Skyrim - Editorials @ Gamefront, VideoGamer

Here are a couple of Skyrim editorials from a few days back that I'm only just getting the chance to come back to.

Gamefront writes about 6 Things Bethesda Must Fix In TES VI, such as "boring conversations" and "lame combat":

Even during the finishing-move animations that occasionally trigger at the end of a fight, Skyrim only gives the most rudimentary impression of a weapon connecting with its target. Fighting in first-person mode, this inert system looks even worse. You can take a running start and a two-handed swipe at someone with a battle-axe, and they won’t even flinch — your only indication that you hit them is a sound-effect and a cheesy-looking blood splatter. Couple this with the awkward collisions, comical strafing, and firehose-like spellcasting that ensue when the combat gets thick, and you end up with a distinctly lackluster system that hasn’t changed much since Oblivion.

...and VideoGamer argues Why Skyrim is a glimpse into the future of RPGs - lack of classes, specifically:

It's telling that Skyrim has dropped traditional classes altogether: It's an imperfect system for anyone who wants to completely mould their character in the way they see fit.

For a genre whose bread and butter lies in being immersive, this kind of full-on control is like watching a developer eagerly try to prove a point: Yeah, this here is role-playing. Breaking from the restrictions imposed by a game, that's role-playing. Erasing the lines between where you stop and the character starts – that's role-playing.

This time around, the design philosophy for Bethesda has been to wave goodbye to the pre-sets it gave you at the beginning of Oblivion, and hello to the possibility of playing any class types, simultaneously, with both hands. One hand can be used for melee weapons, one hand can spellcast. The result is a system that lets players decide how they want to play at any point in time.