Hating on Skyrim. What is it with some people?

• Posted by Paul November 24, 2011 - 592 views

  

  I took a trip to the official Bethesda forums in search of ideas for discussion topics or blog posts

  Big mistake 

  Page after page of threads complaining, whining and bitching about the things that should have been in the game, should have been different or were better in Oblivion / Morrowind / Daggerfall (delete as applicable). Here's a selection of titles:

  • "I HATE, HATE, HATE what Bethesda did to this game"
  • "Anyone else bored already? Going back to Oblivion"
  • "Worst lag I've ever seen"
  • "Sorry but these graphics are TERRIBLE"
  • and my personal favourite... "Class Action Law Suit against Bethesda...NOW!!!"

  Why do people feel the need to populate the official forums (which despite being 'official' are almost certainly hardly ever read by anyone high up at Bethesda) with this kind of stuff? 

  Picking through the wreckage, it seems there are - very broadly - three kinds of issues:

  1. There are those who convinced themselves before release that this was going to be the most awesome and incredible and - above all else - perfect game EVER. Every feature that was ever mentioned or hinted was expected to be perfectly implemented and ground-breaking in its scope. In short, they got carried away by the hype....

  To be fair, and I confess to a slight pang of guilt over this, The Skyrim Blog might have been some small part of the hype machine. But, you see, the thing is I never allowed myself to get too carried away. I never expected companions to be much more than 'meat shields' or pack mules. I never expected children to be more than a bit of eye candy around towns. I never expected marriage to be much more than a gimmick. So I'm not that disappointed when those things turned out to be the case. I guess that's what 20 years of waiting for, and then playing, video games has done for my cynical side.

  2. Then we have a whole bunch of people who are complaining about so-called 'missing' features. Usually its prefaced with some sort of whine about how Todd Howard has lied, cheated and deceived the entire world. One example was someone complaining that Pete Hines 'lied' about treasure maps being in the game because they had 'beaten Skyrim' and not found any. 

  Well, here's the truth of it buddy. If you hadn't blasted through the game in 20 hours, so you could brag to your mates that you had 'beaten' the game, then you might have done a little exploration and - hey - you might have found a treasure map or two. I've barely left Whiterun Hold and I've already found two, in fact I found one before I even got to Riverwood! 

  I blame the short attention span games with their 4 hour single player story lines that people expect to 'beat' on the day of release before moving onto their next game.

  3. The third category is people who have experienced glitches, issues and crashes. Obviously one has to have a certain sympathy with people who have had this. Patches are on their way to begin to address these things, so we'll have to see whether those will improve things.

  I know that as a PC player most (not all) of the issues that happen are actually not to do with game itself, but with particular complexities to do with the specific combination of parts that go to make up a PC. And, of course, a lot of it is down to drivers, firewalls, messed up hard drives and a range of other 'issues' that can be fixed with a bit of care, time and common sense. Speaking purely personally, I spent a whole morning making sure that my PC was ready for Skyrim. Yes its boring to do all the updates, defrag and other 'housekeeping' - but it has led to a crash-free, glitch free game for me, so it was time well spent...

  Is Skyrim 100% perfect? No, of course it isn't. It would be silly to expect that it would have been. That's why I don't mind discussion here about its shortcomings. As I've said many times we are fans of Skyrim here, but not 'fanboys'...

  But is Skyrim an ambitious, engaging and wonderful achievement? Absolutely it is. 

  Patches, DLC and Mods will make the game even better than it is now, and it will be interesting to see how things pan out in coming months and years. But right now I'm amazed and a bit stunned by the outpouring of vitriol towards Skyrim on Bethesda forums. Most of it is immature, overstated and, in many cases, just plain wrong...

  What is it with some people?