Skyrim - Critique @ Grantland

Thrasher sends in this deconstruction of Skyrim at Grantland. It's a lengthy article but makes some good points:

There are other things — a lot of other things — you can do in Oblivion, but most of the roughly 200 hours I spent on the game I spent doing stuff like this. No apologies. For one of the first times in my gaming life, Oblivion offered what felt like a fully realized world populated by characters with alarmingly various social schedules.1 OK, maybe it was an often inert and nonsensical world, and maybe those characters were essentially robots with do-this and do-that timers on them; that didn't make either any less fascinating. What The Legend of Zelda felt like when I was 12, Oblivion actually was. All of this is why, for a lot of console gamers my age, that moment in which Oblivion's open world first opened up has something like moon-landing significance. A massive interactive system, thoughtfully designed, that allowed for player experiences of nearly infinite variety: Here, finally, was a clear argument for what video games might actually be for.
Except for one thing. Despite how much gripping, odd, surprising, and otherwise enjoyable content the Elder Scrolls games contain, you cannot escape the repetitive and somewhat entropic nature of the core experience, which is dozens of hours of heading into caves/dungeons/forts to kill bandits/necromancers/skeletons to find a tome/rune/amulet, after which you beeline for the nearest merchant/alchemist/blacksmith to sell/trade/repair all the picked-up crap you've arranged and rearranged your inventory to accommodate. Is this enjoyable? Of course it is. But there's a point at which this brand of enjoyableness becomes indistinguishable from compulsion, and it seems fair to ask when a game's expansiveness becomes an affable form of indentured servitude.

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More information.

What? No comments? Well, I though it the best analysis yet of this game, and best written, even though it is long.

This is an excellent critique, very good points up until the comparison to Dark Souls. I have played Dark Souls, it is a breathtaking visual game with a story that is very interesting and very sparse. So sparse that you want more of it in between the game forcing you to become as good at action rpgs as you would need to be at super mario bros. to beat the game. It even has a super mario bros. mentality too, die and die again until you learn the trick. It is nothing like Skyrim.

I think Skyrim would benefit from dialing back the dialogue/lore elements to something more akin to Gothic 1 & 2. This is a much better comparison I think, and these games were about as good as you can do dialogue/lore in a fully voiced rpg with the current animation technology. Minimalist but not absent, using the technology to avoid highlighting the limitations of the technology. The article makes a good point that you don't want to be constantly highlighting what you don't do well, which is what the Skyrim conversation system does.

Dark Souls was certainly a stark contrast, but I don't think it was necessarily very useful.

Maybe I missed something but it just seemed to be a really long winded article by someone who doesn't like the voiceovers or the way lore is conveyed in skyrim. The whole article just seemed like a whole lot of rambling. I either just didn't get his point or thought there was going to be a much bigger point.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, released for PCs and the original Xbox in 2002, was a smaller, saner, and far more refined game. I played it a bit when it came out, but two things stopped me from getting too far. The first thing was that Bethesda had not yet figured out how to make a palatable console RPG, though few developers had in 2002. The second was the game's self-serious devotion to its incurably dorky lore — and I say that as someone who's read the Lord of the Rings cycle more than twice. In 2006 came the series' most refined and absorbing iteration yet: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

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Okay then..

I'm guessing he also thinks Arcania was better than Gothic.

I felt the same way. I missed having real drama based on choices made. The people seem, well, too shallow. Combine Skyrim with Bioware storytelling (when it's complete) like in DAO, and you'd have something.

irtehyar said:

Combine Skyrim with Bioware storytelling (when it's complete) like in DAO, and you'd have something.

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Someone did that allready. It is called Fallout New Vegas.

Since DAO is 1/5th the size of Skyrim, at best, it'd be hard to write that level of dialogue for so many people. What could have been done better, would be to have the 15-20 people that you spend lots of time with and/or work for, be more fleshed out. Keep the level of dialogue that currently exists for the majority though, because there are just too many people in Skyrim to give everyone depth.

As far as the lore goes, I'm in the camp that loves TES lore, so I disagree wholeheartedly.

Lol, Biff had a much more interesting answer

An actual world and lore is actually why I like Skyrim and games more than games like Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is just a story, you play on sets and go from set piece to set piece. When not in a cut-scene I'm constantly reminded of being on a 'set'.

We've got stories and movies that can tell compelling stories well. The unique point of games is not story. Ofcourse story can be a component.

In the same way gamplay is not unique to videogames, the various board games and the roleplaying we did in our youths (cops versus robbers or cowboys vs indians, or is that politically correct nowadays?) were full of gameplay.

What he is advocating is removing most of developer induced storytelling (lore/diaglogue/questlines). It's true that player induced storytelling is in the moment very compelling but I felt mostly empty afterwards.

Player induced storytelling happens with games like Civilization or Total War or Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings II (that I'm playing now). There is no actual story, you just interact with the gamesystems and AI and during a campaign a story unique to yourself unfolds. It's exhilerating at the moment you're playing but not memorable. I remember playing Civ2 or that non sid meier one by activision. But they never feel memorable.

That used to be my favorite genre, and probably the only type of game I'd actually admit I'm addicted to. (I had a session of Crusader Kings II the day before yesterday and started at nine in the evening and stopped playing at five in the morning). But at the end it isn't the genre I love since it isn't memorable.

What it comes down to is that some people prefer the storytelling and wish the storytelling of Skyrim was more like Mass Effect.

I'd like more interactivity with the world (or universe in this case) of Mass Effect and not have it feel like moviesets that get me from cutscene to cutscene.

I too find the dialogue crinche worthy sometimes but my solution is so radical it will never happen: bring back the wiki-style dialogue and reserve voiced dialogue for main quest and the most impressive parts. Don't waste money on voiced dialogue that's either being said by the same voice actor for different characters or the exact same line by ten voice actors. This way it opens up the merchants to have dialogue they would logically have. Every local should be able to tell me where the blacksmith is not just the questgiver that sends me to the blacksmith. Every (older) npc should be able to tell me something of the history of the town, not just the Jarl. Spend the money saved on make that dialogue that remains voiced as excelent as possible.

Seeing as the writer likes Oblivion above Morrowind I can see where our tastes differ. I still think about the world and lore about Morrowind. A land torn between adhering traditionss and embracing the good things the empire can bring. Everyone plays 'the same' main quest, but some do it to protect the people of Morrowind, others might play it as a dutifull servant of the Empire, others really think they are the Nerevarine. I also liked the political tension between the great-houses.

The lore in Oblivion was very thin, I only remember Mankar Camoran saying Nirn was actually the domain of Daedra lord Mehrunes Dagon who was reconquering what was rightly his. But the main quest was basicly: we get invaded, you go and kick ass and close the gates. I feel the Ayleids were under-used. I still know next to nothing about them. The most interesting lore in Oblivion was in the Knights of the Nine and The Shivering Isles.

So I see exactly why he likes Oblivion so much and why I like it least out of the TES games.