Agree with pretty much everything that you said.

I suppose Skyrim simply isn't my cup of tea.

If you go into every game wanting the very best concepts of other games cherry picked to create the perfect game, you'll never be satisfied with any game. A game, like any other form of entertainment, has to be valued on it's own merits.

Bethesda games are flawed, but they aren't flawed in such as a way to impact enjoyment of the game itself. The player makes the decision to use exploits, the player makes the decision to grind skills, the player makes the decision to use cheap tactics, and ultimately the player makes what they get out of the game.

A great example of this is people complaining that Giants in Skyrim are too easy. Why? Because they intentionally position themselves in such a way to completely dick with the Giant's pathfinding such as hiding on top of rocks the Giants can't reach or using terrain to make the AI freak out. This means at low levels they can snipe an enemy with a bow they shouldn't be able to kill for another twenty levels. Some will blame the AI and Skyrim for that, and true it is flawed. But personally, I blame the player. You, the player, the one with free will make the decision to intentionally exploit a game system. The same if you intentionally use Alchemy or Enchanting to make obscene amounts of money. There's no in-game pressure to do that, that's on you.

Don't forget getting away with theft by putting pots on people's heads.

Yes and no. Yes, you judge it based on how much it meets your expectations. No, you have to use the same expectations you used to judge game A and use it on other games too.
For example: stealth is being criticised for not being as good as it was in the Thief series. This applies to about every other game with a stealth system, yet it doesn't count as a negativ there. Following that logic, you would have to consider all games with no stealth system at all, as being something lesser, which just doesn't happen.

This leads to a one-trick pony game with a great combat system being considered good or great, but Skyrim with a not so good combat system (which I tend to disagree more and more) AND offering so much more being criticised as average at best.

If I take a few examples right from this thread and put them together, Skyrim needed a:
- The Sims implementation for marriage AND every NPC being marriable (if already married, killing his / her partner would have been demanded to be a solution)
- Thief series for stealth
- stats / skills from Morrowind
- amount of weapons / armor from Morrowind and Oblivion combined
- crafting from Vanguard
- graphics from Battlefield 3
- choices / decisions from Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines
- AI matching Deep Blue chess
- cooking from I-really-have-no-idea
- every single NPC no matter how important to the core story killable
oh I almost forgot: of course no level scaling AND bugfree.

This. is. just. not. realistic. At all.

My question remains: how comes that Skyrim (not only Skyrim really, we can safely put every Bethesda game here) needs all that to accomplish the expectations, yet other games (for example Assassins Creed series) who come with 2 or 3 of these elements done better and nothing else, get away with being awesome?

Edith: ... and everyone coming with the "less done great then much done average" argument - how would you have reacted to a Skyrim stripped down to 2-3 of it's current elements done fantastic? Yes, that's a rhetorical question.

I picked Skyrim up for PS3 about a week and a half ago; I've got about 16 hours in so far. My character is a Khajiit which I'm roleplaying as an archer/thief. This is my first Elder Scrolls game, and I'm having a great time.

I didn't mind the combat in Skyrim, I used duel to make it a bit more interesting though, specifically for the lower weapon reach so you can actually dodge some two handed blows. The better stamina use and timed blocking was just gravy.

I found the stealth in Skyrim pretty good too, why would you even want levels designed to make stealth a cakewalk to success? The thief games promoted avoiding conflict over assassination, and you can play that way in Skyrim too, sneaking past many combat encounters.

If you really want to cut throats all the way to the end game, well you can with a little investment in the illusion tree. Grab the Silent spell casting perk plus the Invisibility spell and you can hide in the middle of combat just like Karliah and Mercer do. Roll behind enemies searching for you and cut their throats one and all... no matter how many.

All of the Dark Brotherhood armor types have double backstab damage gloves, coupled with the stealth tree backstab perks daggers do 30x damage multiplier backstabs. You can stealth kill an ancient dragon if you go to the effort to do so.

My biggest gripe with Skyrim is that it really is a single player sandbox. It relies heavily on looking the other way and using your imagination to immerse yourself in it. None of the npcs in the game where more than one dimensional talking heads that sent you questing and punched your time card when you returned to them.

The civil war factions are a joke, you practically single handedly win the war for either side and get a few dollars and a fancy title. Assaulting Windhelm was a grade A fucking joke.

Negotiating a truce is even funnier with the venerable leaders swinging from "I KNEW I could never trust you Dragonborn..." to "I can always count on your support Dragonborn" from one line to very the next.

The Companions, who're supposed to be a pack of wolves send you out solo, mission after mission to further their goals.

The blades are a pair of whiny shitheels who do nothing to help stop the dragon attacks, other than ordering you to kill the one 'person' who actually does help you, or they'll stop assisting you... emptiest threat ever. I'd have wrapped up the main quest that much faster if the stupid self-important bint hadn't pinched the fucking horn in the first place.

I honestly wish all the tinkering with graphics, fighting and crafting mechanics would take a back seat for a change and the Elder Scrolls series make some headway on immersive/reactive story telling.

I think all Sandbox games suffer from those flaws in narrative and flow. It's part of the reason I don't care for them overall.

But I like the ES system of trying to unite all the missions and sandbox elements into an overall game. Unlike the GTA or SR games for instance that separate all the missions into their neat little areas. So you have the controlled no-choice missions and the sandbox elements seperated. ES games at least unify both aspects into one.

Hardly, try New Vegas.

I really wanted to enjoy Skyrim and i did for a while. The world is beautiful, the combet is fun, leveling system and perks are OK, but unfortunately everything else is as shallow as a puddle. Terrible dialogues (better then oblivious but still), uninteresting main quest, faction quests are a joke (even praised dark brotherhood questline, quest with killing a woman in an orphanage for this annoying kid was just painfully stupid) and quest dispensers instead of real characters.
Shame on you Bethesda for fucking up such an amazing game with your inability to write anything even remotely good

That's the way I'm playing... at lvl 50something I'm loving it... sneak attack bam bam bam :) it's almost a mini game.

How in god's name is the Dark Brother initiation quest bad? The child had been abused by that woman who was shown to not be a nice person at all, no one would help him with dialogue showing other children being told to stay away from him, and so he turned to the only ones who would.

First of all this kid is voiced by the worst actor i could possibly imagine, second the dialouge is just disconcerting (i was actually happy that i had the option to "remain silent" becasue all other answer options made me want to eat my keybord). And think about this: some annoying 10-year old kid asks you to kill a woman who runs an orphanage and you (without knowing anything more about the situation, other then that kid's statement) have only two options:
-yeah, i'll do it
-"remain silent" (which is basically accepting the quest)
Now i don't know about you but i wouldn't kill anybody just because some stupid kid wants me to (not without investigating it further).

Is there some reason you have to do the quest if you don't want to? Suppose you listen to the child, you don't like it, and you don't do the quest. The fact that you feel compelled to do a quest you dislike is somehow the fault of the game?

I liked the quest. My mage is not evil, but he listened to the boy. He heard his story, and he investigated. What he found was a horrific woman in a position of power abusing those children, who had the means to avoid ramifications. Simply put, he did what should have been done. I didn't join the Dark Brotherhood. I even refused his reward, I set his plate back down on the table knowing that one day he'd want that family heirloom back.

If you're given a quest and you can't either A) Roleplay it, or B) can't ignore it out of self compelled reasons, that's not the fault of the game.

All of the quests are implemented like this. The only ones you can actually refuse or cancel are the randomly-generated quests that are infinite and meaningless.

You can even accrue quests through NPCs' incidental dialogue. If someone suggests you might want to join a certain faction or mentions a rumour the associated quest is automatically added without you even asking for more details first.

In real life, and in turn in most RPGs, if someone offers you a job you're not interested in you can specifically say so rather than just walking away. Walking away doesn't even count as role playing because the game mechanics not only don't support your make-believe actions but actively contradict them: as far as the game is concerned you accepted that quest and are still taking part in it, forever.

I know video games aren't real life, but when every other recent (and not-so-recent) RPG has managed to implement a way of opting out of optional quests (and/or specifically opting into them in the first place instead of being forced into them) there's no excuse for Bethesda being so lazy.

Okay, Skyrim has its issues, but this particular point is just silly. I said the same thing you just did, so I went down to Riften. Lo and behold, chatting up guards, random passersby, and people in the tavern, I heard very bad rumors about the orphanage, about how horrible the person who runs it is, and how nice her assistant is (Bethesda actually put in a character to take care of the kids if you decide to kill the orphanage woman). I didn't blindly perform the quest - I roleplayed my research and was surprised and pleased to find that Bethesda had material in place WITHOUT an explicit quest option for me to do so.

As for turning down quests, I found out that the entirety of the rest of the DB was bat-poop insane, walked out of there, and never came back. I didn't feel the need to explicitly turn down the quest. (Besides, if they HAD included that option, there would be people whining that they couldn't change their minds and come back to do the quest later).