Cricket Web - Skyrim

Quote:

Originally Posted by jan (Post 2695004)

A friend of mine made pretty much the same announcement on facebook. Only that he and his ps3 plan to be absent from the real world for about 3 months :)

I am not into this type of games - ie. struggled hard to finish The Witcher - but I read a few reviews and cant help feeling they were more advertisements than reviews...

Yes with Bethesda games a lot of their 'reviews' are basically advertisements. Their owners are big enough that if a reviewer is less than generous they'll get put on a blacklist. It's a pretty distasteful industry and it's common practice, if you can find a publication that is truly independent then stick with them - because most are too busy kissing arse of the high-ups.

If you search Rybicki Maneuver you'll see the sorts of nonsense that happened with Oblivion. Reviewers constantly overlooked the many blatant bugs and short-comings in the game, giving it a high score. Then all of a sudden Fallout 3 comes along, the next big game from Bethesda and all the reviews of *that* reference how all the bugs and short-comings had been fixed from Oblivion... that game that was blatantly flawed but got something stupid like 95% on Metacritic. Of course most of the issues remained in reality.

Now I for one bought and played Oblivion, probably for a good 200 hours. It was modded from day one because I knew about the balancing (I also had Morrowind and Daggerfall and put ****loads of hours into those too - Daggerfall also had the level-scaling loot, you'd start of with iron stuff, stuff you killed would have mostly iron loot with occasional steel, then as you built up on steel stuff you'd find occasional silver loot and so on). So I'm not as quite as cynical as the bunch on No Mutants Allowed - but I do go on that site to get an impression of games, because they're a consistent bunch of cynics who will begrudgingly give praise if you can read through the lines. You'll also hear about obscure games which turn are my sort of thing (I have similar tastes to that lot as I'm a big Fallout 2 fan), like for instance Mount & Blade.

It seems to me that Skyrim is a big improvement on Oblivion. There's not the ludicrous enemy scaling (ie you won't find level 25 bandits with Daedric gear). There are general improvements (voice acting, dialogue, storylines, quests, graphics) and the game and landscape actually has character too it (the snowy environments and weather look particularly good - I personally love these on games if done well, they're kinda haunting but magical). The RPG elements aren't any deeper - though that won't bother you if you liked the previous games (the game is more of an action RPG, player skill does matter a lot in fights). Apparently the game is a horrible port if you're on a PC - particularly with regards to the interface, so you may want to wait til that's fixed (by patch or mod) and it runs quite well on low-end machines, but can randomly lag on even a very powerful PC. And as always Bethesda will release a load of download content - so if you can wait it'll be all bundled together cheaper about this time next year.