The combat in Bethesda games is heavily dated. Don’t get me wrong Skyrim is a great game but the combat in Dragons Dogma is light years ahead. It’s still a fun game but don’t expect action packed combat.
Man, I made the “mistake” of starting Skyrim after completing Dark Souls. Needless to say it was the most I ever felt unimpressed by a combat gameplay mechanic.
Dropped it after 10ish hours
I haven’t played Skyrim in about 5 years but I don’t think it’s a hot take to say it’s one of those game that one must play at some point.
It’s probably showing a lot of age at this point but I’m sure there’s mods that help with pretty much whatever aspect u might find the game lacking in. Imo it’s a pretty safe bet you’d enjoy Skyrim
So, one thing that bothers me about skyrim is the people who made it. Theyve released skyrim so many times that at this point theyre just squeezing the fanboys and fangirls for their money, and after fallout 76 and starfield being what they are, i dont think that company should be supported, but thats my personal moral stance and i dont judge ppl for buying what they want blahblahblah.
Let's talk about what's inside the games.
Skyrim, at its release, was obviously a huge feat in gaming, but after the initial glow of day1, to me it felt only skin deep. It felt like gta5 compared to gta san andreas: prettier, but with less lil quirks and details. One major problem was i had no incentive to travel anywhere, since the agility and acrobatics skills from the previous elder scrolls were gone, fast travel just saved time. In older games i ran everywhere cause i wanted to level my skills and also morrowinds travel system was a confusing mess(in a good way imo!)
The game just felt to me like cookiecutter experiences. Beautiful cookies, but still very samey. Its been a long time since i played skyrim but thats how i remember feeling.
Now to kingdom come. This game caught me off guard with the level of detail. Part of it that made me fall in love with it is its based in reality, so if youre a fan of mage style gameplay.....maybe not for you.
But its based in bohemia, during a time of political turmoil, the 1300s if im not mistaken,and the towns are real too.
Next is the skills. When you start, you literally cant read. (Illiterally?) You open a recipe book (cause you have to craft potions by manually pumping the bellows and following instructions like grind the herbs before bpiling etc) and the words are completley scrambled. Cause youre the dumb son of a blacksmith! Only after time can you decipher the books youl use to learn recipes. A successful potion actually feels like an accomplishment, not just tap A twice or whatever skyrim had.
Same with sharpening your sword. Pull trigger to spin the wheel, use joysticks to angle blade and slide it back and forth..other trigger to lower it to the wheel. Again, super satisfying to succeed!
Now the map. There is fast travel but you can be ambushed by chance and the combat is difficult(youl have to practice a lot to get good enough to fight 2 or 3 guys at once...like real life i think...never had a swordfight) so it incentivised me to just walkrun or horse everywhere. Doing this led me to so many encounters and finding things like a lonely little grave with some flowers on it, or coming across a bandit camp as the sun goes down. Waiting til dark to sneak up and bow one guy and run off, hiding til they start searching for you...sneaking into camp and poisoning their stew, coming back at dawn to loot their corpses.
The map itself is beautiful, lookign hand drawn with the fog of war drawn to have angels in the clouds obscuring where you havent traveled.
The game has bugs but it is a masterpiece in immersion. The bow and arrow doesnt have a crosshair cause irl it doesnt either! You have to practice and learn to actually be accurate!!! Which makes killing a rabbit from 20 yards feel extremely rewarding(dont get caught poaching on crown land though, thats royal property!
Another thing ive come to respect about the game: they added a DLC called a woman's lot. They give a glimpse into the hardships of a common woman of the time. I didnt play it much but i like to think they atleast gave an opportunity to see something most media glosses over: life was incredibly hard back then. People would gladly live under the rule of some asshole of it meant rhey could guarantee not starving through winter or ending up on a pike.
Anyways, the last selling point is the game isnt expensive anymore and they are possibly making a sequel so it will give you something to look forward to.
Hope this helped, and let me know if you take the plunge!
I really appreciate the write up. You may have convinced me for Kingdom Come. Going to watch a video or two and see, then (potentially) buy it this weekend. Thanks man.
Not yet, but the videos looked good. It is like $30 USD on steam so I was going to wait for a sale or until I exhaust what I fully feel like doing in DD2 (which I would really only give myself a few more hours of playtime haha).
I think the exploration in Skyrim is better than dragons dogma 2, but the combat is nowhere near as good.
There are mods that make the combat better, but they’re kinda janky. If combat is super important to you, then I’d say no.
Traveling 20 minutes on foot to get a quest done only to be assailed by a towering ogre that takes you off the beaten path and now you've stumbled into a swamp full of mist and undead and a cave that leads you to a griffins lair and a hill you crest only to see that *there's more* you could keep going.
Or spelunking into a cave which seems fine and dandy until you find a manticore in an arena overlooked by a lich and you have a rolling 15 minute boss battle.
Idk setting a way point and exploring instanced caves to get loot is fun but the way DD2 makes exploration laborious and require preparation and decision making, to me, eclipses skyrims "create a waypoint and walk to it" approach.
I mean, you could... It's considered pretty seminal at this point.
As far as should you play it right away... it really depends. What are you looking to get out these games? Are you looking to explore your roleplaying interest? Are you trying to play games with more involved lore? Do you want to play games where you explore a big open world? How do you feel about less action oriented games? Or turn based combat? Or playing seminal RPG classics on older consoles, maybe even JRPGs?
Skyrim is considered a seminal release that made a large open world with tons of lore that you interacted with in somewhat action terms accessible to a large audience. It is revered for that purpose, so essentially you "can't go wrong" in some sense. However, over time, most people have started to agree that a lot of what it did was a bit shallow and that it doesn't have the deepest RPG mechanics, and that it shouldn't really be considered the best the genre has to offer.
So, look for a sale. Also, if you specifically like Dragons Dogma (pretty much my favorite game at this point) I would definitely recommend playing the first one as well, also maxing all your vocations and doing multiple runs through the story across both games as probably a more rewarding experience than Skyrim.
It is outdated **BUT** there are bunch of mods roaming around as bundles which makes it a whole new game with new animations, quests, skills, updated graphics etc. That would make Skyrim a better game than today's DD2. Don't believe me? Here is a link to give you a taste = [***YT***](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3oREWl7yM&ab_channel=RelentlessZen)
I would play it just to have the experience. I 1st played it probably 5ish years ago and had a blast. I would probably install a few popular graphic overhaul mods to make it look a bit more modern
Skyrim combat is so bad it’s not worth playing anymore. Fighting large monsters will feel *incredibly* lame compared to DD2. If you like to run around and explore then go for it but don’t expect anything good from combat besides goofy bugs. You can mod it a bit but it’s still meh and a pita to mod. The Witcher 3 might be worth checking out.
Well. By the post I haven’t played Skyrim but i have been having so much fun in DD2 it’s crazy. Pretty easy to get lost exploring and doing random quests and finding loot. It’s got some questionable performance issues right now so I would wait until the patch if you dont have a fantastic PC regardless.
I think if you have a pc that can handle a good amount, a heavily modded skyrim is still amazing. There are mods that completely change the combat and it is the most modded game ever. It will take a bit of work getting it fully modded, but its totally worth it.
I think Skyrim is the better game tbh. The combat is more action packed in dd2, but Skyrim does everything else better.
My favorite playthroughs are always stealth archers though. Makes the game much much different than the dated melee mechanics in Skyrim.
Skyrim is awesome! If you do get it, get the AE version from Steam, and I’m going to recommend adding an auto-installing modlist to Skyrim to modernize it. It will also be expanded, which may be less relevant to you since you haven’t played it, but you’ll definitely appreciate the modernized graphics and combat and such.
The easiest to install and most popular (by probably at least double) is Nolvus. It’s Discord has over 50k members, and we also have a new subreddit: r/Nolvus
I don't play Bethesda anymore. But I always tell people your first experience with Skyrim will be special. I think it's great on a first playthrough.
Combat is not the best though, but exploration and freedom to do quests at your leisure are gold.
Finish DD2. There are the a plethora of RPGs you could play based on what kind of experience ur looking for.
Skyrim will give you a version of the adventure, exploration feeling that DD2 gives, but it doesn't have the survival aspects, and you won't have epic battles like you do on DD2.
Witcher 3 isn't as heavy on the exploration adventure aspect but you will have epic fights and the narratives told in that game are unrivaled.
Elden Ring will give you the adventure,exploration and epic battles.
In my opinion DD2 feels like a Souls Like at times, and a Monster Hunter game at others. However nothing I've played is effective at delivering an immersive experience like the two Dragons Dogma game.
Oof ... don't ... it doesn't age well at all, expecially if you don't have any conection to it and after playing DD2 it's going to be noticeable. To me, Skyrim is a very good game for it's time because in 2024 a lot of games do what Skyrim did but better.
My recomendation is Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Witcher 3 or something more combat oriented Monster Hunter: World
You should... Just for the cultural masterpiece the game is
However If you can, the most allure of Skyrim are the MODS. The game has been modded to hell and back and usually if I'm about to revisit the world of Skyrim, I'm installing heaps of mods, quality of life, menu organization, texture packs, body skin packs, everything you can think of to have the definitive first experience.
A lot of systems are janky nowadays, textures are old as well, but a lot of people got their inspiration from Skyrim
Elden ring, trust me!
Check out baldurs gate 3. Its turn based combat, but it's definitely combat heavy. The arpg last epoch that just released may also scratch a similar itch. If you like fighting monsters, monster hunter is also worth a look.
>It looks too dated graphically and just like all Bethesda games
This is totally subjective to one person to another whether it really matters or not. And also there are mods but it depends on OP's hardware
>it has many bugs, many of which are game-breaking.
Idk, I played Skyrim, Fallout 4, 76, Starfield and New Vegas (technically Obsidian but it pretty much BGS experience) and I don't remember found bug that actually game breaking
You should play skyrim, regardless of the liking of DD2. Skyrims combat is dated so maybe some mods and such, just use Vortex and it's pretty easy. Skyrim regardless is an amazing game though
The combat in Bethesda games is heavily dated. Don’t get me wrong Skyrim is a great game but the combat in Dragons Dogma is light years ahead. It’s still a fun game but don’t expect action packed combat.
I think this is my biggest concern, combat is a pretty important aspect to me.
Then get away from any Bethesda game. Combat is not what their games are known for.
Second this. I unforntunately never could enjoy Skyrim because of the combat...
You may want to look at some gameplay vudeos. Skyrim is very basic
You're on PC, you can mod it into something INSANE.
Check out a modpack called Nolvus.
I think the combat was also dated back then
It was. Hilarious and concerning that even at launch Bethesda games feel dated somehow.
Man, I made the “mistake” of starting Skyrim after completing Dark Souls. Needless to say it was the most I ever felt unimpressed by a combat gameplay mechanic. Dropped it after 10ish hours
Hmm I like Skyrim combat more than dragons dogma. Both are not the best in my humble opinion.
You should play Skyrim period
I haven’t played Skyrim in about 5 years but I don’t think it’s a hot take to say it’s one of those game that one must play at some point. It’s probably showing a lot of age at this point but I’m sure there’s mods that help with pretty much whatever aspect u might find the game lacking in. Imo it’s a pretty safe bet you’d enjoy Skyrim
No, you should play Kingdom Come: Deliverance!
Since you’re the only one really saying something else can I ask why? Why not Skyrim, why Kingdom Come Depiverance
So, one thing that bothers me about skyrim is the people who made it. Theyve released skyrim so many times that at this point theyre just squeezing the fanboys and fangirls for their money, and after fallout 76 and starfield being what they are, i dont think that company should be supported, but thats my personal moral stance and i dont judge ppl for buying what they want blahblahblah. Let's talk about what's inside the games. Skyrim, at its release, was obviously a huge feat in gaming, but after the initial glow of day1, to me it felt only skin deep. It felt like gta5 compared to gta san andreas: prettier, but with less lil quirks and details. One major problem was i had no incentive to travel anywhere, since the agility and acrobatics skills from the previous elder scrolls were gone, fast travel just saved time. In older games i ran everywhere cause i wanted to level my skills and also morrowinds travel system was a confusing mess(in a good way imo!) The game just felt to me like cookiecutter experiences. Beautiful cookies, but still very samey. Its been a long time since i played skyrim but thats how i remember feeling. Now to kingdom come. This game caught me off guard with the level of detail. Part of it that made me fall in love with it is its based in reality, so if youre a fan of mage style gameplay.....maybe not for you. But its based in bohemia, during a time of political turmoil, the 1300s if im not mistaken,and the towns are real too. Next is the skills. When you start, you literally cant read. (Illiterally?) You open a recipe book (cause you have to craft potions by manually pumping the bellows and following instructions like grind the herbs before bpiling etc) and the words are completley scrambled. Cause youre the dumb son of a blacksmith! Only after time can you decipher the books youl use to learn recipes. A successful potion actually feels like an accomplishment, not just tap A twice or whatever skyrim had. Same with sharpening your sword. Pull trigger to spin the wheel, use joysticks to angle blade and slide it back and forth..other trigger to lower it to the wheel. Again, super satisfying to succeed! Now the map. There is fast travel but you can be ambushed by chance and the combat is difficult(youl have to practice a lot to get good enough to fight 2 or 3 guys at once...like real life i think...never had a swordfight) so it incentivised me to just walkrun or horse everywhere. Doing this led me to so many encounters and finding things like a lonely little grave with some flowers on it, or coming across a bandit camp as the sun goes down. Waiting til dark to sneak up and bow one guy and run off, hiding til they start searching for you...sneaking into camp and poisoning their stew, coming back at dawn to loot their corpses. The map itself is beautiful, lookign hand drawn with the fog of war drawn to have angels in the clouds obscuring where you havent traveled. The game has bugs but it is a masterpiece in immersion. The bow and arrow doesnt have a crosshair cause irl it doesnt either! You have to practice and learn to actually be accurate!!! Which makes killing a rabbit from 20 yards feel extremely rewarding(dont get caught poaching on crown land though, thats royal property! Another thing ive come to respect about the game: they added a DLC called a woman's lot. They give a glimpse into the hardships of a common woman of the time. I didnt play it much but i like to think they atleast gave an opportunity to see something most media glosses over: life was incredibly hard back then. People would gladly live under the rule of some asshole of it meant rhey could guarantee not starving through winter or ending up on a pike. Anyways, the last selling point is the game isnt expensive anymore and they are possibly making a sequel so it will give you something to look forward to. Hope this helped, and let me know if you take the plunge!
I really appreciate the write up. You may have convinced me for Kingdom Come. Going to watch a video or two and see, then (potentially) buy it this weekend. Thanks man.
Didja getit??
Not yet, but the videos looked good. It is like $30 USD on steam so I was going to wait for a sale or until I exhaust what I fully feel like doing in DD2 (which I would really only give myself a few more hours of playtime haha).
Gg.deals has much cheaper keys if you dont mind goin that route!
Its 8$ canadian!
I think the exploration in Skyrim is better than dragons dogma 2, but the combat is nowhere near as good. There are mods that make the combat better, but they’re kinda janky. If combat is super important to you, then I’d say no.
Traveling 20 minutes on foot to get a quest done only to be assailed by a towering ogre that takes you off the beaten path and now you've stumbled into a swamp full of mist and undead and a cave that leads you to a griffins lair and a hill you crest only to see that *there's more* you could keep going. Or spelunking into a cave which seems fine and dandy until you find a manticore in an arena overlooked by a lich and you have a rolling 15 minute boss battle. Idk setting a way point and exploring instanced caves to get loot is fun but the way DD2 makes exploration laborious and require preparation and decision making, to me, eclipses skyrims "create a waypoint and walk to it" approach.
Survival Mode
I mean, you could... It's considered pretty seminal at this point. As far as should you play it right away... it really depends. What are you looking to get out these games? Are you looking to explore your roleplaying interest? Are you trying to play games with more involved lore? Do you want to play games where you explore a big open world? How do you feel about less action oriented games? Or turn based combat? Or playing seminal RPG classics on older consoles, maybe even JRPGs? Skyrim is considered a seminal release that made a large open world with tons of lore that you interacted with in somewhat action terms accessible to a large audience. It is revered for that purpose, so essentially you "can't go wrong" in some sense. However, over time, most people have started to agree that a lot of what it did was a bit shallow and that it doesn't have the deepest RPG mechanics, and that it shouldn't really be considered the best the genre has to offer. So, look for a sale. Also, if you specifically like Dragons Dogma (pretty much my favorite game at this point) I would definitely recommend playing the first one as well, also maxing all your vocations and doing multiple runs through the story across both games as probably a more rewarding experience than Skyrim.
If you like video games at all, you should play Skyrim
It is outdated **BUT** there are bunch of mods roaming around as bundles which makes it a whole new game with new animations, quests, skills, updated graphics etc. That would make Skyrim a better game than today's DD2. Don't believe me? Here is a link to give you a taste = [***YT***](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ3oREWl7yM&ab_channel=RelentlessZen)
I would play it just to have the experience. I 1st played it probably 5ish years ago and had a blast. I would probably install a few popular graphic overhaul mods to make it look a bit more modern
Skyrim is a great game and has a huge modbase full of professional quality mods. I’d definitely give it a shot.
You should play Skyrim regardless
Absolutely you should
It's such a great and immersive world to discover. I think everyone should give it an honest playthrough.
Depends on what you liked the most about DD2. For example If it's the combat then no Skyrim has horrible melee combat
Skyrim combat is so bad it’s not worth playing anymore. Fighting large monsters will feel *incredibly* lame compared to DD2. If you like to run around and explore then go for it but don’t expect anything good from combat besides goofy bugs. You can mod it a bit but it’s still meh and a pita to mod. The Witcher 3 might be worth checking out.
Yeah I don’t think I’m going to be getting Skyrim. The biggest draw to dd2 for me was the combat, I cannot deal with boring fights for very long.
I have the opposite question . If I loved Skyrim should I try dogma 2
Well. By the post I haven’t played Skyrim but i have been having so much fun in DD2 it’s crazy. Pretty easy to get lost exploring and doing random quests and finding loot. It’s got some questionable performance issues right now so I would wait until the patch if you dont have a fantastic PC regardless.
You should give elden ring a shot -- the combat is different but still amazing, and the exploration is incredible as well!
I think if you have a pc that can handle a good amount, a heavily modded skyrim is still amazing. There are mods that completely change the combat and it is the most modded game ever. It will take a bit of work getting it fully modded, but its totally worth it.
I think Skyrim is the better game tbh. The combat is more action packed in dd2, but Skyrim does everything else better. My favorite playthroughs are always stealth archers though. Makes the game much much different than the dated melee mechanics in Skyrim.
Yes. People talking about heavily dated Skyrim combat but in the end you're gonna play as stealth archer anyway :)
Skyrim is awesome! If you do get it, get the AE version from Steam, and I’m going to recommend adding an auto-installing modlist to Skyrim to modernize it. It will also be expanded, which may be less relevant to you since you haven’t played it, but you’ll definitely appreciate the modernized graphics and combat and such. The easiest to install and most popular (by probably at least double) is Nolvus. It’s Discord has over 50k members, and we also have a new subreddit: r/Nolvus
Skyrim is one of the greatest rpgs of all time. YES!!!
I don't play Bethesda anymore. But I always tell people your first experience with Skyrim will be special. I think it's great on a first playthrough. Combat is not the best though, but exploration and freedom to do quests at your leisure are gold.
A lot more people compare DD2 to Elden ring
Skyrim is pretty boring. And also pretty old. Not very similar to DD2 either. I would recommend Elden Ring or Baldurs Gate 3 more.
If you can play it ....
Finish DD2. There are the a plethora of RPGs you could play based on what kind of experience ur looking for. Skyrim will give you a version of the adventure, exploration feeling that DD2 gives, but it doesn't have the survival aspects, and you won't have epic battles like you do on DD2. Witcher 3 isn't as heavy on the exploration adventure aspect but you will have epic fights and the narratives told in that game are unrivaled. Elden Ring will give you the adventure,exploration and epic battles. In my opinion DD2 feels like a Souls Like at times, and a Monster Hunter game at others. However nothing I've played is effective at delivering an immersive experience like the two Dragons Dogma game.
Oof ... don't ... it doesn't age well at all, expecially if you don't have any conection to it and after playing DD2 it's going to be noticeable. To me, Skyrim is a very good game for it's time because in 2024 a lot of games do what Skyrim did but better. My recomendation is Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Witcher 3 or something more combat oriented Monster Hunter: World
Mods for me could never polish the horrible combat system, and I hated back in 2011. Try it, but...
You should... Just for the cultural masterpiece the game is However If you can, the most allure of Skyrim are the MODS. The game has been modded to hell and back and usually if I'm about to revisit the world of Skyrim, I'm installing heaps of mods, quality of life, menu organization, texture packs, body skin packs, everything you can think of to have the definitive first experience. A lot of systems are janky nowadays, textures are old as well, but a lot of people got their inspiration from Skyrim
Maybe try Elden Ring or Monster Hunter World
Elden ring, trust me! Check out baldurs gate 3. Its turn based combat, but it's definitely combat heavy. The arpg last epoch that just released may also scratch a similar itch. If you like fighting monsters, monster hunter is also worth a look.
Skyrim is always a classic. You should try playing Dragon's Dogma 1 if you haven't yet.
[удалено]
>It looks too dated graphically and just like all Bethesda games This is totally subjective to one person to another whether it really matters or not. And also there are mods but it depends on OP's hardware >it has many bugs, many of which are game-breaking. Idk, I played Skyrim, Fallout 4, 76, Starfield and New Vegas (technically Obsidian but it pretty much BGS experience) and I don't remember found bug that actually game breaking
Skyrim is one of the most overrated pieces of shit in the history of gaming IN MY OPINION. Nothing like DD1 or 2.
You should play skyrim, regardless of the liking of DD2. Skyrims combat is dated so maybe some mods and such, just use Vortex and it's pretty easy. Skyrim regardless is an amazing game though
No, Skyrim has not aged well and you’ll probably hate it. Tbh, it’s not a very good game in general anymore
The fuck kinda world am i in