I know this isn’t the kind of content people sub to my channel for, but I have a lot of fun making these while GuP stuff is cooking in the background. Hope you enjoyed it regardless!

Skyrim is like a RPG Gateway drug. You get a taste for RPG mechanics, but once you try the real deal elsewhere, you can never go back or look at it from the same perspective.

Skyrim's award winning writing: Where you can parade around as an Officer of the Imperial Legion, join the Dark Brotherhood, kill the Emperor still as an Imperial Officer, not be recognised by the Penatus Oculatus or whatever it is despite single handedly ending Skyrim's civil war, and then after becoming the leader of the Dark Brotherhood and what should be one of the most famous Imperial Officers to ever live, go to Riften and have Maven Black Briar threaten you with the Dark brotherhood. YOUR Dark Brotherhood.

"Free unpaid labor shouldn't be required to unfuck a AAA game with millions of dollars behind it."  

That's it.  That's the perfect description of why Bethesda titles always wrankled my ass.  They rely on post-launch beta teams of developers to fix things for them.

Morrrowind is 22 years old, I'm sure 98% of the people that worked on that game either don't work in the industry any more or moved on, the notion that Bethesda still has these people on staff is ludicrous.

I'd be happy to forgive the flaws, except this game might be the most often released game in the modern era. PC, 3 generations of console, VR, and in a few years, inevitably mobile, countless special editions, DLC, and premium mods. The game has been beaten to a bloody pulp. If they want to keep cashing in on it, then it is naturally going to be a target for deep review and criticism by contemporary standards. Make a new damn game already.

In Neverwinter Nights the guards kind of ignored you, until you became the knight captain. Then they saluted you and their behaviour towards you changed.
In Skyrim my character became on officer in the imperial army and the guards told him no to lollygag.
Its little things like that, that take me out of the world.

One slight thing you messed up: The lines in Skyrim weren't recorded Alphabetically, that was Oblivion. The Voice Acting is so stiff in Skyrim because they didn't hire too many VAs, so a number of actors were recycled for MANY characters. I imagine its so stiff due to fatigue more than anything.

"All the power you amass is ultimately pointless" Is the biggest gripe I've ever had with Skyrim. It doesn't matter if you give me the title of Imperial Officer or Stormcloak General or Archmage of the College of Winterhold, or any of the other titles in the game, if I can't do anything meaningful with them. All they do in the game is give you a new outfit and/or a new room to store stuff in. That's it. No decisions on how to move armies around the world and fight the other faction, no teaching classes in the College, no sending the companions on quests like they sent you on when you started, just an outfit and/or a room. And that realization is when Skyrim died for me as a game all those years ago: the fact that it doesn't matter what I accomplish in the game, it's all pointless in the long run. Not just "political" power either, even the players actual combat power is pointless due to the incredibly flawed combat system as well.  Imagine if once you choose a guild to join you lock yourself out of all the other guilds (or most of them, at least) but once you start rising through the ranks in your chosen guild, an action that in this scenario takes longer than it actually does in Skyrim, you start getting more abilities within that guild. For instance, once you become a junior officer in one of the civil war factions you actually get a squad of your own who follow your orders, then when you become a senior officer you get a proper fort to do with as you please with more people under your command and the option to promote people to certain ranks to do certain things for your fort/castle. Then as you conclude your faction questline you get an entire town under your rule as well, with the ability to tax the people, train new recruits, build an army that isn't just 10 people, and continue sending your army on missions to help you while you the player can carry on doing whatever you want (even getting out of your chair and being able to follow them on the missions you assigned them and helping them as much or as little as you want). Wouldn't that be cool?
And the point about mods is accurate as well, I've tried modding the game into something more enjoyable to me but it's not like modding Gmod, where it's press a button wait a little bit and now there's a new mod installed that makes everything better, it's a whole process that can take days or weeks if you start having conflicts or other technical problems, all of which burns so much energy and drive to play the game that when I finally boot it up excited and ready, I play for an hour before uninstalling it for space so I can play other games. So I've stopped playing Skyrim altogether, but am happy to keep watching videos on it.

Ahh another hour long video on why the game I keep playing sucks, and I'm going to watch all of it and proceed to spend the next 72 hours perfectly crafting an intricate and well balanced modded Skyrim experience only to stop playing an hour into my playthrough.

"Skyrim is the Imagine Dragons of videogames" is the most accurate description I've ever heard.

When you first play it you are blown away by the grandness and seeming complexity (ie listening Radioactive for the first time or playing Skyrim as a 14 year old), but as time goes on you slowly realize that is just a clunky, surface level one-trick-pony where everything is just the same bland experience repeated ad nauseam .

Skyrim is simply one of the games of all time. The writing was written, the visuals were designed, and the characters were speaking. Truly one of the games ever made

My biggest complaint is that you can basically do anything, and nobody really reacts. You can be a dark brotherhood speaker, archmage of the college, leader of the companions, a jarl of every district, a high ranking government official, theives guild leader, master vampire, and dragonborn all in one playthrough. It really breaks the immersion for me.

My ONLY critique is that you attribute Todd Howard to Bethesda's problem when the devil is most assuredly Pete Hines. A high ranking Zenimax man and also a writer for Bethesda. Frequently he ignores criticism of the games writing by saying that fans think too much and that it should be accessible to everyone, including women (Women cant enjoy deep writing or gameplay? Now THERE'S a problematic statement)
I directly attribute the fall of Bethesda's quality to Hines. And the devil's greatest trick was convincing the world it was Todd instead. Todd's facial expressions in presentations seem.. hesitant. Like he doesn't want to say what he's about to say.

There was nothing more entertaining than finding a mod that no only turned off the main quest but also allowed me to be a traveling merchant in a cart making my loop around Skyrim and selling wares at far more economical prices than those skooma loving cats.

And the ouroboros of suck continues with Starfield. They learned nothing.

"You're not being sold an experience, but an expectation of one" is such a good description of Skyrim, and modern Bethesda.  Honestly sums up my feelings on the game perfectly.

I've always been annoyed at Skyrims lack of actual role playing. They've got a bunch of really cool races that you can play as, but it makes no real difference in how the world itself treats you. Same thing with joining the different groups and factions, except for who you side with in the Civil War. I want stuff like cities not letting you in right away if you play as a Khajitt, or the Companions refusing to let you join if you are part of the thieves guild.

I know they had stuff like that in Daggerfall. It's too bad because I don't think that Bethesda is willing to put in that kind of work ever again. It seems like all they care about is how to simplify everything and how to charge money for user made mods.

Skyrim fan boys/girls rarely admit that this was the first game in history to turn dragon fights into just another tedious chore.

Something really disappointing about Skyrim is how little alive it feels.

You mentioned how little the civil fucking war that is waging affects every day people.

The game lets you free a terrorist leader from the dungeons of Markath and people in the city comment on it, but absolutely nothing changes.

Apart from one specific group all random groups of fornsworn still attack the player on sight, even after freeing their King from prison.

The people in Markath bitch and whine about the roads not being save for travel anymore, but apparently Markath has no shortages resulting from this.

Nothing happens. The Jarl doesn't care.

The world is static and dumb and boring.

In the game Gothic 1 during an event in the story the mine that was supplying the old camp with magical ore which they needed to trade for food and other goods with the outside world collapsed.

So the leader of the camp went crazy, murdered all of the mages in his camp and moved his warriors to raid the other mine to reestablish control over resources.

SHIT. HAPPENED.  And it had consequences.

If you choose to help Madanach escape from the Markath Dungeon the Jarl should have his guards attack you on sight.

Fornsworn should not attack you after rescuing their King from the prison and there should be more quests that allow you to retake Markath for the Bretons.

The Jarl should take his forces and try to kill Madanach or at least put him back in prison.

There should be world events where you travel around the area around Markath and trade convoys are attacked and looted by fornsworn.

The city should be cut off from outside trade, unable to trade their silver for food they should be starving.