With Skyrim you don't get the feeling of progression because everything is leveled to you, you never find any interesting or meaningful loot as you soon level past it. No armor or weapon in the game is worth a shit because the player can make better equipment. You can breeze through Skyrim at level one the game punishes you if you dare level anything other than combat skills by placing damage-sponge enemies everywhere.Antsan wrote:I think the "lack of skills" is not really a hindrance to good mods. How do more skills help with modding interesting content or mechanics? To me it seems they just cut out a lot of superficial skills that were basically just padding. I do kind of miss Medium Armor and Acrobatics, but that's it. The rest of the skills that were gutted are filler.Vyrukas wrote: The problem with Skyrim and Fallout4 is that they're both simplified and marketed towards a more casual audience to such a degree that making interesting additions is very hard to do. In Skyrim you still have to deal with the limited amount of attack animations the game which prevents adding new kinds of weapons you also have to deal with the completely gutted magic system and the lack of skills.
Regarding animations: Don't know, don't care. The same goes for new kinds of weapons. Having mods for weapons seems kind of… boring. See later.
The loss of magic engineering is kind of sad, yes. I think they abandoned it because it isn't that interesting the way it was in Morrowind and making it interesting is kind of… hard. Actually, the alchemy system suffers from the same problem. Simply matching up strings doesn't seem like alchemy at all. Experimentation is absolutely straightforward, and that problem is not new in Skyrim.
The enchanting system in Skyrim makes more sense to me. Having to destroy some magic weapon to then realize that the weapon you are going to create yourself is going to be inferior… That's hardly "dumbing down".
With Morrowind you're just some poor fuck thrown off a ship with a post-it note and a package and told to get your ass to balmora. There are incredibly dangerous areas for low level characters, there are spells you can't cast, and the best equipment is either hidden, locked behind quests, or guarded by a high level enemy. There is a sense of progress from going from a level 1 weakling to a level 50 Sword-Wizard. Getting a daedric artifact at level one in Skyrim is useless because it will be worthless in a few hours, while in Morrowind it will retain it's usefulness throughout the entire playthrough. Going through a dangerous ruin to discover an enchanted unique warhammer makes you feel pretty good.
As for the skills, I'd honestly prefer a system sort of like Oblivion's were there are tiers of special perks that provide additional utility and uniqueness to skills, like the waterwalking ability you get when you get 100 acrobatics. The magic system shouldn't have been pared down because it had amazing utility that allowed you to tackle a vast range of situations in differing ways.
For the record, I don't think Skyrim is a bad game. I think it's half of good game with a lot of rushed elements.