Let's get to the bottom of this. Why is this game so popular still and what makes it so good...

You can interact with every single object and it hasn't been done again ever since

Yes.

>Why is this game so popular still and what makes it so good?
A lack of better options for players who lean towards narrative/simulation in RPGs.

>accidentally
you've almost always been able to do this in TES. not an accident but a purposeful gigabrain design choice.

>didnt waste your time with the ubisoft towers or collect-5-bear-dicks quests imported from MMOs
no instead it has 'go to the bottom of yet another falmer cave/dwemer ruin/draugr tomb' x 5000000000 instead

Better framework for mods than other open world games with pre written protagonists and limited play styles.

For me it's the fact it have lots of roleplayability and a fairly deep and vast map compared to whatever the competition has to offer.

You can follow the main quest or ignore it entirely. You don't even need to follow any quest to have fun, you can just be a thief, an alchemist or a merchant on your own and give yourself your own goals. It's one of the most sandboxy games out there.

And the game never forces you to do any of these. Neither the main quest nor any major part of the world is locked behind "minimum level/sidequest clears" or any arbitrary number like that.

95% of those caves/tombs/ruins were optional and even if they weren't, still stand head and shoulders above similar side content in other open world games. they were a middle ground between a real dungeon like in pre-botw zelda and a shitty shrine dungeon that takes place in one room. some (but not all) of the side dungeons had cool environmental story telling or quests taking place inside of them. again, instead of comparing skyrim to a game that doesn't exist, compare it to its peers: how many different tilesets are in far cry's cave dungeons? how about kingdom come deliverance? outer worlds? what first person RPGs do side dungeons better in your opinion?

That's a big one too, it blew my mind in oblivion

Only porn-addicted tranny groomers still play Skyrim

Size, insane amount of content, it still is the biggest RPG in terms of content you can play even after 10 years. You can interact with every single prop, set them however you like etc. You can do whatever you want, steal from any npc, kill most of the npcs, go in their houses and so on, it just is the only "simulation" of a fantasy world that there is (and morrowind and oblivion too ofc).

In summary, it's a game where the player asks Can I do X? And most of the time the answer is yes, and people love that

>accidentally
Bethesda fucking knows what they are doing even if Yea Forums likes to pretend they don't. You don't make a good, massively succesfull game on accident. Even with Fallout 4 they fucking knew what they were doing, even if it made the game worse.

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I like walking around and doing random side quests, game also looks nice

Also even the filler content has some manner of narrative attached to it that it makes it interesting. An example would be a nordic ruin in the game filled with female draugr and female ghosts and a necromancer with some diaries that explain how the guy has been banging them and capturing the women from a town nearby. Without that small narrative it's just a linear dungeon with repeat enemies, but with it it becomes memorable.

/thread

Because it's one of a kind. It's also a rare example of player having total freedom AND game having actual content

Fallout 4 was used to test a bunch of ideas they had, story is shit because they don't respect the franchise and know that normies don't care about the story anyways

pretty much, bethesda wouldn't risk new ideas with the elder scrolls.

>They accidentally did a good job allowing the player to completely ignore any and everything you want in the game
>accidentally
They bring this up pretty much any time they talk about one of their games.

They don't force you though, if you want to do them the option is there but if you don't want to then you simply don't have to go there. In WoW for example gathering 800 bear pelts is mandatory to progress

it's incredibly shallow but still manages to be engaging and it dominates the genre of fantasy world simulators that very few people even try to enter. also mods, just look at how far the vr port went thanks to mods despite bethesda shitting out a barely functional hackjob.

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>have to join factions to get the last word to your shouts
gay. Hate these lockouts

there's plenty of FPSRPGs out there but most of them have shitty marketing or have pretentious fanbases

i think a lot of it is the really simplistic and elegant UI. compare the clean UI of Skyrim to any other open world and you really see the difference. Other open world games have tons of icons, skill trees, long descriptions on menus, menus with several different tabs. Skyrims menus are much simpler and easier to read

Every open world game after it (yes including Witcher and BoTW) are shallow in comparison.

The sad part is that I thought Skyrim was shallow until modern open worlds massively lowered the metric.

Todd perfected the Oblivion formula. Simple as. A combination of good aesthetics and good gameplay anyone can easily get into, but still with some depth if you care to dig deeper.

Modders have kept it alive and nurtured its position on the gaming scene. Without the game being the main gathering ground for PC RPG modders, Skyrim would've been old news long ago.

It's one of the few games that justifies being open world and it's easy to mod. It's a true open world that you feel like you could live in with a heavy focus on lore and worldbuilding.

Bethesda embraced what Fallout fans never wanted to admit: the franchise is kind of schlocky and a lot of its ideas don't really belong in a self-serious post-apocalyptic thriller. FEV runs on the same science as Mutagen from TMNT and Super Mutants make about as much sense as Synths. The factions and vault experiments already operated on a 'rule of cool' logic and Fallout 2 was basically a competition to see who could insert the whackiest easter egg. Fans remember Fallout being a more serious franchise because they were kids and teens when they played it.

The really annoying thing about skyrim is that it popularized the term open world. Skyrim is what the mainstream plebs think of when they see open world and they buy it for that reason, but are too braindead to discern anything beyond that. They'll still say it's a good game without realizing the open world part of it is the worst part of it and suits don't give a shit so long as they keep raking in cash.

I sure do love approaching adventure like it's a check list of A, B, and C tasks to complete and getting a quest handed to me on a plate by 1/3rd of the NPCs in the game, with quests just waiting in limbo for me until I do them regardless of the urgency of the quest

If anyone's still playing it, it is because of mods.

Elder Scrolls lore in general is pretty fucking fun. Skyrim at least delivered on a lot of dwemer intrigue with all these ruins and shit. It's refreshing to stumble across a dungeon I hadn't seen before, like the dwemer one that "scans you" with that little ball of light. The game itself is shallow with how little your actions actually affect the world sadly, but the lore and the world building makes it feel much more expensive.

>with quests just waiting in limbo for me until I do them regardless of the urgency of the quest
>unironically advocating for timed quests in games
kill yourself asap please

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>unironically advocating for timed quests in games
Yes, fuck your singleplayer MMO theme park pinata bullshit that holds your hand every step of the way, give me an interesting simulation to fuck around in and experience that pushes me to make decisions that feel remotely meaningful.

Fallout 4 was also an attempt to truly commercialize the Fallout franchise. Fallout 3 was a huge success, but it wasn't the legendary classic Bethesda hoped to be. Fallout 4 attempted to include sim lite gameplay aspects, comic book wackiness, and more self references in order to give the franchise a more iconic appeal. The game sold well but I can't say they succeeded at that.

This wouldn't be popular with pure open world fags, but I like this idea. It would add structure to the game. As long as you could still have some downtime to sit and immerse yourself in the world and life sim aspect, I'd like to see it.

Why do people always pick this over Oblivion?

oblivion is a weird middle ground between skyrim and morrowind that doesn't fully satisfy either.

This. I'm looking for literally anything else with the same ingredients and I haven't found a single damn thing. This is the developer's fault. I have money, I'll spend it. Give me what I ask for, not what you want to give the audience.

idk I think Oblivion is better

what other game lets you stare at some primo magumbos all day?

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this.

>it's incredibly shallow
Compared to Tolkien's books maybe, compared to other video games it's incredibly deep.

>skyrim is incredibly deep compared to other videogames
i refuse to believe you're being genuine

Cartoonish tone and awful levelling. You can amend one of these issues with mods, which makes Oblivion better overall.

the world simulation elements are comparably deep to other games but that's only because hardly any other games have tried it. what are your options, fable and fuck else.

The problem people have with bethesta's fallout isn't lack of realism

Kingdom Come Deliverance, kind of.

Which one? You do t have to joint the dark brotherhood to access the sanctuary

This is the real answer. The unparalleled mod support is just icing on the cake.

KCD is an autistic realism simulator that feels more like a spiritual successor to Mafia 1 than Elder Scrolls. There are little to do and few to see besides doing quests and talking to boring overacted medieval NPCs.

>The problem people have with bethesta's fallout isn't lack of realism
>Kid in the Fridge is the single most complained about quest

As much as people like to shit on skyrim, it never felt like there was an intended order of which areas to explore like in other open world games. You can go basically anywhere at any level, with no consequences or restrictions. Want to play a mage? Go to winterhold on the other side of the map from where you start and do the mage college quest. Nothing stopping you or impeding you.

Games like Elden Ring and BOTW has a clearly intended path for what to explore in what order which in a way kills the sense of exploration.

morrowind and oblivion are both much better but you wont give them a try because much graphics and UI

>Animal Allegiance (Companions Guild)
>Fire Breath (Companions Guild)
>Disarm (Thieves Guild)
>Marked for Death (Join or Destroy Dark Brotherhood)
>Ice Form (Mages Guild)
>Slow Time (Mages Guild)
>Slow Time (Civil War)

Deeper than Elden Ring.

Oblivion is worse than skyrim. If you had played both on release you'd know.

oblivion has to glering problems in level desin and scaling both if you even try to argue than skyrim does anything else better you are honestly retarded
go look at a list of spell from both games, in oblvion and morrowind a good mage is basically an omnipotent god in skyrim you can do alot of damage I guess
don't even get me started on the giulds and quests it's a night and day difference