Lucas
Versantvoort / July 15, 2015
'Oh man, yet another
Skyrim review…', I can hear you
thinking. Well, if you're expecting me to sing this game's praises, then you're
mistaken. Don’t get me wrong, Skyrim’s
a decent game, but it’s got problems that extend beyond classic Bethesda
glitchfests. My history with Skyrim
is a tedious and drawn-out one. I first got it on PS3 back when it came out on
11-11-11 and had fun with it. I'd played the ever-loving f*ck out of Oblivion, which was my first Elder
Scrolls game, so I obviously found the idea of a sequel immensely appealing.
Needless to say, since the PS3 and Skyrim
go together like Imperials and Stormcloaks, my experience with the game was a decidedly
troubled one: there were glitches galore and lag issues that got worse over time.
I eventually sold the game, but years later inexplicably bought it again, this
time on PC, the platform of choice not just due to the bug fixes, both official
and fan-made, but the mods of which there are now more than forty thousand. The
presence of bugs in a Bethesda game has unfortunately become an expected
scenario. Can you believe Bethesda recently stated it'll do everything in its
power to at least ensure your Fallout 4
save files won't be corrupted!? Gee, thanks Bethesda. How about you make a game
where I won't have to feverishly pray I make it through a loading screen! This
little mini-rant aside, on to the review. I'll judge Skyrim from here on out without taking the technical side into
consideration to see how it holds up as an experience. In other words, I'll
judge it on content, not form.
True to
tradition, the next iteration in the series takes place in a new environment, the
wintery home of the Nords, Skyrim. You're a prisoner about to be executed, but
a sudden appearance of a dragon, for the first time in forever, has everyone
scrambling. You escape and you soon discover you're Dragonborn, meaning you
have the inborn ability to use the powers of dragons, namely Shouts. Using your
gift, you fight to rid Skyrim of dragons...or you could, you know, run off and
do your own thing which is what the Elder Scrolls series is all about in the
end.
In terms of
gameplay, no one besides the newcomers will be surprised by what Skyrim's got on offer. You create your
character, customizing his/her looks and stats, and venture out into the world,
looking for adventure.
And there are
plenty of adventures to be found. Probably the key characteristics
of the series: side quests and dungeons. The average mission structure is as
follows: talk to quest giver, clear dungeon, return to quest giver, receive
reward. This is predictably fun up until the point you start to wonder what
else the game's bringing to the table. After all, Skyrim is a role-playing game, aka you play a role, a very
specific type of character and adhere to (your own) rules. This requires the
upkeep of an illusion, both on your part as well as the game's part.
Here is where I
think the game starts to fall apart and you feel the game was rushed just so
Bethesda could have its oh-so special 11-11-11 release date. Sure, the game's
got plenty of dungeon crawling and character building, but what about that
other type of character building; you know, character development,
world-building and so on? This is where the illusion falls apart even on the
most basic level. For instance, you can't walk five seconds in a city without
encountering npc's who repeat their one or two lines before walking on
pretending they’re actually doing something. To make Skyrim feel more 'alive'
and prevent the cities from being too quiet, Bethesda programmed the npc's to
say their little lines to you if you get too close to them. While a nice idea,
since the npc’s only have a couple of lines, this gets tedious really fast,
making you actively start walking around these characters just so you won't
have to listen to the same lines ad nauseam. What immersion! And what is it
with npc's who out of the blue divulge their problems to some stranger on the
street? "I spend a lot of time at the market stalls so I ca--NEWS FLASH:
nobody cares! It's Bethesda's lame excuse for alerting you to the fact that a
particular npc can give you a quest. What immersion!
Speaking of
npc's, pretty much every character is boring and one-note. They serve one of
two purposes: to give you a quest or to fit into a certain type of character
(guard, farmer, merchant, etc.). There is not a single character that holds
your interest for more than a minute. There's the occasional character
development, but since this development has no real consequences beyond the
mission it takes place in, it doesn't really matter anyway. No, what Bethesda
relies on is your imagination, that you fill in the blanks, that you imagine
the characters to be more than they seem. Taking any of these characters
seriously requires Herculean effort and strength of imagination on the player's
part. Some mod authors create custom followers with their own little
backstories, but since most of these followers are not custom-voiced, they
serve no real function. The backstories make no real difference, but are
provided for the player, so he/she will hopefully project the backstory onto the
follower. The mod author might as well say: ‘yeah, this follower is not
custom-voiced, but try to imagine he had a really crappy childhood’…
Even more
hilarious is the inclusion of a marriage system. You do a favor for a certain
someone, wear an amulet and they'll hint at the fact they're interested in you.
It says a lot that the inhabitants of Skyrim are prepared to say 'i do' to
someone who got them an item or, better yet, delivered their mail. I guess South Park was right: we should watch
out for those dastardly UPS guys. This entire system reeks of laziness on
Bethesda's part once again. You marry the npc of your choice and stuff them in
their/your home where they mostly sit around, doing nothing. But at least they
now have maybe like FIVE entirely new lines, including such gems as
"Hello, my love. Back from some adventure I bet." Wow, such
immersion! Who needs a loving bond, the sharing of an understanding, the
lengthy conversations when you can marry mr/mrs Doesn't-Say-Alot.
And what about
the civil war? You know, between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks!? Bethesda
goes out of its way to make you aware of this conflict and how Skyrim's being
TORN APART because of it. Yet, how is it then that I can walk around for hours
and not stumble upon one fight between the two parties? According to the mod
author of Civil War Overhaul, Bethesda hardcoded what they had to reach the
deadline. In other words, what we got is a lot less complex than what could've
been. As it is, the civil war is one of the most uninvolving aspects of Skyrim. Whether you side with the
Imperials or the Stormcloaks, the mission structure stays the same: talk to
general, liberate fort or something to that effect, return for reward. And
don't you just love how in the middle of a civil war, you're sent on your own
to kill a few dozen enemy soldiers? Sometimes npc's from your camp will help
you, but even then it's like a 6v6 fight, hardly a number that instills the
notion that a hard-fought civil war is going on.
I could go on
and on about the lackluster character development, the poor world-building,
etc. The reason this bothers me is quite simple: poor world-building and poor character
development = poor role-playing opportunities. To play a role means to lose
yourself in the game world. Therefore, the game world and its inhabitants must
conform to certain standards of realism and complexity. After all, how can you
lose yourself in your own character, in the way you want to play, if the game
world doesn't respond to your actions in the ways you'd expect? How can I
believe in the Companions, see them as an elite fighter's guild with its own
history and lore, when they never venture out to fight and I'm offered to join
their elite Circle after just one mission? How can I believe there's a civil
war going on when I don't experience the chaos that's supposed to go with it?
How can I believe in the Thieves Guild when its recruiter Brynjolf walks up to
me and tells me he can sense I'm an excellent thief even if my character's
never stolen a single Septim? How can I believe in the whole marriage system
when it's so lazily executed as to boggle the mind? How can I believe in the
cities' inhabitants when the guards talk down to me even if I'm the Jarl of
that particular city? How can I believe the Kahjiit trading caravans are
conducting business with the local cities when all they do is sit around their
little tents? How can I believe that Windhelm is a racist shithole, when I can
be a dark elf and join the Stormcloaks without my character being exposed to copious
amounts of racism and there not being extra demands placed on me? How can I
believe in General Tullius and Ulfric Stormcloak when all they do is sit on
their asses and look at their maps? How can I believe that I'm the key to
stopping the dragons when a handful of town guards take one down with bows and
arrows while I sit back and shove a few cheese wheels down my throat? The list
goes on; believe me, it does.
The causes
behind all these shitty design choices aren't that hard to figure out. Previous
entries like Daggerfall had mediocre
graphics (by today's standards), but a gargantuan amount of content (with the
map being roughly the size of Great Britain!) As graphics got better and
better, making huge games took longer, got harder and more expensive as well.
This led to the inevitable trade-off between graphics and content. The older
games had so much content, because the graphics were relatively simplistic. (Daggerfall had such a rich variety of
conversation options precisely because voice acting wasn’t as important as it
is now.) With Skyrim, compromises had
to be made. Making Skyrim literally
the size of Great Britain would take eons. The aforementioned trade-off has
consequences for all forms of content: from the number of dungeons to npc's.
Bethesda wants their cities to feel alive, but they (were only able to) do so
with the bare minimum of effort: a few dozen npc's with a few dozen lines (if
you're lucky) who walk around doing nothing and say the same things to each
other; day in, day out. Bethesda would want all followers to be unique and feel
like real characters with motivations and backstories, but that would require
dozens of voice actors and hundreds if not thousands of recorded lines, so
instead we get these blank slates who follow you around, saying "I'm right
behind you" every five seconds.
I guess it's
what you expect going into Skyrim
that'll determine if you'll like it or not. Is the game fun? Sure, swinging an
axe, shooting lightning bolts and clearing dungeons for loot is good times...up
to a point. But if, like me, you like complex characters and impressive
world-building in your rpg, then you'll start getting bored really quick.
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