Scrappy Mechanic / The Elder Scrolls

By the Nine, these Elder Scrolls mechanics are so reviled that not even Alduin would consider them for his goals.

Series-wide

• Essential NPCs. Introduced in its current form in Oblivion^note It technically existed in Morrowind, but only as the flag that displayed the window informing the main quest had become unwinnable through a certain character's death, it became a Bethesda staple since then. Essential NPCs have Complete Immortality and cannot be killed period, which breaks immersion and forces players to deal with characters they may come to dislike without the option of simply putting them down, restricting their freedom. While certain quest characters lose their Essential flag once their quests are completed, many don't, forever leaving you stuck with these immortal characters you simply cannot be touched because the developers said so. And it only becomes more prevalent with time; Skyrim has over a hundred more Essential characters than Oblivion did. It comes to no surprise that many Game Mods are dedicated to making certain Essential characters killable.
• Pickpocketing is something that has been a frustrating mechanic in every game in the series. Either the game makes actually stealing something borderline impossible (such as Morrowwind) or the penalty for being caught is effectively no different from killing someone because of how crime is handled in each game, such as Oblivion guards being everywhere and relentless. On top of that, there isn't really any reason to pickpocket, as almost every quest that involves obtaining specific items usually just make the character with the item hostile to the player so they can be killed without issue out of fear for players who can't pickpocket, or the item isn't on a person to begin with. Skyrim is the only game with a decent pickpocketing system, but again, almost no quests actually are designed around it being something you need to use, making pickpocketing frustrating to try and use, despite being in almost every game, and getting skills or perks dedicated to making it better.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena

The Elder Scrolls: Arena:

• Not being able to save inside certain areas, such as stores, temples, and taverns. The latter is perhaps the most absurd, since taverns are literally the only place in the entire game where you can rest without worrying about monsters showing up to attack you, which really makes not being able to save there to be very inconvenient and anti-immersive. Meanwhile, you're free to break into people's houses to save and rest all you want on private property. Obviously, someone at Bethesda realized how unfair this rule was, since all TES games after this one allow you to save wherever and whenever you wish.

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall

The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall:

• Jumping. Due to the buggy nature of wall collision detection near the seams, a badly placed jump can drop you into the Void. A patch was created, but it doesn't prevent the issue in the traditional sense. Instead, it gives you a key press that takes you back one step, sort of like a movement "undo". You can use it to back your way out of the dungeon. It gets worse on more modern computers where your jump can be more dramatic or less useful, hence inconsistent, due to the recalculated number of times the game does a collision check during movement (as a result, you'll also walk slower and enemies may not be able to move).
• Stairs. They aren't intuitive to use and, in fact, a common complaint from first-time players is that they are "stuck" in the tutorial dungeon, when in actuality, they just don't see/know how to use the stairs out. One specific kind of dungeon stairs is even impossible to walk up like stairs and involves dangerous jumping (see above) or climbing (see below) to get out.
• Climbing. It's based on skill, some surfaces are arbitrarily unable to be climbed (despite the exact same surface being climbable in an area just feet away at times), and once you're up there, there is no way to climb down. Unsurprisingly, this ability was removed in all future games to date.
• Melee combat. It involves clicking and dragging the mouse on the weapon to swing it. Unfortunately, it's horribly slow and unresponsive, which means that first-time players are often screwed the moment they first enter combat.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind:

• Spell reflection if you're a magic-oriented character. Many enemies in the game will randomly throw your powerful destruction spell right back at you - which, considering the likely power of your spells combined with your own squishiness, is more than likely to kill you outright. It gets absolutely ridiculous, to the point of being unplayable, in the expansions. Further complicating matters is that any enemy with even a small percentage of spell reflection can cause this to happen due to how the mechanic works. For example, an enemy with 10% Reflect doesn't reflect 10% of your damage back at you, which would be more tolerable. It means that enemy has a 10% chance to reflect the entire force of your spell back at you. Even low to mid-tier enemies like Ash Ghouls and Atronachs have at least a 20% Reflect.
• The Imperial Legion's fixation on uniforms. When you first join, you're given an Imperial Chain Cuirass as your uniform that you HAVE to wear if you want to talk to anyone in the Legion. As you advance through the ranks, you'll be given additional armor pieces and increasingly better cuirasses up to the mighty Lord's Mail, which is one of the best armor pieces in the game. Until then though, you're forced to carry around least one Imperial-type cuirass with you (as you'll most likely find much better armor rather quickly) and if you make the mistake of talking to anyone (higher or equal-ranked to you) in the Legion without wearing it, you'll be curtly informed that you're out of uniform (which will cut off further communication) and suffer a small disposition loss with that person. Note that this will even extend to any fellow soldiers you're sent to rescue (unless they are of lower rank than you), who apparently care more about the Legion's dress policies than they do about being saved from murderous Daedra worshipers or bandits. The Legion is also the only faction in the game that has this mechanic, making it seem even more out of place.
• Having to wait several days between quests for the East Empire Company in Bloodmoon. While it makes sense in-universe in that construction on the colony is ongoing between assignments becoming available (and those assignments are usually you removing issues that were holding up construction), it unfortunately allows all of Solstheim's vicious and plentiful wildlife to respawn during that time. The lack of fast travel across much of the island means you'll be battling the same packs of wolves and hordes of Riekling Raiders every time you cross the same track of wilderness. While not overly challenging to a high-level character, they do wear out your equipment and greatly slow your traveling speed.
• Stamina drains as you run and the more Stamina you lose, the more often tasks you perform fail. This leads to players having a hard time dealing with doing anything after running a short distance, including battle, unlocking things, and bartering. (While it makes sense that one would have difficulty with precise movement tasks and speaking if they are out of breath, it probably should have been an Acceptable Break from Reality for the sake of the player's sanity.) Until you find faster methods of traveling, you'll have to walk for the majority of the time if you're going to get anything done.
• The lack of the series standard fast travel. Instead of going to a waypoint when you're outside and safe, you pay for travel services from one city to another. This makes traveling into the countryside very tiresome, especially when you're trying to find the Ashlander camps or your House manor.
• The beast races (Khajiit and Argonians) not being able to wear boots or full helms. This cuts them off from using some of the best equipment in the game, like the Boots of the Apostle (legendary Light Armor boots with a Levitation enchantment) and Masque of Clavicus Vile (a legendary Heavy Armor full helm with a massive Fortify Personality enchantment). The game does Justify it as each race has non-humanoid feet and snouts too long to fit under helmets, but it is extremely unpopular nonetheless. (All future games in the series changed it to allow these races to wear any boots or helmets available.)
• The lack of passive magicka regeneration can make things frustrating for a mage oriented character. This means that you need to really stock up on magic potions and rest a lot if you have to cast multiple spells.
• The combat system's RNG, though normal enough in some other games, becomes incredibly annoying in a fully-3D first-person game. Veterans don't have as much trouble with it, but new players are usually baffled by the fact that they're firing arrows or slashing their swords and going dead-on point-blank without doing a single point of damage. The main things are that there's no animation for a missed attack aside from the target not reacting, and it adds another level of difficulty to hitting your attacks on top of actually hitting the target (which, in most games, RNG mechanics are an abstraction for to begin with).

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion:

• The strictly scaled leveling mechanic attracts a large degree of ire, essentially punishing the player for not being a munchkin. To note some of the specifics around it:
  • It makes exploring at low levels fairly boring (Why go explore a new dungeon when the best you will find is some marginally better weapon or armor?) and leads to oddities like random mooks somehow having the best and rarest items in the game, or being the champion of the arena at level 1.
  • The system also suffers from "underleveling": when you get weaker as you level up because the game only takes into account your level when determining what enemies will spawn, so if you've been leveling by increasing your non-combat skills you'll find yourself slowly getting outpaced by the difficulty curve. Many online strategy guides actually recommend resting as little as possible to avoid leveling up entirely.
  • Inversely for friendly NPCs, they will (unlike enemies) not scale to the same level you are, so they end up tiny health and/or low-level equipment, making Escort Missions with non-essential NPCs much harder as your allies get torn apart in seconds by enemies scaled to your level. This is particularly blatant in a quest where you protect (what's left of) the city of Kvatch. If you do this quest early on, as the game expects you to, the City Guards fighting alongside you are apparently being terrorized by the goblin-like Scamps, who don't do much besides fling slow-moving, weak fireballs. Postpone it until you're level 20 or so and the guards' reaction will finally look appropriate, now that they are facing humanoid crocodiles, magma golems, and demonic sorcerers.
  • Part of the issue is that there is a major flaw with the leveling system. When you level up, you gain stat points based on what skills you were using. If you raised blunt weapons for instance, you'll gain strength points. The more you used blunt weapons before leveling up, the more points you gain. The problem is that the rate you get skill points is a lot slower than the rate you level up if you make your most used skills your "primary" skills. Those stat points are very important to functioning in the late game, but if you play the way the game encourages you to, you will end up very underpowered in the late game. The best way to level is to do the opposite of what the game encourages you to do and set skills you DON'T actively use as your "primary" skills, that way you can control how fast you level up and gain as many points from your primary skills as possible before focusing on the skills that actually make you level up when ready. So for instance, a sword and board warrior might want mercantile and persuasion as their primary skills so whenever they are ready, they can spend time buying, selling, and persuading with everyone in town after they've killed goblins and gotten beaten up to their fill.
  • Even if you've been careful in your leveling, damage caps at a certain point while health does not, meaning high-level fights become increasingly drawn-out with even standard foes becoming damage sponges without providing much challenge.
  • This same scaling also applies to quest rewards. It's entirely possible to complete a quest at level one and obtain a weapon little better than a butter knife, while if you complete the same quest twenty levels higher, you'll obtain that same weapon in Infinity+1 form. As many such rewards are unique, it leads to putting off those quests or encounters as long as possible in hopes of getting something that remains useful for longer than an hour.
• Though not as heavily reviled as the leveling system, there have been complaints about the minigames required for lockpicking and conversation, particularly in convincing an NPC via a sort of pie-graph based system. Yahtzee explicitly considers the latter to be a particular bugbear to the game's immersion.
• The magic system leaves a lot to be desired. First, you can't cast certain spells until you reach an arbitrary level. It's an extremely odd limitation where you can say, cast a healing spell that restores 24 health but not one that restores 25 health because that requires being level 50 in restoration for some reason. This wouldn't be too bad if not for the fact leveling up magic is painfully slow: you gain a flat amount of XP for each spell you cast with no regard to how much magicka it cost. This means the most effective way to level up is to create a spell with magnitude and duration of 1 and just spam cast it (well, "spam" cast - did we mention casting spells is in itself incredibly slow?). Speaking of creating spells, the fact that spellmaking is unavailable to you until you complete all the Mages Recommendation quests is also a bit of a pain for anyone replaying the game, since it feels less like "do these quests to unlock a cool new thing" and more "we've locked an essential part of the game behind these quests, haha".
• Horse Armour - one of the first ever paid pieces of DLC (in a game with a very active modding community no less) - garnered this reputation immediately, due to how functionally pointless it was. Part of the reason why it was criticized in the first place was because players could pay real money for a set of armor that didn't actually increase damage protection; it merely increased the health of the steed instead. Players expecting the first set of armor and steed they receive (the Old Nag) to be much of an improvement will be surprised when they finally use it in combat, and it quickly establishes itself as the worst horse in the game. Additionally, due to the way the DLC was coded (the armor is not an item; it replaces the horse with an armored variant model of itself), putting the armor on Shadowmere (the one horse that cannot die) causes it to lose any items the player may have stashed on it. As such, the DLC has become a Running Gag within the franchise due to how buggy and pointless it comes across as.
• On a meta example, the base Game of the Year edition only comes with the base game, the Knights of Nine, and the Shivering Isles expansions, and you can't purchase any of the DLC not included separately, meaning if you want any of the other expansions^note Fighter's Stronghold Expansion, Spell Tome Treasures, Vile Lair, Mehrune's Razor, Wizard's Tower, Thieves Den, the Orrey, and the infamous Horse Armor and you only bought the base GOTY version, you have to buy the Deluxe Edition at full price.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:

• The lack of ability to save created custom character design without an external mod, despite the time some players can spend to perfect their character and several older games such as The Sims 3 or the contemporary Saints Row: The Third have such feature. This problem continues to Skyrim's spiritual successor Fallout 4.
• Dragon attacks, which work well in principle, but suffer from so many flaws that numerous mods were made simply to counteract them. To note:
  • Dragons are unexpected. You must be ready for a dragon attack at any time, especially since...
  • Dragons will kill non-essential NPCs without warning. Since dragons level up with the player, but the town NPCs don't, an Ancient Dragon can easily wipe out the NPC population of towns such as Riverwood or Falkreath. Unless you survey the town for damage before saving, you'll likely end up losing merchants and potential quest-givers permanently.
  • Dragons disrupt the fast travel system. Once a dragon is on your radar, even if it's a mile away, you can't fast travel until it is either dead or it leaves your radar, which is mostly up to chance due to their random flying patterns when not actively engaged in combat.
  • Dragons are annoyingly common at higher levels, while the novelty of fighting dragons wears off quickly. You do need dragon souls to unlock shouts, and you also need dragon bones and scales to make equipment, but eventually you will end up with enough of both that you'll start using the former to reset perks en masse while selling the latter for gold (of which you'll likely already have plenty).
  • Dragons are hard to fight with melee characters. Bows and spells are generally the best way to deal with them; dragons deal so much physical damage in melee (along with a potential instant kill move) that melee classes pretty much have to rely on potions to live. Not to mention that until you knock their health down quite a bit, dragons love to fly around well out of your reach.
• The first major DLC, Dawnguard, adds vampire attacks. Essentially, take the "unexpected" and "NPC-killing" aspects of dragon attacks described above, then add the fact that they only happen in cities. Further, it's possible to enter a walled city only to have a group of vampires spawn all around you. If you go between cells within the city, it is possible for them to spawn at the entrance so that you may not even know the attack was happening until you stumble upon the dead bodies. Thankfully Special Edition replaces these with a single disguised vampire who only becomes hostile if you approach them.
• In a similar vein, Dragonborn adds cultists who will wander around any town until you kill them. The good news is that, unlike random dragon/vampire attacks, the cultists will only turn hostile when you speak to them. The bad news is that their high-level magic can easily wreck most of the town's population. Basically, if you see them in a town, run - they'll eventually catch up to you in the wilderness and you can kill them without endangering the civilian population.
• Combat:
  • Kill cams, both how they interfere with certain play styles and how it can instantly kill players without warning. They have a nasty habit of missing with projectile kill cams, they interrupt player control, and worst off that they disregard all damage-mitigating factors: damage resist, blocking, cover, being way out of melee range... essentially, this makes it possible to you to die what should've been a survivable hit because the kill-cam triggered, resulting in very cheap-feeling deaths. It was eventually patched so kill-cams only trigger for the last enemy in current combat.
    • The fact that some gory deaths only limited to kill-cam (and even worse, locked behind high-level perks) arguably made combat dull for those who liked Ludicrous Gibs or combat feedback as for some inexplicable reason, the game lacks gore introduced in Fallout 3, despite the engine being an upgrade.
  • The broken-as-hell yielding system. In Oblivion, all you needed to do to yield was block and press a button, which the enemy would recognize and guards always accepted. In Skyrim, you need to put your weapon away and just stand there. Most of the time it doesn't work, meaning guards will keep trying to kill you for a forty-gold bounty, no matter how many times you try to surrender.
• Marriage. Despite being an interesting new aspect of the game with great potential, many people have taken issue with it. Courtship is easy and short (You found my book for me! I love you! Let's get married!). The dialogue with your spouse is rather boring and often buggy, and you can't have any meaningful interaction with them apart from setting them as a follower, talking about various banal topics, or buying items. The only benefits it offers are certain status buffs, a source of income, and a free follower. It's become enough of a problem that there are numerous mods to improve marriage, including ones that allow you to marry more characters.
• Pickpocketing. Not the skill itself, but the fact that it caps at a 90% success rate, making taking multiple things a hassle.
• Level Scaling, while much improved from the disaster that is Oblivion, still pits you against enemies that are much more powerful than you if you focus on other aspects of the game, such as alchemy, pickpocketing, or lockpicking. This can result in a player who puts levels into non-combat skills potentially fighting enemies strong enough that they can become forced to focus perks into combat stuff, in turn making enemies stronger due to that. On the flip side, enemies will drop slightly better loot, you will find much better equipment in shops and dungeons, and because dungeons are locked to the level you're at when you first entered you can come back later having gotten stronger if one is giving you trouble.
• The Grab system (picking items up) is notorious for being immensely fussy; you can't rotate items and decorate your house properly without accidentally knocking other items over. Thought that was bad? Sometimes when you enter your home, the wonky physics systems sends all the items you took so much time and effort to place flying all over the floor!
• Destruction magic in general. While frying your opponent with lightning bolts or freezing scores of enemies with sweeping blizzards might be cool, it's diminished when one notices that spells don't scale well (enemies will gain health faster than you increase damage) and thus your intended way of playing is to spam the hell out of them. On top of all this, the master level destruction spells cost far too much to use without enchanted equipment, and require a four-second pose to charge that, while cool, makes the player a sitting duck. And to make it worse, there are plenty of shouts that cost nothing to use and give similar if not better results, making destruction magic even more redundant!
• Radiant quests are a hassle: while it's easier for the programmers and writers to have them, it becomes an exercise in boredom as the quests are very limited ("steal this", "clear out this dungeon", "find something for me") and players are forced to trek back and forth in exchange for chump change.
  • The Thieves' Guild quests are the worst example of this. You can get sent to one of the other major cities in Skyrim to do a menial task, and once you've done five of them in a specific city, a new (unique) quest is unlocked that upon finishing grants you a merchant and some other bonuses. Not only does nothing in the game tell you these quests even exist, the game doesn't indicate how many of said quests you've done short of scrolling through your entire log, and there is no way to choose which city you get sent to so players have to repeatedly ask for and default on jobs in order to get one that's in the city they want, or be forced to Save Scum potentially dozens of times just to get five in one city, then dozens more to get the rest of the cities finished.
  • The radiant quests specific to Dawnguard are also a thing. Rather than just let you complete a specific quest series, you have to bounce back and forth between multiple quest givers who force you into dungeon raids (on dungeons you may or may not have already slaughtered your way through) or pointless assassinations, trying to get them to lead you back to the quest givers who actually give out meaningful rewards, and even they sometimes just send you on a pointless quest instead. It serves no practical purpose except to waste your time on meaningless nonsense, and the worst part is that it can even put the quest in Dragonborn-specific locations, even if you haven't even touched that questline. Even Save Scumming doesn't help that much.
• If you travel to Solstheim and start the main quest of Dragonborn, Miraak will appear and steal the soul of some of the dragons you kill until you finally defeat him at the end of the main quest, even if you travel back to Skyrim. The only saving grace is that when you do kill him, you get all the souls he stole from you earlier.
• The final word of the Bend Will shout is no doubt useful, but you'd think the ability to ride dragons at will would be great right? Wrong, for one simple reason: when you ride a dragon, you have no control whatsoever of where the dragon goes. You want to fly across the land on the back of a dragon? Too bad, they'll just circle around the area and never go the direction you want to go. While you can still fast travel on them, that means you have to already have found the area, meaning you essentially can't use this to explore.

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