After the initial buzz has worn off and using the term "arrow to the knee" will more likely get you assaulted than get you any laughs, I thought I'd take a step back and review Skyrim unbiased and compare it to Bethesda's previous games.

The first thing I'd like to address is that Skyrim is a brilliant game and is in my top ten games of last year, and maybe of all time. But after a nice break from it, there are a lot of flaws to the game.

See, one of the big appeals of Skyrim is its longevity. There are supposedly over 300 hours of game time to be had, and while it sounds like a good draw, I think its a bit of a fault. If Skyrim had less throwaway missions and the dev team had spent its time on refining the main content, an even better experience could've been crafted.
You probably want an example, so I'll compare Skyrim's best part to Oblivion's' best parts: The Dark Brotherhood.

In Oblivion, when you kill someone, a message appears in the corner of your screen, telling you that your killing has been observed by forces unknown. I thought this meant some Oblivion God was out to get me, so I slept seeing if I could skip whatever consequences may pursue. This of course is when the Dark Brotherhood assassin appears and invites to the brotherhood. From here, you get to play some of Oblivion's most creative and exciting missions, all of which are unique from the others in some way. The story line had a nice twist ending and the whole thing felt very satisfying, far outshining the somewhat less spectacular main storyline.

In Skyrim, I didn't like how hidden the brotherhood was. I couldn't find out how to join it until very late in the game, and by then my sneak skill was so high, there wasn't much challenge in the missions (at least until cranked the difficulty up). So I made it my goal to not get spotted at all during the missions to make it harder. Doing this, it was very enjoyable. There was an interesting story arc about a traitor among the brotherhood (admittedly a bit copy pasted from Oblivion) and every mission was exciting and memorable, especially the one where you have to assassinate the emperor and escape the city one of the games most tense sequences. When the Brotherhood burned and we moved to the new base, I immediately spiffed it up because I loved the missions so much. But it just ended right there. I mean, the story arc concluded and all the loose ends were tied up but I honestly could not have expected this. And so with all my money wasted, I had already completed my personal favourite part of the game, the SHORTEST part of the game.

The main plotline I thought I could get through, but after suffering through an awful Thieves Guild, a somewhat average Mages Guild (which stumbles in comparison to Oblivion's) and Companions, only to have my expectations set so high by the Dark Brotherhood (admittedly squashed a bit by the brevity of it all) I could not get through it. And I figured out why: the structure was flimsy and dull. There were so many side quests that were too similar to the main ones, and many of the dungeons had been explored already by me previously.


With a game this open ended, I expected the main quest to be set somewhere that I couldn't have otherwise gone (the Dark Brotherhood did this well) but for the most part it was a trundle through empty caves I had already looted, battles with tedious bosses that could only be humanly defeated by exploits, and a story line that, while not terrible, was predictable and had no twists like the Dark Brotherhood.


And I wouldn't mind this so much if the other guilds had been better. But the Thieves Guild was basically an uninteresting copy-paste of the vastly superior Dark Brotherhood, a more interesting but still rather boring Mages Guild, and a Companions guild which was average, and admittedly was better than the fighters guild in Oblivion.

So while it is a great game, the fun parts are too short, and the dull parts too long. They should have taken out about 150 of the "Go to cave, fight bandit, claim reward" throwaway fetch quests and focused on making the whole thing a bit more structured (see Fallout: New Vegas for how open-ended games should go) and the shining parts a bit less brief.


Thank you for managing to trudge through this rant I think I called an unbiased review earlier.