When comparing Far Cry Primal vs The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Slant community recommends The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games on Steam?” The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is ranked 3rd while Far Cry Primal is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is:
You can set off to any of Skyrim's different towns and discover new storylines from interesting factions that flesh out the world and the lore, with great characters and their own absorbing narratives to get lost in. There are a good number of these factions, like the scholars at the snowy College of Winterhold, the secretive assassins of the Dark Brotherhood, or the cohort of rogues and bandits of the Thieves Guild. After picking whichever faction you want to learn more about, you can eventually become a Master of the guild and learn new skills for your character. Playing through each of their individual stories lets you really feel like a member of the faction you choose, like with how the Thieves Guild sends you on missions to pick locks and steal valuables without getting caught by the guards. And if you only get through some of the faction's story and decide you don't enjoy it, you can easily go find another one and play through that one instead. There are no limits on how you play through the plot, with Skyrim giving you the flexibility to pick up stories, set them down, and come back to them whenever you feel like it.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Humanized upgrade system
Instead of some static menu where you pick and choose what areas to upgrade skills the player need to find characters in the game, who can build and improve items for the character. This way the player is interacting with the upgrade system by taking part in finding and interacting with AI.
Pro Recaps when starting game
Each time the game is started there will be a recap of the story progression so far of the user time spent in the game, this makes for a good way to catch up on what was accomplished last and what is next when spending any long amount of time away from the game.
Pro Focuses on survival
Being that the game focuses more on animals in the wild as enemies instead of humans (like past games in the series) the player must survive when out in the wild by avoiding or fighting these creatures. An added day and night cycle adds on to this gameplay by making the animals more aggressive at night. The animals can be warned off with fire, but this means the player needs to collect animal fat in order to create torches. All of this adds up to more of a focus on survival, especially at night.
Pro Total freedom in how you choose to play through the world's different factions
You can set off to any of Skyrim's different towns and discover new storylines from interesting factions that flesh out the world and the lore, with great characters and their own absorbing narratives to get lost in. There are a good number of these factions, like the scholars at the snowy College of Winterhold, the secretive assassins of the Dark Brotherhood, or the cohort of rogues and bandits of the Thieves Guild. After picking whichever faction you want to learn more about, you can eventually become a Master of the guild and learn new skills for your character. Playing through each of their individual stories lets you really feel like a member of the faction you choose, like with how the Thieves Guild sends you on missions to pick locks and steal valuables without getting caught by the guards.
And if you only get through some of the faction's story and decide you don't enjoy it, you can easily go find another one and play through that one instead. There are no limits on how you play through the plot, with Skyrim giving you the flexibility to pick up stories, set them down, and come back to them whenever you feel like it.
Pro Massive sandbox to explore at your own pace
The in-game map is absolutely gigantic. There are so many places to go and so much to do in the world, easily giving you hundreds of hours of content.
Exploring the wide range of environments, from the snowy mountains to the richly-detailed towns and cities is such a joy because of how lush and beautiful everything is. Wandering around often surprises you with new side quests to find off the beaten path, with new characters to meet and history to learn about in whichever area you find yourself in. You can get into all sorts of battles with powerful enemies or stumble into hidden dungeons with awesome loot at the end. Or you can sneak around towns at night stealing peoples' stuff while they're asleep to sell everything off for money. And there's just a ton of other intriguing secrets and fun diversions to discover as you adventure throughout the world.
Pro Unrestrictive skill-based RPG system
Skyrim has no set character classes or equipment/spell limitations. Instead, it allows you to form your own class based on how you decide to play.
For example, sneaking increases your sneaking skill, hitting an enemy with a shortsword increases your one-handed skill, taking damage while wearing leather armor increases your light armor skill, and so forth. You can you play however you want and the resulting character will be a perfect match for your playstyle, giving Skyrim a different feel from other RPGs.
Pro Deep lore rivaling classic fantasy literature
Skyrim inherits the stories and world-building of The Elder Scrolls series, which stretches back 20 years. It has numerous stories surrounding the various races (orcs, elves, lizardmen, demons, etc.), mythical beasts, gods, cataclysmic events, parallel worlds, and just about any fantasy trope you could think off. What's even better you can read the lore in books found in-game, allowing you to immerse yourself for countless hours.
Pro Huge variety of mods
Bethesda Softworks has upheld a tradition of releasing their internal content-creation tools to the public since Morrowind (2002). Many modders transition to new Bethesda games as they are released, bringing their experience with them and helping newcomers through forums and wikis. As a result, Skyrim's mod selection is outstanding in both variety and quality.
Cons
Con Barely expanded from Far Cry 4
The game has taken many aspects found in Far Cry 4 out to focus on things such as hunting and crafting, sadly the hunting and crafting mechanics are barely improved over Far Cry 4, which does speak to the level of development the game received being that even areas that the core gameplay focuses on is not really improved or expanded in any way to make for a more in-depth experience.
Con Poor performance
The game does not utilize multi core threading very well and even on the highest end of PCs with a Titan GPU the game may still dip below 60fps when on max settings at 1080p.
Con Same map as Far Cry 4
While the art has changed to look more stone age, the map size and areas are pretty much the same. This of course makes for way less development time and people see it as a shortcut for a full priced game.
Con Really short
The game only has 4 main missions, which can be completed quite quickly. This shows how much this game should have been DLC instead of a full priced title.
Con No color blind option
Bad guys are marked in red and friends are marked in green, the most common color blindness is in the red a green spectrum's meaning that those that are affected by this will have quite a bit of trouble playing this game.
Con Difficult to connect to characters in the game
There is zero real language used in the game, it is all made up, which makes it difficult to connect to any character in the game since nothing is spoken that anyone can understand. This may have been to save money on voice actors, but no matter the reason it does detract from the story of the game and connecting to it.
Con Combat is too simple
Most of the time you can just whack an enemy until it dies and it involves very little strategy or planning to succeed.
For example, targeting specific body parts doesn't deal extra damage, nor can you cripple an enemy. There are no vulnerabilities, so you can't set furry forest animals ablaze easier than humans. The enemies also lack any real variation in how they attempt to fight you – they just run at you swinging wildly or attack you from afar.
Because of this the combat is very one-dimensional and can start feeling like a chore after a while. Luckily most of the combat issues can be fixed with mods, allowing you to enjoy a more varied and deeper combat experience.
Con Forgetful NPCs can break immersion
After completing certain story quests NPCs get new lines added to their dialogue based on your decisions. Sometimes the NPCs might become forgetful and return to their default dialogue, which can break immersion, especially if they talk about an event that's been long resolved.
Con Buggy and crash prone
While this game is not as buggy as it was upon release, there are still many people that encounter various bugs and crashes. These can happen in both modded and unmodded games and it's a common occurrence in Bethesda released titles. Fortunately, there are some community mods that try to fix most memory issues, stability issues, and general bugs.