By the way that everyone raves about it, you wouldn’t think that Skyrim would be a game chock-full of issues or shortcomings. Despite how much most people love Skyrim, it actually has its fair share of problems. After playing the game for over 1,000 hours, I can say with confidence that the game is phenomenal—but it also has a long list of ways in which it could be drastically improved. Through a combination of problems with the existing content and features that could be added to improve it, Skyrim falls far short of a perfect game, no matter how much people adore it.
Because I was so into the game, it took me quite a long time to really notice the shortcomings. Skyrim has a peculiar way of hiding them with its breath-taking landscapes, entrancing music, and entertaining gameplay. But if you can take the enamored goggles off, you can see a bit of a different picture when it comes to details of the gameplay.
To avoid repetitiveness, I’m not going to go into the more obvious ways in which Skyrim could be improved upon. It’s generally widely accepted that the combat in the game is clunky and too simple, the game gets way too easy in the second half, and your choices basically mean nothing in the game since those choices don’t reflect at all in the world around you.
In reality though, Skyrim has much more smaller shortcomings than those, and they tend to pile up once you start paying attention. The following is a list of just some of the issues or ways there could have been obvious improvements that I’ve really started to notice after hours of gameplay:
- The journal: aside from the main quests, there isn't really quest organization whatsoever. If you want to go back to a specific miscellaneous quest later, you’ll have to spend a significant time scrolling to find it.
- The inventory: There are some categories, but they’re too vague. Searching for a potion you want to use that isn’t favorited is a nightmare, for example.
- Most enemies don’t have certain weaknesses or strengths.
- There aren’t any acrobatics in the game whatsoever.
- You cannot create any spells.
- Alduin, who is supposed to be the most difficult final boss, is not hard to defeat.
- Armor and weapons never wear out, making smithing shops mostly pointless.
- There are no directions for most quest, just map markers, making it feel unrealistic.
- The fast-travel does not fit into the lore.
- There’s a lack of a bunch of locations that were included in Arena’s Skyrim.
- Essential NPCs can’t be killed, spoiling who is a major character for quests and also adding to the unrealistic world feeling.
- Water exploration almost never paid off.
- There’s a lack of weapon and armor options, such as not being able to use spears.
These are only some of the ways that Skyrim falls short. In all honesty, this list could probably be at least twice as long. It seems though, the majority of people seem not to care too much about any of this. And why? Because at the end of the day, the good qualities that Skyrim has have blown everyone’s mind so much that the game is still totally enjoyable anyway. If the game is fun to play, that outweighs all of the nit-picking about stuff that would be cool to see implemented. That being said, Bethesda got away with this for their Skyrim game, but I suspect that people are going to be angry if the next Elder Scrolls game includes all of these same shortcomings.