@Tuco
Skyrim was an awesome game
no, not really. Not a single one of its subsystems works.
From a design standpoint Skyrim is not awesome, not good, not even average. It's actually terrible.
I never played Gothic 2, but I did play Risen and like the vast majority of game critic thought it was much better than Risen
Skyrim? Better than Risen? Hell no, it wasn't.
More big, more impressive, more shiny? Sure. A better game? Not really, it couldn't even dream to compete on even ground, as Risen has a world that actually feels worthy of exploration, a combat with a resemblance of strategy and balance, quests that aren't carbon copies randomply generated, actual interaction with NPCs and so on.
Who would be this "vast majority of game critics" exactly? A bunch of clueless fratboys from some console-centric magazine?
(simply check metacritic for that, though to be fair the games did come out a few years apart)
OR you would find that most of the complaints are about how awful the console port it is or how the graphics aren't cinematic and polished enough, just to prove my previous point about clueless critics.
On the other hand, try to ask around here or visit some specialized community like RPG Codex or NMA and go to ask to RPG lovers what they prefer between Risen and Skyrim.
You will learn it's not even a contest for many of them.
Your personal taste our your own. But I don't see how one can denie the overwhelm commercial and critical success of Skyrim.
I don't deny it, I find it irrelevant to the Nth degree.
You don't like it that is fine, you have your own taste.
Yeah, I do, but I'm not talking about tastes here, I'm talking about objective mechanical flaws.
Then again I'm probably arguing with someone who actually prefer Skyrim to Dark Souls, which I find frankly comical.
And I don't care if you don't like Batman or not, that's not the point (apparently making big display bad taste for you is almost a faith); Batman is a mechanically solid game. Skyrim isn't.
I personally tend to find the critics to be very accurate, both for movie, tv shows and games
For movies, books and music I would generally agree, because usually critics are people of vast, deep competence in the field they work on, even if not necessarily of good taste.
Too bad that's not the case with game journalism, so you have people reviewing roleplay games without even knowing what's Ultima VII, the yet unmatched king of the genre. Larian Studios talked about this in one of their blogs: about how they compared their next game (Divinity OS) to Ultima and then they had to explain what Ultima was to most of these teenager "critics" from several game magazines.
It would be like having a movie critic who doesn't know what Citizen Kane is. He would laughed out of the door.
Anyway, you talk a lot to say very little of useful. But I can tell you how all your monologue about the general praise for Skyrim sounds to me: "I don't have any personal standards, I think I will let others decide what's good and what not for me".
I'm not even sure why arguing about Skyrim's metascores should be of any relevance here and now, by the way.
You are dragging this OT which is of very little interest to me (I had plenty of occasions to shit on Skyrim in other topics and in other forums) and of very little relevance with this thread.