Critical Acclaim +: Open Mic

[spatular]

was that like the sega equivalent of zelda?

[Craymen Edge]

I have LTTP on virtual console, but I've only played about 40 minutes of it ever. I think it's a victim of me always forgetting about the Wii when deciding What to play next.

Sorry.

[HandsomeDead]

I remember preferring Landstalker

I preferred Lady Stalker.

[wholehole]

was that like the sega equivalent of zelda?

Sort of. I love Landstalker also, I still remember buying it and playing it for the first time vividly, but it really hasn't aged well at all. I played it again just before Christmas and it was really only my nostalgia for the game pulling me through.

[Sly Reflex]

Skyrim then. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. I'll be out back sharpening my knives. I'll be back when you're all done gushing.

[HandsomeDead]

I never played this game, but I don't like this brand of fantasy so

[DANGERMAN]

I don;t really like fantasy either, and I did think I was Bethesda'd out after playing through New Vegas twice, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. The combat and levelling could be better, but the discovery in the world is probably the best I've experienced in a game. So much so that despite the time I've spent with it I'm no where near the end of the main story, and I haven't finished any of the faction stuff. There is a decent sense of progression too, I used to avoid fighting dragons, now I hunt them down, I can even fuck a giant up.

It's got problems though, and there's probably not enough variety in enemy types, although there are a few decent missions that mix things up. More should have been said about the PS3 version, not that it affected me but it's a disgrace how much of a pass that got

[radiofloyd]

I managed 60 reasonably fun hours of jumping around the place in Oblivion, having explored most of the map, done tons of sidequests, and none of the story,

I've played 40 hours of Skyrim so far which consisted of a small bit of story and mostly sidequests related to Whiterun and Solitude. I'll definitely go back to it because I was still enjoying it even if fatigue was creeping in.

They're solid games. However they're very uninspired. The world of Ultima VII feels more lived in than Skryim and that game came out in 1992. The pattern of play in the ES series hasn't changed since Morrowind, and it's not very exciting. Exploration is probably the series' selling point, but the game needs to reward you more for it. Loot is meaningless. Equipment rarely changes. Levelling up doesn't mean much. Most of the time you're only reward is that you get to tick "quest complete".

The developers have two choices, they can make TES6 bigger and shinier than Skryim or they can learn from other games like Dark Souls and The Witcher, and inject some life and creativity into the world. They managed it perfectly in Fallout 3.

[Bob]

First off I absolutely loved Skyrim, spent 120 hours on my first character alone but in terms of critical appraisal, that thing critics are supposed to do it has so many glaring flaws.

I have to disagree with Ben and agree with RadioFloyd even though I heard something about Ben being always right or something. There were two stages to the game in terms of progression. There was the time when fighting Dragons was a bit tricky and the time when fighting them was a walk in the park. Thanks to things like one off loot being fairly useless and the speed at which the blacksmith tree levelled I had kitted myself out in the armour I wore until I got bored within 20 hours. By this point I was a walking nuclear equipped deathmobile... or something. The rest of the game was basically walking forward and swinging a sword and shield about until they had levelled up and then swinging a two handed sword about until that had done the same.

The story was fairly poor and I remember this feeling of awe when I had finished it, there was all this stuff and I thought, "wow, what now?" but that was it, after a few minutes I realised that was it and then I fast traveled somewhere to exploit a glitch at a local shop where they had infinite money. Which pretty much sums up the whole game. Anti climax > glitch or sometimes. Glitch > anti climax or if you were very lucky. Glitch > reload > anti climax.

However, I loved it. I absolutely adored it and I still feel the same way about it now. The basic mechanics of everything can be basic but they work very well with each other. You are rewarded for making the most out of the game mechanics and part of the reason the one off loot feels so useless is because the crafting and enchanting system are incredibly powerful if you use them right.

The main reason the Elder Scrolls games are such a success in my opinion though is the unique stories everyone has about them. Whether it is through the way you played it, the people you spoke to, the things you saw and who you saw them with or some hilarious glitch that didn't quite break the game enough for you to be forced to reload. They are stories that are just so easy to create by simply playing the game any old way you like. You don't have to be elite, you don't have to hack it or be a complete noob to make fun things happen. Fun things just happen as you play it.

So should they be rated so highly by critics? No, I don't think they should because critics should be looking for something truely special for that 10 out of 10 and it is so easy to pick Skyrim apart because of the bugs or the story or certain aspects of the gameplay. However as a fan, someone who is just playing the game for entertainment. I struggle to think of games I enjoy more.

[Hendo]

Haven't played it but didn't get on with Oblivion. Tempted by Skyrim but their last two games I found dead janky.

[DANGERMAN]

It's pretty solid on pc, it's been a while since I played it but I can't remember many bugs after the first few weeks

First off I absolutely loved Skyrim, spent 120 hours on my first character alone but in terms of critical appraisal, that thing critics are supposed to do it has so many glaring flaws.

I have to disagree with Ben and agree with RadioFloyd even though I heard something about Ben being always right or something. There were two stages to the game in terms of progression. There was the time when fighting Dragons was a bit tricky and the time when fighting them was a walk in the park. Thanks to things like one off loot being fairly useless and the speed at which the blacksmith tree levelled I had kitted myself out in the armour I wore until I got bored within 20 hours. By this point I was a walking nuclear equipped deathmobile... or something. The rest of the game was basically walking forward and swinging a sword and shield about until they had levelled up and then swinging a two handed sword about until that had done the same.

The story was fairly poor and I remember this feeling of awe when I had finished it, there was all this stuff and I thought, "wow, what now?" but that was it, after a few minutes I realised that was it and then I fast traveled somewhere to exploit a glitch at a local shop where they had infinite money. Which pretty much sums up the whole game. Anti climax > glitch or sometimes. Glitch > anti climax or if you were very lucky. Glitch > reload > anti climax.

I didn't exploit the blacksmith glitch, I sometimes wish I had because I've got an awful lot of stuff that could make better armour, but it's not how I wanted to spend my time with it. The flip side to that for me was that I was never over-levelled or over equipped, so the first 50 hours were paced about right. I think the point I left off there isn't too much that can take me, but it wasn't so long ago that I was getting fucked over if I was attacked by powerful ice/lightning mages

You're both right about the loot, there's maybe 2 or 3 moments where you find something that you feel is a real improvement, then you just keep it stocked up on gems or whatever, it needed more reason to explore rather than a side story or some XP.

I agree it's successful on the basis of it being the player's experience too, although I also think New Vegas was better at that. NV had much better side stories and missions, plus some unique items, it makes for a more lived in world, even if Skyrim easily has more places to explore

[Hendo]

Not janky in terms of bugs but in the way it played, like not smooth enough.

Also the medieval style dialogue and bad voice acting didn't help. I thought Fallout would be better suited to me but it didn't grab me like I thought it would.

[Sly Reflex]

To me Skyrim is one of those games that sweeps you up in the hype. I spent 50 hours in Skyrim and at the time I believed I was enjoying myself. Looking back in retrospect I really wasn't, I was just playing because fuck it, why not? This is Elder Scrolls! It's awesome! Whooo!

My main problem comes from the actual mechanics of Skyrim being massively behind the curve of what I expect. Sure, making something huge and filling it with interesting things to do is no mean feat, but actually doing those things should be interesting. So you walk from village to town and that, sometimes you'll come across bandits or wolves or maybe even a bear and have a cumbersome fight before moving forwards to a place on your map where you've been told to go. When you finally get there you're sweet talked into going to do something in the same style a QVC presenter hawks shitty jewelry in either a passive aggressive or with a similar creepy nonchalant delivery, some faux Albion shit thats a few grades down from talking Queens english so that the American audience can understand it. Then you're back out doing the towns to wolves, bears to cities. Oh look, a dragon, I've just dispatched him using exactly the same way I beat that bear back there.

Fighting mainly consisted of mobs running directly towards you. Like in FPS from the late 90's.

The pacing is fucking terrible. I understand it's a hard thing to do given the open nature of the game, but when you are essentially funneled into doing something specific that is out of your hands then it should be more driven and epic. The whole intro of Skyrim is a fucking car crash of epic proportions. The cart ride that takes forever. The whole stilted conversation after. It's like being on the worlds shitest rollercoaster. Even the escape doesn't have any immediacy. There's no threat. It's not a good way to present a game. Not a supposed top tier one.

One thing that annoyed me so much about this game was related to pacing and that was mission difficulty. There's no warning from what I could gather that whatever inhabited whatever dungeon I was about to trawl through would be doable with the skills I had.

Friendly AI was possibly some of the dumbest I've seen in a game, some of the routines they programmed in didn't make any sense at all. If I'm with Lydia she knows I'm there. It's impossible for her to be there without me. So why when I fire arrows and accidently hit her do I strike for 4x damage and insta kill her? Tell me that makes sense. It'll improve your lying stat.

Most of the missions were boring as fuck and also didn't make any sense. For instance the Thieves guild stuff. Here I am, worth 80 grand in gold and I'm running about stealing cups and picking pockets for small fry. Because that makes sense. I also happen to have done some of the biggest atrocities Skyrims ever witnessed, but nobody ever bats an eyelid to that shit.

Almost all of my problems tie down into how antiquated this game plays. It's like the template they set all this shit on was borrowed from the early 00's. They set an old game in a new world, and for me personally that doesn't cut it.

The last thing that bothered me was the fact that you could basically craft the best of the best by yourself in a loot game. Where's the drive once you have done that to go looking for better loot? I cannot even fathom why they made that decision. Make a few hundred knives and soon you could be decked out in the best gear in the game. Fucking idiotic.

I won't go into the all the bugs and stuff, one because there's too many to mention and two, I'm fed up of typing already. I understand that a game of this size is going to have discrepancies and fuck ups along the way, but this game took the biscuit.

I'm assuming this game got it's reception mainly because it was another TES game. The thing is we've had other major games since Oblivion that have major leaps forward in some parts of the genre, it's about time Bethesda looked at these and caught up with the times.

Rant over.

Would someone like to pick a number between 1 and 86 to randomly pick the next game? Yeah, it's a long list.

[Sambob]

Seems overly negative to me, but I get thats almost the fashion nowadays. Personally the first time I realised that I could bait several kinds of enemies to one spot and then watch them all fight (albeit whilst pissing myself because a giant just hit a dragon for a homerun) was something really special. I dont see Skyrim as a loot game at all, you compare to something like Diablo, which is a proper loot game and the differences are very clear. In my opinion, that you can make the best equipment in the game means it cant possibly be a 'loot game', its a crafting game, evidence perhaps should be taken from which elements it carries on to the online game, crafting and reverse engineering.

The thing that this game does well, and ive touched on it in the demon souls thread a bit, is that you can genuinely play it in several very different style and theres no obvious 'this is the best class to play as' trade off. Take this game's contemporaries and even stuff released today, and you cant say that many offer that. Diablo 3 had an obvious best class to play as, borderlands 2 had a fairly obvious best class (certainly had some that were just pointless to play as compared to others) and its the same on and on. Continue the comparison for how memorable those games' various areas were, personally I remember waterfalls, sunken ships and mountain villages off the beaten track from Skyrim that stick in mind infinitely more than key story areas in other games.

All this said it had its flaws of course, but it comes back to how you feel a game should be put through its paces when it comes to critique. Marked against its own mission statement, or against 'the ten commandments of gaming', by a connoisseur of the genre or by somebody impartial.

[Sly Reflex]

69.... Oo-er missus.

It'll be up sometime on Sunday, or maybe Monday if people continue to talk about Skyrim. It'll cause a few laughs when it goes up.

Seems overly negative to me, but I get thats almost the fashion nowadays. Personally the first time I realised that I could bait several kinds of enemies to one spot and then watch them all fight (albeit whilst pissing myself because a giant just hit a dragon for a homerun) was something really special. I dont see Skyrim as a loot game at all, you compare to something like Diablo, which is a proper loot game and the differences are very clear. In my opinion, that you can make the best equipment in the game means it cant possibly be a 'loot game', its a crafting game, evidence perhaps should be taken from which elements it carries on to the online game, crafting and reverse engineering.

While it isn't in the same vein as those games you mentioned you are still looting. In a lot of the cases the only thing worth taking is the gold. The weapons or apparel you have on you tends to shit over whatever is offered to you. It gets to the point where you stop looking in loot places and exploring every nook and cranny because you already have something better. The game becomes it's own paradox, you don't search because you don't need to and you don't need to because you can do better buy buying stuff from sales people and forging them into other items.

The thing that this game does well, and ive touched on it in the demon souls thread a bit, is that you can genuinely play it in several very different style and theres no obvious 'this is the best class to play as' trade off. Take this game's contemporaries and even stuff released today, and you cant say that many offer that. Diablo 3 had an obvious best class to play as, borderlands 2 had a fairly obvious best class (certainly had some that were just pointless to play as compared to others) and its the same on and on. Continue the comparison for how memorable those games' various areas were, personally I remember waterfalls, sunken ships and mountain villages off the beaten track from Skyrim that stick in mind infinitely more than key story areas in other games.

All this said it had its flaws of course, but it comes back to how you feel a game should be put through its paces when it comes to critique. Marked against its own mission statement, or against 'the ten commandments of gaming', by a connoisseur of the genre or by somebody impartial.

You can eat tofu in lots of different ways, none of them right, none of them wrong. The only common ground is you're consuming something that's bland as fuck. Going off memory I can't really remember any significant landmarks in Skyrim. Not on the level of other Bethesda games anyway. For 50 hours of trundling about that's bad going.

[Sambob]

In that respect its more like a traditional RPG (baldurs gate) as opposed to the more modern take of loot game (borderlands), where the latter has the point of the game to find more loot, on the ground, and the former has you only finding legendary items very rarely. As such you are then rewarded for the laborious task of practising your blacksmithing skill by being able craft better items at a point that you want (its worth pointing out that dragonscale armour isnt necessarily 'the best' armour hands down, certainly not for sneaky types, in which case there are armour better suited which can be earned by doing related quests.)

The criticism in this case is more that its this generations dungeons and dragons style RPG rather than a loot game, however it never attempts to be such, to criticise it for that is to miss the point. Its definitely not as good a loot game as other loots games, but then again its not as good a karting game as other karting games, however its hands down one of the best traditional RPG games, al la Baldurs gate, and it should be judged that way, as thats what kind of game its trying to be.

In this case the fact that you cannot remember any significant landmarks from a game that even now, but particularly at the time of launch, was THE game people talked about for throwing up atmospheric environments (just look at any of the articles written by reviewers who were given a 20 minute play through prior to launch) is more of a reflection of the fact that you just dont get the game than how lowly you regard the game. To have played 50 hours and say you didnt enjoy any aspects of any of the quests also seems a bit puzzling, most people that just comparatively dipped their toes had at least one or two 'I went into an inn and was suddenly on this crazy quest where I had to X, Y, Z' stories. Id suggest you were difficult to please, which is fine, were it not for the fact that youve said you loved so many of the borderlands stories, which have at least as unappealing main story quests, but much worse side quests and reward for exploration. Also, why do you need to be told in advance whether you can clear a particular area based on your current skills, it would be completely counter intuitive to an exploration led traditional RPG and is completely against the ethos of skyrim. You can go pretty much where you want when you want, the fact you will struggle to clear some areas at the start and breeze through others near/post end game are the point of this kind of game, not agreeing with that doesnt make it a bad game.

[DANGERMAN]

I really liked the way New Vegas handled difficult areas. There's a graveyard right at the start of the game with a sign that tells you one direction from there is incredibly dangerous, if you talk to anyone and ask directions they tell you to head south because heading north is suicide. So when you inevitably head north out of curiosity and get fucked by some giant radscorpians and mexican death flies you just think "probably should have headed south"

[HandsomeDead]

I think Elder Scrolls are just a whole bunch of hokey stuff. It's a big package that is so big it's hard not to be impressed by it. I like Fallout 3 a whole lot and that isn't amazing really but I dig that game, so I can only assume that's why people like Skyrim, too, even though I think it looks like a whole lot of boredom.

I've played TES games in the past; I really enjoyed Marrowind at the time as I was floored at the size of the game and I'd tell all my friends about my latest robbing spree. I stole fucking everything. I think it's because of Marrowind I'm not into the GTA3 and family games of the time because in those you could only steal cars, but in Marrowind you could steal anything not nailed down, and I did. If it was worth having I stole it. That's the only reason I trekked around, so I could find a new town with a shop I could empty.

But I soon found the game wasn't that fun and I accidentally killed a character who was important so stopped playing it. Then I got Oblivion and convinced myself I was having a good time until mountain lions become common and fuck your shit up all the time.

I dunno what point I'm trying to make. They aren't good games, I think, but then they probably are just like Fallout 3 which I do like, and couldn't really tell you why I like it. I should play it again; maybe find a Gotye version on the PS3 if it isn't totally fucked on that.

[Sambob]

I love it when someone who doesn't like something doesn't "get it".... its like listening to Chris fucking Moyles all ovet again.lol.

I will assume thats aimed at me... I hate when thats used as a defence by people that like something and are talking to somebody that doesnt, so will clarify. I dont think Sly likes this game, and thats fine, but I also think that from analysing his criticism, he doesnt get parts of it either, its all I can conclude from some of the sentiment within his criticism. Hopefully Ive pointed out where I conclude this from his comments.

[radiofloyd]

Does Different Class really think the game is called Marrowind...

Baldur's Gate is an interesting comparison. There was a bit more inspiration in those games though and in fairness the rewards (in terms of equipment) for exploration were pretty frequent. When you consider you had six party members getting +1, then +2, then +3 weapons and all the magic armours and accessories.

I'm not coming at it from an "oh I hate TES" angle, for me Skyrim is an 8/10 game (this is a long term impression, of course I would have rated it higher in those initial hours) with huge room for improvement.

For me Fallout 3 was the game filled with memorable moments. My opinion of New Vegas is closer to Skyrim.