TL;DR: the game is better than critics credit it for, and the game was very hard to make due to its size and ambition. Selling points are the visuals, soundtrack, content, and Civil War questline. Worst part is the combat, which I’ve expanded on in a different article.
Synopsis: you are being executed by the Imperials, and the execution grounds are attacked by a dragon. Your primary goal is to eliminate the king of dragons, Alduin.
Skyrim is, by all means, a very flawed game. In an RPG where one can both be free and engage in defined quests, there are two very big tradeoffs: one between quantity and depth: developers can make more quests or make existing quests deeper/more unique; and another between quantity and context: the more guilds and quests that are added, the more context-dependence (e.g. dragonsreach quest changing depending on the civil war state) has to be added.
Bethesda chose quantity, and I think this was the right choice. There is such thing as enough content. Skyrim has it, maybe even too much of it. But there is no such thing as enough context, because Skyrim is a game; it can’t simulate real life. Diminishing returns also come sooner for context rather than content.
Even though the base game has issues, Skyrim fills an important “niche” in the gaming world: a high fantasy role playing game with gameplay and a story where you can create your own character. As far as I can tell, no other game not made my Bethesda satisfies these criteria:
The Witcher: no character creation
The Legend of Zelda: no character creation
Oblivion and Morrowind: fit the description, but were made by Bethesda.
Fallout New Vegas: in a modern world. Also, I thought it sucked.
Cyberpunk 2077: in a modern world. Also, I thought it was mid.
Dark Souls: doesn’t really have a story.
Gothic: the controls/mechanics are way too outdated.
Dragon Age: tried it, combat was terrible.
Code Vein kind of fits the description — I played it and I thought it was decent, but lost interest halfway through the game. It also has nowhere near as much content as Skyrim.
Some comments on the particular aspects of the game:
Production
Skyrim is well produced. The graphics look realistic and have a unique vibe to them that is hard to emulate. The skies in particular are quite beautiful.
The only complaint I have about the visuals is that it’s impossible to make characters that look 12-25 years old without mods. I don’t know why, but every single Skyrim character that I make either looks like a middle aged person or an old person.
The soundtrack is great. The iconic main theme has ~43 million views on youtube as of now. The regular music is some of the best in the entire gaming world, though it didn’t best Oblivion’s best track:
The only gripe I have with Skyrim’s OST is that the combat music is annoying and plays way too often; ideally music would just stop when fighting low level enemies. Even people who are critical of skyrim rarely rip on the soundtrack, it’s one of the best parts about the game.
The game also has unbearably slow mouse lag that needs to be fixed with mods — the set of mods that increase frame rate to 240 are sufficient but not necessary to do this.
Guilds
I have mixed feelings on the Skyrim guilds. The main problem with them is that they suffer from having the same story in the abstract. “We used to be cool, now we suck, and you’re here to fix it” describes all four of the main guilds fairly well. There’s no real excuse for not being able to make guilds with different themes, Oblivion did fine in this respect.
My favourite guild is the Dawnguard. It has the second coolest main building, a decent storyline, and is the easiest guild to integrate into any role. Unfortunately, all of the characters besides Serana are boring, though I can’t say other guilds are better in that regard. Castle Volhikar is basically the same guild as the Dawnguard, but with vampires instead. This makes it harder to integrate into your character, though I must admit their crib is cooler. Only part I don’t like is that the dungeon dives, the Soul Cairn and Darkfall passage are a bit grueling.
The Dark Brotherhood is the best guild from the original game, well, maybe the least imperfect one. The first quests are somewhat shallow, especially when you compare them to the Oblivion ones, though it gets better with time — the final missions are good.
In third place, we have the Imperials and Stormcloaks. Personally, I think Ulfric and the stormcloaks are more emotionally compelling than Tullius and the imperials, so I typically play as a stormcloak. Best change they could do is remove 1 or 2 of the battles for forts and add another weird quest, like choosing between assassinating a leader or sabotaging their defense life before the final run on Windhelm/Soltitude. Ideally, the questline for Stromcloaks/Imperials would be divergent.
My favourite part of the Imperials vs Stormcloaks battle isn’t the gameplay or the quests, but the underlying depth in the conflict. There’s a religious, racial, metapolitical, and international aspect of the conflict that mirrors the depth of a real-life political issue; Bethesda really went all out on the Civil War.
In fourth place (or sixth, including the DLC guilds), we have the College of Winterhold. A lot of people complain that magic isn’t really necessary to complete the questline, which is reasonable; personally I always role play even if the game doesn’t force me to. The bigger problem is that guild storyline is short and low quality. What the eye of magnus actually does is never properly explained or left as a real mystery.
This is where I would have implemented a radically different vision for what a Skyrim guild looks like: there would be no main storyline, just a lot of extremely detailed side quests. You could have the MC hunt down some cunt who is killing mages. Maybe you have to help J’zargo find his family. The end result would be you being voted new guildmaster as a result of being popular, though you would be explicitly recognized as a figurehead rather than a true mage. Essentially, I want the questline to embrace this meme:
The Companions are fine, though I can’t help but resent the fact that there is only one real warrior guild and that it forces you to be a werewolf unless you have Dawnguard. Even after playing Skyrim SE for ~400 hours, I only learned you could cure lycanthropy a few weeks ago because of how often I avoided them.
The guild story is short, but I think it’s fine, especially since non-mage builds in Skyrim scale so quickly. Only thing I would change is the antagonists — the silver hand suck.
In last place, we have the Thieves Guild. The storyline was somewhat entertaining — Mercer’s betrayal caught me by surprise on the first playthrough. One negative — I thought it was kind of gay that you couldn’t refuse to become a nighingale, it’s easy enough to defeat Mercer with poison or scrolls one finds in the surrounding area anyway. I even installed the ‘No to nocturnal’ mod because I hated that part of the game so much.
There are also a few blunders in the writing of the Guild’s story which this reviewer explains well. Personally, I think a lot of his criticisms go too far, so I’ll summarise the relevant ones:
For some reason, poisoning the big barrel in the honey-brew meadery also poisons the sample the captain takes when you arrive to the inn right after you poisoned the barrel. In writing this doesn’t feel that bad, but in the game this does feel awkward.
It also doesn’t really make sense for Karliah not to be able to make multiple poisoned arrows — it’s just convenient for the storyline.
There’s no way she couldn’t get somebody to translate Gallus’ journal in the ~20 years she was on the run.
How did nobody notice that the vault was cleaned out before?
I have to admit, the hideout is cool and the rewards are good. Definitely a downgrade from Oblivion’s thieves guild, but not a terrible group by any means.
Main quest
Skyrim’s story starts out with you being executed at an imperial camp — a lot of good storytelling here. Within the first ten minutes, you are introduced to a lot of the game’s main conflicts and some of the main characters. Beyond that, the main quest is… Fine? I guess? In terms of quality, it’s better than the guilds, with the exception of the Dawnguard/Volhikar and maybe the Dark Brotherhood. There’s a lot of minor twists involved (e.g. the second dragon attack, Thalmor infiltration resulting in no findings, fighting against Alduin midway through the story), but it never feels like any of them were meaningful.
I will say though, the ending ending was beautiful, and I loved seeing Paarthunax circle the throat of the world with all of the dragons.
Gameplay
Skyrim’s gameplay is worse than it should be, but still passable. It feels good at early levels, but starts to drop off post level 15. For that reason, I often create new characters.
The stealth archer is the strongest build in the game, and is also the most satisfying one, especially at lower levels. Unfortunately, the build suffers from a lack of variety — the build revolves around only one weapon which fires the same way. The DLC gives you a crossbow, but it isn’t quite enough. Ideally, there would be multiple ranged weapons: the standard bow and arrow, the crossbow, repeating crossbow, and maybe some rudimentary guns. The variety in types of bows could improve as well, with variance in speed/range/draw/power and not just damage/weight. Also, who’s idea was it to not have headshots? Crazy that has to be modded in. Also, the bow should be able to block.
Sneak is also kind of busted. It’s balanced in the early game, but has really broken scaling, so enemies basically can’t detect you once you have muffle boots and ~80 skill sneak. The two big changes I would make to it are to make detection more circumstancially dependent and reduce the scaling. In the dev’s defense, it’s very difficult to balance sneak in Skyrim because changing parameters to balance the late game screws over the early game, and vice versa.
The warrior is fun for the first few hours or so, but suffers from being boring. There are a few cool battle dynamics — guard > attack, strong attack > guard, bash > strong attack) — otherwise, there is not much to speak of. Blocking also sucks too much without a shield; solo-weapon feels cooler than sword/board. Having to specialize in either two or one handed also feels a little constraining.
The mage is the most skillful of the main 3 builds, as it requires aim and lots of spell management. It still suffers from a few issues: one, too many actions have to be cycled through to play optimally (armor → ward → conjur atornach → destruction → potions or staff of magnus → repeat). Second, the dragonborn runs out of mana way too quickly. Ideally, most spells would cost ~20% more mana, and base magic regen would be ~200% faster. People complain that the spells don’t scale, but I think that’s compensated by the fact that there are different tiers of spells (novice/apprentice/etc) and that there are perks that buff destruction spells.
Crafting is the most busted part of the game, but it also takes the most effort and time, so I’m not sure what to do with it.
Besides the class issues, Skyrim suffers from a few meta-problems. The first is the potion problem, which is that it is too easy to make certain fights/dungeons easy by buying ~30 potions, which feels cheap and boring. Perhaps the potions could have a gradual effect rather than an instant one. The second issue is the difficulty slider — it increases enemy health too much, so at high difficulties the enemies are bullet sponges and it feels like the game doesn’t have enough damage.
Not all races should have an active ability; Skyrim has enough actives as is.
Design
The diversity in enemies is stunning: Spriggan camps, giants, mages, bandits, mercs, forsworn, draugr, ghosts, vampires, dragons, soldiers, necromancers, reavers, falmer, hired thugs, thieves, Hagraven, Dremora, animals, random people, and dwemer machinery.
In practice, the diversity isn’t encountered that often, as bandit/draugr style enemies are too common. Overall there should be about half as many of these kinds of enemies in the game. Skyrim also has too many hostiles in general. Except for hired thugs, thieves, and assassins — those are fun. I also think it would be funny if some forts only had normal NPCs in them or were just empty for no reason.
Mods
Many fans defend the game on the grounds that it is one of the easiest games to mod, and that mods fix a lot of the games’ issues and make it funner to play.
My hot take is that most mods are terrible or negligible. The mods are made by people who loved the original game and tried to improve on it — the ones who didn’t like it moved on. This is made obvious if you check out the most popular mods - almost all of them are either graphics mods, bug fixes, UI mods, or content mods. These are already things Skyrim does well at or doesn’t need, except for maybe the bug fixes and 240 fps — most of Skyrim’s shortcomings aren’t things that can be fixed by mods.
What Skyrim does need modded in to make it better the combat; there are some attempts at a combat redesign, but none of the ones I tried were good. As such I am skeptical when people recommend overhaul mods to me like Requiem or Lorerim. Mod-designers don’t have the same eye for development that Bethesda or even I have.
Um actually Dark Souls does have a story🤓