Skyrim Skyrim, lacking a soul?

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I honestly do believe it is possible to have a good story and characters and exploration. The Ultima 7 games did it and that was 20 years ago.

Morrowind had some mods like the Less Generic NPC project ones that while basically being just text, did wonders for fleshing out the characters in some of the towns and making them seem more unique and alive. To this day there are some characters I remember specifically because of those mods.

It just takes a little bit of effort which is something Bethesda has never done with their npcs. They always take the generic route. A lot of their in game books have rich stories with interesting characters and I have long lamented that they seem unwilling or unable to apply that kind of writing to the game itself and not just books within the game world.
 
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
966
Do any of you visit the official (Bethesda) Skyrim forums?

I'm hoping the developers haven't been influenced much by the threads there in that the topics brought up by the users are boring as sin. Nobody seems to ask good questions there at all. It's all about grafx and can I put tattoos on my character. Ugh.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,897
Location
Oregon
Do any of you visit the official (Bethesda) Skyrim forums?

I'm hoping the developers haven't been influenced much by the threads there in that the topics brought up by the users are boring as sin. Nobody seems to ask good questions there at all. It's all about grafx and can I put tattoos on my character. Ugh.

It's really sad over there now. I used to visit it a lot during morrowind time and it was fun and intelligent place then Oblivion came out and it was downhill from there on.

Its all to do with dumping down of Oblivion, since it means more idiots/immature people are playing the game hence state of the forums.

Sadly this has affect on the dev too, recently one of them talked about "63 different types of beards"…..
 
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
4,425
Location
UK
Sadly this has affect on the dev too, recently one of them talked about "63 different types of beards"…..

63 types of beards? WHY? Why would anyone care about that? How does affect my gameplay in the slightest?

I seriously don't get the graphics thing. For about 5 years now I've been totally lost when people say a game is ugly. I'll look at it and think, "HOW?"

Take the new Deus Ex as an example; Someone said it looked ugly. I looked at screenshots of it and thought to myself they're nuts. I seriously can't tell the difference between what is awesome looking and what is supposed ugly. It all looks great to me now and has for quite a while.

The only difference in grahics I can tell anymore is between my 3D glasses, AAA, middle-of-the-road games, indies and roguelikes. All AAAs pretty much look the same to me, middle ones have varying degrees of how good they are, indies as well, but neither of them can compete with AAAs. Indies have to make due with what they can afford and roguelikes still rely on your imagination to bring the world alive.

Another examples is Oblivion and Skyrim. They both look exactly the same to me. They both look great(maybe Oblivion's fat faces could be improved, but that's it). Sure there might be a few nifty little things Skyrim throws in, but I could give a rat's ass about the differences between the two. One day it would be nice if they took just a small portion of those manhours they put into graphics and switched it over to gameplay and story. I would love to see what they would come up with if they weren't so concentrated on making their games pretty.
 
Joined
Feb 3, 2007
Messages
5,347
Location
Taiwan
1zl7hpl.jpg
 
Joined
Apr 4, 2008
Messages
2,437
Location
Prague
LMAO, you are kidding me? They had an actual poll on beards?

I give up. I'm going to go over here and play with the roguelikes and indies while the kiddies try and decide what color toenails they want.
 
Joined
Feb 3, 2007
Messages
5,347
Location
Taiwan
There is no option like "none" in that poll … :S
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
63 types of beards? WHY? Why would anyone care about that? How does affect my gameplay in the slightest?

I seriously don't get the graphics thing. For about 5 years now I've been totally lost when people say a game is ugly. I'll look at it and think, "HOW?"

Take the new Deus Ex as an example; Someone said it looked ugly. I looked at screenshots of it and thought to myself they're nuts. I seriously can't tell the difference between what is awesome looking and what is supposed ugly. It all looks great to me now and has for quite a while.

The only difference in grahics I can tell anymore is between my 3D glasses, AAA, middle-of-the-road games, indies and roguelikes. All AAAs pretty much look the same to me, middle ones have varying degrees of how good they are, indies as well, but neither of them can compete with AAAs. Indies have to make due with what they can afford and roguelikes still rely on your imagination to bring the world alive.

Another examples is Oblivion and Skyrim. They both look exactly the same to me. They both look great(maybe Oblivion's fat faces could be improved, but that's it). Sure there might be a few nifty little things Skyrim throws in, but I could give a rat's ass about the differences between the two. One day it would be nice if they took just a small portion of those manhours they put into graphics and switched it over to gameplay and story. I would love to see what they would come up with if they weren't so concentrated on making their games pretty.

I agree with you 100% about graphics. They all look pretty good to me and I don't really worry about crappy looking games any more. However I think what matters now is art direction and world design. Some games do this well others do it badly. This is why Gothic games still "look good" even these days.
 
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
4,425
Location
UK
One day it would be nice if they took just a small portion of those manhours they put into graphics and switched it over to gameplay and story. I would love to see what they would come up with if they weren't so concentrated on making their games pretty.

It is possible to do both. They aren't mutually exclusive. I think The Witcher 2 is a good example of that. Beautiful game, great story. Sure it has its flaws, but it still looks fantastic and is interesting and thought provoking.

I realize it's a totally different type of game and that it's harder to do a good story with an open world than it is with a game that pushes you along a more narrow, linear path, but still there's got to be more interesting stories and dialog than what we ended up with in Oblivion.

Even the old ES games were better in this regard. Daggerfall had a lot of political scheming going on from various factions and some memorable characters, Morrowind's main plot when you got to it all was quite complex and had several mysteries in it, but Oblivion was like Elder Scrolls for Dummies.
 
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
966
2h6zfbc.jpg

c2855a7e-83d9-44d7-9174-eba2b331d9ae.jpg

30djti9.jpg


Beards are the new black when it comes to mainstream cRPGs.

Personally I´m not touching Skyrim till post-ironic mustaches are implemented.
 
Joined
Apr 4, 2008
Messages
2,437
Location
Prague
I realize it's a totally different type of game and that it's harder to do a good story with an open world than it is with a game that pushes you along a more narrow, linear path, but still there's got to be more interesting stories and dialog than what we ended up with in Oblivion.
.

I don't understand why you can't do good story with an open world. For example why can't you do W2 in say Oblivion world? You can limit it to a certain region? The rest of world can be open for exploration and you can throw in some side quest etc?
 
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
4,425
Location
UK
It's really sad over there now. I used to visit it a lot during morrowind time and it was fun and intelligent place then Oblivion came out and it was downhill from there on.

I agree. But even during Oblivion's development I was sucked into a lot of discussions I thought were worthwhile. My problem with Bethesda's forums from Oblivion on back to Arena was just that it was such an angry place. But now it's a boring place, I think boring is worse.

I've been regularly visiting the Bethesda Skryrim forum since the game was announced and have not participated in a single thread - which is odd for me since my wife says she can never get me to shut up.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,897
Location
Oregon
There were some really great chats with the developers over on the dalnet #morrowind channel. The forums slowly replaced dalnet and it was a terrible substitute. You see, it takes a small amount of brains to set up and run mIRC, so the lowest common demoninator crowd couldn't figure out how to access the Devs. Then came the Xbox 360 and PS3 and the web forums and now all you need is a pulse to be able to spout an opinion.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
8,821
The Lore forums there are pretty decent still, but slow. I also drop into the Morrowind mods one every so often and am always surprised to still see work being done on mods for that game even now. Those are the only forums I visit there though. Whenever I go to the Skyrim one my brain hurts. That sort of crowd is what you end up with when you pander to the lowest common denominator, sorry to say.
 
Joined
Jan 24, 2011
Messages
966
I agree with you that I'd like to see those things in a game, and Oblivion didn't have them. But I don't see how you can possibly make that kind of prediction based on what we've seen of the game so far.
 
Joined
Apr 4, 2009
Messages
526
Location
Auckland, New Zealand
I find I agree with lostforever. They can make a gorgeous open world but one can explore only so much before getting bored. Its the same problem in all there games even fallout 3. I play for story and exploration. Not just exploration.

Then go play Dragon Age or ME or something. Not trying to be smart, but there it is. Bethesda makes sandbox RPGs. The star of the show is your character, and how it moves through the world. It's not for everyone, but neither is the story games.

I have literally hundreds of hours of gameplay in Morrowind, Oblivion, and FO3. I have a couple hundred hours in FO:NV, but i think FO:NV is TOO story driven.

I do agree that Oblivion was weak, ecen on the area of exploration. The procedurally generated content was unacceptable to me. They dropped that in FO3. If Skyrim has the location graphic storytelling of FO3, then it's going to be a much better game then Oblivion.
 
Joined
May 28, 2011
Messages
194
DA, ME etc are not open world like Oblivion....

I understand that Oblivion is a sandbox but that does not mean you can't have nice optional quest chain for people to follow....

Even the "main quest" is really optional in Oblivion. You can have nice story driven main quest but you don't have to follow it ifs TOO story driven since its sandbox and you have lot of other things to do.....

Its win/win for all....
 
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
4,425
Location
UK
Skyrim is lacking a soul because, like Oblivion, it is a thoroughly corporate product assembled out of parts which guarantee to result in maximum monetary profit for its producers. There is no creative vision or inspiration behind it to speak of, it is designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and cause the player to ask a minimal amount of questions about the plot and require him to understand the bare minimum about the setting of the game.

The basic formula behind Oblivion went like this: what kind of a setting do most successful games have? Standard European Medieval sword&sorcery fantasy? Let's go with that. What did the players hate the most about Morrowind? Having to wander about the landscape looking for a particular cave? Let's include a compass which will always point the closest path towards the quest objective. What parts of the previous game did players fail to notice/appreciate? Esoteric texts and speculative philosophy? Let's ditch that and keep the plot as simple and streamlined as possible: an Evil Lord of Destruction wants to Destroy Everything, the player needs to gather N Artifacts and put them in the Right Place to banish the Evil. I have no doubt Skyrim will follow this formula as well. Modern TES games to the older ones (Daggerfall) are like the Star Wars prequels to the original trilogy.
 
Joined
Dec 14, 2010
Messages
101
Eh, a lot of the games mentioned in this thread didn't have very good NPC's either. The characters in the Gothics, Ultimas, Daggerfall, Morrowind, etc, are very one-dimensional. Oblivion wasn't any worse in that respect, even if it lacked the character finesse you can find in games like Witcher and Mass Effect.

Good writing takes skill, time and money - because good writers don't work for free. When you have to write characters and stories for hundreds and hundreds of NPC's, the quality tends to drop. That's just how it goes, because even companies like Bethesda have limited resources. Good writing takes a lot of work.

Moreover, in an open world game you typically don't spend a lot of time with the same characters. Emotional connection builds over time - You can make it stronger in a game where you spend time with the same, small bunch of characters from beginning to end.

In a game like Oblivion the main quest might have the same key characters playing important roles from beginning to end. But when you repeatedly spend a dozen hours doing all kinds of side-quests between the different parts of the main storyline, you easily lose the emotional connection. You just kind of forget about those characters.

One solution for this would be to give the player permanent companions who follow him throughout the game. But if that would be done, people would complain about it instead.
Maybe the new Radiant Story will improve on this a little bit, since it's been programmed to link new quests to characters that the player is already familiar with.

All in all, this is not to say that the writing couldn't be better. It could. But the quality in Oblivion wasn't any worse than in any other open world RPG.

And better character animations and graphics do help to better emotionally relate to characters. Back in the day you pretty much had to imagine the characters in your head, because the small sprites on the screen didn't give you much. But for the last decade we've been stuck with vectors that tend to bring the characters very close, visually. And they have never been able to convey emotion well - At least not before games like Mass Effect came around. The dead-eyed NPC graphics in Oblivion certainly weren't very good in emoting in a realistic manner.

The world in Skyrim looks a lot better to me than the world in Oblivion. It feels more gritty and real, and therefore more immersive.
 
Joined
Sep 14, 2011
Messages
129
Back
Top Bottom