Skyrim offers players something that its predecessors in the Elder Scrolls series do not: A rotund point with which to drive home its positive attributes.
Daggerfall‘s strength is often cited as its vision for a sprawling, old-school, punitive roleplaying system that set the foundations for what could have been an era-defining series.
Morrowind, despite simplifying some of the roleplaying mechanics in Daggerfall, has a width of strengths that are found in its writing, complicated magic system, and general commitment to player freedoms and navigation within its settings on Vvardenfell.
Oblivion‘s strength lies in the fact that it’s designed to be a simplified RPG for a wider audience, for better or for worse, and to contain outrageous facets of gameplay: Instant fast travel to all main locations, “modernized” combat with old-school leveling and character creation, outlandish storylines, goofy randomized NPC dialogues, and an enemy scaling system that begets more frustration out of the generic player than might be worth the while at higher difficulties.
But then comes TES 5: Skyrim. Its strengths, almost always, lie in the fact that each system it gives to the player is a system that previously existed in other games, but has been ground down into a version of that system without any edge.
The leveling system in Skyrim has been simplified from its predecessors: no more derived stats, no more efficient leveling beyond HP stacking. The alchemy and enchanting system are no longer tied to a player’s intelligence, but instead to their individual levels as skills, and they can no longer provide players with navigational conveniences, nor stack their buffs.
The quest system in Skyrim is exclusively a game of following quest markers: gone are the Morrowind and Daggerfall experiences of having to actually pay attention to the directions given to you by NPCs in the world.
Enemy scaling, probably due to the harsh lesson Oblivion provided, is tuned backward into a far less punitive system: enemies, at all stages of the game (perhaps except at the highest of difficulties) are always manageable to defeat in combat, even for hybrid classes without a pure focus in combat.
One aspect of gameplay that Skyrim does experiment with can be seen in its smithing system, a rework of the armorer skill from previous games. Despite being a little on the grindy side of things, all points should be given to Bethesda for moving in a good direction for a new skill in the TES games. And despite the nature of this article, it is important to be pragmatic and recognize Skyrim’s ability to move in the right direction for TES’ game designs on occasion.
The point of all of this is to show the change in design philosophy Bethesda followed during Skyrim’s development: Morrowind changed what Daggerfall was trying to do, Oblivion changed what Morrowind was trying to do, but Skyrim perfected what Oblivion was trying to do.
And what Oblivion was trying to do was be the ultimate, newbie-friendly RPG with simplified combat/magic, an intuitive quest system with fast travel, and a hard-to-mess-up ( almost non-existent) roleplaying system with limited use cases for disposition.
And doesn’t it just make sense, then, to find that Skyrim is all of those things, but in a way that, in accordance with those design philosophies, blows Oblivion out of the water by virtue of having little to no edge at all?
Where each of the TES games has a wide array of strengths and weaknesses that will appeal differently to different kinds of players, Skyrim manages to pull all of those ups and downs in towards the center, creating a consistent, hard-to-define title that appeals to just about everyone while, ultimately, truly satisfying next to no one.