From my point of view Oblivion was better - i'm an old school gamer and don't mind tons of stats (i actually feel that streamlining is harmful .. after all it's the stats that make the difference between a RPG and a action game), and there were more variables that would affect the outcome of each decision made by the player. The speech wheel, character stats, acrobatics, open lock spells, spell customisation, and many more. Too many more - there is too much stuff that got taken out and although Skyrim is stupendously playable and bug-free (well, a game of this kind will always have a few bugs but .. it's no Clear Sky), the stuff that was taken out pretty much balances out the good stuff in.
And of course, the whole "3d immersion engine" thingie is getting old - Oblivion, and Morrowind before it, was revolutionary. Ofc Morrowind look old today, but on the other hand Oblivion looks just as good as Skyrim does, so no points here.
"A Good Story is what always gets me"
Yes, and i got to say Skyrim's story is way less immature than what you'd expect from a "hollywood" production, but the devil is in the details .. i'm going to have to be a bit specific here, or this won't make sense.
In a grim fantasy world such as TES, there is too much high fantasy - too many beautiful females, too many clean temples, too many neverending dungeons, too many spell, and in general too much safe play from the designers making Skyrim look like a different kind of commercial ad, but one nonetheless.
I guess i could say that if you took all the complaints from the Skyrim boards and put them together, you'd have a picture of the problem
If the Jarl is facing a though situation, why the hell isn't anyone else in town sent - alone - to solve it?
Some things in the gameplay are a bit horrid, for instance, when talking to an NPC for a quest some random passerby will stop and blurt out some random audio while the other guy is talking, some of the most popular being "..i took an arrow to the knee", and of course the immortal "you know what's wrong with Skyrim?".
But Skyrim it's a great game. So let's say screw the gameplay bugs - it's awesome. but ...
"You Know What's Wrong With Skyrim?"
Yes, my friend. Yes, i do.
The problem is that Bethesda, as a whole, wrote a game that they just couldn't deliver; you'v got this immense script (6k pages??), greatly complex situation, so many variables, and they just couldn't code it in.
1) The script is silly.
sure the story is nice, but the script itself is silly. i like the whole "barely escapes thanks to a dragon attack", but if you are going to write such quest lines as "humble beginner becomes Archmage of Winterhold", then you'd better be prepared to code in the changes to the script that this requires.
as Archmage of Winterhold, Thane of (every city in Skyrim), head of the Thieve's Guild, Listener of the Dark Brotherhood, and of course legendary Dragonborn, defeater of Anduin and saviour of Skyrim, i get the same shtick as average joe in the street. And - if you are listening, Beth - this doesn't mean that i want to hear every NPC saying "i heard you defeated that dragon" every minute of gametime, but it means that you actually need to have a timeline moving forward to make me feel as if anything has changed at all - which brings me to point
2)the game scripting is childish
nothing ever happens...
thief runs amok in the market, people rush out and kill him - you can simply ignore that; it's just a visual trick, and it means absolutely nothing in the story. Nothing really happens in the story. Some guy asks you to deliver food to High Hrotgard, you take the food.. then forget about it for a few months. the guy doesn't care. His sense of time is "takes quest - completes quest". This is made worse by the ingame waiting, sleep modes, quicktravel, and just plain bad time management - sure these are lovely features, if they were implemented nicely.
Like the thief trick, too many things in the game look the part but are just a cloud of smoke; walk past a cave, get attacked by bandits. Walk in said cave, there's a bunch of quest NPCs there. "Why the hell are you guys holed up here with a bunch of mobs??" but no answer there, other than "meh, we're just unkillable npcs".
You see, i'd rather have 5 NPCs in the whole game world, but that i can interact with in several ways, than a thousand that i can't interact with in any way but the one that was coded in. Have the Jarls (the lot of them) in the castle in Solitude after Ulfrik Stormcloak takes the throne, some of whom are all pissy about me having [saved the world] [liberated skyrim][being the legendary dragonborn][being a general badass who can wipe out an entire city, solo] and some of them insult me - and now, if i try to kill one (or more), well, they are immortal.
Some would say, "where is the freedom", others (the coders) would reply "if we let you kill them, you can fuck up your game";
We'd reply then "let us fuck up our game, it's OUR game", but then justly or not, the coders would reply "but then you'd complain about us letting you fuck up your game by doing unsanctioned interactions with environment/items/NPCs".
To which the correct reply is "then code some more interaction responses". Which is something you obviously can't do with a game as expansive as Skyrim.
So in the end the problem is not that Skyrim is a bad game, it's just that the designers should have foreseen that such a game is beyond their means to deliver, and it certainly is. In Oblivion, having a high athletics meant you could get into places the coders never meant you to go, and it was fun - the speedrun for Morrowind is seven minutes without glitches, but there's a nice 16 min speedrun with full instructions here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfNbPQJ5Fdc
Morrowind is still the game that every TES fan cites as best of the series, and while i liked Oblivion very much (Morrowind is too old to me, and i agree, it had to be played when it came out, not now), Skyrim is too devoid of interaction with the - stupidly large - content to make it a good recommendation.. the elements left out weigh particularly in favour of Oblivion vs Skyrim, now that every single character is a dual-wielding, dual-spell casting, daedra summoning, heavy armour wearing master thief archer Dragonborn alchemist enchanter smith, bringing me to the last point of my review
3) the milieu is ridiculous
great visual settings, great visual effects, but sadly, ridiculously mispalced content - not just the guards, jarls, emperors and random NPCs blurting out their life's secrets to everyone in the street, but the general sillyness of making the PC a divine, world-saving superbeing, overpowered form the word go.
RPGs are a matter of choice, and choice always involve losing some other aspect of the choice - if you chose tuna salad, you can't also have steak, pasta and chicken. Had they designed Skyrim to be - albeit the same size - smaller in scope, say, where the end quest is to become Jarl of Whiterun, removed fasttravel except for coaches(what's the point of a huge map, then?), lowered the amount of NPCs (or at least differentiated between main NPCs and minor), and stuck with the earlier "chock-full-o-choices" character build system, Skyrim would have been much, much better - but as you can easily see from the gamefaqs boards, everyone's got the same storyline, everyone's got the same build, same spells, same armour, etc.. the fabled variation (that Oblivion had lots of) is a myth and as such Skyrim is nothing but a complicated, sometimes buggy Action game where Smithing, Enchanting and occasionally Alchemy are overpowered, and even when not using these, it's just plain childishly easy, except on higher difficulties where it's still easy but for some totally unbalanced things which are stupidly hard.
And maybe they could have spent the time instead implementing cool stuff. Like time. Stuff happening. Flight. NPC interaction. Politics. Buildings. Mounts. A million other things.
I used to be a {insert comparison here} like you, but then i took an arrow to the knee.
