The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC & Xbox 360)
(Edited 23/August/2017)
I have this game both on my Xbox and my PC, I lean more towards the PC because I can Mod it. ( For those who have not played this game yet This review contains spoilers and dose include the DLC) Before I start I want you to know I do not think it is a bad game, I do not hate this game, I would still highly recommend you go and get this game and play it! And mod the heck out of it! However I am about to write a very critical review of it because I DO think people need to know about its problems and hopefully Bethesda might learn not to rush or hype their stuff, take a step back look at where they have gone wrong, learn and improve and thus get better, and hopefully along the way maybe fix some bugs in their games so their games can truly shine! Skyrim after all is considered a AAA game and as such should have been MUCH better then it is! If I do a star rating system of 1 being the worst and 10 being the best I would say Skyrim gets a 5/10 as an unmodded game, however with mods that goes right up to a 9/10 and here is why.
I will admit I expected more from an elder scrolls game, not sure why I did, maybe because I have been playing them since The Elder Scrolls: Arena, The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall (Battlespire and Redguard) and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. I just felt that The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion took a bit of a back step but was still ok. So I'm not sure why I expected The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to be Better? But I did expect it to be Better and to just be.. well more then what it was, there were bugs all over the place, half finished scenery you could SEE area lines or item lines where they had not cleaned it up, Memory bugs that would make it crash at random Both on PC and console and all while still totally un-modded as I like to do my first few plays of these games with out mods so i can experience everything it has to offer first, and then add to it later with mods. I am going to admit I am disappointed in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this is likely because it truly is NOT living up to its hype, this is a lesson a learned long ago was to not buy into the hype of games or consoles or anything else, unfortunately this time I let myself fall into the hype trap with Skyrim and as a result I was disappointed.
Ok here is what the problems are with Skyrim is. Again remember I do not think its a bad game I just think it should be better and that these things need improving or fixing.
1: Bad gaming code and Bugs. *: The biggest one on this is the memory coding, this even effects high spec PCs who can run the game twice over on its highest specs. There are two ways to fix this, 1: learn which line of code it is in your game files and manually change it to the correct code to change where it draws things from, or 2: and bay far the most easy for the non tech savvy, download a mod to change it for you. This memory problem even on an unmodded game is the biggest reason for the game crashing with out warning and for seemingly no reason, or for the slow FPS rate at times in the game (that is also usually a warning so if you get the slow FPS rate save your game as it maybe due to crash due to lack of memory)
*: unfinished Graphics / graphic glitches all over the place. see the screen shots to see what I mean and these are some of the tame ones. I am not alone with this, there are literally 1000s of these problems all over the place (just web search Skyrim bad Graphics) to fix this Mod the heck out of it with graphics fixing mods.
*: Auto saves. These things happen literally EVERYWHERE and end up at times crashing your game, if you don't keep tabs on your save games you can literally end up with hundreds of them which again adds more strain to the memory bug not to mention clogging up your PC or console storage space
*: When stealthed you can be seen past walls even with 100 on your stealth skills. yet somehow from across the other side of the building or area they can SEE you stealing something in a room with no one in it, doors closed and past walls that should be covering what you are doing when sneaking, even with invisibility spell or Drink! it's just silly.
*: Skill tree, is both buggy and laggy and ANNOYING to try to skill up. when you try to skill up one skill by pressing up to get to where you want to place your new skill point it flips over to another skill tree, and the where to place the next 10 points of health, magic or stamina is ALSO annoying if you have left your levelling up for a few levels.
*: Spawn points. By this I mean the Random items, NPCs and even you, this is sometimes a very funny thing to watch as the spawn points are above you in the sky (which is why you sometimes drop a little when you load in) just web search "raining mammoths in Skyrim" this is funny to watch as you walk around, doing dragonborn things when a mammoth falls from the skies to its death (sometimes yours as well if it lands on you), but sometimes it can be you, there is a bit of a bug where sometimes when you fast travel you fly across Skyrim and then end up under the map or falling to your doom into some giant camp outside whiterun or your game crashers because its working so hard to try to correct and load what is going on.
*: Dawnguard Word of power glitch. You get 2 version of Drain life called Drain vitality and marked for death. Drain Vitality comes in Dawnguard DLC and for some reason these two shouts seem multiply so you end up with 2 Marked for deaths and 2 Drain Vitalities this glitch only seems to come up if you have Dawnguard DLC.
2: Quest lines They just seem to end abruptly or build to a climax and just fizzle out to a dissatisfying ending. (Civil war or guild quests are good examples of this.)
3: Thalmor Faction There is No explanation to why the Thalmor suddenly out of the blue a minority fringe group have suddenly managed to become the ruling body Aldmeri Dominion, also it makes no sense that the high elves would suddenly hate Talos, Who as you find out via Elder scrolls lore and game play is in fact simply one of many forms of the first Devine god Auri-El, (also known as Akatosh) who takes many forms and names over the era's one such form is the mythical dragonborn as a mortal avatar. Such was Tiber Septim, also known as General Talos fought to unify Cyrodiil and finally all of Tamriel, an effort that culminated in 2E 896 with the birth of the Third Empire. The Human Mortal Tiber came to be revered as one of the Nine Divines under the name of Talos after the 8 divines ascended him to godhood. The whole thing is a mess.
4: Lack of factions to join. We have a few factions but a number of them from previous games are missing, we also have new random factions (such as the Thalmor or Forsworn) who run around killing you or talk to you like you could join them but it just draws a blank.
5: The obsession with starting you as a prisoner. Sometimes this has made sense but in Skyrim it's just an annoying long winded intro with no skip function.
6: The Thieves guild (or as I like to call the one in Skyrim "The Thugs guild") has NOTHING on its predecessor in the Elder scrolls games, you run around beating people up to get money out of them, or vandalising things for one noble, this is NOT what a thieves guild should be doing! they operated in the shadows and covertly stole stuff from nobility and gave it to beggars, hell even beggars were part of the thieves guild! This just felt like a TROLL on elder scrolls fans.
7: The bards collage. I mean What was the point of this faction?! you do 4 quests (Book, drum, flute and loot) and then what? it just drops off randomly and makes no sense, You have to MOD this faction to make it make sense, it's not like you can even USE the interments or even sing in Inns or anything, it is just a pointless faction! With a bunch of out of tune god awful singers EVERYWHERE (Including your 3 Hearthfire homes) around Skyrim!
8: The Blades. OMG this faction annoys the hell out of me in Skyrim. NOT only do they demand you kill the 1 dragon in ALL of Skyrim who has waited 100s of years just to try to help you even turning on his brother to do so, but they suddenly make no sense! their suddenly out of the blue DRAGON hunters LOL! Someone didn't brush up/read up their own elder scrolls lore when they came up with that one. and MOST annoying of all you can't even turn them into the Thalmor where you could earn yourself an army of highly trained elven allies to fight against Alduin! the whole thing is poorly thought out and totally illogical. And THAT is putting it nicely and mildly!
9: Stormcloaks and Imperials. By the gods these two factions annoy me, not as much as the blades but they are annoying, you basically become their Errand boy/girl/thing after an unconventional "test" to join them, My first thing on this is WHY would you join the empire? they just tried to kill you for NO REASON at the start of the game, you should be thanking the main bad guy Alduin for saving your hide by attacking helgan, just as they were about to cut your head off! Now add in the second quest of the blades to the Thalmor embassy where you find a book detailing the lies they feed ulfric to turn him on the empire, yet you have NO way of stopping this stupid war and turning the two factions on the real bad guys?! you literally spend all your time in these two factions fetching some old hat from a tomb so one of them can declare their leader/puppet as king or queen at some moot that NEVER happens at all, (as dragon born that should be you!) but you run around taking random forts, killing bandits to take forts, 1 quest to steal some documents and then fake being on the other side to give them some fake documents, and then storming a city and killing the leaders of one the factions. That is literally it, so you can't say "Screw this faction" and go a 3rd by helping white run who should have been a 3rd faction in this war, you can't say "screw both these factions" and become high king or queen of Skyrim which as dragonborn should have been an option. Nope you are just some errand person who is cast aside at the end of the stupid quest line which gets in the way of the main story at times! OH but it doesn't stop there you see there is really annoying bug "the home glitch" tied to this stupid quest line, For some reason in white run if you get your home before the stromcloaks invade you run the risk of loosing your key to your home, so if you get it before joining say stromcloak's you loose the key and even with your reappointment as thane and give the right to re-buy your home you still don't get the key back, so the best way is do not buy homes in places effected by this quest line Namely Whiterun, Windhelm and Solitude until you have at least completed that area of the quest. Also no one ever seems to fix their towns/ cities after they have been attacked, they just sit in ruin for the rest of the game.
10: Shops and Quests getting screwed up by random attacks. Yes I am talking random dragon, Vampire, Bandit or random enemy attacks. This is very annoying when you have a quest in your quest list that you can not complete because the quest giver/receiver is now dead because they get in the way of an attack or attack when they should RUN! No one outside of the Thalmor, orcs some random bandits, the ebony warrior and you are equipped with anything other then the basic iron or steal weapons and most only have clothing for armour and ALL but the guards & companion guild NPC's die in 1 maybe 2 hits, the only way to fix this is again to MOD it to make them 1: essential and 2: run away to a safe place like indoors!
11: Dragonborn DLC. This is passably the MOST glitchy thing I have EVER had for a Paid for DLC, the whole thing just feels rushed even more so then the main game! Remember the glitches above? those were PRE-DLC and mod free! They only get WORSE with dragonborn! to fix 80% of my problems in Skyrim I have had to mod it with the Unofficial Skyrim Patches to fix much of what Bethesda are to lazy to fix! (THANK YOU Unofficial Patch Project Team you literally SAVED Skyrim!)
12: Hearthfire DLC Your 3 Built homes. Where to start with this, between its glitching and lack of creativity its hard to think on where to start on this stolen idea from modders. YES mod makers were the first to come up with the idea to make homes or villages and then Bethesda went "oooo we like that idea lakes make Hearthfire" which is a buggy messy limited shadow next to the mods that allow you to make villages and estates. That's not to totally Diss Hearthfire because it made this kind of thing playable for the console gamers which was a good thing! but Hearthfire is a buggy mess at times, its not unplayable but it can be annoying when you spend ages building your home only for things to keep replicating its self and then NEVER building, unless its your trophy stands which end up making loads and then clumping everything on one stand which looks awful, or a few graphics bugs meaning you can ignore walls as you walk around or fall under the map or the weapons racks don't hold weapons correctly ( built add on bedrooms wing is the best example of that). the lack of being able to nicely place things into your displace cases, the gods awful way to place things just for them to return to the point where you first spawned them to place them or they just point blank REFUSE to place the correct way up! so to pull it to the bits that need improving of fixing.
*: The graphics coding needs looking into. The graphics are time are choppy and glitchy, as said sometimes its like there are no floors or walls and mounted heads/crabs/fish sometimes don't attach the wall they float in mid air!
*: Martials and gathering them. Lets start with Wood, in a home that literally needs 1200 wood to build everything, why is it we can only buy 20 at a time?! its darn right annoying as you save the gold up to buy everything you need for your home only to sit there for ages buying wood! mining clay and stone at 2 of a time and then the straw, glass and goat horns NO ONE EVER SELLS ENOUGH! you spend 3 maybe 4 hours just waiting in game days at a time to return to buy more 2 or 3 of theses items fast travelling to each area with a general store to buy more pithy amounts of these things! and you can't sell your excess wood. Then there's the hunting to get things for home to look nice, large antlers, every damn elk or deer that has antlers large enough to be classed as large never drops them and all the ones with tiny antlers sometimes drops them, you spend a hell of a long time chasing around Skyrim trying to get these materials that so rarely drop it becomes BORING an you end up getting a mod that gives them ALL to you in a box because you get SO fed up taking FOREVER trying to get them!
*: Your home. So bar all the glitching your home looks like it has woodworm! you just spent ages building your nice new home just to what half ass your flooring with big gaps your kids and pet could fall down? WHAT the hell Bethesda! who makes a home with mega holes in the flooring?! (you lot at Bethesda apparently) it was just utterly stupid!
*: Adoption of kids. This seemed a bit silly to me, you could only adopt 2 with the something like 12 or 13 homeless kids in Skyrim but you can only adopt 2? not save the children's home in riften and take it over and run it better? nope you just get 2 kids that are not even yours! EVEN Fable covered this one well! Black out screen impaled romantic relations with your husband or wife, and hello there's a kid in the crib. don't get me wrong I'm also pro choice for those who like homosexual relationships, but there should have been a choice for everyone here.
*: Unless you mod the game for this you can not fortify your home Yep I'm talking defending your home against random attacks from giants, bandits or hostile wildlife and you get VERY fed up with replacing you chickens, horse and cow when they die in these random attacks. which is almost EVERY TIME you go outside or load into the outside area of your home! we have to mine a tone of stone so why the hell could we not build walls and have guards?!
*: With out a mod such as your home is my home, you can't have your followers live in your home. Literally you build this new mini meeting point that may as well be an inn with a big table and living area with a bunch of beds and other things and all you get is your House carl, sometimes a steward, an annoying can't sing bard and if married your family (who you wont move there due to random dragon and giant attacks so you end up just sending them to a city house for safe keeping). it just seems pointless to have all these houses all over the place when you can't send your followers to live there. There are loads of beggars all over Skyrim as well as homeless kids and your followers and you've just built everything to house them! but NOPE your houses just sit there empty gathering dust and growing more floor holes from the woodworm that's been eating it since you started building it! (yes the last part is a sarcastic gibe).
*: Vanishing House Carls Not sure why this happens but for some reason if you don't make your House Carl's for your 3 homes follow you they just seem to vanish into thin air never to be seen again! you end up having to use console commands to teleport them to you just to rescue them from what ever black hole they vanished into somewhere between where you first talk to them and your home. Sometimes they will make it to your home and even become stewards (if your not lucky enough to find a follower who will do that for you) and THEN they just simply vanish into some pit of oblivion somewhere.
13: Marriage in Skyrim! This is possibly the MOST PATHETIC MARRIAGE SYSTEM I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS IN AN RPG! Its just well LAME! After obtaining the Amulet of Mara, the Dragonborn gets the option of marriage with an eligible NPC regardless of either party's gender, while I'm glad to see every sexuality gets a choice here the Method is just.. Pathetic!
*get Amulet of Mara from a priest named Maramal for 200 gold Bee and Barb or the Temple of Mara in Riften. Or if your really lucky Can be found as random loot. But you still need to talk to Maramal about marriage!
* Do some random quests or have high enough rep to get asked to marry some one. You get the "is that an amulet of mara?" dialogue come up with an eligible NPC and you can say yes or no and then off you go to a rushed wedding, no getting to know this random NPC no engaging story or quest line, just maybe 1 random quest or tagging around you or high rep in their area and some random dialogue and off the Temple of Mara to be married.
* The MOST annoying part of it is There are no eligible Bosmer's. Khajiit's, male Redguard's, Vampires (talking Dawnguard here), male Altmer(high elf), Snow elf ( Knight-Paladin Gelebor) or even interesting NPCs to marry. and almost ALL of them are ugly as hell! if you want interesting, looks good or romance AGAIN YOU HAVE TO MOD IT!
14: Modding the game: Modding this game is sadly is often the ONLY way to make it more interesting, fixed, looking good and adding to fun BUT the issue is those DARN core files, Bethesda are TO lazy to clean them, so again it's players and Modding community of this game who had to come up with a mod called TESVEDIT to clean the core files to make the game SAFE to mod. and sometimes make and unmodded game stable! This is something Bethesda SHOULD have done from the get go!
So now I have covered a few of the things that need fixing and improving these things don't always make the game unplayable they are the things that after 100s of hours of game play I have picked up on. (at the time of this readmitted review) on steam I have clocked in 963 hours of game play (and counting) and on the console 132 hours of game play on Skyrim, so I do NOT hate this game I just want to see it made BETTER and be the shining star it should be and even then the things I have pointed out are only SOME of the things I could literally make this post so much longer with the things wrong because sadly there are a lot and not all are game braking most are funny glitches or just irksome at times.
