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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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Occasionally, one sees articles with titles like "Skyrim: 15 Choices That Made Absolutely no Difference", "Skyrim: 25 Ridiculous Things That Make No Sense" etc. Sometimes, it's not real criticism, merely incompetent authors using dramatic exaggerations in order to attract (undeserved) attention. Like, instead of "A few things I've discovered you may find useful" they name their article "Top 10 amazing things you didn't know you were doing wrong".
That said, it's undeniably true that there are many things in Skyrim many people are critical about.
But do you know one reason why we are so critical of Skyrim? (One, not the only one! )
It's the same reason why almost everyone hates Microsoft. Microsoft has created brilliant programs, and we use them every day, and we are so used to their brilliance that we take it for granted, and when we happen to encounter something that those programs can't do, we find ourselves greatly annoyed. In simpler words, programs like Word and Excel are able to fulfill 90% of our wishes, and we get angry at them for those 10% we'd like to do but can't. Yet, there are analogous programs on the market that can do only 20–30% of what we want, but we don't hate those because we never even use them because we can see immediately that they're crap. That's how we end up using Microsoft programs that are superior to almost anything the competition can come up with, and criticizing them for being, not actually bad, but less than perfect.
The same applies to Skyrim. In terms of the size of the gameworld, the amount of things you can do, the pleasingness, the realism, the extent of your freedom of choice – how many games you can name that give you even 1/10 of the overall pleasure you get from Skyrim ? (That is with the possible exception of other Bethesda games, none of which I have played seriously.)
Not to deny that there is a lot of legitimate criticism for sloppy programming and illogical features, I have realized that often we (myself included) are being unfair to Skyrim, forgetting that it's lightyears beyond 99% of games currently on the market, and "merely" far better than the remaining 1%. At times we overflow Bethesda with expletives for failing to give us features we wouldn't even dream of requesting from any other gamemaker in the world. In other words, we pick so much on Skyrim because we take its brilliance for granted, while most other games are such primitive crap that we don't even bother to criticize them.
The bottom line:
While we're striving to make the world better, let's not forget to be grateful for all those things that are already faboulous, amazing and delightful.
P.S. Well, yes, by 2021 we are already beginning to see games that are as good as Skyrim from 2011. :D
