Yes, it's big. Yes, I've put many hours into it in the time I've owned it. Yes, it's a huge time sink. Yes, it looks lovely. Yes, there are many, many, quests. But if I were reviewing it professionally, I'd be hard pressed to justify giving it above 73%. Which is the lowest score you can give a large name game without being blacklisted by its publishers, according to Amiga Power back in the day.
Okay, maybe I'm being a bit stingy. With the various DLC packs (especially Dragonborn, which is markedly better designed than the main game and has ACTUAL PUZZLES IN THE DUNGEONS) I'd boost it up to 80%. But it's not the all-conquering behemoth that people fap themselves red raw over. It has flaws, and they are serious ones, especially for people like myself who were brought up on Ultima VII and Baldur's Gate and the original Fallout and Torment and suchlike. In fact, it was these flaws that caused me to lose interest until I forced myself back to it.
Firstly, the main plot. It's pretty shite, let's be honest. So you're crossing the border illegally and are about to get your head cut off when all of a sudden a very large dragon appears and starts burning things down round your ears. In the confusion you escape and discover yourself to be the Chosen One, the Dragonborn, the dovahkiin in the Draconic language of the game. You have the power to kill off dragons, eat their souls, and as such, you're the only one who can save the land of Skyrim from being destroyed by the said oversized reptiles. Unfortunately... the main quest is hardly as epic as it sounds. It's a fraction of the total game content, and there's absolutely no urgency involved in it. Which is a bit incongruous, considering the whole plot is based on the idea that only you can save the day, and that all the dragons across Skyrim are waking up and laying waste to the locals - and indeed, there's one bit where you have to hot foot it from Riverwood, a village conveniently in the centre of the map and where you start the game proper, to another village in the eastern region of the map to intercept and slay the dragon before it crawls out its burial mound. This is presented to you as being of enormous urgency, yet I simply told the woman who I was supposed to go with to go on ahead while I:
- Used some performance-enhancing fondue (don't ask) to boost my magical skills enough to bluff entry to the College of Winterhold (a magical academy in the far north of the map)
- Went on an expedition to an ancient Nordic settlement infested with undead and stole a priceless amulet
- Buggered off and started wandering around the mountains for days looking for something interesting to do
- Got incredibly annoyed as my trusty black horse kept wandering off and getting eaten by bears
- Joined the Stormcloaks (more on that below)
- Then, five in-game months later, once I'd done my own bodyweight in side quests, went and met up with yon woman to sort this dragon out. She'd been literally stood about, day and night, waiting for me, upon where, conveniently, my presence was just in time with Alduin, the big bad dragon lord who's the final boss also, awakening his minion from its barrow, upon where I filled it full of arrows and then stove its head in with an axe.
So you see why my immersion was slightly broken by all this.
Speaking of immersion breaking plot holes, how come nobody noticed that my character had the magical skill of a mollusk (because I'd thrown all my points into archery, two handed weapons, heavy armour, and stealth - yes, you can sneak about perfectly in full plate mail, the legendary plate mail that boosts your sneaking notwithstanding) yet I was able effectively to become Archmage of the College of Winterhold and putatively the most powerful wizard in the land despite this. None of the quests to become Archmage other than the first actually require any magic to complete. Similarly, once I was Archmage, well, it was a sinecure really. I could get random procedurally generated quests off the fellow Winterhold inhabitants but they rapidly became repetitive. But I suppose that's for the best, because I was also the head of an order of great warriors (and also secret werewolves), head of the Thieves' Guild, head of the Dark Brotherhood (that's the assassin's guild), and all these were sinecures too apart from the occasional procedurally generated quests.
I mean, come on, people, what's wrong with mutual exclusivity? Granted, you can't join both the Imperial Legion and the Stormcloaks, on account of they're opposing sides in a civil war (which is completely invisible unless I. you join one of those sides and get involved in it, or II. you hear people talking about it in pubs and things). You don't see bands of each side's soldiers on manoeuvres; they spend all their time hanging around their various camps. But even so, you can be all these people simultaneously, which is not bounded by your class, race, previous adventures, or similar. The lack of mutual exclusivity kills any replay value the game might have as well. Why should I stop being a ginger Nord man with sideboards, Ebony Mail (the aforementioned legendary plate armour of super stealth, and also the only legendary piece of kit that's worth anything - more on this below), a Longbow of Fiery Soul Trap, and a habit of FUS RO DAH-ing people off cliffs if everything plays out exactly the same if I'm a female Bosmer (wood elf) with full body tatts and a rare skill in fire magic and stabbing people in the back. I'm supposed to be this long-prophesied figure of legendry, so why is the only mark I make on the world the shape that Bethesda wants it to be, or at best only a cosmetic change?!
And occasionally the lack of mutual exclusivity causes episodes that are just made of plot hole. For instance, in the Dark Brotherhood quest line, you end up being employed to murder the Emperor. Of the same Empire from whom the Stormcloaks are trying to secede. However, when I did this little number, I'd already sided with the Stormcloaks and booted the Empire and all its troops definitively out and back into Cyrodiil where they belonged, the elf-sucking-up-to earslings, so the reason the Emperor had only just come to Skyrim, to bolster the morale of his soldiers, was completely nonsensical. They could at least have put in some substitute dialogue to have the game tell you that he was there to negotiate a lasting peace treaty or something similar, or better still, have had a totally different quest instead. Even the Civil War quests are exactly the same, just in different locations, depending on whether you're a Stormcloak or an Empire man.
But the biggest, and most serious flaw, and one which really had me grimacing and bouncing off walls, is the shocking linearity of it. Whoa! Linearity in a huge open world game! Yes sir! There is sir! And it's a particularly insidious type of linearity as well, because the huge overworld exists to deflect attention from it. It is this - imagine being in a room with 534 different exits. Now imagine every exit was a long, featureless passage with an occasional monster in it. Now imagine the passages only came in a handful of different styles and the styles dictated what type of monster could be found therein. That room is Skyrim and those passages are each a dungeon. Because yes, almost every single dungeon in Skyrim is basically a series of rooms with monsters in, a more powerful monster at the end, and a treasure chest whose contents are scaled to your level. And they're all looking the same. It's either an ancient burial crypt with undead in it, an icy cave inhabited by trolls or wild animals, a Dwemer ruin (these ones are usually the exception to the rule; they have - gasp - PUZZLES! in them occasionally) or a castle that's been taken over by bandits or renegade mages. Ugh. Bore-ring. And NONE of these places have branching paths either. The whole charm of dungeon-crawling in older RPGs and also tabletop games is that they often broke up the sword-swinging with traps, gates, challenges, and similar. Now I will make an exception from the Dragonborn DLC, which I am still yet to finish, but have just completed one dungeon which had a logic puzzle, followed by a jumping section, followed by a mathematical challenge (albeit a rather easy one), and even then had several branching paths (which many dungeons in the main game have not) and hidden bits with secrets in. My thoughts on playing this, though, were not "oohh, an interesting dungeon, how wholesome," but "why the christing wank couldn't Bethesda have put more parts like this in the main game?" I mean, if you're going to challenge the player to retrieve something from the bottom of a crypt or a ruin or whatever, then there has to be a compelling reason why some meathead with a sword hasn't gone and got it first and slain all the monsters to boot? If the gratingly repetitive city guards (mention "arrow in the knee" to me once more and I swear I will snap) are to be believed about how they used to be adventurers, why is everything just waiting for you to go and clean it out? If, as the song goes, "we're the children of Skyrim and we fight all our lives / and Sovngarde beckons, when each of us dies," then surely the locals would have already explored these places, being the daring, hardy folk they are.
Oh yes - crafting. It's way overpowered. And also, because random weapon and armour and kit drops are bound by your level, as is the number of plusses on the unique and legendary stuff, this means that there's no point doing the quests to get those items when in a few levels' time a random Draugr will drop a weapon that is strictly better. There are therefore one, possibly two, legendary artifacts that are worth getting out of bed for. One is the Ebony Mail, which is full plate that has a lot of plusses anyhow and boosts your stealth skills by exponential amounts and also emits toxic fumes that hurt enemies, and the other is the Black Star, an infinitely reusable soul gem.
I will give the game a lot of credit though for its ambition, its looks, its attention to detail visually and in terms of the art style. But it's... it's not really a role playing game, as there's no meaningful role for you to play and no characters that are more than cardboard cut outs and signposts, and the plots and suchlike are rather lacking.
I'd describe it as an exploration simulator. And it is fun. But it's so heavily flawed and suffers from a total lack of arsedness in other places that once the honeymoon period wears off, you see the linearity and repetitiveness and Skinner box tendencies exposed for what they are.