I feel a bit guilty still giving this game a rating this high. I’ve become really disillusioned to Bethesda in recent years, and this game still has huge, at times game ruining issues that they still just have not bothered to fix across any of its remasters and rereleases. I don’t care how good the water looks, I just want to be able to complete the fucking Bloodline quest damn it. And yet I can’t deny how this game still manages to suck me in. It’s so massive in scope, so dense with things to see and do, so many choices and customization options available to you, and with an atmosphere that just takes me back to a different age. It takes me back not just to that era of gaming, but also to that era of internet culture, all the animations and machinimas from people like Freddiew and Psychicpebbles. The fandom and excitement this game garnered was real and it was hard not to get sucked into.

Completed the main story, all side quests, obtained all achivements.
This game definitely does not deserve the praise that it gets, and it often underdelivers in many aspects. If anything, this shows an issue withing the Bethesda Studios, that keeps making Oblivion again and again with the same poor scripting and abundance of bugs.
In my opinion, the game just does not have any strong "Pros".
- Some praise Skyrim for its atmosphere, but it is very mediocre at most, but perhaps I just did not understand it properly.
- Others praise the story, but it is very childish, predictable and often boring.
As for "Cons", there are some which are not too crucial to make this a bad game, but are definitely annoying.
- The menu and hotkeys on the PC version are absolutely horrible. I have clicked on the wrong thing so many times when clicking on items with a mouse, and it interfered with the keyboard controls, that it really made me annoyed.
- The spells were absolutely butchered and were made unfun. The spells system overall has been degrading from entry to entry, having peaked in Daggerfall, but has been immensely simplified and made boring in Skyrim in all aspects.
- The skill system is horrible as well. The skill points system that artificially makes the skill more efficient is absolutely awful, so that instead of for example swinging a weapon and getting better at it, the player will have to be limited as to what skill to invest in due to them being limited.
- The autolevelling and difficulty system should not be present in such games. It is a plague that follows Bethesda games from Morrowind, and though it can be tolerable there, it is not imlemented properly in Skyrim, though not as bad as in Oblivion.
- The way the game plays, makes only few builds viable, with the obvious choice of being a Stealth Archer with Smithing and Enchanting. You cannot be a purely melee build or avoid smithing and enchanting, otherwise the game will become very unsatisfying to play.
- The quest design is very poor and consists of going to a marker, going to the same boring cave, killing/stealing the target and reporting back. Even so, the very presence of quest markers is absolutely horrible and is made for people to brainlessly follow from one point to another (and playing without this marker is very inconvenient, due to how the quests are designed).

TES' fifth main installment in 17 years was Skyrim, ostensibly their mature statement but in reality a sterile blockbuster that continues their trend towards storytelling, action and production at the cost of depth. This streamlined adventure favors a universal freelancer-like build with minimal influence from character creation. It's no longer an RPG in that there's no particular 'role' to follow, as differences among elements and weapon types feel trivial, and better customization is determined by enchanting, smithing and alchemy skills (that - alas, rely too much on menu routine). Without Acrobatics or key alteration spells, navigation is reduced to endless jogging, sprinting and mountain goat-ing towards a single point if one isn't fast-traveling already, like Daggerfall with fewer incentives. On the other hand, this contains their best-feeling combat (not exactly an achievement), and their OST and visuals continue to impress (until the next step in graphical tech arrives). It is telling that - despite the cinematics and setpieces of their main campaign, two of its peaks involve exploration: dwemer ruins and the 7000-step climb.

Of course, many features that you knew and loved from the predecessors were missing (creating magic, for example) and many guild quests were very short and hasty (just started with the companions quest line, next day I'm their boss^^) and yes, the dragons are no longer a threat after a few hours, but my goodness, it was still an awesome gaming experience. The atmosphere of this Nordic landscape came across really strong, the dungeon design was greatly improved compared to its predecessor and the main quest wasn't that uninteresting, even if it wasn't particularly deep or surprising. And hey, no Enderal without Skyrim, so I'll always be grateful for that alone.

Eu rejoguei esse jogo muitas vezes sem fazer as quest principais e eu sempre me diverti muito com a exploração e com os mods mudavam a minha gameplay.

Porém quando eu parei para fazer as quest principais foi um balde de agua fria, não por ser ruim mas por perceber o padrão das missões e também como algumas escolhas parecem não ter diferença, como tu vira o heroi de tudo sem muito esforço, quanto mais tu joga mais percebe a Bethesda e as suas peripécias.

Eu não acho o jogo ruim, eu acho um ótimo jogo pra recomendar pra quem nunca jogou rpg ainda mais com mods que podem fazer a experiencia ser completamente diferente.

nota: The Companions são uns merda, Thieves Guild são uns fudido, Dark Brotherhood são uns bunda rachada, escola dos bardo são uns folgado e o Todd Howard é um pilantra

Using the magic powers of hindsight and post-Fallout 76 Bethesda hate, the gaming community has come together to scorn and mock its once celebrated golden child. In 2023, Skyrim is a buggy, overrated mess, with a terribly dated combat system and mediocre main questline. In 2013, we didn't have the time to analyze and nitpick Skyrim's flaws- because we were too busy falling in love with it.

Like many gamers, Skyrim was my first true gaming love, and it was love at first sight. Nearly a decade later and very few games can capture the majesty and splendor of Skyrim's lush landscapes, accompanied by an rich soundtrack that instantly transports you into the wilds. From verdant forests to icy peaks to foreboding Dwemer ruins, Skyrim is a masterpiece in art design and immersive world building. Every inch feels...alive, a rarity for even the greatest of video games.

The freedom in this world is of course, unparalleled. We all know the sensation of boundless possibility, of travelling to complete one quest and finding yourself peering into every nook and cranny along the way. There are endless ways to approach exploration and combat, and as dull as the melee combat is, I'll admit that the stealth and magic mechanics are still gleefully fun even without mods. It's still a blast cloaking yourself with Ebony Mail (complete with cool shadow effects!) and slitting the throats of an entire bandit camp unnoticed, or baiting enemies into walking into explosive runes, or eviscerating them with shouts. The dungeons and cities and POI are rich, packed with detail, and unique in design and attractions.

Skyrim critics often target the quests and writing- which can be lackluster, if all you play is the main quest (outside of the masterpiece that is Diplomatic Immunity) and the Companions. There are too many iconic side quests to count- No One Escapes Cidihnia Mine, Blood On The Ice, Lost To The Ages, The Wolf Queen Awakened, The Raid, Forbidden Legend, pretty much every Daedric quest- that each tell wonderful stories that bring Skyrim to life while offering fun and unique gameplay options. The Dark Brotherhood questline is my particular favorite- what other game gives you the thrill of whacking the Emperor's imposter, and then killing the Emperor again? This is to say nothing of Dawnguard or Dragonborn, probably the two best DLCs of any game ever made.

Many gamers claim that Skyrim aged poorly, but in an era of broken and incomplete and shallow titles I'd argue there are few games that have aged so well. I have over 2000 hours and counting in vanilla Skyrim alone- what other title gives so much bang for your buck? 11 years later, this is still the best $60 I ever spent.

Skyrim is a game that you cannot avoid. It's available on damn near everything. It's not a matter of if you'll play Skyrim, it's a matter of when. As far as I can tell, this must be some rite of passage, and my time has finally come. Enter H'kage, a female Khajiit who slices and dices, strikes from the shadows, and will rob you blind if given the chance. This game brought out my inner kleptomaniac AND hoarder. Neither of those things are good for the game's save file size, but we'll get to that problem in a while. For now, it's time to embrace Bethesda's masterpiece.

The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.

Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.

There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.

Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.

Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.

Here's a list of games that are better than Skyrim from the year 2011:
1-Portal 2
2-Dark Souls
3- LittleBigPlanet 2
4-Infamous 2
5-Uncharted 3
6-Sonic Generations
7-Marvel vs. Capcom 3
8-The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
9-Minecraft
10-Jetpack Joyride
11-Super Mario 3D Land
12-Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
13-Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games
14-Mario Kart 7
15-Batman: Arkham City

A take I see around the internet a lot is that this is where the Elder Scrolls franchise went mainstream given its massive success; however, I would argue that Skyrim is the result of the mainstream success Bethesda found with the 3rd installment, Morrowind. That game is where Bethesda had found that simplifying a game and streamlining systems previously more complex to create an accessible experience for a wider audience was a recipe for success. For better or worse, this sealed the fate of the franchise as a whole.



And how do I view the result of 9 years' worth of streamlining? Well, it's a bit complicated. The thing is, I don't entirely hate Skyrim as a video game. It didn't earn the merit of being the biggest success Bethesda had ever released at the time based on reputation alone. As simple as an Elder Scrolls game as Skyrim is compared to its predecessors, it still has enough going for it. The melee combat is pretty darn good. I felt rewarded at points for having to manually aim my strong attacks to avoid hitting a companion or actually hit an enemy who was mid-movement. Archery is good, but it’s impossible for Bethesda to fuck that up.



What they did appear to fuck up, however, is the magic. This being said, I should say upfront that the most magic I’ll use in any Skyrim is generally healing magic. I’ve never deeply delved into this game's magic system, and I can’t begin to imagine what a magic-only run of Skyrim would look like with how bare-bones this game’s magic catalog is. Phasing out movement-based spells is one thing I can understand why something as busted as levitation had to go given the direction the games were going with regard to their environmental structure. This system focuses largely on a three-element scheme: Fire, Ice, & Shock. Every offensive spell is more or less designed with these three elements in mind. There is a vampirism spell that siphons health from enemies, but it seems to be a novice spell without any strong version of it present in the game. And without spell crafting, this limits the level of play for magic heavily. And while I can use some illusion spells to fuck with the enemy, I struggle to imagine why I’d do that for anything beyond a challenge run when the better alternative is to enchant your war axe with a 10% chance of inducing fear and then hacking everything around me into little bits.



So as far as Elder Scrolls games go, Skyrim doesn’t have a lot going for it outside of its setting, and even that feels stale when compared in aesthetic when compared to the dry palette video games were hard focused on having at the time. I can’t hold it fully against this game, however, given the setting they set out to build, the odds were stacked against it having a vibrant environment like Oblivion or something otherworldly like Morrowind. Skyrim is the cold, dry mid-west of Tamriel. Any colors that ought to stand out from the stone gray, dirt brown, & snow white is muted to all hell and back. That being said, I should reiterate that I don’t hold it against Bethesda; in fact, I’d even go as far as to say I kind of like how Skyrim looks. This, of course, is with the massive caveat of moving the other Elder Scrolls games just out of the frame of your mind. But if I do that, then I can say I don’t hate Skyrim as a video game.



Skyrim is just a nice game to shut your brain off. If you don’t think too hard about what you’re doing on any given quest, then you’ll avoid any unnecessary rage from the simple of thought how asinine this game is. There’s no real sense of reputation in this game. No matter how much you do on the side, everyone in the main & guild questlines will treat you like a baby bitch. I suppose it’s because they couldn’t account for that in all the dialogue & writing they’d already done, but that’s something I’ll blame on them using voice acting too much. One can only spend so much on a voice-acting budget before the dialogue has to be curbed for the sake of every NPC having fully voiced lines. So I’ll round off this with my lukewarm take that opting for full voice acting was the worst direction for Bethesda to make period. I think Morrowind’s system for dialogue was so much better and I’d rather have that than hear Stephen Russel or Paul Ganus for the millionth time.