I feel like I’m in the vast minority when I say that the game is heavily overrated
People make paragraph long rants on why skyrim is an amazing masterpiece, all while Todd sweats heavily behind the curtain, fearful for the day people realise he just bashed together a bunch of random shit to create a bloated mess
As someone who kinda liked morrowind, and was disappointed with oblivion, skyrim just fell flat for me. The engine got better, but there just was less and less substance to it each game. Ignoring the content, just the base mechanics were stripped down to almost nothing.
I’ve got a friend who is experiencing oblivion for the first time after years and hundreds of hours of skyrim. They’re becoming increasingly upset at skyrim the more they learn about what was in oblivion but was removed.
Skyrim is one of my most played games in my library. It’s a 6/10. Better sandbox RPG games in the same genre just do not exist.
Eh… It’s boring…
Any decent DnD session or literally writing your own story surpasses it in my opinion
My first impression of Skyrim blew me away.
I came down from the hills early in the morning into a sleepy little village. Feeling peckish, I struck a nearby chicken to harvest it for meat, and was immediately made an enemy by the village. Without any weapons I ran towards a small bridge, but got surrounded on both sides. I jumped into the river and let the tide carry me all the way down away from the angry mob down onto a snowy plain where a blizzard was taking shape. I wandered through the blinding snow heading for the tree line, whereupon a met a frost troll herding goats. To my relief he ignored me, but as my hunger took hold of me, I decided to try to take a goat for myself. For the next 6 hours he stalked me across the landscape. I ran through woodland and mountain and lake to escape him and still he came in relentless pursuit. I ran upstream away from his lumbering stride, swam through parts unknown until I came to a town, where to my relief, there was an armed guard. I tried to beg him for help, but he recognised me from somewhere and took to arms instead, as the troll continued to stalk me from the otherside. Trapped between certain death, I jumped into the river once more, and to my everlasting relief I saw a fleet of guards attacking the troll. He made mincemeat of them, and then turned to me and smiled.
Skyrim was released in 2011, originally designed for the PS3 and XBOX 360. According to Statista, over 60 million copies have been sold as of June 2023. Regardless of any subjective feelings we might have, let’s agree that the game couldn’t have been this popular based on hype alone, so there must be something that makes it special.
I suspect that what you’re experiencing is not an overrated game, but the source material for a broad swath of games that have improved and iterated on many of the mechanics and ideas that were presented in Skyrim (and Morrowind, Oblivion, etc).
It’s like saying that you’re a fan of sitcoms, but you hate Seinfeld and Friends. Those shows weren’t perfect, but they created demand for a new type of show that has been modified and improved in numerous ways since they were aired.
Similarly, Skyrim is far from perfect, but when you put it into context, it is easier to see why it was successful. In 2011, Skyrim was THE option for an open world rpg with skill progression, decisions matter, and a crafting system. It was released in the same year as the original dark souls, Portal 2, battlefield 3, and Minecraft. If I’m completely fair, the Witcher 2 also came out in 2011, but had a more linear storyline, and was also one of the first games where your decisions mattered.
The fact that we’re even having a discussion about this game in 2025 should be a testament to its success. While I haven’t played it in years, I’d have a hard time agreeing that it is overrated. It certainly isn’t underrated, so maybe we could agree that it is appropriately rated, given the relevant context?
Regardless of any subjective feelings we might have, let’s agree that the game couldn’t have been this popular based on hype alone, so there must be something that makes it special.
by that logic, mc donalds is the best restaurant in the world.
They don’t let just anybody open a restaurant in the Louvre.
this comment makes zero sense. nobody said anything about the best, nor about restaurants or hamburgers or anything even CLOSE to that
Appeal to tradition fallacy
Just because something seemed good back then, doesn’t mean it aged well. This is especially bad for skyrim because Bethesda made oblivion and new Vegas before it
wrong information fallacy
bethesda did not make new vegas, obsidian made new vegas. bethesda made fallput 3 which is what fallout new vegas is built on top of
Okay google lied to me about the fallacy, but that’s not my point
Skyrim was never a forerunner of anything, as there were multiple examples of better games in the same genre released before it
I think at this point it’s a lot of nostalgia. But the game does have a lot in it, so once the jank becomes endearing rather than off-putting, it is easy to lose yourself in my experience. There are still heaps of quests and parts of the game I haven’t finished. And if I want to replay something, I can approach it very differently each time.
I think it’s an okay game. I think it was the best available game with mass appeal (see overlap of marketing with early Game of Thrones) during formative years for a lot of people, which extended and amplified the volume of discourse.
100%
To be clear, I think the game is still fine, but like the worst kind of fine. Like mediocre fine. Like I find the vast majority of quests absolutely mind numbingly boring, even if they technically add to the experience and function perfectly well
People point at the fact that you can walk in practically any direction and stumble on a quest or landmark, but I really have to ask how many times they’ve actually done that? Let alone how many have gone on to complete the quest or dungeon once found
Almost all quests and dungeons, outside of the main story/side quests, felt practically identical. It gets to the point where you feel like you’re forcing yourself into cave number 196 just to get another level up so you can pick locks slightly easier, meanwhile all the enemies become slightly beefier, undoing all your progress
And don’t get me started on the levelling system. I hate how enemies don’t really get harder the further into the game you are, but rather they just have more health and damage. When you can barely go back to some bandits at the start of the game after 15 hours it really feels defeatist
Compare this to botw and elden ring. Yes, they have a similar problem where their shrines and catacombs started feeling samey towards the end (and on subsequent playthroughs), but each one still had a unique gimmick, making them stand out amongst their peers. I love replaying each one every now and then (gone through botw 6 times, elden ring 3, started skyrim 15+ times and completed 0)
The most fun I’ll always have with Skyrim is wistfully thinking what my next character should be, before playing for ~2 hours, and remembering all my problems with the game
Nah, you’re right.
TBF, whomever you escape Helgen with doesn’t lock you in to their side of the war.
You can choose to escape with Ralof and later join the Legion. I think there’s even some special dialogue when he recognises you during the fighting
If you’re not happy with your side, you also get one last chance to switch when you are tasked with acquiring the Jagged Crown. If you’ve decided you don’t like your guy, you can bring it to the other guy.
Drag can see a completely clueless player escaping with Ralof, receiving instructions to go to Windhelm, obliviously walking past Segregation Lane, and swearing fealty to Ulfric without using any critical thinking or caution.
Skyrim was baby’s first RPG for a lot of people. Lots of people played it that didn’t really expect or were interested in engaging with moral complexity in their games, to the extent that it really existed in Skyrim.
The Imperials were seconds away from executing me for crossing a border. Fuck them.
Yup. I played an Argonian and still preferred the racist Stormcloaks. Unlike MAGA, they were all talk and didn’t try to deport me or kill me.
Both Oblivion and Skyrim made me appreciate Morrowind more, where a nonhuman race was the majority for a change. They still treated non-Dunmer like shit, but ah well.
Maga aren’t self aware
No one on far left or right is.
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Both just wanna incite violence and post hate speech about those they think deserve it. And shit up the internet. I agree that far left takes social issues that actually need solving but instead of solving them they just hurt the cause that should be solved through civil discourse, education and other means.
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I live in the first world where citizens do their duty and change peoples minds through discourse and turn up to vote.
Hahahhahahahaha. What? A thoroughly dissatisfied electorate stayed home and let Trump win. What are you talking about?
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Skyrim civil war in nutshell:
One side - ambitious and zealous racist who got fedup when species that have ages old beef with his people fucked Imperium, and then spat in the face of nords.
Other side - A scorned mother that got pissed old traditions resulted in the death of her child and became petty incarnate deciding that these traditions are yucky only after they fired against her.
Still on Ulfric’s side ideals wise, but the racism pisses me off x_x
Still on Ulfric’s side ideals wise, but the racism pisses me off x_x
Same here! I started a new game a few months ago and am actively ignoring both of the major factions, and it’s been the best playthrough yet.
They really could have used “Mr. House” and “Yes Man” equivalents. Like, Im 100% sure a Dragonborn can take over shit, or Talos’s name isn’t Tiber Septim.
Is there “yes man” story line like it was in fallout new vegas?
Sadly no, and that’s a real problem because as racist as the Stormcloaks are… They do seem to be the lesser evil given that the Empire is actively working with the Thalmor and will even force changes to major world religions just to appease them, and the Thalmor are far FAR more bigoted than the Stormcloaks, going full mask off on wanting to enslave anyone who they can’t genocide away.
The Stormcloaks do not like foreigners in their country and if you’re an Argonian or an Elf they REALLY don’t like you… But their main point, that the Thalmor want to criminalize their very culture and kill them are, is valid, if it wasn’t then the Stormcloaks would be the clear villain.
I kinda wish the Thalmor weren’t part of the plot, because the twist of the underdog rebel group being evil and the big scary empire being good is actually a genius subversion of expectation.
Edit: I want to underline the whole “The Empire bans aspects of major world religions because the Thalmor told them to.” part, because I feel like it’s easy to overlook that as a big detail. In real life, it’s still fucked up, but at the end of the day “So what, customs change over time and it’s not THAT big a deal.”
But this is a Fantasy setting where the reason for the major religion being major is because you can literally prove it, and even go to the Nord afterlife and meet Talos, the guy they banned the worship of, and find he does live up to what the good book says about him.
Meaning it’s less “Tone down the religion because aspects of your practices are offensive to elves”, and more akin to “We will kill anyone who acknowledges the Law of Gravity.”
While it’s bad that the Empire basically outlawed a major deity due to losing so bad to the Thalmor, I still find them the correct choice to pick during the civil war questline due to them trying to work against the Thalmor and build up their strength for a counterattack, so to speak.
What the Thalmor wants in game is for the civil war to drag on and be a drain on the Empire’s resources, however a Stormcloak victory is also acceptable to them due to Ulfric being a useful idiot and that the Empire’s power would wane and be easier to conquer later (y’know, divide and conquer).
And Legate Rikka, one of the higher ranking members of the Legion, worships Talos and prays over Ulfric’s body when you kill him. So it’s more of a case of banning Talos worship but not fully enforcing the law.
Yeah, the Empire really only enforces the ban while the Thalmor are looking. Elisif is another Talos worshiper and she’s their choice for ruler of the province.
Removing the Thalmor would make Skyrim a much less nuanced game, it’s better off for not having easy moral choices.
True, but it means that ultimately at the end of the day the Stormcloaks are the only rational choice. The Empire doesn’t give a shit about Skyrim, only about appeasing the Thalmor, the fact that they do so reluctantly isn’t good enough.
The Empire was content to cut my head off without a trial or even knowing my charges if any existed to begin with.
What bad do we see the Stormcloaks do exactly, a bit of racism? Running some Argonian/Dark Elf Ghettos? That’s horrible and I won’t deny that it is, but the people I see killing unjustly are the Empire, and they’re largely doing it because someone’s honoring Skyrim’s Customs (Roggvir comes to mind) or because they happened to be in the proximity of the Stormcloaks.
Again, I hate apologizing for Ulfric, (Especially when I usually play a Khajit or a Bosmer meaning I’m a target of their bigotry) especially with how depressing, crazy, and bigoted Windhelm is (It’s the biggest downer town in the whole game), but the only people I’m seeing actually take lives in the name of supremacey, are the Thalmor, and the Empire when it acts on behalf of the Thalmor.
Now if there were a “Yes-Man” option like New Vegas where I told the Empire to fuck off (btw, it’s the Blades, people from the Empire, that tell you to kill Party Snacks at the end of the game, while the Greybeards, people of Skyrim, who acknowledge that’s a horrible idea and will never forgive you if you even think about it), and told the Argonian Dock workers “You have nothing to lose but your chains my comrades!”
I’d take it everytime.
God even in my power-fantasy I’m a slave to Lesser Evilism. I hate everything.
The fact both sides of the civil war can be argued for is a great thing: it means that you can choose different justifications for your character to join either side instead of there just being a ‘good’ option. You’re forced to pick the ‘best option available’ depending on what your character would think; this is an RPG after all.
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Not choosing is what the Thalmor want. Reading the notes in their embassy makes it clear that they want the war to drag on as long as possible since it weakens both the Empire and Skyrim, improving the Dominion’s odds of victory in the next war. Any resolution to the civil war is less bad than allowing it to continue. There is no good option, just ones you can live with and ones you can’t.
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No, it’s an odd one because you can do pretty much every quest for both sides right up until the end, and then it just goes “pick one and kill the other”.
Kind of robs the game of a satisfying conclusion, but at the same time is like real life in that there’s very rarely a perfect choice. You could always abstain and not do it of course.
I sided with the filthy Imperials, mostly because I couldn’t really think of any of them I hated, while Ulfric’s second-in-command rubbed me up the wrong way.
Imperial was really the only way to go. The stormcloaks winning would only result in them being wiped out by the thalmor anyway. The imperials were bending the knee just enough to survive and maybe have a chance at freedom in the future.
I think the last time I played Skyrim, I walked up to Ulfric and shouted him to death. Rest in pieces, motherfucker. Then I turned it off and went on a years long Stardew Valley binge.
On year seven, after Mayor Lewis sold out to Joja despite your best efforts to restore the community house, you challenge him to a battle of Junimo-singing and frighten him all the way off to exile on Ginger Island. Half the town side with you, but the governor rolls in (in his Joja-branded limo) and rules with an iron fist, bringing in cheap labour fleeing the Gotoro Empire, and torturing those who try to resist.
“Stardew belongs to the valley-folk!” you cry from your farm, now fortified and suffering the bitter winter month.
“M’lord Farmer Sir,” says Vincent, now grown up and serving as your errand boy. “News came of a trader caught trying to enter from the Calico Desert. The Gov’s forces were going to execute him-” (would that be poor Robin with her famous axe?) “-but he was saved by the ominous arrival of a green jelly!”
For a moment your hopes rise: are the prophecies coming true, that you found inexplicably written in a note in your farmyard tree last year? Will this mysterious interloper perhaps give you victory and free Stardew Valley from the clutches of the evil governor and his swarms of cheap immigrant labour? … From the dirty, rude, immigrants … From the immigrants…
You slump forward in your hands downcast, at last facing the terrible realisation: that you have, in fact, become the very evil you once swore to destroy.
I’ve been saying that for a while. Nobody to root for in the game. Not the Empire, not the Stormcloaks, not even the Forsworn. And the Forsworn thing is a whole racist trope of its own, holy shit. You have basically this blackface take of Native Americans, who’ve been wrongfully dispossessed of The Reach, but they had to make them all black magic worshiping, centered around the witch/hag hierarchy, every weird colonialist slur you could even dig up from the “Manifest Destiny” days. Skyrim’s great as like a fidget spinner for the ambience and the like, but man does it have problems.
It is just such an excessively mediocre game, that I’m still surprised to see people talking about playing it to this day. Just… why?
why?
Eternal recurrence
"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It’s fun. Especially with mods.
Why people on consoles still play it? I’ve no idea
Did Skyrim age well? I sort of want to play it but don’t really enjoy clunky older games. I think I would have liked it if I played it when it came out, but I did not.
Its really hard to tell how much of the hype is just childhood nostalgia.
Skyrim is timeless when you include modding
I’d say it holds up extremely well, especially with mods, but your enjoyment will depend on what you look for in a game.
The sandbox and exploration elements are the best part of the game IMO, but if you don’t care about that kind of thing, you might not like it.
What other games would you describe as “clunky older games”?
The OG SW:KOTOR RPG. One of my friends raves about it but I couldn’t get used to the controls.
I did like The Witcher 2, for reference.
KotOR’s control scheme is definitely weird. It’s a turn based game but the turns are obfuscated to appear like real time. On top of that, it’s in an engine intended for top-down isometric mouse-driven gameplay but it’s been kludged into an over-the-shoulder console game, then that control scheme was kludged back to mouse-driven for the PC port. It felt real good on the original Xbox way back in 2003, but if I hadn’t played it back then I would probably have some difficulty with it now.
The writing is shockingly good, though, especially for 2003. It was easily one of the best things in the expanded universe.
Stormcloaks are MAGA, Empire are liberals, Aldmeri Dominion are IDF
