Tomorrow will mark a full week since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released and we will have our first weekly view at worldwide sales. So far "Skyrim" has became the year's second fastest selling videogame behind, ofcourse, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. "MW3" smashed all sales records on the first day and became the highest-grossing entertainment launch ever, totalling over $400 million in the first 24 hours alone. Skyrim, on the other hand, sold over 3.4 million copies at retail - which does not include digital sales - on the first day and that number is closer to 7 million now. The vast majority of sales were on consoles as only 14% of sales were on the PC platform. So, how good are these for PC figures? It's difficult to measure success as a game on the PC because of the sheer amount of piracy, and digital sales often don't immediately contribute to initial sales figures. However, online activity has been promising with Steam publishing that Skyrim set a record with over 280,000 concurrent players, blowing away all of the competition.
Despite the relative success in sales, there is another side to the story. Modern Warfare 3 broke all sales records despite poor reviews and widespread criticism. Many reviewers claim that the latest instalment in the Call of Duty franchise is a step backwards, offering nothing we haven't seen before and more of the same - explosions, linearity, crass humour, explosions, weak story, repetitive and more explosions. PC Gamer said in their review: "Modern Warfare 3 is linear, badly written and one note. It’s still, from a certain angle, regressive." Many see it as a glorified DLC and there have been some circumstances of player's noticing entire structures copied & pasted from previous titles: source. MW3 is currently scoring 80/100 on MetaCritic but it's worth noting that the User Review box shows a score of 2.0.
And as for Skyrim, despite it undoubtedly being a magnificent game, developer and publisher Bethesda Softworks has largely ignored the needs of the PC platform, rushing out a poorly optimised console port, complete with clunky controls and unintuitive menus. Some have claimed that Skyrim boasts "the worst screen in the history of User Interfaces". It's a shame really, considering that Bethesda's early success came on the PC platform and by releasing such a shoddy port they are ignoring their loyal fanbase. Jim Rossignol from Rock Paper Shotgun perhaps summed it up best when he said:
There is a much wider debate to be had here, but the facts are that the two most successful games of the year have glaring flaws which the mass consumer market evidentially no longer cares about.
Despite the relative success in sales, there is another side to the story. Modern Warfare 3 broke all sales records despite poor reviews and widespread criticism. Many reviewers claim that the latest instalment in the Call of Duty franchise is a step backwards, offering nothing we haven't seen before and more of the same - explosions, linearity, crass humour, explosions, weak story, repetitive and more explosions. PC Gamer said in their review: "Modern Warfare 3 is linear, badly written and one note. It’s still, from a certain angle, regressive." Many see it as a glorified DLC and there have been some circumstances of player's noticing entire structures copied & pasted from previous titles: source. MW3 is currently scoring 80/100 on MetaCritic but it's worth noting that the User Review box shows a score of 2.0.
And as for Skyrim, despite it undoubtedly being a magnificent game, developer and publisher Bethesda Softworks has largely ignored the needs of the PC platform, rushing out a poorly optimised console port, complete with clunky controls and unintuitive menus. Some have claimed that Skyrim boasts "the worst screen in the history of User Interfaces". It's a shame really, considering that Bethesda's early success came on the PC platform and by releasing such a shoddy port they are ignoring their loyal fanbase. Jim Rossignol from Rock Paper Shotgun perhaps summed it up best when he said:
There is a much wider debate to be had here, but the facts are that the two most successful games of the year have glaring flaws which the mass consumer market evidentially no longer cares about.
Playing Onimusha 4 on PS2 currently! :-D
The 3rd part was pretty nice gameplay wise, but I found it so strange to control Jean Reno, think he didn't fit in at all!
The 4th part is just too much of all imo, way too much to upgrade/chose from and hell of a weird and always changing story. Really prefered the more linear earlier games. Still gotta finish it !
Oblivion was the first mainstream TES as it was the showcase for what the (back then recently released) XBOX360 can do. That helped it a lot.
And now here we are 5 years later and Skyrim is this massive success (if you consider the rather small target group due to RPG, no key for online play, ...).
Just goes to show what series should actually be and/or become. TES is one of the very few franchises that stayed true to its identity in order to go big.
Oh and on account of the only (repeated) critisim ive heard, the UI:
all TES games had horrible menues. I actually think Skyrim has taken a step forward, but it was tiny and still messed up. Minor draw back tho and i have to admit that i actually love scrolling thru my items.
wat? no icons is a good interface? font size aimed at people sitting in their couch playing on a tv? a normal drag and drop interface like diablo 2 would have made sense ... You do get used to the console UI, its even doable once you get the hang of hotkeying and other small tricks, though its not replacement for a decent mouse UI ...
I suggest you subscribe to this guy, has some videos already with cool features for skyrim, check out his channel :)
you can change controls like in every games :D
it's easy to unlock door o: ?
I admit that I did not try to make many efforts, but I didn't like the general pattern: walking through corridors, facing two or three enemies, starting randomly to strike him and your teammate is finally the one who finishes him, then you rob the dead, pick random things (you don't know if you can carry everything, what use you can make of the items), then starting to walk again till the next enemy... Yet again, I know I did not put much time into getting used to it ;)
YOU HAD THE TIME BEFORE NOW ITS TOO FUCKIN LATE
btw you cant go deeper in the interface its a flatshit for consoledick
I guess Oblivion was also a nasty piece of shit to use at first but now mods have made it quite amazing, so I can only hope the same will happen for Skyrim. Already something that's very useful for me is a mod that displays my local time in the loading screen. I've missed less stuff thanks to this very simple addition :p
But looks like we'll have to wait till the creator kit gets released before we get to see some really great mods.
No more saving and opening the load menu to know the time! Using this one as well.
but Skyrim is awesome! Epic world, dangerous enemies and cool story :) And imo UI is good. U can easy find everything u want.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mi6pg/skyrim_fantasy_warfare_3/
Completely forgettable amongst the wealth of positives the game has
i've had issues with it randomly crashing (just closes itself after loading screens every so often, so i have to save before i go through pretty much any door) and purple trees also, but that's usually fine after restart
i don't know if others feel the same way but i always expect bugs with games as expansive as the elder scrolls series, so i kind of put up with it
Shoddy and rushed console port? Not acceptable!
Really bugged me how inconvenient it is to switch spells. You can't switch left and right spells without either hotkeying them or equipping/unequipping a weapon. Lots of things dont/didn't even work properly with the mouse. I don't mind the quest bugs, the game is so huge. But I hate how they dumb things down to make it viable for console and then they can't even get it right for PC.
I still like the game, but mainly because of its massive content, open world and promise of future mods. The random quests and discoveries are actually the most fun, because the choices you make throughout the game don't really affect anything.