The algorithm has thrown me into a hole of multi-hour video analyses of the elder scrolls games and I couldn’t be happier. Especially with this as I’ve been wanting to start a modded play through for a while and your perspective is really interesting and well-explained. Gg my man
Honestly my issues with Skyrim is that we are the chosen one too many times. I want to be an assassin not the leader, I want to be a companion and not the leader, I want to be a powerful mage not the arch mage. I wanna be a master thief not the leader. Stop killing off all the guild leaders and just have different endings, it’s all the same skeleton and that pretty much all. I love the game and the quests, but it’s nothing like other games. Even with oblivion we kill all the brotherhood members and it ends in the area we are known by higher ups and that’s it.
Agree with you re: “Stop making the player character the leader of every faction”, disagree with “stop making them the chosen one.” Main series Elder Scrolls are set during a crisis where an individual comes forward to resolve it, and that’s the player character. You don’t have to engage with the main story, but the main story is always of that magnitude. If they want to make smaller games where you’re just some guy then sure, but main series should be grand in scope. I’d prefer Morrowind’s approach taken more extreme. If you’re going to make me a high rank in a faction, it should exclude me from a few of the others and being a high rank should actually require input from the player. You should be running the fighter’s guild, not hands off and sitting on a title.
@@deifiedtitan the chosen one for every single quest line, like the dragon born, and the listener, and a special visitor seen in a dream. Our character is too chosen one.
A french youtuber that I really like and has a 300+ episode series on skyrim said something that really stuck with me. He said that he doesn't "let the game entertain him", but rather he entertains himself using the game as a support and I think that's what a lot of people don't get about skyrim
For the longest time I never really played games the way they were meant to be played, I just used them as sandboxes or canvases to make adventures or stories in my head. Now it's kinda coming full circle as I try to do that now with some of these retrospectives. Bethesda games really enable that sort of playstyle unlike any other game out there between the mods and how they are fundamentally designed and built. It's really one of the reasons I enjoy them as much as I do: they hearken back to what I used to do with games as a kid.
no, skyrim is objectively a badly designed game. thats why there thousands of mods to try to fix it and even then you still go "not as fun" and thats because of how it was designed. skyrim does what bethesda does best and thats environments and environmental storytelling. combat took a backseat and the rpg mechanics were being tossed out.
@@kay_keik7842 I love when a random person on the internet uses the term "objectively" in their opinionated statement like it's a fact. By your own argument, I can claim that Oblivion is objectively a badly designed game because the combat is very floaty and off-putting, 3rd person is practically unusable, the main story is extremely short, the world leveling ruins the aspect of you becoming more powerful, the character models are really bad, the dungeons are mediocre and tedious... That is my opinion but I won't say it's an objectively bad designed game because thats my opinion. People may enjoy that and actually I do like Oblivion quite a bit but for different reasons.
The real reason why the Thieves Guild suck is simple: they plan all their activities from their secret hideout in a well where anybody standing in the town above can hear them. The Dragonborn doesn't speak, so quickly revives them.
Writing mature stories requires a certain level of commitment Bethesda really struggles to maintain and I'm not sure whether it's just inexperienced writers, lack of care, or just the process they make their games and quests in general. They excel at making really short and sweet adventures and silly diversions, especially in Oblivion.
@@PrivateSessions Their main writer is allegedly pretty close friends with Todd Howard, which could explain the huge difference in quality between some side quests and the main quest. Don't remember my source for it though, so take that with a mountain of salt.
@@monkeman5895 its a pretty bad storyline, tbh. The first half is a collection of (sometimes quite silly) standalone ideas followed by a bad traitor/revenge story where you are treated like an complete idiot that fell for a pretty obvious ruse.
I loved and really enjoyed this video. You've done some great work. However I disagree entirely with the thinking that Bethesda needs to be less serious in the next Elder Scrolls. The point about the Shivering Isles dlc being more comedic and working is great, however I think the fact that it was just a smaller dlc part of a larger game is what made it work so well. A full length game with that kind of narrative would get very old very quickly. With Shivering Isles, you could experience the funny bits and then leave and go back to the rest of the game's more serious tone. If you were stuck in a world that was just slapstick comedy and absurdity all the time, for hours, it would get very tedious. It worked with Oblivion because it was short and sweet. I don't want to see this series turned into a joke. The game taking itself seriously isn't a bad thing, the quality of the writing just needs to raise up to meet it at that level.
Agreed, one hundred percent. I want them to keep the serious tone, but I also want them to bring on talented enough writers who can rise to the challenge. Additionally, I desperately want them to stop watering down and retconning so much of their incredibly unique lore and instead actually delve deeper into it, make far more use of it in their main quest, the guild quests, the games' world design (including the races, flora and fauna, regional architecture, locals dress and customs, etc.). For example: If TES VI _is_ set in Hammerfell and they have Temples to Akatosh and the Eight/Nine Divines instead of to Tall Papa and the Yokudan pantheon, I will lose my freakin' mind with rage!
I wouldn't mind if it was just a tad more wacky, but not too much. However after seeing recent games trying so hard to be funny with the likes of Borderlands 3, Watch Dogs Legions, Forespoken and Saints Row I get why everyone is extremely cautious about adjusting the tone. I can't believe I'm saying this but there's not enough serious games anymore are there. Complete 180° from the gritty 2010s huh
just by adding alternate start mods, I replayed skyrim atleast once every faction, i just find it stupid that after saving the world 3 times, vilkas still thinks his sword is more valuable than me.
You can be decked out in all gear earned through Daedric quests (Ebony Mail, Masque of Clavicus Vile, Ring of Hircine, Dawnbreaker, Spellbreaker, and even Auriel's Bow [not Daedric but Aedric, so close enough]), and he still says that about his crappy Skyforge Steel sword that does little more damage than a butter knife. It really does break the immersion.
@@HickoryDickory86 I mean that line was never supposed to indicate your actual worth. It's him saying that he doesn't value you as a person. And in that case the kinda shitty blade works better imo. Whatever you have and did, to this guy you're worth less than 70 septims
You made a great choice limiting fast travel. It really helps you to discover all the unique trinkets and locations the develpers created that most players using fast travel at every opportunity will never see. Legacy of the Dragonborn is the single greatest mod ever created for Skyrim because of this, Legacy doubles down on the exploration elements and guides you towards every location and collectible in the game so that you can see all the small details and short stories bethesda crafted to fill their amazing world, and as a reward for experiencing what bethesda created, you get to experience and entirely new story created for the mod as you collect more and more things. I could honestly play Skyrim with nothing but Legacy and no fast traveling and still have a lot of fun.
I really want to do a run with legacy. Ordinarily I'm not big on collecting but elder Scrolls games lends themselves to that sort of thing. Collecting weapons and armors especially.
Megacy of the dragonborn is a very cumbersome mod to run in SSE it requires like 20+ patches wich is annoying to deal with love the mod but i find it’s more trouble then it’s worth.
I have a bittersweet feeling about this game, i love it but i cant really play it any more simply because the magic of discovering every hidden detail isnt available to me simply because of how much I've played. I love the game but it just feels... empty to me right now. Maybe a mod will come along and re ignite that flame(hopefully the beyond skyrim project) and i want it to, but unfortunately im not holding my breath.
Makes me think if bethesda might take a page out of what devs are doing now with the whole "games as a service" business and keep adding content to tes6 after it launches to keep us coming back to explore.
@@PrivateSessions I kind of sincerely hope not, if only because I prefer my games to be complete packages. I've never once observed a "games as a service" model that worked.
I hear ya. Been playing vanilla skyrim for 10 years nearly, now I just play on legendary and visit my favourite dungeons. Nowadays for me the game is like a relaxation thing, nostalgic and replaying old dungeons as if they were self contained levels like mario or something.
Cool! I don't use fast travel, either. It changes the game and forces you to engage the world. Camping and food become necessities. Frostfall makes them mandatory.
How does this not have more views? This was the most unique and interesting retrospective I’ve seen of a game ever and has changed how I look at Skyrim from now on. Thank you for this
Long-form videos usually don't get high view counts unless the channel carries a lot of clout. Even then, short and snappier videos are the ones that usually get the big counts and interactions. Part of it is the YT algorithm and part is the average person's shorter attention span. Quality alone is not enough to beat the odds.
Deeply meditative and philosophical about game design and purpose. I think you're a very good critic. The ideas you're getting at when you talk about expectations and frame-of-reference shift are, I think, super important. Aristotle talks of an object's 'end' or its purpose, its 'telos' and I think it paramount to good media criticism that we look at a thing for what it is trying to be, not always impose on it what we go into it expecting it to be. Ignoring this fact leads to a lot of really bad media criticism where people essentially talk past a game, story or movie, disparaging it for not doing something it isn't trying to do anyways. For whoever reads on, (I wrote a lot/too much) there're some dualisms you've established in both your Oblivion long-cut and this video that I'd like to play around with. You've talked about a game world's agnosticism to the player vs. making the player the center of everything. You've also talked about the degree to which a game is structured, tells the player what to think, gives them a clear experience VS giving a player a blank canvas, a stage. You put it in the video something like stage-building vs. directing/directors. Oblivion is inconsistently sometimes agnostic to the player--they are one person in a large world, other times the player is the center. Sometimes the game systems' illusions breaking down alone is enough to make it obvious the player is the center. I take these to be arguments you make about Oblivion, and I agree. I would also agree that a really fine 'stage' can sometimes be enough for the player to make of the canvas what they will. Some use mods in Skyrim to skip the introduction entirely and start in a random dungeon. What I would say--and this isn't necessarily disagreeing with anything you've said in either video--is that there are probably better and worse stages/canvases, and there's probably a broad spectrum among players in terms of their willingness to 'fill in the gaps' or 'tell their own story'. For the most creative, they might need very little at all to begin telling their own stories, to get lost and immersed in the world. For others, they might need to be railroaded to the nth degree before a story makes their synapses light up. For others like me, they're very much in the middle. I'm willing to do a great deal of roleplaying, suspension of disbelief, even filling in the gaps, but I think a game, story or experience needs to give me good jumping off points, good contextualization, sympathetic and/or interesting characters and compelling conflicts. Or, failing that, at least adequate helpings of these things, or an attempt at them. Skyrim has some things really going for it compared to Oblivion in higher production values, polish and probably an overall greater wealth in mods that, on paper, can offer a greater promise of immersion and chance for telling your own story. Some critics might point out that, when you strip Oblivion's mechanics down, they're pretty shallow--and all Skyrim did was finish the streamlining and make everything more presentable. Mods can make up for, in either game, some gameplay deficits and certainly a lot of graphical deficits. Some modders do try their hand at writing their own stories, but voice acting is expensive and writing is hard, so past voiceless or text-based quests, adding additional quest content in any substantial sense is hard to do. So in some sense, then, the core of Oblivion and Skyrim's writing, quests and characters are pretty fixed. For me, this makes it possible to enjoy Oblivion but at this point impossible to enjoy Skyrim. Why? I want to return to that 'agnostic to the player' vs. 'player is center of universe' paradigm. To add my own claim in, I just generally think making the player the center of the universe just kinda sucks, it ruins immersion, makes the world smaller, everything revolving around you. It's harder to roleplay as your own character with their own individual choices to make in a big world if the script makes you out as a demigod. One way of alleviating this really is Bethesda's efforts to create big AI systems to make the world alive. To make it seem like the world around the player still moves and acts when the player isn't. Like you, I do applaud this and hope they take it further--it'd be cool to see what they could make with an updated engine and a lot of money, time. Maybe that will end up producing a fantasy simulator so complete that writing, quests and story will hardly matter anymore. --I take this to be what you'd like to see. Barring that, though, the most surefire way to invest a player into a game's world is through a story. Story is a broad term. The constituent parts matter more--conflicts and characters. At its best, Oblivion is goofy and open ended in its quest design with entertaining if silly characters. The main villain isn't interesting, is rushed, as you say. Martin gets a bit of character development though--and that's cool to see. Lucien Lachance is an interesting personality, the Dark Brotherhood in general makes for a good story. The Thieves Guild makes for a good story on the whole. Sheogorath too. A lot of Oblivion's stories are mediocre or even bad, ridiculous but there are some entertaining characters and memorable stories, at its best. For me, that is the core upon which everything else rests. If it really seems like there are no other interesting people with their own goals or desires, or genuine conflicts--physical or philosophical--then the world is just dead past what I make up for myself. Skyrim and Oblivion are similar in that, at least in my view, both their mages and fighters guilds are the weaker points, and their thieves guilds and dark brotherhoods are the stronger ones. But man, Oblivion's highs are so much higher, the lows lower. Skyrim is just smoothed out, there's just nothing substantial there at all. To me, the characters, conflicts color the world, give it life, and give me a starting point for imagining my own character in relation to them. Skingrad IS the vampire count with all the secrets of his castle, it IS Glarthir's paranoia. Chorrol IS the detective quest about the stolen painting--when I think of Chorrol, I think of that experience. When I think of Whiterun in Skyrim, I feel nothing, it's a set of aesthetics and architecture to me, nothing more. A good, layered, multifaceted story with good characters and a decent conflict gives me an excuse to return to the game/world, to come back with another character and revisit it, perhaps rethink it or approach it differently. In Skyrim, this just doesn't feel like an option, ever--so I'm just going through the motions, over and over. Which is why the natural next step is to ignore all of that and focus on the story you create for yourself. And honestly, as far as you just follow random odd jobs this could work okay--but then it feels like the player lacks for larger goals. As soon as you begin to touch those larger goals, the game starts to take you out of the experience and tell you how you're the chosen one, gotta decide the civil war, stop the end of the world, lead every guild, be the dragonborn savior--AND DO IT NOW, QUICK, BEFORE ITS TOO LATE. --Oblivion does this too, as you point out, but the fact that Oblivion does really have characters/stories of its own worth telling every once in a while makes it possible for me, at least for some little glimpses and moments, to get lost in the world. For Skyrim, if I want to entirely just roleplay as my own little character, then I feel like I'm constantly fighting against the game world trying to make me something else. And mods can't *really* fix that, because this is pretty much the core of Skyrim's content. Unless some modder has overhauled it such that they've replaced 90% of the quest content with something else entirely, given the player a different endgame for things to do, goals to pursue. --but if you can get past that, don't let me stop you, just watching the video takes me back to a moment so long ago while modding Skyrim that I could see the glimpses you talk about, and just trying your best to see those glimpses is worth it, however flawed the game is. (It's been over 5 years since I really tried to touch Oblivion, don't know if there are any big modpacks I should try. Have dabbled in Morrowind, but similarly think there'd need to be a really good modpack to streamline the visuals, mechanics a bit for me to return. Morrowind is probably the most pure in philosophy when it comes to slowing down, enjoying exploration and feeling like a small part of a big world.) I think you give good advice for Bethesda, as there's really just the two routes--or both, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. They've gotta make the story, world tonally appropriate to that roleplaying. Maybe a bit more comic, a bit less serious, and less grating to a roleplay experience where the player is just one person in a big world. Or they've just gotta tell much better stories with more interesting characters and writing. Or both. Honestly I don't have much hope for either, but if they can pull off just 1 of those 2 really well for Elder Scrolls VI, they'll have a great game on their hands. For my part, the more interesting, fleshed-out characters and conflicts there are in a game's world and/or story, the more I can get lost in it and feel like part of a larger world. But it could also be that by working hard enough at AI systems to create a more living, breathing fantasy world, that the stories will just write themselves in the player's head, and that'd be really cool too.
There are some decent mods for Morrowind which essentially “modernise” it. I believe the main mod I used is called “Morrowind Rebirth” which overhauls a lot of the games mechanics, adds a bunch of new features. All I did after was download mods to fix the combat and graphics and I was good to go. I actually think there was a UA-cam guide for it that was fairly straightforward. I still find it harder to get into than Oblivion and Skyrim because of the lack of quest markers and infrequent fast travel but I’ve found it a much more rewarding and immersive gaming experience. The world building is excellent for a game originally made in 2002.
I mean, of course if you have to add mods to the game to make it good and restrict yourself in how you play to have fun, it means that the game has flaws and those flaws should be criticized. But I wouldn't call that irredeemable. It's a flaw, and you can fix that flaw, and of course you are doing the designers' job for them, but that's only relevant if we examine the process of making games and absolutely irrelevant if we examine which games to play and how to do that.
It's interesting that I found this video because I'm actually playing Skyrim again for the first time in about six years. Back in the day I got burnt out on Skyrim feeling like the charm was only skin deep, but after playing through Morrowind it got me thinking how much I was missing by fast traveling everywhere. I installed a lot of mods for immersion, npc ai, perks and magic related ones and vowed not to fast travel. And honestly I'm loving it. By just warping from place to place and mindlessly following quest markers I was depriving myself of most of the game and I didn't even realize it. The game is certainly flawed, but the world it's set in is gorgeous and a lot of work obviously went into it. I'm glad I gave it another chance.
I always think it's funny how Paratus (the Synod mage in Mzulft) always devolves into petty threats, that he's gonna get you and the College of Winterhold in trouble with the Synod Council by tattling on you, that you're hoarding powerful artifacts. And I'm just like, "... Okay? The College of Winterhold is older than the Synod by millennia and has always been and still is an autonomous organization that isn't under the Synod's jurisdiction. Go and tattle, you useless dweeb. What do you honestly think the Synod could do about it?" And then I proceed to soul trap and kill him. Every time. The fewer loose ends in the College of Winterhold's busted, janky as questline, the better.
What I find funny is that a twat that couldn't defend himself against the falmer that killed his whole team, to the point that he had to lock himself up in a room and risk dead by starvation, decides to antagonize the powerhouse that just slaughtered said falmer with ease; while they are both in the middle of nowhere, in a world with no forensic sciences. Comes to show that, just because you are a scholar, that doesn't mean you are particularly smart.
I like the way you tell the story with your views basically like a story book in a way. I’m so use to watching retrospectives on the vanilla game, it’s nice to see a slight modded one. Good video.
Enai's mods are basically "more vanilla than vanilla" at this point. Ignoring other mods that add content for a second, I can't even imagine anymore what it's like to be 'forced' to play as a Stealth Archer. *Ordinator* and *Apocalypse* are by far the most important, because they actually allow me to play other viable RPG archetypes. If I want to be a _heavy-armor-wearin,' mace tottin,' restoration flingin,' cast-per-day'in,'_ orsimer vigilant, I can. If I want to make a _dagger-back-stabbin,' no-bow'in,' illusionist'in,'_ assassin, I can. Heck, I can even specs into making a thu'um-centered caster (especially with *Thunderchild,* another of Enai's hypervanilla mods). Vampirism? Sacrosanct. Priest? Daedric Cleric? *Wintersun.* Pure vampire bloodmancer? *Sacrosanct.* *Wildcat, Andromeda, Imperious,* and *Summermyst* add to the world in subtler, but nonetheless critical ways. This playthrough runs the Big Two, and many of their lesser companions for a good reason. Back to other minor mods, here we can truly see how much people try to make Skyrim more complex. Deeper. More... of a fantasy RPG world, really. Consider how long the average modlist is (including Pvt. Session's) and you can see how many small details will come together to be greater than the sum of their parts. Knowing bethesda, they *aren't* taking notes and the next TES will still be a broken, shallow mess at release. Enai, or people like him, will have to bail us out yet again.
if you love skyrim wanna watch some good quality rp then gopher probably has the most enjoyable lets plays of skyrim ive seen. its funny as hell at times, the story telling is top notch and his game is beautiful. HIGHLY reccomend
This wasn't a very good modded retrospective. The cart at the beginning wasn't flipping out. Not realistic at all. But I loved the video, definitely one of my favorite formats I've seen for these. I wish they would've made TES6 instead of Fallout 76. It's way overdue now. 10 years between games is too long.
10 years and counting. Here's hoping Starfield is a good stopgap because tes6 is barely in development still. The new engine will hopefully be worth it.
I mean, massive open world games take time to make. Especially since people demand the best in graphics and shit nowadays. With how much it’s hyped up, they are gonna want to put as much time in it as possible
Well Sir, you have convinced me to play Skyrim once again after all these years... after I finish breaking it with all the mods on your list! LOL! Just a few more conflicts to resolve, and I should be able to start playing! I very much enjoy your takes ( and style) on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. I look forward to future works from you. o7
Hey, Private! I am currently in the works of a retrospective myself and have really fallen in love with your way of storytelling. Giving the character of the retrospect a personality makes for a incredibly fun watch/ listen. I just wanted to ask you for your blessing in adopting that style in my next vid.
Absolutely. I hope you can do it better than I have been able to thus far, it's a tricky thing to balance. Good luck and keep me posted when you got something to show :)
@@PrivateSessions Thank you so much! I will :D Edit: i misread your comment lol. I will do my best but I've never done any commentsry before so me being better than you is a stretch. I will however do my best to make a great video!
I was hoping for an in depth retrospective, but instead I got a lame summary about the objective information of the quests that we’ve all done many times, sprinkled with introspection here and there.
Pretty much. "Content creators" imagine we're all dying to hear about their super-special Skyrim character, which thanks to the lack of innovation or choice in the game is pretty much the same as every other character. Strat-Edgy's "How To Skyrim" video takes a fairly amusing look at this shambling garbage heap of a game. Don't get me wrong, it can be a beautiful pile of garbage, but garbage it remains.
I love long analyses but what is the point of detailing every step of every quest? We've all played Skyrim, we know the quests. Furthermore it's just a step by step reading of what happens in the quests. Skyrim's quests really aren't that interesting in the first place, let alone with a tedious, boring retelling. "My character spoke to this person, my character discovered she was dragonborn, my character met the greybeards". In my opinion it would be better to skip straight to the analysis with a brief overview of the quests. You even said the quests were boring, so why tell us every single step of every quest? OK that's all. Thanks.
I only just recently discovered the reason I've always loved this game is for the world, not the story or gameplay, then I find this video. It's been brutally beaten over the last few years, but it's honestly a pretty great game, even if the whole RPG label is a bit of an unfulfilled promise.
A key element of writing complaints is that if a game makes you listen to it then the dialogue should be worth listening to. The story doesn't need to be more niche rpg or this or that. It needs to be finished, polished, and touch the potential it brings up. It needs to do what its aiming to do but falling short of. Skyrim has a lot of ideas but the game was rushed on a lot of elements and the writing is one of them.
I think Elder Scrolls games need to let you play as multiple characters in one save game. I want to play as an Argonian who becomes head of the Thieves Guild and then start a new character who is pursuing the main quest, at some point running into the head of the Thieves Guild - my Argonian character.
Yep :P Frostwall & needs mod are almost so mandatory that Bethesda themselves (and New Vegas crew) integrated it with Fallout base game going forward. Unofficial Skyrim Patch & MoreHUD & SkyUI for baseline modding/stability, Equipment Durability System, Vigor Enhanced Combat, Path of Sorcery, good stuff.
I have my own personal views of how Skyrim was received by fans, and I find myself both agreeing with the vast majority of criticism, calling out the games shallowness and untapped potential, but I feel that as the years have gone on, we've just taken Skyrim and TES games for granted. Like we expect the game to achieve a level of immersion and quality and freedom that literally no other game developers have ever achieved, and they've had years and years and years to try and match the Elder Scrolls go-anywhere-do-anything in this deep cultured fantasy world. I'm being serious too, The Witcher 3 did not achieve what Skyrim or Oblivion or Morrowind did, even though it achieved greatness and set the bar for narrative driven RPG games, saw countless attempts to copy its formula from Assassin's Creed Odyssey adopting elements, tons of other games from this generation were tonally or functionally influenced by Witcher 3. Literally no one even attempts to do what Bethesda does over and over again with TES games. Even The Outer Worlds, which IMO was the first real genuine attempt to match the Bethesda formula in a new game and new world, still was only like a sliver or fraction of what TES games have been offering us for years. So while I fully agree with critical points made against TES games the majority of the time... I still feel we should criticize and see these games through a lens of maintaining that appreciation of what they do achieve without just taking it for granted like it's not a big deal. I'm not saying to brown-nose Todd or defend Bethesda when their greed overcomes them either. Just to not take for granted how amazing these immersive crafted worlds are and how they give us something that no other developers have been able to offer.
I can’t bring myself to say “go-anywhere-do-anything” because you can’t. What are some examples of not being able to go everywhere/do anything? 1. There’s an entire Dwarven ruin you can’t get into because you don’t have the key. 2. The Embassy is entirely blocked off and the only time you get inside the building is for one mission. 3. You can’t get to the statue of the elf that has gems for his eyes unless you do a quest. 4. A lot of NPCS just take a knee if you hit them. 5. You can’t get to Solitude’s Catacombs at all unless you do a mission. 6. You have to become a nightingale to finish the thieves guild quest line.
Exactly. I agree with the criticism people throw at skyrim, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: no other game has achieved what it has. It definitely could have been better, even with reasonable expectations in mind, but it’s a great game for its time.
@@thegifting267 a lot of those mechanics are to prevent you from breaking the game though. It’s still a very open world. My main issue is that it guides the player way too much with the main story, but if you can force yourself to ignore that then the game is pretty damn open.
@@Mr-tu4cj how would it break the game? Because it would prevent you from doing a entire quest line or something? This is a RPG so doing things that prevent you from doing a specific quest a specific way is supposed to happen.
@@thegifting267 I’d say the majority of people would be dislike it if they could unknowingly kill someone involved in a major questline. I see what you’re saying but it makes sense that they’d prevent that from happening. Ideally there’d be multiple ways to complete major quests in the event that you killed someone involved, but that would be a lot more work and they clearly struggled with time as is. Or they could have multiple game modes, one which ensures you can do all the questing and one that lets you do whatever and kill whoever you want, but I doubt they’ll ever add something like that to ES unfortunately
Skyrim is a terrible game compared to Morrowind. With Skyrim its very dry. Mechanics suck, story is bland, dialog is one sided and it lacks depth in general. Compared to Morrowind where the mechanics felt like a true rpg, story was amazing which fit into the unique world, the dialog intriguing and traditional.
I think the game is fantastic with survival mode on and some self imposed rules. My favorite character by leaps and bounds was that kind of playthrough. I also played a Khajiit girl. She was raised in Elsweyr with her father and traveling caravan who were practically family. Growing up she learned archery and had developed excellent communication skills being part of a caravan and all. She always has a sunny disposition and is always ready to help those in need without any expectation of a reward. On her 17th birthday her father surprised her with a beautifully crafted elven bow she had been eyeing up since she was a little girl in one of the towns the caravan frequented. He had secretly been saving money for it for years. That same night the caravan was razed by marauders and she was left the only survivor. Grief stricken, she buried her family and decided she couldn't stay in Elsweyr any longer. She was hurt and felt like running away. For two years she journeyed far north through Cyrodiil to the Jerall Mountains. Skyrim, as she read in books, was a vast sub arctic tundra. A far cry from the warm savannas and jungles of her home. While crossing the border she is unfortunately taken prisoner in an Imperial ambush being mistaken for rebel in a conflict she had no knowledge about. In my playthrough Alduin does destroy Helgen but my character isn't the Dragonborn. She not a chosen one type of character. She's just a 19 year old Khajiit girl who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the attack she continues her quest. Which is buy a house and make Skyrim her new home. She adventures all over the province making as much money as she can using the skills she learned back home. Here are the self imposed rules. She cannot carry any more than she realistically hold. Regardless of her in game carrying capacity. She carries her beloved bow, a quiver with a bundle of arrows, a dagger and a satchel of provisions. Any more than that I have to think about how she's carrying it. She has to dress warm. She has to eat and sleep every day. She cannot fast travel. She cannot take down an entire bandit camp or monster filled dungeon by herself. She's not a one person army, she needs help for dungeon diving. She does not loot corpses unless necessary as she finds it disrespectful. This mostly applies to draugr specifically. Bandits not so much. If she can talk her way out she'll try. She doesn't enjoy fighting but at the same time she is prideful of her skills. No save scumming. If she fails she lives with the consequences. She helps everyone in need because she wildly empathicle and cares. She doesn't like alcohol but always checks out the local tavern cus she's a social butterfly. Skyrim the game isn't much interested in letting you roleplay so I had to make up my own rules. Bethesda seems more interested in making a power fantasy. You're an untouchable demigod who's bad at nothing. But I think that's boring. I like being a regular inhabitant of this fantasy world. That playthrough was fun as hell. Very rememberable.
I'm not big on RP, but I do feel like adding a bit more of a challenge to Skyrim makes it much better to play. I recently started playing Skyrim with my own self-imposed rules and restrictions, and it was honestly surprisingly fun. I took a bit of inspiration from from the Ironman mode in RuneScape, and the Survival mode in Fallout 4.
The problem with eliminating fast-traveling in these games is that fetch quests just make you wanna kill yourself. Even games that I really enjoy, like FNV, aren't safe from this. Fetch quests should be outright eliminated, along with fast travel that didn't involve carriages and such.
1:46:49 to 1:47:16 had me in complete hysterics, i couldn't pay attention to anything that was being said because i was laughing too hard over paarthurnax spinning his way up to the heavens
if skyrim is meant to be about exploration then its obvious why i dont like it. there's little to discover through that exploration. the overworld and a few set pieces are pretty but thats not enough. blackreach is the only thing i felt like i discovered, the only thing that was interesting enough to be worth exploring for. the rest is bland and repetitive. so little is noteworthy i cant remember much at all of the locations major quests take you to while oblivion and morrowind i remember vividly despite having a fraction of the hours played. then you could say its the journey rather than the destination that's fun but that would require fun mechanics or good story in the world, the plot and characters, or in the characterization and roleplaying of the PC; none of which skyrim has. it's all just a bland fantasy adventure soup
I never liked oblivion to be honest. I think its the worst elder scrolls game I have ever played. Morrowind is the best and skyrim is a close second with daggerfall being 3rd.
You're wrong about the story taking itself too seriously. It's never felt any different than other games for it's plot or how they present it. You repeat that point many times but never explained why you feel that way
Yeah idk wtf he was talking about, oblivion’s main quest takes itself completely serious it’s just the voice acting ai and dialogue that makes the entire game funny but the quest themselves aren’t in on it because when the game came out it wasn’t funny it just aged that way
when skyrim first came out i was unbelievably disappointed and thought the game sucked. Especially after playing morrowind and oblivion while growing up, skyrim was an objective downgrade in many key areas. but after10 years and 1040 active mods, I think it's one of the greatest games ever made.
great video. i definitely remember being upset at the removed character customization from oblivion when skyrim came out, but i still couldn't put it down. while oblivion will always be my favorite game for getting me into games in the first place (also i love forests) i cannot deny that skyrim is, as a whole, is much more fully realized, despite not having as many interesting quests. but the daedric quests are actually pretty great.
The question of reviewing modded titles comes up often, especially in TES circles. I find it very interesting, and perhaps the reason why we can’t come to a consensus is because it’s so foreign to any other form of media. No one would say something like “I didn’t like Alien until I installed a mod that replaced the Alien with Thomas the Tank Engine” or something like that. If a game needs to be modded in order to be enjoyed, how can we then say that it’s a good game inherently? I have a ton of criticisms I could levy at Skyrim, and yet I’ve spent 100s of hours over many different consoles getting lost in it, vanilla. “This game sucks. I know it does. Why did I play it for so long if that’s true?” Complex opinions and answers to these questions are something that don’t get discussed very often in analysis. It’s either “this game sucks” or “this game is good”, and there can be no in between, probably because lukewarm or otherwise indecisive answers do not satisfy. There really is just something different about Bethesda and their ability to enthrall in spite of some baffling design choices and emphasis on extreme accessibility (and not the good kind).
I find the modability of Skyrim it's strength. My Skyrim is almost a survival game but someone else doesn't have to. It is also very clear that Bethesda kept modders in mind when designing the game. As for accessibility, the simple design means that new players can get into the game easily. Whereas die hard fans are gonna mod the game anyway, as they did for all the previous games. Hell my Skyrim uses a skill XP hybrid system for leveling. That possibility is part the games design, it has been since Morrowind.
We "mod" many of our experiences by adding to them. I sincerely doubt that the people who attend Burning Man do so only to see an effigy burn, as an example. Bethesda builds an amazing framework that we customize with mods. Despite the pseudo-intellectuals with their equally false sense of superiority, mods are an integral part of the Bethesda game experience. These folks know that and, I believe, enjoy them as much as the next player. They just pass judgment in a public forum so that they can earn some edgelord points.
Balgruuf: "Hurry to the Throat of the World, Dragonborn! Speak to the Greybeards and fulfill your destiny!" Me: "Yeah sure whatever." *Proceeds to f@ck off for two in-game years of sidequesting.* As an aside: anyone approaching a Bethesda title and expecting/hoping for a deep and engaging story is only setting themselves up for disappointment: Bethesda'a lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, has made it abundantly clear in interviews that He thinks games with kindergarten-level narratives is the secret to reaching the largest audiences and making the fattest stacks.
I love elder scrolls games for their lore and enviromental story telling and when they are allowed to characters. This is why while an mmo ESO is my favorute along with morrowind. Amazing stories , characters , lore and other provinences. Skyrim is great with modding community. Many actual lore relevant and very lore friendly mods helps with the game.
My first play through in Riften I broke Bersis' vase and i felt terrible about it, on my next play through I made sure to visit him last and used the info Brynolf gave me to investigate how I could coerce everyone without coming off as a prick. it was only skin deep in terms of decision making, but I liked that I could in some way maintain my own honor, not like it matters to the game. The more i played the more Invested i go in how i played. it wasn't about the games limitations it was about placing some on my own will.
This spurred me to have another playthrough, attempting a similar style as you plus writing a journal as I go. I then saw your mod list and it blew my mind. How do you even get it to run. I have so many errors and stuff happen with just 10 or so mods. Going to try pulling out the camping and frostfire and I'll see how I go.
Just want to say before we start, having just watched your Oblivion video (which was great), that my favourite Bethesda game is Fallout 4 with the huge asterisk that it is only so thanks to mods - but with mods it is one of the best and longest times I've spent in a game world. Skyrim is the same way for me. The playground is wonderful and it's what Bethesda does well; all the systems such as levelled enemies, unique loot locations, revamped leveling and perks, graphical overhauls and all that other stuff can be made orders of magnitude better than the vanilla experience by mods; not to mention bug fixing. I think it's the fundamental reason why I love fallout 4 and absolutely could not stand 76 despite being a similar experience on the surface. When the mechanics of the game are sharpened the world really shines. As much as I'd love the games to have better writing and quests, that's not what I come to them for and I can sink many, many hours into the worlds alone. But I could never play vanilla skyrim or fallout 4 again I don't think. Ordinator especially for Skyrim is essential, and morrowloot allowed me to completely ignore smithing and made loot incredibly rewarding to find, doubling the satisfaction of exploring and crawling dungeons.
I just find this game is a good dopamine machine with a lot of sources available. There isn't anything spectacular about it, aside maybe for the scale. What I don't understand myself is how people can make new characters or come back to it. Any magic the game has just isn't there on a second playthrough, at least for me, it just feels like a chore to get back to where I was.
The mod list is in alphabetical order. It would be nice to see the mods as they appear in your load order.Still nice to see you've enjoyed your stay in Tamriel.
35:03 It's not just the Psijic Order/Order of PSJJJJ that's absent for long periods of time, their entire island, the Isle of Artaeum, tends to vanish from Nirn for centuries at a time.
The fact I have 100s of hours in this game and have never once played a mage or ever done any of the guilds quest lines always makes me laugh. They just don't interest me.
I previously started this video, then paused to watch the 6 hr Oblivion (over time) and now i can't even remember if i watched this already or am having simple deja vu
I had very similar as experience as you. I was hyped and played roughly 100 hours of Skyrim on launch in 2011 but was never very compelled to return. I tried a couple of times in 2017 but I always got bored. However recently I reinstalled it again with couple of mods (Ordinator and Morrowloot) and having a blast again!
This is one of the better retrospectives of Skyrim, I'm coming back to it after my own personal "Oh shit I get it this time" playthrough on the VR version (with about 100 mods, ofc). I still think Oblivion is the better game overall, but this time I can really appreciate what Skyrim does, instead of thinking it's just a style-over-substance rehash of Oblivion and Morrowind. In VR I don't want too much menu-intensive RPG stuff (and even then, there's still a lot of it), so the streamlining of the mechanics actually works in the game's favour this time. I had that moment battling a random dragon on a mountaintop, blasting shouts at each other, peppering it with arrows until it landed, and finally closing in to finish it off at the very peak with a sliver of health left, like Gandalf defeating the Balrog. That's the moment I said "Okay Skyrim, I was wrong about you." One thing has to be said, and it's hammered home in the VR version where the scale and grandiosity is impossible to ignore, and it's that the *world* is the main character with Skyrim. Bethesda clearly put all of their work into designing the world itself, and the quests were just quickly shoved in after they had built it. The caveat underneath this is that Skyrim is actually kinda hard to explore. You can't just walk in a direction and come across landmarks, you have to really look for things. All of the most interesting and unique places are hidden around the very margins of the map and tucked away behind these complex layers of forced perspective and zig-zag paths that give the illusion of distance. Skyrim hides stuff in places it looks like you're not supposed to be able to go, because it knows players are going to try and go there anyway, and wants to reward them for that. But it's a double edged sword. My memories of playing Skyrim in 2011 are of getting frustrated searching for a route, and instead just awkwardly clipping Shadowmere up near vertical cliffs, as I'm sure we all have done. It's much more "hand crafted" than Oblivion, much more in line with Morrowind arguably, but it does end up feeling much smaller and kind of restrictive, claustrophobic even, if you try to fight against it. But if you engage with it on its own terms, there's truly nothing like it.
Seeing this video makes me think you'd really like Kenshi. Look into it if you've never heard of it, the entire game is designed around you creating your own stories. Open world, sandbox, rpg-lite. It's a really good time
1:29:20 This was a brilliant piece of roleplaying as PS took on the role of the average Skyrim player who is so illiterate they don't know the difference between Asset and Agent.
19:18 As soon as I saw the thumbnail, I guessed it, but it's good to hear that I'm not the only one who went from hating Skyrim to liking it when it's loaded down with mods. I've completed the vanilla storyline exactly twice, and both required a heavily modded playthrough that relied on Legacy of the Dragonborn to tie it all together. That said, I've gotta disagree on the whole "immersion" bit. In my opinion, you want immersive, you play Morrowind. Sure, it's older and the mechanics are dated, but just walking through Vvardenfell is an experience no other game has captured for me. Despite how alien the world is, it's so easy to immerse yourself in it, even without survival mods designed to help with immersion.
Morrowind is coming... eventually. I've never played it for more than a bit but I suspect I'll enjoy it once I get over the combat. With that said, I only get one shot at playing it "for the first time" and I want to get my ducks in a row before tackling a video on it: I want to make sure I got the skills and plan in place to do it right.
I'm not capable of getting attached to fictional characters unless they're mine, and most story emotional beats fall flat on me, so Skyrim's lack of good narrative never really bothered me. It's definitely at its best as a sandbox, either by pretending to play a character, or just going full mess-around. It's kinda like the Minecraft of RPG's right down to being able to mod it so hard you create an entirely different game.
I did the same thing when playing my vampiric Altmer. I roll played as I was her,and played the game like you are, just without mods (PS user, mods are... barebones). It was fun, for the first few dozenhhours, but then the cracks started to shine through again. I won't say Skyrim isn't fun, I had 500+ hours of fun in the game, on 4 different characters, but... It is objectively poorly designed. The quests are shallow as heck, the writing is poor, the stories are badly thought through, the lore breaks or outright shatters the lore of previous games, the characters are idiots, the mechanics are WAY too simplified... It's got a lot of problems, but if you can immerse yourself and ignore that? The game can be a lot of fun. I wish I could go back to the time before I started seeing all the many, many cracks, so I could enjoy the game again.
I think the difference for me is, I'm entirely able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy a cliched wish-fulfillment story, which is what the main and faction questlines are. I actually really enjoy radiant fetch quests and don't mind when they draw out a questline with them. Some questlines, like the College of Winterhold, I think would benefit from having a slower start, but that's my only real complaint. My love for The Elder Scrolls has been an imperfect one up until Skyrim. Morrowind had an interesting story, but a setting I had trouble appreciating. Oblivion was closer to my tastes, but didn't quite hit the mark. Skyrim actually suits me the best, both in setting and in story, and I think that's why, while I've let Oblivion and Morrowind fade into the past, I still regularly play Skyrim when the mood strikes me. It's just my kind of adventure, you know?
Well , years later but what a better place than to tell this: I belive if you approach skyrim as a complete newbie in rpgs like I was (look at me now running pathfinder & dnd tabletop) the glaring issues don't take hold until much later, and even so, you can still have a blast. There are some amazing moments: The twist that Parthonax was a dragon, the first time the big falmer cave was in view, and my absolute favorite moment when you enter sovngarde and start hearing that OST, feeling like a complete badass, like the a army of warrios is walking right behind you chanting your praises and announcing to Alduin, this mighty beast: The Dovaakin has come for you. This moments will forever live rent free in my head and I still listen to sovngarde years laters from time to time. I can't go back to skyrim now, because I see its problems, but honestly, I don't want to, I'd much rather remember those moments and how they made me feel. Great video my dude
But Private Sessions, Whiterun is the Balmora of Skyrim! "If you ever make a mod and are too stupid to know where to put it, just place your stuff in Whiterun! It's the Balmora of Skyrim!" - Bhruce Hammar
I love how much work you put into the videos, but I’m having a hard time understanding why you feel like you need to recite all the Vanilla quests that everyone who’s into Skyrim is sick of at this point. Like come on, I’m interested in your opinion and analysis, but I have to watch the first 30 minutes of narrated playthrough to get 5 of the content that’s relevant to the video title. I’m happy you’re putting your soul and work into the character, but in my personal opinion, the relation of Vanilla playthrough to actual analysis is very, very off at times. Overall, huge respect though, the analysis is very engaging and totally worth watching.
I think rather than not taking itself seriously, what they need is to lower the stakes. High stakes encourages the player to rush through a given story and this puts too much pressure on the writing. If the writing encourages the player to take the quest at their own pace, then the writing problems don't pile as high and don't matter as much. Death of major characters also feels cheap if it isn't earned, so should only be done when it's built up to. I think Mirabell's death in particular was pointless. That isn't to say you should *never* have high stakes, but the stakes need room to breathe. They should be built up to. If I were put in charge of faction questlines, I would have a series of low stakes episodic adventures that let us get to know our fellow members. Then have a few major quests with higher stakes once the player is more established in the faction. Your fellow faction members come with you to this or that dungeon, and stuff happens that showcases different aspects of the faction. Their relations with other factions, their internal politics, what they generally spend resources doing. Then once you're a higher rank, you can go on a higher stakes questline wherein at most the faction's existence is at stake. World ending stakes should be reserved for the main story, if you have them at all.
Just like Rockstar games, the main quest is trash. Turn the HUD off. Don't use the map. And just go... That's how to play Bethesda games. I stashed the stone tablet, and wandered around for a year before dragons even showed up.
I was in the same boat as you. I played skyrim the first time on a ps3 at my friends house. I was immediately hooked and installed a cracked version on my super crappy laptop at home before i had my own ps3 to play the game with. My laptop barely managed to run the game at all but it was a wonderous time. I had no idea what everything is, no meta or glitches or even knew how smithing worked, but i played the game and explored everything. After i got Skyrim firat on Ps3 then on my new proper Gaming PC i never really could recapture the wonder of the first time playing, even if i played a bunch and beat the game so many times i literally am on rails when i start the game. Get out of helgen, off to the site to the house with an adept lock, clear it and get the silver form at the end and a bunch of early loot, then off to embershard mine for some early iron, then to Riverru....wood, clearing bleak falls barrow and get the stone, get money and then off to Whiterun. Now after years of reflection and a healthy amount of Fallout 4 played on survival i currated my own modlist to make the game more immersive while keeping the vanilla feel of the game intact and i found myself in skyrims grasps yet again. Now, no fast travel on Master Difficulty with a healthy amounts of lore friendly race mods and fixes for things that are broken in the basegame i am playing this game really slow and enjoying it more than i have ever. It really makes a difference
Can anybody explain why everyone say that main quest is you going along with a prophecy, i think that prophecy says Aldyin comes and destroyes the world, i think main character is destroyes or as graybeards explain (when you ask them why you don't consume Alduin soul) delays prophecy.
This video is great and really hit the nail on the head for me. I just started a new playthrough with some new lands mods to help give some new content to explore, but just testing my load order I found myself playing normally through the vanilla game. My friend and I have had this talk about what makes Bethesda games different from our other favorite RPGs hundreds of times and we always mention the world and world building. The tiny details, whether that's notes or the position of a skeleton or a Talos shrine in the mountains that spawn an aggressive Thalmor group, in small, unnecessary places that some or most players will never see are what bring me into the world and make the game worth playing. I love that quote from Rebelzize that you shared, I can't wait to get sucked into his world when the time comes.
Wait, it just dawned on me how much of an idiot decision is to tone down certain aspects of a sequel because one playstyle is more boring than the others... why tone down magic and stealth because people gravitate more towards them and not... say... make melee even more fun to counter the initial problem? My god what a lopsided way of fixing an issue
Skyrim has always been a great game it's just Bethesda ruined that experience by not letting it age when they kept re-releasing it multiple times And they kept trying to sell pieces of it for 5$ each oh you want a brand new quest line sure you could buy it from our mod store
Skyrim has always been a mediocre standalone game but an amazing template to mod a great experience. Still bores me at its core but Enderal was very enjoyable for me.
i am pretty sure every single player of skyrim would agree that the best way to play skyrim is play it once without mods, then only ever play it with mods from then on. game is just far superior with mods.
Disagree with the idea that the solution to writing serious subject matter poorly is to just make it a farce. Morrowind has a much more serious tone and manages to balance the lighthearted aspects much better without being a complete joke.
The algorithm has thrown me into a hole of multi-hour video analyses of the elder scrolls games and I couldn’t be happier. Especially with this as I’ve been wanting to start a modded play through for a while and your perspective is really interesting and well-explained. Gg my man
Check out the playlist Long-Form Analysis; it’ll keep you busy for the rest of the year
SAME
Any that youd recommend checking out?
@@ConnorRunda PatricianTV morrowind retrospective
Yes wtf with the algorithm
Honestly my issues with Skyrim is that we are the chosen one too many times. I want to be an assassin not the leader, I want to be a companion and not the leader, I want to be a powerful mage not the arch mage. I wanna be a master thief not the leader. Stop killing off all the guild leaders and just have different endings, it’s all the same skeleton and that pretty much all. I love the game and the quests, but it’s nothing like other games. Even with oblivion we kill all the brotherhood members and it ends in the area we are known by higher ups and that’s it.
True. That trope does get tired.
I honestly like in ESO how you are relied upon and respected, but they sont hand you the reins of the guilds because you showed up a week or two ago.
There's a mad for that...
Agree with you re: “Stop making the player character the leader of every faction”, disagree with “stop making them the chosen one.”
Main series Elder Scrolls are set during a crisis where an individual comes forward to resolve it, and that’s the player character. You don’t have to engage with the main story, but the main story is always of that magnitude. If they want to make smaller games where you’re just some guy then sure, but main series should be grand in scope.
I’d prefer Morrowind’s approach taken more extreme. If you’re going to make me a high rank in a faction, it should exclude me from a few of the others and being a high rank should actually require input from the player. You should be running the fighter’s guild, not hands off and sitting on a title.
@@deifiedtitan the chosen one for every single quest line, like the dragon born, and the listener, and a special visitor seen in a dream. Our character is too chosen one.
A french youtuber that I really like and has a 300+ episode series on skyrim said something that really stuck with me. He said that he doesn't "let the game entertain him", but rather he entertains himself using the game as a support and I think that's what a lot of people don't get about skyrim
For the longest time I never really played games the way they were meant to be played, I just used them as sandboxes or canvases to make adventures or stories in my head. Now it's kinda coming full circle as I try to do that now with some of these retrospectives. Bethesda games really enable that sort of playstyle unlike any other game out there between the mods and how they are fundamentally designed and built. It's really one of the reasons I enjoy them as much as I do: they hearken back to what I used to do with games as a kid.
Who is the French UA-camr?
Exactly. This is how I always played skyrim and how it has stayed fresh to me for so long.
no, skyrim is objectively a badly designed game. thats why there thousands of mods to try to fix it and even then you still go "not as fun" and thats because of how it was designed. skyrim does what bethesda does best and thats environments and environmental storytelling. combat took a backseat and the rpg mechanics were being tossed out.
@@kay_keik7842 I love when a random person on the internet uses the term "objectively" in their opinionated statement like it's a fact. By your own argument, I can claim that Oblivion is objectively a badly designed game because the combat is very floaty and off-putting, 3rd person is practically unusable, the main story is extremely short, the world leveling ruins the aspect of you becoming more powerful, the character models are really bad, the dungeons are mediocre and tedious...
That is my opinion but I won't say it's an objectively bad designed game because thats my opinion. People may enjoy that and actually I do like Oblivion quite a bit but for different reasons.
The real reason why the Thieves Guild suck is simple: they plan all their activities from their secret hideout in a well where anybody standing in the town above can hear them. The Dragonborn doesn't speak, so quickly revives them.
Lmao true
its cool they were trying to write a more mature/gritty story, but the quality of the writing in those quests simply didn't support that very well.
Writing mature stories requires a certain level of commitment Bethesda really struggles to maintain and I'm not sure whether it's just inexperienced writers, lack of care, or just the process they make their games and quests in general. They excel at making really short and sweet adventures and silly diversions, especially in Oblivion.
@@PrivateSessions Their main writer is allegedly pretty close friends with Todd Howard, which could explain the huge difference in quality between some side quests and the main quest. Don't remember my source for it though, so take that with a mountain of salt.
@@PrivateSessions Would you say the Dark Brotherhood questline in Oblivion is an example of a good long yet serious/edgy storyline?
@@monkeman5895 its a pretty bad storyline, tbh. The first half is a collection of (sometimes quite silly) standalone ideas followed by a bad traitor/revenge story where you are treated like an complete idiot that fell for a pretty obvious ruse.
@@monkeman5895 there are some fun quests in the first half, but that doesnt make a good storyline on its own
I loved and really enjoyed this video. You've done some great work.
However I disagree entirely with the thinking that Bethesda needs to be less serious in the next Elder Scrolls. The point about the Shivering Isles dlc being more comedic and working is great, however I think the fact that it was just a smaller dlc part of a larger game is what made it work so well. A full length game with that kind of narrative would get very old very quickly. With Shivering Isles, you could experience the funny bits and then leave and go back to the rest of the game's more serious tone. If you were stuck in a world that was just slapstick comedy and absurdity all the time, for hours, it would get very tedious. It worked with Oblivion because it was short and sweet. I don't want to see this series turned into a joke. The game taking itself seriously isn't a bad thing, the quality of the writing just needs to raise up to meet it at that level.
Totally agree, other game series have been made worse by attempting to change to a ~sillier~ tone
Agreed, one hundred percent. I want them to keep the serious tone, but I also want them to bring on talented enough writers who can rise to the challenge.
Additionally, I desperately want them to stop watering down and retconning so much of their incredibly unique lore and instead actually delve deeper into it, make far more use of it in their main quest, the guild quests, the games' world design (including the races, flora and fauna, regional architecture, locals dress and customs, etc.). For example: If TES VI _is_ set in Hammerfell and they have Temples to Akatosh and the Eight/Nine Divines instead of to Tall Papa and the Yokudan pantheon, I will lose my freakin' mind with rage!
I wouldn't mind if it was just a tad more wacky, but not too much. However after seeing recent games trying so hard to be funny with the likes of Borderlands 3, Watch Dogs Legions, Forespoken and Saints Row I get why everyone is extremely cautious about adjusting the tone. I can't believe I'm saying this but there's not enough serious games anymore are there. Complete 180° from the gritty 2010s huh
Late but this is why alot of people felt The Outer Worlds didn't work.
just by adding alternate start mods, I replayed skyrim atleast once every faction, i just find it stupid that after saving the world 3 times, vilkas still thinks his sword is more valuable than me.
You can be decked out in all gear earned through Daedric quests (Ebony Mail, Masque of Clavicus Vile, Ring of Hircine, Dawnbreaker, Spellbreaker, and even Auriel's Bow [not Daedric but Aedric, so close enough]), and he still says that about his crappy Skyforge Steel sword that does little more damage than a butter knife. It really does break the immersion.
@@HickoryDickory86 I mean that line was never supposed to indicate your actual worth. It's him saying that he doesn't value you as a person. And in that case the kinda shitty blade works better imo. Whatever you have and did, to this guy you're worth less than 70 septims
Oh no another long video on Skyrim, time to consume all my food before the 10 minute mark.
This hit home so hard 😂
You made a great choice limiting fast travel. It really helps you to discover all the unique trinkets and locations the develpers created that most players using fast travel at every opportunity will never see. Legacy of the Dragonborn is the single greatest mod ever created for Skyrim because of this, Legacy doubles down on the exploration elements and guides you towards every location and collectible in the game so that you can see all the small details and short stories bethesda crafted to fill their amazing world, and as a reward for experiencing what bethesda created, you get to experience and entirely new story created for the mod as you collect more and more things. I could honestly play Skyrim with nothing but Legacy and no fast traveling and still have a lot of fun.
I really want to do a run with legacy. Ordinarily I'm not big on collecting but elder Scrolls games lends themselves to that sort of thing. Collecting weapons and armors especially.
Megacy of the dragonborn is a very cumbersome mod to run in SSE it requires like 20+ patches wich is annoying to deal with love the mod but i find it’s more trouble then it’s worth.
Binging on your content. Would really love to hear your take on the Dishonoured series.
Hell yes!
oh yeah
You deserve way more views! Came here after your fnv retrospective
Love how you structured this video half role play half review
I have a bittersweet feeling about this game, i love it but i cant really play it any more simply because the magic of discovering every hidden detail isnt available to me simply because of how much I've played. I love the game but it just feels... empty to me right now. Maybe a mod will come along and re ignite that flame(hopefully the beyond skyrim project) and i want it to, but unfortunately im not holding my breath.
Makes me think if bethesda might take a page out of what devs are doing now with the whole "games as a service" business and keep adding content to tes6 after it launches to keep us coming back to explore.
@@PrivateSessions I kind of sincerely hope not, if only because I prefer my games to be complete packages. I've never once observed a "games as a service" model that worked.
I hear ya. Been playing vanilla skyrim for 10 years nearly, now I just play on legendary and visit my favourite dungeons. Nowadays for me the game is like a relaxation thing, nostalgic and replaying old dungeons as if they were self contained levels like mario or something.
I felt this way until the DLCs came out, but then I finished the DLCs a few months later and I felt that way again :(
@@PrivateSessions I doubt it, there's already ESO.
Cool! I don't use fast travel, either. It changes the game and forces you to engage the world. Camping and food become necessities. Frostfall makes them mandatory.
How does this not have more views? This was the most unique and interesting retrospective I’ve seen of a game ever and has changed how I look at Skyrim from now on. Thank you for this
Long-form videos usually don't get high view counts unless the channel carries a lot of clout. Even then, short and snappier videos are the ones that usually get the big counts and interactions. Part of it is the YT algorithm and part is the average person's shorter attention span. Quality alone is not enough to beat the odds.
Deeply meditative and philosophical about game design and purpose. I think you're a very good critic. The ideas you're getting at when you talk about expectations and frame-of-reference shift are, I think, super important. Aristotle talks of an object's 'end' or its purpose, its 'telos' and I think it paramount to good media criticism that we look at a thing for what it is trying to be, not always impose on it what we go into it expecting it to be. Ignoring this fact leads to a lot of really bad media criticism where people essentially talk past a game, story or movie, disparaging it for not doing something it isn't trying to do anyways. For whoever reads on, (I wrote a lot/too much) there're some dualisms you've established in both your Oblivion long-cut and this video that I'd like to play around with.
You've talked about a game world's agnosticism to the player vs. making the player the center of everything. You've also talked about the degree to which a game is structured, tells the player what to think, gives them a clear experience VS giving a player a blank canvas, a stage. You put it in the video something like stage-building vs. directing/directors.
Oblivion is inconsistently sometimes agnostic to the player--they are one person in a large world, other times the player is the center. Sometimes the game systems' illusions breaking down alone is enough to make it obvious the player is the center. I take these to be arguments you make about Oblivion, and I agree.
I would also agree that a really fine 'stage' can sometimes be enough for the player to make of the canvas what they will. Some use mods in Skyrim to skip the introduction entirely and start in a random dungeon. What I would say--and this isn't necessarily disagreeing with anything you've said in either video--is that there are probably better and worse stages/canvases, and there's probably a broad spectrum among players in terms of their willingness to 'fill in the gaps' or 'tell their own story'.
For the most creative, they might need very little at all to begin telling their own stories, to get lost and immersed in the world. For others, they might need to be railroaded to the nth degree before a story makes their synapses light up. For others like me, they're very much in the middle. I'm willing to do a great deal of roleplaying, suspension of disbelief, even filling in the gaps, but I think a game, story or experience needs to give me good jumping off points, good contextualization, sympathetic and/or interesting characters and compelling conflicts. Or, failing that, at least adequate helpings of these things, or an attempt at them.
Skyrim has some things really going for it compared to Oblivion in higher production values, polish and probably an overall greater wealth in mods that, on paper, can offer a greater promise of immersion and chance for telling your own story. Some critics might point out that, when you strip Oblivion's mechanics down, they're pretty shallow--and all Skyrim did was finish the streamlining and make everything more presentable. Mods can make up for, in either game, some gameplay deficits and certainly a lot of graphical deficits. Some modders do try their hand at writing their own stories, but voice acting is expensive and writing is hard, so past voiceless or text-based quests, adding additional quest content in any substantial sense is hard to do.
So in some sense, then, the core of Oblivion and Skyrim's writing, quests and characters are pretty fixed. For me, this makes it possible to enjoy Oblivion but at this point impossible to enjoy Skyrim. Why?
I want to return to that 'agnostic to the player' vs. 'player is center of universe' paradigm. To add my own claim in, I just generally think making the player the center of the universe just kinda sucks, it ruins immersion, makes the world smaller, everything revolving around you. It's harder to roleplay as your own character with their own individual choices to make in a big world if the script makes you out as a demigod. One way of alleviating this really is Bethesda's efforts to create big AI systems to make the world alive. To make it seem like the world around the player still moves and acts when the player isn't. Like you, I do applaud this and hope they take it further--it'd be cool to see what they could make with an updated engine and a lot of money, time. Maybe that will end up producing a fantasy simulator so complete that writing, quests and story will hardly matter anymore. --I take this to be what you'd like to see.
Barring that, though, the most surefire way to invest a player into a game's world is through a story. Story is a broad term. The constituent parts matter more--conflicts and characters. At its best, Oblivion is goofy and open ended in its quest design with entertaining if silly characters. The main villain isn't interesting, is rushed, as you say. Martin gets a bit of character development though--and that's cool to see. Lucien Lachance is an interesting personality, the Dark Brotherhood in general makes for a good story. The Thieves Guild makes for a good story on the whole. Sheogorath too.
A lot of Oblivion's stories are mediocre or even bad, ridiculous but there are some entertaining characters and memorable stories, at its best. For me, that is the core upon which everything else rests. If it really seems like there are no other interesting people with their own goals or desires, or genuine conflicts--physical or philosophical--then the world is just dead past what I make up for myself. Skyrim and Oblivion are similar in that, at least in my view, both their mages and fighters guilds are the weaker points, and their thieves guilds and dark brotherhoods are the stronger ones. But man, Oblivion's highs are so much higher, the lows lower. Skyrim is just smoothed out, there's just nothing substantial there at all.
To me, the characters, conflicts color the world, give it life, and give me a starting point for imagining my own character in relation to them. Skingrad IS the vampire count with all the secrets of his castle, it IS Glarthir's paranoia. Chorrol IS the detective quest about the stolen painting--when I think of Chorrol, I think of that experience. When I think of Whiterun in Skyrim, I feel nothing, it's a set of aesthetics and architecture to me, nothing more. A good, layered, multifaceted story with good characters and a decent conflict gives me an excuse to return to the game/world, to come back with another character and revisit it, perhaps rethink it or approach it differently. In Skyrim, this just doesn't feel like an option, ever--so I'm just going through the motions, over and over.
Which is why the natural next step is to ignore all of that and focus on the story you create for yourself. And honestly, as far as you just follow random odd jobs this could work okay--but then it feels like the player lacks for larger goals. As soon as you begin to touch those larger goals, the game starts to take you out of the experience and tell you how you're the chosen one, gotta decide the civil war, stop the end of the world, lead every guild, be the dragonborn savior--AND DO IT NOW, QUICK, BEFORE ITS TOO LATE. --Oblivion does this too, as you point out, but the fact that Oblivion does really have characters/stories of its own worth telling every once in a while makes it possible for me, at least for some little glimpses and moments, to get lost in the world. For Skyrim, if I want to entirely just roleplay as my own little character, then I feel like I'm constantly fighting against the game world trying to make me something else. And mods can't *really* fix that, because this is pretty much the core of Skyrim's content. Unless some modder has overhauled it such that they've replaced 90% of the quest content with something else entirely, given the player a different endgame for things to do, goals to pursue.
--but if you can get past that, don't let me stop you, just watching the video takes me back to a moment so long ago while modding Skyrim that I could see the glimpses you talk about, and just trying your best to see those glimpses is worth it, however flawed the game is.
(It's been over 5 years since I really tried to touch Oblivion, don't know if there are any big modpacks I should try. Have dabbled in Morrowind, but similarly think there'd need to be a really good modpack to streamline the visuals, mechanics a bit for me to return. Morrowind is probably the most pure in philosophy when it comes to slowing down, enjoying exploration and feeling like a small part of a big world.)
I think you give good advice for Bethesda, as there's really just the two routes--or both, they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. They've gotta make the story, world tonally appropriate to that roleplaying. Maybe a bit more comic, a bit less serious, and less grating to a roleplay experience where the player is just one person in a big world. Or they've just gotta tell much better stories with more interesting characters and writing. Or both. Honestly I don't have much hope for either, but if they can pull off just 1 of those 2 really well for Elder Scrolls VI, they'll have a great game on their hands.
For my part, the more interesting, fleshed-out characters and conflicts there are in a game's world and/or story, the more I can get lost in it and feel like part of a larger world. But it could also be that by working hard enough at AI systems to create a more living, breathing fantasy world, that the stories will just write themselves in the player's head, and that'd be really cool too.
homie writing an essay for a youtube comment :0
@@portalfan0438 an essay within a comment on a video essay.
There are some decent mods for Morrowind which essentially “modernise” it. I believe the main mod I used is called “Morrowind Rebirth” which overhauls a lot of the games mechanics, adds a bunch of new features. All I did after was download mods to fix the combat and graphics and I was good to go. I actually think there was a UA-cam guide for it that was fairly straightforward.
I still find it harder to get into than Oblivion and Skyrim because of the lack of quest markers and infrequent fast travel but I’ve found it a much more rewarding and immersive gaming experience. The world building is excellent for a game originally made in 2002.
This comment is longer than my term paper
I love how you write!!!!
I mean, of course if you have to add mods to the game to make it good and restrict yourself in how you play to have fun, it means that the game has flaws and those flaws should be criticized. But I wouldn't call that irredeemable. It's a flaw, and you can fix that flaw, and of course you are doing the designers' job for them, but that's only relevant if we examine the process of making games and absolutely irrelevant if we examine which games to play and how to do that.
It's interesting that I found this video because I'm actually playing Skyrim again for the first time in about six years. Back in the day I got burnt out on Skyrim feeling like the charm was only skin deep, but after playing through Morrowind it got me thinking how much I was missing by fast traveling everywhere. I installed a lot of mods for immersion, npc ai, perks and magic related ones and vowed not to fast travel. And honestly I'm loving it. By just warping from place to place and mindlessly following quest markers I was depriving myself of most of the game and I didn't even realize it. The game is certainly flawed, but the world it's set in is gorgeous and a lot of work obviously went into it. I'm glad I gave it another chance.
fast traveling, poor quest design leveling and essential npc's are the curse of Bethesda games from TESIV to current games.
I always think it's funny how Paratus (the Synod mage in Mzulft) always devolves into petty threats, that he's gonna get you and the College of Winterhold in trouble with the Synod Council by tattling on you, that you're hoarding powerful artifacts. And I'm just like, "... Okay? The College of Winterhold is older than the Synod by millennia and has always been and still is an autonomous organization that isn't under the Synod's jurisdiction. Go and tattle, you useless dweeb. What do you honestly think the Synod could do about it?"
And then I proceed to soul trap and kill him. Every time. The fewer loose ends in the College of Winterhold's busted, janky as questline, the better.
What I find funny is that a twat that couldn't defend himself against the falmer that killed his whole team, to the point that he had to lock himself up in a room and risk dead by starvation, decides to antagonize the powerhouse that just slaughtered said falmer with ease; while they are both in the middle of nowhere, in a world with no forensic sciences.
Comes to show that, just because you are a scholar, that doesn't mean you are particularly smart.
I like the way you tell the story with your views basically like a story book in a way. I’m so use to watching retrospectives on the vanilla game, it’s nice to see a slight modded one. Good video.
Enai's mods are basically "more vanilla than vanilla" at this point. Ignoring other mods that add content for a second, I can't even imagine anymore what it's like to be 'forced' to play as a Stealth Archer. *Ordinator* and *Apocalypse* are by far the most important, because they actually allow me to play other viable RPG archetypes. If I want to be a _heavy-armor-wearin,' mace tottin,' restoration flingin,' cast-per-day'in,'_ orsimer vigilant, I can. If I want to make a _dagger-back-stabbin,' no-bow'in,' illusionist'in,'_ assassin, I can. Heck, I can even specs into making a thu'um-centered caster (especially with *Thunderchild,* another of Enai's hypervanilla mods). Vampirism? Sacrosanct. Priest? Daedric Cleric? *Wintersun.* Pure vampire bloodmancer? *Sacrosanct.* *Wildcat, Andromeda, Imperious,* and *Summermyst* add to the world in subtler, but nonetheless critical ways. This playthrough runs the Big Two, and many of their lesser companions for a good reason.
Back to other minor mods, here we can truly see how much people try to make Skyrim more complex. Deeper. More... of a fantasy RPG world, really. Consider how long the average modlist is (including Pvt. Session's) and you can see how many small details will come together to be greater than the sum of their parts.
Knowing bethesda, they *aren't* taking notes and the next TES will still be a broken, shallow mess at release. Enai, or people like him, will have to bail us out yet again.
if you love skyrim wanna watch some good quality rp then gopher probably has the most enjoyable lets plays of skyrim ive seen. its funny as hell at times, the story telling is top notch and his game is beautiful. HIGHLY reccomend
Why the fuck would anyone want to watch another person play Skyrim?
@@jamesbrincefield9879 why would someone wanna watch someone play anything?
This wasn't a very good modded retrospective. The cart at the beginning wasn't flipping out. Not realistic at all.
But I loved the video, definitely one of my favorite formats I've seen for these. I wish they would've made TES6 instead of Fallout 76. It's way overdue now. 10 years between games is too long.
10 years and counting. Here's hoping Starfield is a good stopgap because tes6 is barely in development still. The new engine will hopefully be worth it.
I mean, massive open world games take time to make. Especially since people demand the best in graphics and shit nowadays. With how much it’s hyped up, they are gonna want to put as much time in it as possible
Well Sir, you have convinced me to play Skyrim once again after all these years... after I finish breaking it with all the mods on your list! LOL! Just a few more conflicts to resolve, and I should be able to start playing!
I very much enjoy your takes ( and style) on The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. I look forward to future works from you. o7
Hey, Private! I am currently in the works of a retrospective myself and have really fallen in love with your way of storytelling. Giving the character of the retrospect a personality makes for a incredibly fun watch/ listen. I just wanted to ask you for your blessing in adopting that style in my next vid.
Absolutely. I hope you can do it better than I have been able to thus far, it's a tricky thing to balance. Good luck and keep me posted when you got something to show :)
@@PrivateSessions Thank you so much! I will :D
Edit: i misread your comment lol. I will do my best but I've never done any commentsry before so me being better than you is a stretch. I will however do my best to make a great video!
1:46:41 I admire not stopping to gawk at the insanity unfolding.
I was hoping for an in depth retrospective, but instead I got a lame summary about the objective information of the quests that we’ve all done many times, sprinkled with introspection here and there.
Pretty much. "Content creators" imagine we're all dying to hear about their super-special Skyrim character, which thanks to the lack of innovation or choice in the game is pretty much the same as every other character.
Strat-Edgy's "How To Skyrim" video takes a fairly amusing look at this shambling garbage heap of a game. Don't get me wrong, it can be a beautiful pile of garbage, but garbage it remains.
I love long analyses but what is the point of detailing every step of every quest? We've all played Skyrim, we know the quests. Furthermore it's just a step by step reading of what happens in the quests. Skyrim's quests really aren't that interesting in the first place, let alone with a tedious, boring retelling. "My character spoke to this person, my character discovered she was dragonborn, my character met the greybeards". In my opinion it would be better to skip straight to the analysis with a brief overview of the quests. You even said the quests were boring, so why tell us every single step of every quest? OK that's all. Thanks.
i liked it, gave it a personal touch, like we where joining him in his journey discovering the game
Because it's his channel and he can do what he wants
@@Hero_Of_Old And comments are for feedback and criticism, no one is forcing him to take my feedback into account.
Because this video isn't just an analysis. He explains what this video is in the description.
I only just recently discovered the reason I've always loved this game is for the world, not the story or gameplay, then I find this video. It's been brutally beaten over the last few years, but it's honestly a pretty great game, even if the whole RPG label is a bit of an unfulfilled promise.
I'm not bothered that you used mods, I'm bothered that you played as a furry.
Private Sessions: I'm finally enjoying Skyrim.
**WHAT THEY DID TO YOU!?** Who they are holding hostage? Your cat?
113 mods? Lol that's all it takes?
A key element of writing complaints is that if a game makes you listen to it then the dialogue should be worth listening to. The story doesn't need to be more niche rpg or this or that. It needs to be finished, polished, and touch the potential it brings up. It needs to do what its aiming to do but falling short of. Skyrim has a lot of ideas but the game was rushed on a lot of elements and the writing is one of them.
I think Elder Scrolls games need to let you play as multiple characters in one save game. I want to play as an Argonian who becomes head of the Thieves Guild and then start a new character who is pursuing the main quest, at some point running into the head of the Thieves Guild - my Argonian character.
Impressive for a two hour video deconstructing the tenets of Skyrim and its world and nary a mention of the Dark Brotherhood.
mods are pretty much required for skyrim. without the unofficial patch my main story softlocked to hell.
Yep :P Frostwall & needs mod are almost so mandatory that Bethesda themselves (and New Vegas crew) integrated it with Fallout base game going forward.
Unofficial Skyrim Patch & MoreHUD & SkyUI for baseline modding/stability, Equipment Durability System, Vigor Enhanced Combat, Path of Sorcery, good stuff.
vanilla skyrim is great but not replayable
I have my own personal views of how Skyrim was received by fans, and I find myself both agreeing with the vast majority of criticism, calling out the games shallowness and untapped potential, but I feel that as the years have gone on, we've just taken Skyrim and TES games for granted. Like we expect the game to achieve a level of immersion and quality and freedom that literally no other game developers have ever achieved, and they've had years and years and years to try and match the Elder Scrolls go-anywhere-do-anything in this deep cultured fantasy world.
I'm being serious too, The Witcher 3 did not achieve what Skyrim or Oblivion or Morrowind did, even though it achieved greatness and set the bar for narrative driven RPG games, saw countless attempts to copy its formula from Assassin's Creed Odyssey adopting elements, tons of other games from this generation were tonally or functionally influenced by Witcher 3.
Literally no one even attempts to do what Bethesda does over and over again with TES games. Even The Outer Worlds, which IMO was the first real genuine attempt to match the Bethesda formula in a new game and new world, still was only like a sliver or fraction of what TES games have been offering us for years.
So while I fully agree with critical points made against TES games the majority of the time... I still feel we should criticize and see these games through a lens of maintaining that appreciation of what they do achieve without just taking it for granted like it's not a big deal. I'm not saying to brown-nose Todd or defend Bethesda when their greed overcomes them either. Just to not take for granted how amazing these immersive crafted worlds are and how they give us something that no other developers have been able to offer.
I can’t bring myself to say “go-anywhere-do-anything” because you can’t. What are some examples of not being able to go everywhere/do anything?
1. There’s an entire Dwarven ruin you can’t get into because you don’t have the key.
2. The Embassy is entirely blocked off and the only time you get inside the building is for one mission.
3. You can’t get to the statue of the elf that has gems for his eyes unless you do a quest.
4. A lot of NPCS just take a knee if you hit them.
5. You can’t get to Solitude’s Catacombs at all unless you do a mission.
6. You have to become a nightingale to finish the thieves guild quest line.
Exactly. I agree with the criticism people throw at skyrim, but at the end of the day it comes down to this: no other game has achieved what it has. It definitely could have been better, even with reasonable expectations in mind, but it’s a great game for its time.
@@thegifting267 a lot of those mechanics are to prevent you from breaking the game though. It’s still a very open world. My main issue is that it guides the player way too much with the main story, but if you can force yourself to ignore that then the game is pretty damn open.
@@Mr-tu4cj how would it break the game? Because it would prevent you from doing a entire quest line or something? This is a RPG so doing things that prevent you from doing a specific quest a specific way is supposed to happen.
@@thegifting267 I’d say the majority of people would be dislike it if they could unknowingly kill someone involved in a major questline. I see what you’re saying but it makes sense that they’d prevent that from happening. Ideally there’d be multiple ways to complete major quests in the event that you killed someone involved, but that would be a lot more work and they clearly struggled with time as is. Or they could have multiple game modes, one which ensures you can do all the questing and one that lets you do whatever and kill whoever you want, but I doubt they’ll ever add something like that to ES unfortunately
Skyrim is a terrible game compared to Morrowind. With Skyrim its very dry. Mechanics suck, story is bland, dialog is one sided and it lacks depth in general. Compared to Morrowind where the mechanics felt like a true rpg, story was amazing which fit into the unique world, the dialog intriguing and traditional.
*Me, who hasn't played in 4 years and just realised I can't remember what barrel I left my horde in:*
c r i p p l i n g a n x i e t y
I think the game is fantastic with survival mode on and some self imposed rules. My favorite character by leaps and bounds was that kind of playthrough. I also played a Khajiit girl. She was raised in Elsweyr with her father and traveling caravan who were practically family. Growing up she learned archery and had developed excellent communication skills being part of a caravan and all. She always has a sunny disposition and is always ready to help those in need without any expectation of a reward. On her 17th birthday her father surprised her with a beautifully crafted elven bow she had been eyeing up since she was a little girl in one of the towns the caravan frequented. He had secretly been saving money for it for years. That same night the caravan was razed by marauders and she was left the only survivor. Grief stricken, she buried her family and decided she couldn't stay in Elsweyr any longer. She was hurt and felt like running away. For two years she journeyed far north through Cyrodiil to the Jerall Mountains. Skyrim, as she read in books, was a vast sub arctic tundra. A far cry from the warm savannas and jungles of her home. While crossing the border she is unfortunately taken prisoner in an Imperial ambush being mistaken for rebel in a conflict she had no knowledge about.
In my playthrough Alduin does destroy Helgen but my character isn't the Dragonborn. She not a chosen one type of character. She's just a 19 year old Khajiit girl who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the attack she continues her quest. Which is buy a house and make Skyrim her new home. She adventures all over the province making as much money as she can using the skills she learned back home.
Here are the self imposed rules. She cannot carry any more than she realistically hold. Regardless of her in game carrying capacity. She carries her beloved bow, a quiver with a bundle of arrows, a dagger and a satchel of provisions. Any more than that I have to think about how she's carrying it. She has to dress warm. She has to eat and sleep every day. She cannot fast travel. She cannot take down an entire bandit camp or monster filled dungeon by herself. She's not a one person army, she needs help for dungeon diving. She does not loot corpses unless necessary as she finds it disrespectful. This mostly applies to draugr specifically. Bandits not so much. If she can talk her way out she'll try. She doesn't enjoy fighting but at the same time she is prideful of her skills. No save scumming. If she fails she lives with the consequences. She helps everyone in need because she wildly empathicle and cares. She doesn't like alcohol but always checks out the local tavern cus she's a social butterfly. Skyrim the game isn't much interested in letting you roleplay so I had to make up my own rules. Bethesda seems more interested in making a power fantasy. You're an untouchable demigod who's bad at nothing. But I think that's boring. I like being a regular inhabitant of this fantasy world. That playthrough was fun as hell. Very rememberable.
I'm not big on RP, but I do feel like adding a bit more of a challenge to Skyrim makes it much better to play.
I recently started playing Skyrim with my own self-imposed rules and restrictions, and it was honestly surprisingly fun.
I took a bit of inspiration from from the Ironman mode in RuneScape, and the Survival mode in Fallout 4.
The problem with eliminating fast-traveling in these games is that fetch quests just make you wanna kill yourself. Even games that I really enjoy, like FNV, aren't safe from this. Fetch quests should be outright eliminated, along with fast travel that didn't involve carriages and such.
1:46:49 to 1:47:16 had me in complete hysterics, i couldn't pay attention to anything that was being said because i was laughing too hard over paarthurnax spinning his way up to the heavens
if skyrim is meant to be about exploration then its obvious why i dont like it. there's little to discover through that exploration. the overworld and a few set pieces are pretty but thats not enough. blackreach is the only thing i felt like i discovered, the only thing that was interesting enough to be worth exploring for. the rest is bland and repetitive. so little is noteworthy i cant remember much at all of the locations major quests take you to while oblivion and morrowind i remember vividly despite having a fraction of the hours played. then you could say its the journey rather than the destination that's fun but that would require fun mechanics or good story in the world, the plot and characters, or in the characterization and roleplaying of the PC; none of which skyrim has. it's all just a bland fantasy adventure soup
My fav has been skyrim forever.
I never liked oblivion to be honest. I think its the worst elder scrolls game I have ever played. Morrowind is the best and skyrim is a close second with daggerfall being 3rd.
You're wrong about the story taking itself too seriously. It's never felt any different than other games for it's plot or how they present it. You repeat that point many times but never explained why you feel that way
Yeah idk wtf he was talking about, oblivion’s main quest takes itself completely serious it’s just the voice acting ai and dialogue that makes the entire game funny but the quest themselves aren’t in on it because when the game came out it wasn’t funny it just aged that way
when skyrim first came out i was unbelievably disappointed and thought the game sucked. Especially after playing morrowind and oblivion while growing up, skyrim was an objective downgrade in many key areas.
but after10 years and 1040 active mods, I think it's one of the greatest games ever made.
1040? That’s more challenging than anything the base game can offer.
great video. i definitely remember being upset at the removed character customization from oblivion when skyrim came out, but i still couldn't put it down. while oblivion will always be my favorite game for getting me into games in the first place (also i love forests) i cannot deny that skyrim is, as a whole, is much more fully realized, despite not having as many interesting quests. but the daedric quests are actually pretty great.
It’s an Ancient Ambience Simulator with rpg elements and a lot of lore.
The question of reviewing modded titles comes up often, especially in TES circles. I find it very interesting, and perhaps the reason why we can’t come to a consensus is because it’s so foreign to any other form of media. No one would say something like “I didn’t like Alien until I installed a mod that replaced the Alien with Thomas the Tank Engine” or something like that.
If a game needs to be modded in order to be enjoyed, how can we then say that it’s a good game inherently? I have a ton of criticisms I could levy at Skyrim, and yet I’ve spent 100s of hours over many different consoles getting lost in it, vanilla. “This game sucks. I know it does. Why did I play it for so long if that’s true?” Complex opinions and answers to these questions are something that don’t get discussed very often in analysis. It’s either “this game sucks” or “this game is good”, and there can be no in between, probably because lukewarm or otherwise indecisive answers do not satisfy.
There really is just something different about Bethesda and their ability to enthrall in spite of some baffling design choices and emphasis on extreme accessibility (and not the good kind).
I find the modability of Skyrim it's strength. My Skyrim is almost a survival game but someone else doesn't have to. It is also very clear that Bethesda kept modders in mind when designing the game. As for accessibility, the simple design means that new players can get into the game easily. Whereas die hard fans are gonna mod the game anyway, as they did for all the previous games. Hell my Skyrim uses a skill XP hybrid system for leveling. That possibility is part the games design, it has been since Morrowind.
We "mod" many of our experiences by adding to them. I sincerely doubt that the people who attend Burning Man do so only to see an effigy burn, as an example.
Bethesda builds an amazing framework that we customize with mods. Despite the pseudo-intellectuals with their equally false sense of superiority, mods are an integral part of the Bethesda game experience. These folks know that and, I believe, enjoy them as much as the next player. They just pass judgment in a public forum so that they can earn some edgelord points.
Quite the audiobook. Love this different type of approach.
Balgruuf: "Hurry to the Throat of the World, Dragonborn! Speak to the Greybeards and fulfill your destiny!"
Me: "Yeah sure whatever." *Proceeds to f@ck off for two in-game years of sidequesting.*
As an aside: anyone approaching a Bethesda title and expecting/hoping for a deep and engaging story is only setting themselves up for disappointment: Bethesda'a lead writer, Emil Pagliarulo, has made it abundantly clear in interviews that He thinks games with kindergarten-level narratives is the secret to reaching the largest audiences and making the fattest stacks.
I think you just fixed Skyrim for me. Thank you. I've missed being able to enjoy it
I love elder scrolls games for their lore and enviromental story telling and when they are allowed to characters. This is why while an mmo ESO is my favorute along with morrowind. Amazing stories , characters , lore and other provinences. Skyrim is great with modding community. Many actual lore relevant and very lore friendly mods helps with the game.
wonderful video despite the fact that you call riverwood "riverrun" for the entirety of the video
The first time he says river rock 😂
My first play through in Riften I broke Bersis' vase and i felt terrible about it, on my next play through I made sure to visit him last and used the info Brynolf gave me to investigate how I could coerce everyone without coming off as a prick. it was only skin deep in terms of decision making, but I liked that I could in some way maintain my own honor, not like it matters to the game. The more i played the more Invested i go in how i played. it wasn't about the games limitations it was about placing some on my own will.
you know what?
since I already pumped 20 hours into Patrician's retrospectives, might as well cram in a few more hours for skyrim.
1:36:05 YOOOOO IT'S SUPER DUPER GOD DAMN MARIO
This spurred me to have another playthrough, attempting a similar style as you plus writing a journal as I go. I then saw your mod list and it blew my mind. How do you even get it to run. I have so many errors and stuff happen with just 10 or so mods. Going to try pulling out the camping and frostfire and I'll see how I go.
Just want to say before we start, having just watched your Oblivion video (which was great), that my favourite Bethesda game is Fallout 4 with the huge asterisk that it is only so thanks to mods - but with mods it is one of the best and longest times I've spent in a game world. Skyrim is the same way for me. The playground is wonderful and it's what Bethesda does well; all the systems such as levelled enemies, unique loot locations, revamped leveling and perks, graphical overhauls and all that other stuff can be made orders of magnitude better than the vanilla experience by mods; not to mention bug fixing. I think it's the fundamental reason why I love fallout 4 and absolutely could not stand 76 despite being a similar experience on the surface. When the mechanics of the game are sharpened the world really shines. As much as I'd love the games to have better writing and quests, that's not what I come to them for and I can sink many, many hours into the worlds alone. But I could never play vanilla skyrim or fallout 4 again I don't think. Ordinator especially for Skyrim is essential, and morrowloot allowed me to completely ignore smithing and made loot incredibly rewarding to find, doubling the satisfaction of exploring and crawling dungeons.
One of the greatest games ever created.
I just find this game is a good dopamine machine with a lot of sources available. There isn't anything spectacular about it, aside maybe for the scale.
What I don't understand myself is how people can make new characters or come back to it. Any magic the game has just isn't there on a second playthrough, at least for me, it just feels like a chore to get back to where I was.
mods
@@AubreyOnfroy Yeah I imagine you're right.
The fact the the Synod were terrible mages is a fact I actually always picked up on in the game. Just by the way the college treated them I guess
The mod list is in alphabetical order. It would be nice to see the mods as they appear in your load order.Still nice to see you've enjoyed your stay in Tamriel.
You put in a hell of a lot of effort into these, hope they get more appreciated soon!
SUS NAME
You are a cutie :3
35:03 It's not just the Psijic Order/Order of PSJJJJ that's absent for long periods of time, their entire island, the Isle of Artaeum, tends to vanish from Nirn for centuries at a time.
what's the song at 00:48:16?
The fact I have 100s of hours in this game and have never once played a mage or ever done any of the guilds quest lines always makes me laugh. They just don't interest me.
I previously started this video, then paused to watch the 6 hr Oblivion (over time) and now i can't even remember if i watched this already or am having simple deja vu
I had very similar as experience as you. I was hyped and played roughly 100 hours of Skyrim on launch in 2011 but was never very compelled to return. I tried a couple of times in 2017 but I always got bored. However recently I reinstalled it again with couple of mods (Ordinator and Morrowloot) and having a blast again!
This is one of the better retrospectives of Skyrim, I'm coming back to it after my own personal "Oh shit I get it this time" playthrough on the VR version (with about 100 mods, ofc). I still think Oblivion is the better game overall, but this time I can really appreciate what Skyrim does, instead of thinking it's just a style-over-substance rehash of Oblivion and Morrowind. In VR I don't want too much menu-intensive RPG stuff (and even then, there's still a lot of it), so the streamlining of the mechanics actually works in the game's favour this time. I had that moment battling a random dragon on a mountaintop, blasting shouts at each other, peppering it with arrows until it landed, and finally closing in to finish it off at the very peak with a sliver of health left, like Gandalf defeating the Balrog. That's the moment I said "Okay Skyrim, I was wrong about you."
One thing has to be said, and it's hammered home in the VR version where the scale and grandiosity is impossible to ignore, and it's that the *world* is the main character with Skyrim. Bethesda clearly put all of their work into designing the world itself, and the quests were just quickly shoved in after they had built it. The caveat underneath this is that Skyrim is actually kinda hard to explore. You can't just walk in a direction and come across landmarks, you have to really look for things. All of the most interesting and unique places are hidden around the very margins of the map and tucked away behind these complex layers of forced perspective and zig-zag paths that give the illusion of distance. Skyrim hides stuff in places it looks like you're not supposed to be able to go, because it knows players are going to try and go there anyway, and wants to reward them for that.
But it's a double edged sword. My memories of playing Skyrim in 2011 are of getting frustrated searching for a route, and instead just awkwardly clipping Shadowmere up near vertical cliffs, as I'm sure we all have done. It's much more "hand crafted" than Oblivion, much more in line with Morrowind arguably, but it does end up feeling much smaller and kind of restrictive, claustrophobic even, if you try to fight against it. But if you engage with it on its own terms, there's truly nothing like it.
Jeez ThTs a lot of mods
Seeing this video makes me think you'd really like Kenshi. Look into it if you've never heard of it, the entire game is designed around you creating your own stories. Open world, sandbox, rpg-lite. It's a really good time
1:29:20 This was a brilliant piece of roleplaying as PS took on the role of the average Skyrim player who is so illiterate they don't know the difference between Asset and Agent.
I don't blame you for doing an analysis of a modded playthrough. This game is significantly better modded.
19:18 As soon as I saw the thumbnail, I guessed it, but it's good to hear that I'm not the only one who went from hating Skyrim to liking it when it's loaded down with mods. I've completed the vanilla storyline exactly twice, and both required a heavily modded playthrough that relied on Legacy of the Dragonborn to tie it all together.
That said, I've gotta disagree on the whole "immersion" bit. In my opinion, you want immersive, you play Morrowind. Sure, it's older and the mechanics are dated, but just walking through Vvardenfell is an experience no other game has captured for me. Despite how alien the world is, it's so easy to immerse yourself in it, even without survival mods designed to help with immersion.
Morrowind is coming... eventually. I've never played it for more than a bit but I suspect I'll enjoy it once I get over the combat. With that said, I only get one shot at playing it "for the first time" and I want to get my ducks in a row before tackling a video on it: I want to make sure I got the skills and plan in place to do it right.
I love the LotD mod. Absolutely my favourite, right above Inigo.
I'm not capable of getting attached to fictional characters unless they're mine, and most story emotional beats fall flat on me, so Skyrim's lack of good narrative never really bothered me. It's definitely at its best as a sandbox, either by pretending to play a character, or just going full mess-around. It's kinda like the Minecraft of RPG's right down to being able to mod it so hard you create an entirely different game.
I did the same thing when playing my vampiric Altmer. I roll played as I was her,and played the game like you are, just without mods (PS user, mods are... barebones). It was fun, for the first few dozenhhours, but then the cracks started to shine through again. I won't say Skyrim isn't fun, I had 500+ hours of fun in the game, on 4 different characters, but... It is objectively poorly designed. The quests are shallow as heck, the writing is poor, the stories are badly thought through, the lore breaks or outright shatters the lore of previous games, the characters are idiots, the mechanics are WAY too simplified...
It's got a lot of problems, but if you can immerse yourself and ignore that? The game can be a lot of fun. I wish I could go back to the time before I started seeing all the many, many cracks, so I could enjoy the game again.
"play as intended" "the games own merits" he says about a heavily modified version.
26:25 if this was Morrowind you could turn on the Black-briars, while still staying in the guild.
I think the difference for me is, I'm entirely able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy a cliched wish-fulfillment story, which is what the main and faction questlines are. I actually really enjoy radiant fetch quests and don't mind when they draw out a questline with them. Some questlines, like the College of Winterhold, I think would benefit from having a slower start, but that's my only real complaint.
My love for The Elder Scrolls has been an imperfect one up until Skyrim. Morrowind had an interesting story, but a setting I had trouble appreciating. Oblivion was closer to my tastes, but didn't quite hit the mark. Skyrim actually suits me the best, both in setting and in story, and I think that's why, while I've let Oblivion and Morrowind fade into the past, I still regularly play Skyrim when the mood strikes me. It's just my kind of adventure, you know?
Well , years later but what a better place than to tell this: I belive if you approach skyrim as a complete newbie in rpgs like I was (look at me now running pathfinder & dnd tabletop) the glaring issues don't take hold until much later, and even so, you can still have a blast. There are some amazing moments: The twist that Parthonax was a dragon, the first time the big falmer cave was in view, and my absolute favorite moment when you enter sovngarde and start hearing that OST, feeling like a complete badass, like the a army of warrios is walking right behind you chanting your praises and announcing to Alduin, this mighty beast: The Dovaakin has come for you. This moments will forever live rent free in my head and I still listen to sovngarde years laters from time to time. I can't go back to skyrim now, because I see its problems, but honestly, I don't want to, I'd much rather remember those moments and how they made me feel. Great video my dude
But Private Sessions, Whiterun is the Balmora of Skyrim!
"If you ever make a mod and are too stupid to know where to put it, just place your stuff in Whiterun! It's the Balmora of Skyrim!" - Bhruce Hammar
BTW that name you decided not to pronounce, is pronounced "irkinghand"
I love how much work you put into the videos, but I’m having a hard time understanding why you feel like you need to recite all the Vanilla quests that everyone who’s into Skyrim is sick of at this point.
Like come on, I’m interested in your opinion and analysis, but I have to watch the first 30 minutes of narrated playthrough to get 5 of the content that’s relevant to the video title.
I’m happy you’re putting your soul and work into the character, but in my personal opinion, the relation of Vanilla playthrough to actual analysis is very, very off at times.
Overall, huge respect though, the analysis is very engaging and totally worth watching.
I think rather than not taking itself seriously, what they need is to lower the stakes. High stakes encourages the player to rush through a given story and this puts too much pressure on the writing. If the writing encourages the player to take the quest at their own pace, then the writing problems don't pile as high and don't matter as much. Death of major characters also feels cheap if it isn't earned, so should only be done when it's built up to. I think Mirabell's death in particular was pointless. That isn't to say you should *never* have high stakes, but the stakes need room to breathe. They should be built up to.
If I were put in charge of faction questlines, I would have a series of low stakes episodic adventures that let us get to know our fellow members. Then have a few major quests with higher stakes once the player is more established in the faction. Your fellow faction members come with you to this or that dungeon, and stuff happens that showcases different aspects of the faction. Their relations with other factions, their internal politics, what they generally spend resources doing. Then once you're a higher rank, you can go on a higher stakes questline wherein at most the faction's existence is at stake. World ending stakes should be reserved for the main story, if you have them at all.
Just like Rockstar games, the main quest is trash. Turn the HUD off. Don't use the map. And just go... That's how to play Bethesda games. I stashed the stone tablet, and wandered around for a year before dragons even showed up.
I was in the same boat as you. I played skyrim the first time on a ps3 at my friends house. I was immediately hooked and installed a cracked version on my super crappy laptop at home before i had my own ps3 to play the game with. My laptop barely managed to run the game at all but it was a wonderous time. I had no idea what everything is, no meta or glitches or even knew how smithing worked, but i played the game and explored everything. After i got Skyrim firat on Ps3 then on my new proper Gaming PC i never really could recapture the wonder of the first time playing, even if i played a bunch and beat the game so many times i literally am on rails when i start the game. Get out of helgen, off to the site to the house with an adept lock, clear it and get the silver form at the end and a bunch of early loot, then off to embershard mine for some early iron, then to Riverru....wood, clearing bleak falls barrow and get the stone, get money and then off to Whiterun.
Now after years of reflection and a healthy amount of Fallout 4 played on survival i currated my own modlist to make the game more immersive while keeping the vanilla feel of the game intact and i found myself in skyrims grasps yet again. Now, no fast travel on Master Difficulty with a healthy amounts of lore friendly race mods and fixes for things that are broken in the basegame i am playing this game really slow and enjoying it more than i have ever. It really makes a difference
Can anybody explain why everyone say that main quest is you going along with a prophecy, i think that prophecy says Aldyin comes and destroyes the world, i think main character is destroyes or as graybeards explain (when you ask them why you don't consume Alduin soul) delays prophecy.
DO DARK SOULS IMMEDIATELY (1)
Or Bloodborne if you have access
Thanks and have an excellent day
I can't watch the beginning again...AHHHHH.
This video is great and really hit the nail on the head for me. I just started a new playthrough with some new lands mods to help give some new content to explore, but just testing my load order I found myself playing normally through the vanilla game. My friend and I have had this talk about what makes Bethesda games different from our other favorite RPGs hundreds of times and we always mention the world and world building. The tiny details, whether that's notes or the position of a skeleton or a Talos shrine in the mountains that spawn an aggressive Thalmor group, in small, unnecessary places that some or most players will never see are what bring me into the world and make the game worth playing. I love that quote from Rebelzize that you shared, I can't wait to get sucked into his world when the time comes.
More RPGs should take some notes from Live Another Life, if I'm gonna be a Nobody at least give a choice on what kind of Nobody.
Wait, it just dawned on me how much of an idiot decision is to tone down certain aspects of a sequel because one playstyle is more boring than the others... why tone down magic and stealth because people gravitate more towards them and not... say... make melee even more fun to counter the initial problem? My god what a lopsided way of fixing an issue
Skyrim has always been a great game it's just Bethesda ruined that experience by not letting it age when they kept re-releasing it multiple times
And they kept trying to sell pieces of it for 5$ each
oh you want a brand new quest line sure you could buy it from our mod store
My ISP is really pissing me off, I can't watch any of these videos in a quality higher than 480p 😡🥺
Skyrim has always been a mediocre standalone game but an amazing template to mod a great experience. Still bores me at its core but Enderal was very enjoyable for me.
I’m having the same experience right now with immersion and RP’ing mods. Feels like Skyrim is coming into its own at last.
Any chance we could get a video on enderal?
I've been wanting to try that for a while now. Wouldn't be for a while, but I'll consider adding it to the long list of games I need to play.
@@PrivateSessions fair enough lol
i am pretty sure every single player of skyrim would agree that the best way to play skyrim is play it once without mods, then only ever play it with mods from then on. game is just far superior with mods.
Disagree with the idea that the solution to writing serious subject matter poorly is to just make it a farce. Morrowind has a much more serious tone and manages to balance the lighthearted aspects much better without being a complete joke.