Fus Ro...Nah.

I'll be the dissenting voice in the crowd. I don't like Skyrim. I know this is heresy within the gamer hivemind, where general consensus is that Skyrim is the Best Game Ever (until a new "Best Game Ever" comes along, as always), but I just don't care for it.

Don't get me wrong. I wanted to like Skyrim. I tried very hard to like Skyrim, and in fact, it was fun for the first week or two after I got it, but the novelty of the game wore off shockingly fast. One can only hoard brooms and raise cows as undead minions to wreak havoc on small villages for so long before it gets old. And despite what you may think, yes, it does get old.

The scenery is lovely, yes, but it's also monotonous. Vast, open meadows, snowy mountains, the occasional ruin, castle town, or village, and that's it. Also given how far apart many places are the world feels quite empty indeed. I spent a lot of time running along or riding one of the slowest horses in all of creation in near-silence. Occasionally I had to deal with a few bandits, a wolf or two, or the random dragon and then back to nothing. The emptiness didn't create the same feel of loneliness that say...Shadow of the Colossus does. It's just boring.

Sighing and going "Am I there yet?" while progressing through a game is a bad thing, don't you think?

The NPCs are dull. I've met lobsters with more personality than just about anybody in the game. When you think of the characters as only "that guy" or "the other guy who's kind of a jerk", there's a problem. I couldn't find it in me to care about either the Imperials or Stormcloaks that much, since one's a generic military empire and the other's a generic band of rebels. They just happen to hate anyone who's not a Nord. I ended up siding with the Imperials solely because they didn't bash my character for being a cat.

The plot's also appallingly bare-bones and smacks of laziness. Destined hero kills evil dragon, saves world. End of story. Why? There's so much lore there to use! Why not bother writing a really good story with it that'll make the world more interesting?

...oh right. Because shiny graphics trump everything. Silly me.

Then there's obtaining materials for things like alchemy, blacksmithing and the like. Considering that I play World of Warcraft, I'm used to leveling crafting professions and gathering the required materials. Here's the thing though; WoW has a handy little feature that goes with the gathering professions, like "Track Herbs" or "Track Minerals". They'll appear as yellow dots on your minimap and sparkle in the field, like a big sign going "Hey! You can grab this!". There's no such thing in Skyrim. I had to learn to recognize different kinds of herbs by sight, or wander up to them and see if they were pickable if I was in an unfamiliar area.

I went through an entire dungeon once without realizing that there was mineable ore. It didn't grab my attention in any way, and it was only when I was trying to sneak around that I noticed that I could mine a chunk of iron ore. Once I'd slaughtered everything that moved, I went back and started looking for iron. The difference in the wall was ridiculously subtle, and it was no wonder I overlooked the mineable spots the first time.

One would also think that, with all the detail put into character creation, Bethesda could give you hair options  that looked like hair and not lumps of clay. I can adjust the amount of dirt on my character's face and the color thereof. I can give them scars, wrinkles, war paint, make them taller, shorter, leaner or heavier and mold their facial features however I damn well please, but hair that looks like hair? Madness!

The two biggest offenders were the twin buns and pigtails. They looked like they were designed by someone who had never actually seen either style. No, scratch that. Whoever designed them had no idea how hair even works. I ended up rolling a Khajiit not only due to my love of cats, but because their short braided hairstyles were among the few that didn't look awful.

I suppose I learned my lesson with this game. Normally I don't go for games based on the hype surrounding them alone, or for seemingly-cool mechanics like fighting dragons as a werewolf. I did this time, and I hated it.