I was watching "...why Skyrim?" by Razbuten on sloptube this aft and it's so weird that it finally took Starfield for people to realise. Like Fallout 76 wasn't enough, only now are negative things people were first saying about Skyrim in 2012 finally bleeding into mainstream consciousness. It's so wild, like wow they ruined the magic system? The game has worse writing than a PS1 era Mega Man X game??? Skyrim is just shitty Game of Thrones?? Welcome to thirteen years ago!!
Bethesda hasn't made a really good game since 2002, but it'll probably be years before that realisation sinks in.
I think a lot of it is that we've been conditioned to filter our thoughts through the lens of explosive and quick hot takes. Something can't be middling or be flawed it has to be either an afront to god or a gift from god himself.
No I just actually think this. It legit surprised me that this thread blew up so much.
The language I used is spicy in retrospect, but I'm just a vulgar sweary person. I have nuanced flaw-acknowledging takes, on Oblivion and Fallout 3. I was hyped for Skyrim and it was bad, so bad. I'vebeen cooking my Skyrim thoughts ever since. I have also never posted on twitter.
I guess what i'm trying to say is that people should examine and disect things not through trying to create sound bites. Like skyrim's writing is bad but how? Is it just self evident or that it is worse then mega man x? Is it a worse game of thrones in that they're both fantasy and skyrim is worse in what game of thrones is attempting to do?
You don't need to ever post on twitter to be exposed to the attention economy.
Reading this as an outsider it feels pretty invalidating of what they're saying, only engagement with it I can see in this comment is the implied question of what they mean by bad writing, but I think in the future it would be better just to ask that
Yeah I didn't mean to come off as hostile or invalidating I guess the way people can sometimes talk about art regardless of medium on the internet can kind of annoy me.
I try not to just be stupid, like I could spend several days posting my GAMING HOT TAKES!! but this thread happened by accident. If I tried to purpose-build a hot take it probably wouldn't even work, I am too autismy. I'm more prone to writing 4000-10,000 words about why something is bad, or good, and often people don't wanna read that which sucks. It's kinda lame that this post got a ton of engagement just for "skyrim bad" tbh.
Yeah that's the consequence of so much content being shoved in our face all the time making it what does get the most attention is the most immediately understandable and eye-catching (think buzzfeed articles with inflammatory headlines) so when someone does sit down and write something that is carefully thought out it gets blown by the wayside.
Ideally the trick would be molding the title of your giant essay into a super hot take so people click, and I have seen good Youtube videos do that, but I'm really bad at it, lol. Hard to catch people's eyes...
It's been a while since I played it and I'd need a comb to go over it, but the scene where you absorb a dragon soul and everyone stands around gawping "wowee, the protagonist! you are the player in this power fantasy game! what a big guy!!!" is eyerolling. I hate it. I also do not like Game of Thrones fwiw, but the Stormcloak-Imperial scuffle is small scale and half baked imo.
I am in the business of writing ridiculous, lengthy examinations and dissections, but a lot of people missed that this post is not a review of analysis of Skyrim, it is about opinions shifting.