UESP Forums

The game is over 5 years old, it's on almost every current platform so I thought it's about time we discuss what we dislike/hate about the game. From guild quests to gameplay features etc... if ye dislike it, this is the thread for ye.


Pacing of Guild Questlines


The severe lack of pacing really ruffles my feathers. I mean, the Companions is 6 quests long with no way to pad it out via radiant quests. Halfway through it does the Circle stuff. This is the best example of the main 4 guilds having pacing issues. Literally 1 or 2 radiant quests per Companion quest and it is lacklustre. The COW feels like it's just begining when it ends and well, I've not included the Bard's College as a guild. I feel that the Companions should have used Oblivion's system of starting off small and gradually getting bigger. It's really disappointing when the prologue for the Mage's Guild is longer then an entire guild's questline. The only guild that has decent pacing is the Dark Brotherhood.


The railroading in the main quest.

Why? Why do we have to start First Lessons? It ruins immersion for me and it is baffling. I mean, would it be so hard to have a dialogue option and for the quest to not trigger? The only other way to avoid it is to metagame. Admittly, it's only the COW being mandatory that I have an issue with in terms of railroading. The rest of the main quest, well, see below for my thoughts on it.


The overreliance of Radiant Quests.

Radiant. Radiant. Radiant. There's too many radiant quests and I know it's their purpose to pad out/provide cheap income but the game could have had a healthy balance of side quests. Look at Oblivion, some quests were short, simple and had a small unexpected twist. E.g. The Bravil quest ended up on an island in a Hunger games type game and we actually fail to save the NPC. Stuff like that needed to be more common. Not glorified dungeon quests(admittly, I do like most of them) but it's just the variety I am after along with more stuff.. I love Potema's questline being a questline and a two parter. Stuff like that would have been nice if we saw mre of it.


The lack of weapon and armour variety per material tier.

Steel Armour has two versions. A Pauldron version and one without pauldrons. I find it to be quite meh that we only get one weapon choice per weapon type in each material. E.g. Iron sword, iron axe, iron armour etc... Whilst Steel and Iron have two armours, the rest don't. Aside from Dragon armour but that's just light and heavy. There should have been at least 3 choices just for variety with small differences. E.g. Iron shortsword is the quickest but only does 8 damage whilst a normal iron sword does 11 and a heavy iron sword or something that serves as the slowest of the class but for more damage.(which gets outclassed by axes and mace as it does in the game).

It would have been nice for options like that. I would even settle for it all being cosmetic. Oblivion had light iron shields on top of normal iron shield. Why not tower shields? Or big circle ones along with the normal ones?


Customisation of weapons not being a thing.

They introduced crafting weapons and it's barebones. I mean, it's good but barebones. I really want to use gems(it's too easy to get too many) on sword hilts, shields being adjorned with diamonds etc... Would it have been too hard to split the weapon up into two/three sections for customisation via an option? E.g Iron Sword hilt allows you to customise that, the blade section has you using materials to alter the colour etc... Also, no sheaths can be crafted. Why can't we make a sheath out of wolf pelt? Same with armour.



Hopefully, this is not coming off as complaining but I am just curious to see what people dislike about the game. I love it and when it first released, I couldn't shut up about it on other sites along with wanting it more then ever but a few years later, i'm kinda notiicng stuff. Perhaps, it's just because of other RPGs or seeing mods. Perhaps not.

Anyway, share your dislikes with me, UESP!

Except for you M'aiq.

Immortal essential characters and the loss of armor condition/repair as well as armor suits instead of separate pieces are my biggest gripes. Actually, they're mostly carry-over gripes from Oblivion, so I'm not sure how much they qualify.

The repetitiveness of some of the Companions' radiant quests does get to be annoying. It's nice that they're randomly selected, but there should be some sort of table in the game that tallies up how many times a particular quest has been given so the game can choose a different one if it happened to pick one that's already been given a zillion times. I shouldn't have to save my game before receiving a quest, and restoring to try again for a different, less stale quest.

Case in point, I was playing one game where one of the brothers asked me to wipe out the head dead dude in a dungeon, but I'd already killed him in the alchemy quest, and that meant there was no way for me to complete the radiant quest, hence I couldn't receive any more quests from the Companions.

Okay, so now I'm playing a different game, and when I got to the alchemy quest I used my masterful sneaking ability to get past the head dead dude and make off with the prize, because I wanted to save him for when I eventually got the radiant quest. Except now I never get that particular radiant quest, I just get the "Gee, I've never seen a dragon" quest over and over and over again. Aargh! You have so seen a dragon! :p

Stuff on the cutting room floor.

This is another carry-over gripe, but it appears a bit more egregious in this installment of the series:

If a dragon can destroy a town, and I can become more powerful than a dragon, shouldn't I at least have the capacity to smash a box or a door?

My main disappointment is the way the PC is presented as a sort of superhero with regard to the Voice. If TES takes the high fantasy approach and Fallout the low fantasy one, I prefer the latter, where it is usually about unexceptional characters achieving exceptional things. It worries me that in order to top Skyrim the next title might have to make the PC even more of a special snowflake.

There could have been more immersive signposting to help smith characters locate which mines produce which minerals, in particular the rarer ones (perhaps I missed it).

Poor choices for resolving the Thieves Guild questline, compared to the Companions questline for example which had better player agency. Too much good guys versus bad guys, honor amongst thieves, and forced piety; it's a society of criminals for Pete's sake.

Some areas of the map felt light on content, like Eastmarch, the Pale and the northern coastline in general. By contrast the mountains of the Reach felt thematically fleshed out and content dense, practically bursting with Forsworn hideouts, settlements, landmarks and so on. Which is not to say that a more uniform content distribution would have been better, but that some areas seemed a bit underutilized.

Vampires spawning in towns. While I'm over near Dragon's Reach or Jorrvaskr, poor Adrianne is getting murdered. They'll pretty much kill anyone near the entrance, so I have to check every time I'm in town and reload if necessary.

The power creep of the whole Dragonborn thing always kinda bugged me, in the way that you can be this Demi god with powers granted above your mortal ken and then sent off to do menial tasks compared to your level of ability; kill x mudcrabs, take this fort for the Empire, etc.

So like my favorite thing to imagine is the Dragonborn fighting the civil war AFTER the main quest.

Like, imagine how much it must suck to be on the opposite side of that!

“ALRIGHT MEN, THE ENEMY HAS SINGLE HANDEDLY DEFEATED A KNOWN DEVOURER OF WORLDS AND THE CLOSEST THING OUR WORLD HAD TO A SATANIC FIGURE, HE IS DECKED OUT TOE-TO-TOE IN OTHERWORLDLY ARTIFACTS THE LIKES OF WHICH WILL NEVER BE REPLICATED THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND, AND HE LITERALLY BREATHES FIRE.

So like… Raise your iron battle-axe and hope for the best, kiddos.”

The whole Dragonborn thing is consistent with the most popular fantasy trope of all time: "THE ONE". It's mainly the reason why I no longer read/write fantasy books anymore because I got sick of it. And I agree, it bugged me that in whatever faction I explored I always had to be the responsible one. Could no one else kick butt in all these years?

I love Skyrim and it's my favorite video game of all time next to mother luvin' PACMAN. But my biggest complaint was the blah/meh/ugh nature of the followers. They were so boring and shallow. Yawn. Give me more dialogue options with them. I loved the way they did Serana! She was so interesting and the more she trusted you, the more of her backstory she shared. It's why she's my favorite follower in the game nex to Meeko (he's just adorable). If you're on the road spending that much time with someone, at least give us the option of knowing more about their life and conversing with them.

Two words for why I'm generally accepting of vapid followers: Carth Onasi.

Carth is a bro you shut your mouth

I always disliked Serana honestly speaking. Between the constant complaining, the uppity attitude, the weird bald spot that her modelers thought looked good apparently, the weird anachronistic dialogue, generally shallow... I dunno. Just because there is a lot of content with her, I don't think that means that content is involving or deep.

Far as followers go I prefer the adventures we have being the story as opposed to them having their stories detailed overly... procedural story telling is the way to go for me. It's why I didn't intend on loving J'zargo so much, but he's now my favorite follower and has been since release pretty much.

Morrowind to Oblivion - No pauldrons or left/right gauntlets.
Oblivion to Skyrim - ^ + No greaves.

When I started Skyrim for the first time I was hoping they would bring back shoulders and hands, not take away my legs!

Just wait, the next game's gonna have a one piece body suit for every armor type and clothing.

Skyrim is my first and only ES game, so I know most responses will be "lolololol that's Bethesda for you" and/or "suck it up, you silly console gamer, and download some mods," but I guess in all my years of gaming I've never encountered a developer who left all of the bug-fixing and innovation to modders. Like, villager NPCs running from danger, fixing broken quests, having NPCs who give out quests marked as essential, etc. should be in the vanilla game. It kind of boggles my mind sometimes that Bethesda has released several patches for the game, but yet that stupid "Return to Esbern" quest is still in my miscellaneous quest log. Like...fix your game, dudes.

Being treated like a newb by the College/Companions/etc even when I've completed all their quests and ave risen to the top in each of them.

The fact the game really doesn't seem to acknowledge our achievements in-game really annoys me. That, and the fact the min faction quests are mostly pretty meh.

What I've come to like the least about the game mechanics is the leveling system.

Like I feel like any character build that I try winds up being unfocused because of combat skills keep leveling me faster than I want.

I dislike the lack of variety in Destruction magic. I'd like more than just varying power levels of fire, frost, and shock.