Skyrim was a hell of a good game to play...:S

lol. shit story telling, boring sidequests. repetetive dragon fights. useless shouts cause you one hit everyone even at master later. dumbed down magic. characters were dull and boring besides cicerus. like i said boring melee system. idiotic ai. many bugs. Hell. in Oblivion the sidequests were the best. the dark bortherhood questline was such a fucking let down if you knew the ones in the other games. the best thing about this game was the large world.

EDIT: for every elder scrolls fan this was a big let down, even after oblivion.

Thank you! I am sick of various snobs only worrying about one aspect, some saying only the gameplay matters, some saying only the story matters, theyall have to come together

Graphics are very important, they draw people in, then the gameplay can keep them captivated

I hate to break it to ya, but games started becoming less about substance and more about flash all the way back with the PS1. It's just that that has become more and more the case with each given console generation. We've come full circle to games like Dragon's Lair and early Sega CD games, where it was literally just motion video that you pressed a button to once in awhile.

There are tonnes of games with great gameplay, great graphics do not mean bad gameplay, you can have both. With the indie scene thriving on Steam and growing on console there are all kinds of great gameplay games. Ever hear of the whole package? Maybe your playing the wrong games.

AAA games are lacking a bit IMO, but there are a tonne of great gameplay games (Dark Souls being the best IMO).

The implication is that the growing trend for the last few generations has been towards presentation and not depth (or more importantly FUN) of gameplay. Of course there are still deep, immersive, fun games. But I've personally found that quite a lot of especially "big budget hits" are severaly lacking in the actual substance department.

Yeah but dont play them....There are a tonne of great games that are not 100 million dollar budget games.  There are as many now as there always have been they are just over shadowed buy the big market games.

Agree to disagree, the last to elder scrolls are the 2 most overrated game this gen IMO. Horrible combat, terrible loot and level systems, repetitive questing and dungeons. Found them lacking any real substance.

OP, you get a cookie. You are waking up to the real picture. :)

This resulted from a mix of Microsoft rushing in the new gen and raising the cost of game development, publishers pressuring the media to be able to reduce the risk of investment and the reviewers for giving in to the pressure and making reviews about technology and no longer about gameplay and if the game is just plain fun to play, wich is the reason why people played games (at least until before this gen).

When you see things from that perspective, Nintendo isnt the boogie man everyone makes them out to be. They just didnt embark on the suicidal bandwagon and took things at their pace with products that are differentiated by features and not by graphics.

I would love to see more advance AI and physics, but I also understand we're still in a transitional phase. If console games don't significantly advance in anything other than presentation in the next two or three years, there's a problem.