On what's wrong with Skyrim

Metacritic has Skyrim at 96/100 and the broadsheets give it gushing 5 star reviews. Despite this, in the blogosphere many commentators have concentrated on its faults. Nils in particular using two posts to outline the many issues that detract from his enjoyment of the game, yet in his third stating that Skyrim could be possibly the best RPG of the last ten years.

Can a game perceived as this good, really have this many problems and still be worthy of 5 stars? And does one overriding positive factor outweigh all the negatives?

So lets go through those negatives in the order of the most jarring as i have found them. (applies to the PC version)

1. Its a lazy port from the console.

The menu system is designed for console controllers and is not particularly intuitive or optimized for PC users. Whether its my grounding in MMO's expecting certain ways of doing things, but Bethesda failed to take advantage of the mouse and keyboard. The default mouse sensitivity is also set to a bizarre setting and actually persists in the initial game launch menus. Buried in the manual is a way to hotkey different favourite items, but the default settings expects you to turn the combat in game into a series of events broken by the pause button as you switch from ranged to melee, or stop to drink a healing potion mid-fight.

2. Animations, glitches and jumping.

I personally cannot believe they allowed the game to be released with such a poorly done jumping mechanic. Whether you can jump up onto something in front of you is a complete lottery, more often than not landing on the side of it, then slowly sliding back down. This has lead me to a general strategy of running, hammering the jump key and shouting at the screen to scale anything in game. The jumping animation itself is also woeful, feeling more like you've temporarily strapped a jet-pack to yourself as you slide, knees bent about against the scenery.

3. Skilling up, gaming it and leveling to become weaker.

Is this an issue? Its easy not to be aware of it with no real stats or numbers floating up screen a la MMOs. It seems the only reason to level up, being as it is unavoidable is make sure as you level that your ability to kill monsters increases with it.

I'm still on the fence on this issue. Its not as if most MMOs handle this particularly well either. In Wow or Rift, a linear questing path gives you on level mobs where the actual difficulty of mob killing never really changes. You become strong enough to kill the next set of monsters.

Of course where Rift and Wow often get this wrong is in allowing you to outlevel the content and then have the player choose to either skip quests to keep to the experience/hr sweetspot or continue to clear content that becomes increasingly too easy.
In Skyrim it appears that there is no way to make a particular quest easier. (other than to restart on an easier difficulty setting) If you find yourself stuck in a dungeon, abandon it for now, level up some more and come back, you'll only find that the mobs have leveled with you. You could concentrate on leveling something combat orientated, but this would still affect your overall level and this appears to be the scaling on which the mobs are based.

4. Stilted NPCs, 'ask a stupid question' dialogue.

Bethesda seem to have created animations for NPCs when walking around, but as soon as you stop them to talk or they talk amongst themselves they become like statues with only lip movement actually indicating who is speaking. I actually spent a large proportion of time in dialogue with three hooded characters talking to the wrong acolyte instead of the leader by mistake, until i realized the second expressionless figure was who i should be looking at.

Its very easy too, to pan the camera to an NPC to initiate conversations and have them spend the next few minutes talking to the back of your head. Its a shame in both these areas that they didn't create more animations and gestures while in conversation and a simple auto-adjusting rotation to have the player talk face to face with the NPC, but i don't perceive this as game breaking.

On the 'ask a stupid' question issue. You at least often have the choice of responses and i personally accept this as a limitation of the genre.

5. Inventory management issues.

Unlike many MMO's which give mobs a loot table from which to generate items for loot, their clothes often being mysteriously unlootable. Every humanoid npc will cough up their full set of armor, weapons, coins and potions and its very easy to hit your burden threshold. This happens right at the start of the game if you loot everything on the way out of Helgen. The first time you'll have to sell any of it is a walk to Riverwood. Often in game I've found myself trying to knockout a bunch of similarly located quests and having to throw away valuable loot in order to carry on, being miles away from a trader. There aren't many general traders either, unlike in Wow where any vendor/trainer/landlord will buy all of your junk no matter what it is, most vendors will only trade items of the type that they sell. Is this annoying? Yes. Game breaking? No. Immersion breaking? Definitely not.

And i think this is key.
None of these faults break immersion. The open world exploration, the not knowing what you will come across and the temptation to then go and explore it. The sheer beauty of the landscape (its almost impossible to take a bad screenshot). The immersion you feel in your character and the world...If you're coming from an MMO like Wow or Rift these things are what's been missing if you've ever felt that nagging dissatisfaction. It is something i've always felt playing Rift. The lack of desire to read quest texts because frankly it adds nothing to the experience compared to knowing the reason for every quest in Skyrim.

The rewards for exploration compared to the on rails leveling path. Ok in Rift there are mountain cairns to find, but these simply play out as just another quest to be done at the optimum time for the level of the reward and this linearity persists all the way to level cap and beyond.

The music. Compared to Rift's synthesised short attempts to create atmosphere, the music in Skyrim is lush, memorable and evocative. A comparison of the two games shows just how important music is to game immersion. I feel virtually no immersion in Rift. The only zone where i even begin to feel it is in Silverwood where some of the music matches the setting and you for once have the feeling of a fantasy world to discover and enjoy.

So, with Bethesda managing to get these key things right. The things that many MMO players have been crying out for in their themepark, Big mac and fries, empty calorie MMOs, this much in itself is worth five stars, regardless of any faults. In fact i wonder just how many more faults this game could have before i could stop loving it?