So a few months ago I started playing Skyrim. It never gripped me to begin with, so I barely played it at all. Last weekend I had a bit of spare time so I put a few more hours into it, and to be honest I came away from it with a worse feeling for it than I had before. I'll break down what I disliked about it in a few points.
First, the puzzles in the game suck. They're either overly simple (match the icons!) or simple to the point where to make it challenging, they simply require you to find a very precise solution where nothing else, no matter how logical, works. Case in point is a puzzle that requires you to sprint through a set of stones which open a set of doors, then use "whirlwind sprint" to zoom past the open doors. Makes sense on paper. It should be simple. But it isn't. You must activate whirlwind sprint at a precise location on the floor (probably around 1m^2) to be allowed to pass through the doors. The doors stay up for a short period of time regardless, but activating whirlwind sprint at any other location causes the doors to close instantly. Bullshit. However, once you activate whirlwind sprint correctly, not only do the doors stay up indefinitely, but the cooldown on the spell is inexplicably reduced to zero, allowing you to whirlwind sprint twice in rapid succession to clear the set of doors. So not only do they turn something that should be logical into something so contrived and set-up, they didn't have the decency to allow your whirlwind sprint to clear the door in one go, instead giving you a random cooldown buff that functions only in that one spot.
The dungeons which house these puzzles are boring. They're trite and unremarkable. They vary from dark cave, dark dungeon or dark cave with snow piled up in it. They're also essentially linear, with only one way to progress from one end to the other. This is an issue that is not obviously not unique to Skyrim, but I expect far more from an ambitious open-world game.
Speaking of open-worldness, the quest progression, while branching and open-ended, invariably result in a simple compass chase that ends in either a boring conversation or one of the afore-mentioned boring dungeons. In fact it seems the only non-compass chase kind of missions are the small miscellaneous jobs you do for random people on the streets. These are obviously not integral to the plot so I fail to see why I should spend more time and effort doing them than I would just following the compass. The most interesting quest I've done is probably playing keep-away from a young girl in Whiterun. Interesting change of scenery; not sure if it really fits in with the whole Dragon-murderer characterisation though.
A lot of it comes down to what I feel is worth my time in the game. Doing miscellaneous jobs to which I don't know the outcome or reward doesn't feel worth my time. Stopping on the side of the road to mow down bandits or wolves isn't worth my time either. What's more, it seems that 90% of the time I leave my horse (from which I am inexplicably incapable of performing any basic actions), the horse either walks away mysteriously without a sound, or it zooms into the sky. Once it hit a Dragon on its way up. I'm not even kidding. I don't think the Dragon cared too much about that, just like how I don't care about anything or anyone in the game.
Speaking of anyone I didn't care about in the game, what happened to my companion? One minute I was on a horse (she can't ride a horse so she will invariably get left behind wherever you go), next minute I never hear from her again. Normally when I fast-travel to a location she'll appear next to me, but she's been missing for the past couple of hours in game time. I wasn't aware she was able to die (I never managed to kill her at least), so I guess she just bugged out and got stuck somewhere. Oh well, I don't care.
Fighting Dragons is stupid. You kill your first Dragon at level 4 (so I'm not spoiling anything here, you kill a lot of Dragons in this game), but at this level you're struggling to take down Trolls, and don't even think about fighting Giants. So if these stupid Dragons are the bane of the World...I think secretly the Giants are just waiting for the Dragons to kill all the humans, elfs, etc, then just go to town on the rest of the World. The actual act of fighting the Dragons itself is also terribly implemented. Dragons are capable of flying and roam a large tract of territory, so half the time you're literally just waiting for the Dragon to get back to your location, since you have no way of chasing it down. Your horse is far too slow (and getting on and off your horse is even slower), and as I said, you can't actually do anything while on your horse. The Dragons don't fly off to return to a more advantageous location, they return to basically exactly where they were before, so...what I'm trying to say is, Monster Hunter is a much better game.
The good thing about games that don't feature voice actors, is that when a character is bugged and has absolutely no sound coming out of them, it doesn't matter. That's normal. It's not normal in Skyrim. Obviously patches and mods address several of the issues I mentioned in the game, but honestly I don't think anything can make it more fun for me than just closing the game and starting up a different one.
Can't wait to start Arkham City in the holidays ^^
