Epic propaganda at the beginning. Totally not one sided. Torture is a legitimate method of extracting information from enemy soldiers. Ulfric wasn't executed first because the Imperials view him as a common criminal, he doesn't warrant a special execution. This is not torture. Skyrim is a troubled province, riddled with crime and rebellion. It's no surprise they're heavy handed on crime, and if you're seen among stormcloaks they're naturally going to assume you're involved with them. Guilt by association.
It is funny I still consider this a new game, this game came out just after I started university and I was so hyped to play it. I even bought it the day it came out. Over 8 years later and I am still yet to sit down and play it properly (only 12 hours of gameplay), always too busy with university and then after that, work. If only it came out 6 months earlier I am sure I would easily have got over 200 hours on it. Because of all this pretty much every game released late 2011 and onwards still feels new to me, because they are all games that I plan to play but still have not had a chance to.
42:08 and the video just took a nose dive the killing of essential npcs or quest giving ones or the lack of consequences is a vaild point and they should happen and things like not being able to get married or a minor character not speaking to you is not equal to killing the emperor or making interesting choices or killing major characters like Ulfric and seeing as you avoided games against your point Fallout New Vegas will be one of the easiest games to refrence in terms of failing quests due to certain actions locking off other quests due to working with other factions or hell even killing the leaders of each faction before it would be ideal it is not entitlement and how dare you act as such it is wanting better. I mean hell in skyrim if you attack a quest giving npc or character and then they are agroed permanently then they are useless and the quest should be failed but now all that can be done is hit that npc until they kneel and leave
You don't seem to understand what people meant by "your actions having no consequenses."
By "consequences," we mean meaningful consequences that affect the world.
You brought up the Sven and Faendal example: Yes, on an individualistic perspective, there is a consequence for whom you help; one will hate you, and the other becomes a follower.
HOWEVER. Doing this quest not only has NO EFFECT on Camilla Valerius, it also changes NOTHING in Riverwood itself. Faendal will still be working at the mill, sleeping on a bedroll on the outskirts of town every day… …and Sven will always be his usual annoying, self-important Bard self, doing his usual job at the Inn.
Hell, Faendal and Sven never ONCE confront each other on the matter. Not even if you agree to "help" both of them and show one of the fake letters to Camilla. Camilla never does anything about it afterwards and the only one affected is the player via exclusion of a potential follower.
This is a small-scale example, but imagine if the bigger quests had and actual AFFECT on the world itself.
Remember when you slay Alduin, and the world moves on like nothing happened? -Guards still talk shit to you. -Commoners have no respect for their "savior;" let alone know who the fuck you ARE. -The Jarls don't even give a FUCK about your exploits unless you do their chores like you were going to do anyway, even if you didn't just… you know… SAVE THE UNIVERSE FROM BEING EATEN. -Hell, when you kill THE FUCKING EMPEROR, nothing changed aside from a throwaway line guards might say in passing; as if they just found out… and will continue to do… forever.
“At least the romans didn’t torture people for their own sadistic pleasure.”
The emperor Nero is said to have thrown himself a party where christians were crucified upside down in a ring around the party grounds. When dusk came, Nero burned the Christians alive to serve as tiki torches so the party wouldn’t have to end.
Dude I just want to say your videos like this are fucking FANTASTIC. Please keep making these 2-4 hour analyses of games. The amount of attention paid and details you noticed are absolutely unmatched.
I like the lock-picking in Skyrim I never understood how to pick locks in Oblivion although I do know one thing that I wish that they would have added was that your character was able to do something by joining the bards college like singing or play a lute or a flute or drum but nope it's just for your speech 😑
I really don't know where to start with this.First of all i coudn't see this "retrospective" till the end.At 50 min mark it was clear to me that this is not a retrospective but a 3 hour long "why i like skyrim" monologue from a skyrim fanboy with no experience in the RPG genre and NOT AT ALL A NOSTALGIA FREE and i will try to explain why and i will take dragon age origins as an example aswell since you have the audacity to compare it to skyrim
It is well established in the elder scroll games that we have many races to pick from but in case of skyrim it doesn't matter not because the races are well balanced but because it doesn't matter what you pick.There is no role play element in the game. No matter which one you pick because you gonna have the same character you wanted to create in the first place. Just because you start a little higher in some skills doesn't mean the other races won't catch up since the game has literally no lvl cap. In dragon age origins class and race matters a lot. The starting stats are different, the origin story is different and the way people speak to you in the game is different and that's the difference between skyrim and a RPG.
Next you bring up a point about the removal of class system by saying it is superfluous and unnecessary. I agree it is for skyrim but your reasoning is wrong. Skyrim is not a RPG. It may have lvling and character creation but there is no choice to make(exept for some quests here and there). Period. There is no arguement here. Skyrim is not a role playing game. An rpg lets the player express himself throughout the story(like dragon age orgins) and the class and race you pick in a RPG matters a lot in this expression. Bethesda took a different approach in the making of skyrim. The picked the exploration aspect and made that the game that's why they tried to cut every single role playing aspect. In a RPG the character must have flaws and limitations. You cannot be the dragonborn and the leader of the companions and the guild master of the thieve's guild and the arch mage and the listener. I think i made my point.
Next the leveling system. While the idea of leveling though usage is niche it creates some problems. One of those problems you yourself picked up. The armor skills. But there are other problems aswell. Like how you can spam magic skills for perk points and use it in other trees, or the stupidity that is the reseting of a skill tree to get the points back. leveling thought experience might be an old way to handle leveling but it is more reliable to map the exp gain throughout the game and determine how much you will allow the player to obtain. At least it is much better than the never ending lvling skyrim allows you to do.
Then you talk about the open world and exploration. I agree to your statement that THIS is what bethesda is good at and they marketed their game towards this way(and to be honest this is the core of the game) it creates many problems in the way they handled it but i will point out the 2 most obvious. Scaling and sense of progression. Allowing the player to access 90% of the content right away removes the sense of progression in the game. You don't have anyting holding you back or make you work for. Everything is there for the taking, even the entry to the factions. Where is the sense of progression? And to add more to the injury the implimented a better version of the oblivion's scaling system. This is a very bad design choice, it might have allowed them to create a more exapnsive world but it comes out as lazy and uninspiring. You fight the same monsters over and over again from lvl 1 to lvl 100 with more health pool because they didn't even try to change what monsters the player encounters at each level. Not to mention because of this scaling many god tier weapons you pick have trash stats because you can pick them as soon as you can walk. Limiting a player's access creates mystery and excitement. It makes you work towards something. And why compare it to wind waker and metroid? They are not RPGs. They have well established formulas which differs from an RPG. Why not compare it to fallout 1 and 2? Or even Morrowind which is the best blend of a RPG and open world? And back to DA:O. Dragon age origins is the defintion of a RPG,tt may have tightly focused areas or not being open enought to access everything from the start but the story is different for every player. There are many things you gonna miss the first time, many actions and decision you make lead to a different result and ending. Pick 2 players who never played DA:O and make them finish their first playthough. Chances are not only their road to the archdemon will be different because in every major point in the story have 2 or more possible ways to appraoch it but the ending will be different aswell. Now pick 2 players and make them play skyrim and finish the main quest and see what "railroading" means. Because DA:O wasn't marketed as exploration heavy game but as an RPG and it delivered so hard,bioware regreted releasing the other 2 dragon age games because the comparison just doesn't exist.It is the best dragon age game of the franchise.
This detailed world skyrim presents and you praise so much is all skyrim has to offer. We went from morrowind and its facinating alien world and political situation you are uncovering bit by bit to"stay at this spot and look the view" .All of this open endness and detailed world means nothing when you have nothing to work towards to. You just explore and enjoy yourself nothing more because skyrim has nothing else to offer to a player who played some other rpgs and expects something more. Also witcher 3 did the same with its overworld but at least had the decency to offer a good and engaging story and didn't even bother to use scaling which shows how much work and effort they out into it compared to bethesda.
Now lets talk about the last part of this "retrospective" i was able to watch before all this bethesda fanboying i suffered reached to its limit, the accessibility. Skyrim is THE GAME for THE CASUALS(i use the words from Miste Caption here) and i use casuals in the bad defintion of the term(those who played skyrim and a handful of other uninteresing games and they never went further than that). Let's go to all those things you mention at 40:19. Things like quest failing and companion killng etc exist in a RPG to create consequences and skyrim lacks that aswell and since you are going with the comparison route and not with a clear explanation as to why they should and should not exist, i will take dragon age origins again as an example (also comparing World of warcraft a MMO to Skyrim is just stupid they just cannot be compared.WOW is an MMO and takes others things into account in the game design) In DA:O you can fail MANY quests just by not being persuasive enough,you can fail quests and get a different result like the quest in the mage tower, you can lose companions thought actions and dialogue options hell you can reach the archdemon and don't have any companion at all. Having the ability to disagree with a companion is part of role play(which again skyrim does not have) and ofc the RPG fans don't like when skyrim doesn't allow you to kill essencial characters in the game when Morrowind locked you out of the main quest when you killed essencial characters. It is an option many ppl like in a rpg.It is an option the fallout games(exept the ones bethesda make ofc) offer you. In one way or another RPGs leave the failure of the player open as an option because some people want to go on with their games carring the mistake.
My closing statement is this.Skyrim tried to be an accessible and easily digestible game to appeal to the masses and didn't even try to go in depth in any of its aspects.You may like it ,you may defend it all you want but when you put the RPG stamp on it is just a patheic excuse of an RPG with nothing redeeming or even remotly memorable. You may want to go and play more RPGs and look at their themes,what they have to offer and how they deliver them and then come back and make this retrospective as a RPG fan and not just as a Skyrim fan.
I'm a long time Elder Scrolls fan. This video is a fantastic retrospective. I love how you cover every detail. I love Skyrim and still play it to this day. Are there features I love? Oh yeah. Are there features that I wish were different? Yes. But all in all Skyrim is a fantastic fantasy Role Playing Game. The base game is great. The main mods I use are extra content mods like Falskaar and Project AHO which just add to the fantastic game underneath.
Started playing Skyrim again on my switch after like 10 months of a hiatus and I just really got back into it and was looking for a ridiculously long review of the gamw so thanks for this review! And you got yourself a new subscriber!
Horse thieves were hung in the old West (not technically legal, but by vigilantes). Stealing a man’s horse was a serious offense in a land where being left afoot could be fatal. There was an Old West saying that if you stole a man’s horse, you had condemned him to death. So Lokir had earned a headsman's haircut.
Cool video, but I would work on your delivery and pronunciation. Occasionally you slur words, rush through them, have weirdly placed breaks in talking, or just pronounce things downright bizarrely (like “occupation” at 4:02
This is a very well done video. By far the longest YouTube video I've ever watched, but very well crafted and well put. Props man! Ignore the salty dislikes. It's a solid, very thorough analysis of the game
Epic propaganda at the beginning. Totally not one sided. Torture is a legitimate method of extracting information from enemy soldiers.
Ulfric wasn't executed first because the Imperials view him as a common criminal, he doesn't warrant a special execution. This is not torture.
Skyrim is a troubled province, riddled with crime and rebellion. It's no surprise they're heavy handed on crime, and if you're seen among stormcloaks they're naturally going to assume you're involved with them. Guilt by association.
It is funny I still consider this a new game, this game came out just after I started university and I was so hyped to play it. I even bought it the day it came out.
Over 8 years later and I am still yet to sit down and play it properly (only 12 hours of gameplay), always too busy with university and then after that, work.
If only it came out 6 months earlier I am sure I would easily have got over 200 hours on it.
Because of all this pretty much every game released late 2011 and onwards still feels new to me, because they are all games that I plan to play but still have not had a chance to.
Witcher 3 is a life changing game. I'd suggest playing until it sinks in, you'll see the difference.
42:08 and the video just took a nose dive the killing of essential npcs or quest giving ones or the lack of consequences is a vaild point and they should happen and things like not being able to get married or a minor character not speaking to you is not equal to killing the emperor or making interesting choices or killing major characters like Ulfric and seeing as you avoided games against your point Fallout New Vegas will be one of the easiest games to refrence in terms of failing quests due to certain actions locking off other quests due to working with other factions or hell even killing the leaders of each faction before it would be ideal it is not entitlement and how dare you act as such it is wanting better. I mean hell in skyrim if you attack a quest giving npc or character and then they are agroed permanently then they are useless and the quest should be failed but now all that can be done is hit that npc until they kneel and leave
You don't seem to understand what people meant by "your actions having no consequenses."
By "consequences," we mean meaningful consequences that affect the world.
You brought up the Sven and Faendal example:
Yes, on an individualistic perspective, there is a consequence for whom you help; one will hate you, and the other becomes a follower.
HOWEVER. Doing this quest not only has NO EFFECT on Camilla Valerius, it also changes NOTHING in Riverwood itself.
Faendal will still be working at the mill, sleeping on a bedroll on the outskirts of town every day…
…and Sven will always be his usual annoying, self-important Bard self, doing his usual job at the Inn.
Hell, Faendal and Sven never ONCE confront each other on the matter. Not even if you agree to "help" both of them and show one of the fake letters to Camilla.
Camilla never does anything about it afterwards and the only one affected is the player via exclusion of a potential follower.
This is a small-scale example, but imagine if the bigger quests had and actual AFFECT on the world itself.
Remember when you slay Alduin, and the world moves on like nothing happened?
-Guards still talk shit to you.
-Commoners have no respect for their "savior;" let alone know who the fuck you ARE.
-The Jarls don't even give a FUCK about your exploits unless you do their chores like you were going to do anyway, even if you didn't just… you know… SAVE THE UNIVERSE FROM BEING EATEN.
-Hell, when you kill THE FUCKING EMPEROR, nothing changed aside from a throwaway line guards might say in passing; as if they just found out… and will continue to do… forever.
NOTHING. CHANGES.
That is what we mean by "no consequences."
“At least the romans didn’t torture people for their own sadistic pleasure.”
The emperor Nero is said to have thrown himself a party where christians were crucified upside down in a ring around the party grounds. When dusk came, Nero burned the Christians alive to serve as tiki torches so the party wouldn’t have to end.
I just played this game for the first time this past year…I will probably wait another 10 years AT LEAST to pick it up again.
Nice video. Thanks.
Dude I just want to say your videos like this are fucking FANTASTIC. Please keep making these 2-4 hour analyses of games. The amount of attention paid and details you noticed are absolutely unmatched.
I like the lock-picking in Skyrim I never understood how to pick locks in Oblivion although I do know one thing that I wish that they would have added was that your character was able to do something by joining the bards college like singing or play a lute or a flute or drum but nope it's just for your speech 😑
speak normally dude, no need for that comical shit
I really don't know where to start with this.First of all i coudn't see this "retrospective" till the end.At 50 min mark it was clear to me that this is not a retrospective but a 3 hour long "why i like skyrim" monologue from a skyrim fanboy with no experience in the RPG genre and NOT AT ALL A NOSTALGIA FREE and i will try to explain why and i will take dragon age origins as an example aswell since you have the audacity to compare it to skyrim
It is well established in the elder scroll games that we have many races to pick from but in case of skyrim it doesn't matter not because the races are well balanced but because it doesn't matter what you pick.There is no role play element in the game. No matter which one you pick because you gonna have the same character you wanted to create in the first place. Just because you start a little higher in some skills doesn't mean the other races won't catch up since the game has literally no lvl cap. In dragon age origins class and race matters a lot. The starting stats are different, the origin story is different and the way people speak to you in the game is different and that's the difference between skyrim and a RPG.
Next you bring up a point about the removal of class system by saying it is superfluous and unnecessary. I agree it is for skyrim but your reasoning is wrong. Skyrim is not a RPG. It may have lvling and character creation but there is no choice to make(exept for some quests here and there). Period. There is no arguement here. Skyrim is not a role playing game. An rpg lets the player express himself throughout the story(like dragon age orgins) and the class and race you pick in a RPG matters a lot in this expression. Bethesda took a different approach in the making of skyrim. The picked the exploration aspect and made that the game that's why they tried to cut every single role playing aspect. In a RPG the character must have flaws and limitations. You cannot be the dragonborn and the leader of the companions and the guild master of the thieve's guild and the arch mage and the listener. I think i made my point.
Next the leveling system. While the idea of leveling though usage is niche it creates some problems. One of those problems you yourself picked up. The armor skills. But there are other problems aswell. Like how you can spam magic skills for perk points and use it in other trees, or the stupidity that is the reseting of a skill tree to get the points back. leveling thought experience might be an old way to handle leveling but it is more reliable to map the exp gain throughout the game and determine how much you will allow the player to obtain. At least it is much better than the never ending lvling skyrim allows you to do.
Then you talk about the open world and exploration. I agree to your statement that THIS is what bethesda is good at and they marketed their game towards this way(and to be honest this is the core of the game) it creates many problems in the way they handled it but i will point out the 2 most obvious. Scaling and sense of progression. Allowing the player to access 90% of the content right away removes the sense of progression in the game. You don't have anyting holding you back or make you work for. Everything is there for the taking, even the entry to the factions. Where is the sense of progression? And to add more to the injury the implimented a better version of the oblivion's scaling system. This is a very bad design choice, it might have allowed them to create a more exapnsive world but it comes out as lazy and uninspiring. You fight the same monsters over and over again from lvl 1 to lvl 100 with more health pool because they didn't even try to change what monsters the player encounters at each level. Not to mention because of this scaling many god tier weapons you pick have trash stats because you can pick them as soon as you can walk. Limiting a player's access creates mystery and excitement. It makes you work towards something. And why compare it to wind waker and metroid? They are not RPGs. They have well established formulas which differs from an RPG. Why not compare it to fallout 1 and 2? Or even Morrowind which is the best blend of a RPG and open world? And back to DA:O. Dragon age origins is the defintion of a RPG,tt may have tightly focused areas or not being open enought to access everything from the start but the story is different for every player. There are many things you gonna miss the first time, many actions and decision you make lead to a different result and ending. Pick 2 players who never played DA:O and make them finish their first playthough. Chances are not only their road to the archdemon will be different because in every major point in the story have 2 or more possible ways to appraoch it but the ending will be different aswell. Now pick 2 players and make them play skyrim and finish the main quest and see what "railroading" means. Because DA:O wasn't marketed as exploration heavy game but as an RPG and it delivered so hard,bioware regreted releasing the other 2 dragon age games because the comparison just doesn't exist.It is the best dragon age game of the franchise.
This detailed world skyrim presents and you praise so much is all skyrim has to offer. We went from morrowind and its facinating alien world and political situation you are uncovering bit by bit to"stay at this spot and look the view" .All of this open endness and detailed world means nothing when you have nothing to work towards to. You just explore and enjoy yourself nothing more because skyrim has nothing else to offer to a player who played some other rpgs and expects something more. Also witcher 3 did the same with its overworld but at least had the decency to offer a good and engaging story and didn't even bother to use scaling which shows how much work and effort they out into it compared to bethesda.
Now lets talk about the last part of this "retrospective" i was able to watch before all this bethesda fanboying i suffered reached to its limit, the accessibility. Skyrim is THE GAME for THE CASUALS(i use the words from Miste Caption here) and i use casuals in the bad defintion of the term(those who played skyrim and a handful of other uninteresing games and they never went further than that). Let's go to all those things you mention at 40:19. Things like quest failing and companion killng etc exist in a RPG to create consequences and skyrim lacks that aswell and since you are going with the comparison route and not with a clear explanation as to why they should and should not exist, i will take dragon age origins again as an example (also comparing World of warcraft a MMO to Skyrim is just stupid they just cannot be compared.WOW is an MMO and takes others things into account in the game design) In DA:O you can fail MANY quests just by not being persuasive enough,you can fail quests and get a different result like the quest in the mage tower, you can lose companions thought actions and dialogue options hell you can reach the archdemon and don't have any companion at all. Having the ability to disagree with a companion is part of role play(which again skyrim does not have) and ofc the RPG fans don't like when skyrim doesn't allow you to kill essencial characters in the game when Morrowind locked you out of the main quest when you killed essencial characters. It is an option many ppl like in a rpg.It is an option the fallout games(exept the ones bethesda make ofc) offer you. In one way or another RPGs leave the failure of the player open as an option because some people want to go on with their games carring the mistake.
My closing statement is this.Skyrim tried to be an accessible and easily digestible game to appeal to the masses and didn't even try to go in depth in any of its aspects.You may like it ,you may defend it all you want but when you put the RPG stamp on it is just a patheic excuse of an RPG with nothing redeeming or even remotly memorable. You may want to go and play more RPGs and look at their themes,what they have to offer and how they deliver them and then come back and make this retrospective as a RPG fan and not just as a Skyrim fan.
Ah yes, I too have watched WillLovesVideoGames' Oblivion retrospective.
I'm a long time Elder Scrolls fan. This video is a fantastic retrospective. I love how you cover every detail. I love Skyrim and still play it to this day. Are there features I love? Oh yeah. Are there features that I wish were different? Yes. But all in all Skyrim is a fantastic fantasy Role Playing Game. The base game is great. The main mods I use are extra content mods like Falskaar and Project AHO which just add to the fantastic game underneath.
Not gonna lie. It took me quite a while to figure out u actally had to inspect the claw
Started playing Skyrim again on my switch after like 10 months of a hiatus and I just really got back into it and was looking for a ridiculously long review of the gamw so thanks for this review! And you got yourself a new subscriber!
radiant quests are a way to get gold quick as well as for role play aesthetic.
Horse thieves were hung in the old West (not technically legal, but by vigilantes). Stealing a man’s horse was a serious offense in a land where being left afoot could be fatal. There was an Old West saying that if you stole a man’s horse, you had condemned him to death. So Lokir had earned a headsman's haircut.
Cool video, but I would work on your delivery and pronunciation. Occasionally you slur words, rush through them, have weirdly placed breaks in talking, or just pronounce things downright bizarrely (like “occupation” at 4:02
That "self entitled" part… yeah no, you're missing the point
Can you make a video on why you support the Stormcloaks? Or why they should win?
This is a very well done video. By far the longest YouTube video I've ever watched, but very well crafted and well put. Props man! Ignore the salty dislikes. It's a solid, very thorough analysis of the game