DANIEL GOODMAN
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Opinions are opinions I guess. Personally I find a fantasy setting extremely immersive and fun. And while a post-apocalyptic wasteland should have been extremely appealing to me, it didn't quite play the way I thought it would. If you are going to make human survival and nature a theme in your rpg, social interaction has to be very good. But I found that Bethesda didn't really address the simplicity of interaction that was so criticized in Oblivion. It was BECAUSE I could go around exploring the lands if cyrodill for hours without having to interact with blabbering mindless NPCs that I was so immersed. Consequently, I played Oblivion much more Fallout 3, and I wasn't particularly impressed by New Vegas. And having hostile creatures that you can't interact with (other than chopping them up) is a part of that. Sure, you might wonder why the hell there is a cave full of trolls or goblins but thats the beauty of it. Magic may be a convenient excuse for the existence of wonderous creatures but it really allows you to carve your own story, use your imagination. Just because I know why super-mutants are roaming the wasteland doesn't mean that killing them is any more fun.
I think that out of the myriad of problems there were in Oblivion (and even Fallout) such as NPC interaction and combat (among others), you chose to extensively criticize elements of the game that weren't really problems at all. Moreover, they were things you just can't fix, because they are really fundamental to the fantasy and lore of the Elder Scrolls universe. Things like the fantasy environment and history of the elder scrolls games. I personally think that Bethesda did amazing things with the genre. And there is always more potential to be unlocked. Lots of us enjoy being transported into paintings, fighting our way through ghost ships, trying to retrieve magical rings that weigh a ton from the bottom of a water well. These are things that, mind you, can't really be done in non-fantasy settings. There are so many creative applications of a fantasy setting. In Skyrim Bethesda really seems to be improving on all the things that made Oblivion a less than perfect game. And there were a lot of things wrong with Oblivion. They can't, however, change what makes an Elder Scrolls game an Elder Scrolls game. This article should really be called "Things I don't like about the fantasy genre" or "Why the fantasy genre is antiquated and boring". For many of us gamers, the genre is alive and well. I just find it kind of odd that when reading an article that is headlined with "Concerns going into Skyrim" that the author chose to take issue with things that I (for the most part) don't find concerning at all.
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