20 Beloved Video Games No One Admits They Hated

It's hard to believe that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is 15 years old. Since launching in 2011, it's gone on to achieve almost unparalleled success, regularly cited as one of the greatest video games ever made. It drops players into a massive open world and grants them almost immediate freedom to go off and explore it as they see fit. Like other legendary titles on this list, Skyrim broke several cultural barriers, helped by the fact that it arrived around the same time social media really started to explode in popularity.

That same sense of freedom that set it apart from every other game at the time proved to be problematic for others. It's a game that can overwhelm you pretty easily if you let it, with distractions seemingly round every corner, and side quests and objectives stacking up pretty quickly. It can definitely leave some players feeling like they're wandering around the map almost aimlessly, as main quests get buried in among everything else.

Then there's the bugs. Bethesda games are notoriously riddled with bugs, and for some, thats part of their charm. But there's no doubt Skyrim had plenty at launch, perhaps unsurprisingly given its scale. ranging from tiny to game-breakingly bad. Static NPCs delivering dialogue segments that feel like they go on for far too long in the game's opening hours will not have helped players much either.

Skyrim was a significant milestone for the video game industry. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone that disagrees with that. Listen carefully though, and you just might hear whispers of how much the game was initially misunderstood.