting enamored with Skyrim. It's honestly fine and does certain things really well.

A hotter take (and one that more people need to accept) would be that Oblivion isn't good and never was. I actually think Skyrim is better as an overall game lol

there's basically no other first person, open world, fantasy RPG out there. the closest i can think of at the moment is like, kingdom come: deliverance, which aside from not really being fantasy (other than its idealized racially pure christian ethnostate version of europe) has garbage inaccessible combat you have to grind hours of being a racist czech peasant to even access the tutorial of. also it has no playable cat bois. skyrim is mediocre at best but it fills that niche of first person, open world, fantasy RPG with accessible and simple combat mechanics, and has the khajiit on top of that.

I like Skyrim (as well as older Elder Scrolls games) but I'm also basic enough to enjoy most Ubisoft open world games so my opinion should probably legit be discarded

I am an oblivion supremacist and enjoy skyrim. By saying this I have probably earned the lifelong enmity of the screeching morrowind boomers

But I like Skyrim, the place, and want to go there, and other places in Tamriel, and it's got better graphics than other elder scrolls games and probably isn't the worst one I've played. It's good enough in a lot of ways. Not my favorite Elder Scrolls game, but dogshit? No.

Agreed, even when it first came out I was clear the depth had been removed from the series.

I really wish corporations would stop trying to dumb down RPGs, but money talks.

only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness

so like now that the only people left talking about it are the nerds who were/became genre aficionados? normal people who didn't put 100s of hours into morrowind and oblivion were like 90% of skyrim's playerbase, and complaints about 'systems' and writing are no more salient with those casual players today than they were in 2012. they just aren't still talking about it

i know everybody 'gets' the idea of being able to watch/enjoy a movie with poor writing that has other virtues, idk why its so hard to imagine people connected with skyrim on the basis of the (at the time) sophisticated and lived-in feeling world

The longevity and nostalgia for Skyrim largely comes out of the extensive modding community that developed around it. That blinds people to the reasons the vanilla game needed such modding.

Why is there a 300+ comment thread on such an obvious and uncontroversial truth? It's like having a 300+ comment thread on why Diablo 2 is better than Diablo 3 or why Doom is better than Wolfenstein 3d or why Sonic 1 is the weakest of the Genesis Sonics. Bethesda's last good game was Morrowind just like how Blizzard's last good game was W3:TFT.

Hexbear is not ready for your "Fallout 1 is better than Fallout 2" take.

Maybe we really do need an emoji.

Until then I'm gonna keep saying it: "enjoyment is subjective".

That's a lotta comments. I always thought most people enjoyed the sandbox nature of skyrim and said the main story is mid even way back when it came out.

Anyway last time i played and enjoyed it was om ps3 until I bricked my save leaving too many watermelons and cheese wheels on the floor which I didn't realise would cap out the slim amount of memory the console had. Lost so many hours i simply never went back.

I think that Skyrim was good for it's time and I say this as someone that could never get into Skyrim, I mean even you said in another comment that you've played 400 hours of Skyrim. You don't do that unless there is something enjoyable about the gameplay loop.

But the thing is you can't keep making, re-skinning and releasing the same game you made a decade ago, as much as gamers say they just want companies to remake their favourite games from their adolescence and update the graphics with some quality of life improvements, this isn't what gamers actually want. Such a game would appear very dated on release and get harshly criticised by gamers. Old games always had their flaws that would be very apparent nowadays. And I think that's exactly what's happened with modern open world Bethesda games, ever since Fallout 4 actually. They keep making a similar type of game, and it feels old on arrival, with the same flaws as games from a decade ago.

There is one fun way to play vanilla Skyrim, be a stealth archer and explore the world at your own pace and not follow the questlines at all except when the next quest marker happens to be the next place in your exploration pattern. Those two things happen to work very well for me, so I enjoy vanilla Skyrim.

But that doesnt make the fact that theres no other viable playstyle than stealth archer remotely acceptable. Or the fact that the questlines lack depth acceptable (I dont think the writing is as bad as you do, but I'm also fairly tolerant of bad writing and love CONTENT so I'm kind of just a shallow uncritical baby). And even in a game they sort of designed to be explored, most people arent going to do that and they have quest markers on your screen so obviously a lot of people are going to follow them. And while I've never done this, my understanding is that following quest markers to do the main quest kinda sucks ass because it takes away from a lot of enjoyment. (though based on the games overall popularity I guess it worked as slop for a lot of people).

Also even when the game came out I never accepted the "the game is big of course there's a ton of glitches!" bullshit lol. Fuck that. Bigger games since have not been anywhere near as broken and people working for free managed to largely fix the broken ass game for them.

Personally I've found that if you just install the unofficial patch, 5 of the unofficial patch-patches, 30 bug fixes, 300 model fixes, 8 NPC AI overhauls, 3 perk tree mods with their cross compatibility patches, 10 magic rebalancing mods, your economy mod of choice, all of Jayserpa quest extension mods, DYNDOLOD and all its requisite resources and tools, the mod that let's you adopt more than 2 kids, one of the three rival lighting mods, an autopatching framework, and at least one mod that nerfs Draugr deathlord health, then Skyrim becomes a pretty passible RPG.

Plus there's plenty of optional mods you can install!

Currently re-visiting Fallout 4 and reflecting on Skyrim, it's kind of weird how much work goes into them, to then make their stories terrible and have other problems.

I think about how when I played Skyrim without fast travel I really appreciated the way the land rises and falls and there's clear changes of biomes, with travelers on the road and inns about a days walk in between towns. Then you can just fast travel wherever ignoring that.

In Fallout 4 provisioners don't walk in a straight line from Settlement to Settlement, they tack cross country to the nearest road and then follow that as close to the settlement they can then again go cross country. It's such a nice realistic touch that 99% of players will never see.

When Skyrim came out I thought it looked like some bro shit like Halo.

(I haven't played either, I claim no deep insight.)

i like oblivion and fallout 3 for the nostalgia factor but yeah, they basically all stink

Holy shit 270+ comments. Nice

I torrented this shit in 2011 and I shut it off 5 minutes in because it just felt like lord of the rings

I'm not reading 250 comments fucking insanity.

But you're right, absolutely right. Skyrim was never good. Bethesda was carried by the modding community. Always was and would continue to be if they weren't so fucking incompetent because apparently the space game can't be modded or the modders gave up idk I saw this affirmation in a YT tittle so it must be true.

But yeah, Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul. That was the peak, a mound hill compared to NWN 1 and all the custom shit in that game ~~even though I was too young to appreciate it so definitely no rose tinted glasses there yep definitely 100% nods~~.

My opinion was always it was waaaay overrated and did not deserve multiple remasters or whatever. But it was perfectly fine and accessible.