Skyrim from Like/Hate

[Jonathan Meer]

I think a lot of the fun of Bethesda's games actually result from their being terrible. Most of the times people talk about the fun times, it's about the hilarious bugs like people being mad and unkillable, then being able to start conversations with them where they seem to be totally unaware you were fighting. Like how you can put pots on people's heads and they don't give a fuck. Like how you can glitch and fly around being a god, that kind of thing. So it doesn't surprise me that people enjoy the games, it just boggles my mind that reviewers rate them highly while marking down other games for needing more time and polish despite them being essentially fun, just like Bethesda's games.

As before, because of ambition. Considering how many things the Elder Scrolls games let you DO, it's not surprising that they come with their set of bugs. We have a right to expect a game to be reasonably free of bugs, but we scale that expectation according to the complexity of the game. We would expect, for example, a casino-style game to be completely free of bugs, as the gameplay is extremely simple.

Bethesda frequently releases games with some of the most complex gameplay around. When they plan their games, and sketch out what they want to include, their list is longer than anyone else's.

One of the elements you mentioned as annoying is the fact that NPCs don't respond to items being placed on them (such as buckets over a person's head, or bananas stacked up on their back as they sleep). This annoyance is a direct outflow from the simple fact that Skyrim does include the ability to manipulate items in an external world that act and react relatively normally. How many other games have this? How many other games carry it to the same extent, with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of items in the game world, from forks stacked up on a china cabinet to a daedra lord's mace.

We expect a certain amount of polish from all game producers. That amount of polish is usually enough to cover the entire game. Bethesda simply makes a bigger game than anyone else, and the amount of polish we reasonably expect isn't sufficient to cover the whole damn thing. If you want your games technically perfect, then don't play Skyrim. I, for one, am able to appreciate it as a genuine achievement in spite of its technical flaws.