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wjm110's Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)
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| [January 31, 2012 02:01:01 PM]
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So, this stupid session-based website logged me out when I tried to submit my assignment (my second game log) because I had been on one page for too long (because I had been writing the stupid thing). And it didn't have the courtesy to save my work in its form submission or anything. So now I get to try to reword what I have already written. Be warned, I'm not happy about it.
My first impression when starting my second gamelog session with Skyrim was regret. I really did not want to be playing this game; there were other things I wanted to be doing with my time. Now that I had completed the main campaign, I had no desire to return to this unchanged world and waste any more of my time. Sure, there were some guild quests that I hadn't completed, but I didn't feel any motivation to complete them. And it's because of the reasons that I wrote in my last log, some of which I am about to discuss.
There is simply too much content in this game. And it's not that I wish the game had been less of a game, but given the amount of effort the developers put into this game, I wish they would have taken that effort and made a much more condensed, engaging package than the one they in actuality produced. In reality, what we have a game mindlessly filled with fetch quest after fetch quest, without any concern for creating a believable universe.
Bethesda has struggled with this since I started playing their games back with ESIII: Morrowind. The developers can neither create a convincing, realistic narrative, nor can they engage me with any single character. They are all lifeless vessels that apathetically blot this game world that is supposed to be heaving with vitality. Because of this fast-paced, cram-as-many-locations-into-the-story-as-possible structure, we players never get to know anyone, and we consequently don't care about them when we are tossed into the air by a dragon or when we together slay some giant mythical beast.
I do have to give them credit for one thing at least. Bethesda has designed the game so that you can play through the entire main campaign without entering some of the game's main cities, and for that I am impressed. And the reason I'm bringing this up is to relate how a convincing game universe is so crucial to an immersive experience like this. So I, after 70 hours of playing, only yesterday entered Markarth, a town nestled along the side of a mountain ridge in the far western reaches of Skyrim. As I approached the gates, I admired the town's architectural structure, which was splayed in much more of a vertical direction than the other towns. At the very least, it changed things up, and for that I was grateful. Before entering, I took a quick detour to the stables outside the walls to speak with some NPCs. One of the three there immediately began complaining to me about having to carry some dog food up to to the city castle. After he had finished rambling, my character had the option to offer to take it up there for him.
What??
I, the fabled Dragonborn, the legendary slayer of the evil dragon Alduin, the Archmage of the Mages Guild, offered to carry dog food up some mountain to serve to a noble's pets?? What on earth would drive me to do such a thing? Was it the promise of some mighty reward upon completion of this grandiose task, rewarded to me by the kingly stablehand? What a stupid idea. I was taken aback. Instantly, my sense of awe and any sort of appreciation for the potential that this mountainside city may have held was demolished, as I was painfully reminded the truth about this game world. This static universe didn't care if I had journeyed to an unreachable land on the back of my own dragon to defeat a millenium-old, murderous, winged beast with three immortal souls (as dull as that actually was). This universe was content to plod along in its own way, with no regard to my past accomplishments, and dish out the same menial tasks as it would have if I would have just begun the game.
But that's not even the entire problem. Another monumental problem here was that this NPC wasn't ever going to do anything anyway, unless I did it for him! He was going to get off his lazy rump and drag that sack of Pedigree to the Royal Doghouse in the first place. I, in every conceivable case that the game could provide, was going to have to do it for him. If I turned him down (which I assuredly did), he would stay leaned nonchalantly against that clay-brick wall until the heavens themselves fell down. And it's things like this, this sad and immersion-ruining experience, that destroy all suspension of disbelief.
So why, if the game universe is so botched, and the characters so boring, do people still consistently fall head-over-heels to spend their life on this game? It's not because the combat is intense, undoubtedly. But it is because Bethesda has nailed it where they needed to nail it (when it comes to the business of selling games). They have stripped down their product to include the one thing that gamers really want, what really fulfills them: progression, and that quickly.
The one draw here, from Bethesda's point of view, is not to invest players in a realistic game world that they can care about, not even to make the gameplay considerably enjoyable, but to give them some false sense of achievement through the rapid numerical advancement of their skills or some aesthetic enhancement of their character. What else do people talk about when they discuss MMOs? Every time I hear my friends talk about Skyrim, it's never about the epic battle they took part in, or how this or that narrative thread really grabbed them and threw them for a loop; instead, it's always about how they maximized this skill, or made this kind of armor that they will never need anyway but only wear because it's better than their last set. We have exactly what we wished for: a gave that gives us exactly what we want, and makes it easy for us to get there. There's no thought given to the progression of your character; the developers stripped out all tactical forethought for your character's advancement. There no classes that limit your skills, no races that provide anything more than minimal modifications, only skills that desire to be thoughtlessly power-leveled. Everyone starts out at the same playing field, and everyone has an equal opportunity to reach the same level of accomplishment. Your character can be proficient in Heavy Armor, Light Armor, One-Handed Weaponry, Two-Handed Weaponry, Archery, Stealth, Speechcraft, and every School of Magic available. You can be everything at once. Where's the sense of replay in that?
And why would players even need to put forethought into their character? There's no difficulty, no conflict of direction to take. Keep on chugging along, and you'll be better than everybody at everything in no time at all. This is called addiction. And when you have a game that feeds directly to that desire, you have a problem. Eventually, your mind degrades until you no longer even feel combat anymore; it serves only to bring you closer to leveling up this skill or receiving that inevitably disappointing item at the end of some quest that has without a doubt overstayed its welcome.
What you end up with is a repetitive game, complacent in the mire of its proven formula, shed of its complex mechanics and difficulty for a fast-paced console generation, and over-inflated because some long-time fans would have most certainly complained had the breadth of content been anything less than overwhelming. And the sick part of it all is society's acceptance -- no, embracing -- of this well-disguised cow fodder. Will Americans continue to blindly devour what big-name publishers continue to shovel at their faces as "next-generation" RPGs? This improvement is not next-generation. It is merely skin deep, and I'd be inclined to argue even that.
This entry has been edited 2 times. It was last edited on Jan 31st, 2012 at 14:14:42.
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| [January 25, 2012 03:58:55 PM]
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I just completed Skyrim a night ago. It's funny because I wrote this blog/review about it after beating it. I feel it is in every way appropriate for this type of journal entry:
"Nothing in Skyrim is special." This quote comes from an article written as a player's overall impressions after finishing Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
http://ontologicalgeek.blogspot.com/2012/01/guest-article-skyrim-is-gonzo.html
Although the blog is certainly not perfect, it accurately illustrates all the feelings I similarly experienced during my playthrough of the game.
Skyrim is by no means a bad game, but it fails to push the boundaries of an RPG in any meaningful way. I generally try to limit myself to playing only a select number of titles in order to keep my experiences as positive as possible. And it has been a long time since I have had to force myself to finish a game, but Skyrim simply bored me with its unashamed conformity to a fast-food fed, adrenaline-overdosed culture that threatened, if it didn't appeal to every one of our basest needs for stylized action, dramatic beauty, and a spoonfed and equally childish narrative all of the time, mainstream rejection. In essence, Skyrim was Bethesda's cash-in, its appeal to the mass market.
There's nothing wrong with Skyrim. In fact, it does so many things right, that this actually works against the game as a whole. The article compares Skyrim to pornography, and if you take a step back and really think about it, that's what it is. Everything in Skyrim just screams that this fantastical world, full of dragons, battle-hardened men, busty women, and legendary tales of grandeur wants to bend to your every wish and desire. Indeed, you can literally do anything you want. Want to battle an ice-breathing dragon as guards from a nearby town rush to your aid and their certain demise? Want to ride your horse clear across the country? Want to cook food, mine and smelt ore, or craft your own weapons and armor? Skyrim allows you to do all these things. But think about how alike this is to how pornography works. You get everything you want; there's no beating around the bush, there's no relationship in progression, no sense of accomplishment, no sense of lasting beauty. And that's the feeling I get when I leave Skyrim. Did I just waste that time? The 70 hours I played of the game, when all was said and done, left me feeling disappointed and like those hours were wasted in hoping for something that was would never be given to me in this game.
It's not like the graphics are bad. Sure, there are random textures that are awkwardly out of place and low-resolution among other, better looking textures. But the core world is beautiful and varied. In fact, it is so beautiful, and beautiful constantly, that we become desensitized to its beauty. The game taught me to expect no less than to be impressed at every corner, and when it disappointed, I was disgusted. This is the problem. For a game that (successfully?) attempts to transport gamers to another world, one that immerses you into the universe, it teaches gamers that everything should be perfect and at their grasp immediately. It's the same with pornography. There's no time wasted with buildup or development, it all moves from scene to the next at a blazing pace, and even this particularly because of Fast Traveling. This mechanism further reinforces the "Everything Right Now" idea that plagues our Western society.
There's no work. Not once in the entire game did I ever encounter anything that gave me trouble. This reveals another flaw, and that is the core gameplay, which has been notably unchanged from Oblivion. Combat has never been one of the Elder Scrolls strong points, from back in the days of Morrowind, where two character would stand toe to toe and battle it out, waiting on random change adjusted by some calculations to hit the other until one fell awkwardly to the ground. Combat has improved surprisingly little, if you think about it. Sure, now you're guaranteed a hit when your blade strikes an opponent, but think about how "immersive" or "realistic" it is when, if your health gets low, you can just take a timeout and drink whatever healing potions or buffs you need, only to jump right back headfirst into the action against your enemy as if some attentive god had seen your distress and instantly answered your silent cries for assistance.
All enemies function the same, save for the dragons. I mean, did it really take Bethesda five years (since its predecessor) to make a dragon and some cheap crafting system? The first time you fight a dragon, it is genuinely exciting. There are men running around, hacking at its scales, getting thrown into the air, and the varied geography of the tower ruins affords some interesting dueling and tactics. But all too soon after that, you realize that that is the only original enemy in the game. The rest of the time, it's "hack, slash, pause game, hack, slash, find a rock that the stupid unimproved AI can't navigate onto and fill enemy with a hundred arrows, hack, slash."
Non-combat too seems uninspired. How much thought did the developers really put into this system? Modders have already come up with the brilliant idea of melting mundane items and turning them into valuable ingots. If they could think of that in a couple weeks, what was Bethesda doing for five years? What they have done is turn it into a single-player MMORPG. Introducing the crafting system injects the game world with a poorly planned, generic mining-smelting-creating system. Similarly, why did they remove the weapon condition mechanic present in the past games? It would seem perfect for the already present workstations found in every major city and more. And it's for one reason only -- because it inconvenienced the player.
Now I do have to give them credit; there has been a lot of work done in the sound department. The voice acting is largely convincing, even if character animations are consistently and distractingly bland. It goes back to the "quality vs. quantity" issue for me. I would rather see less content, but content that is supremely polished, engrossing, and well-delivered, than (vastly) more content, but content that is unpolished, uninspired, and, simply put, shoddily done. The only time, and I mean the only time, that I can remember even acknowledging that the animations were believable was when your character is given a vision, a vision of three heroes fighting a dragon. The funny thing is, your character is frozen in place. Frozen. What is preventing Bethesda from making believable animations for their characters? Is it laziness? Maybe. Is it too much content to work on? Definitely. Is it that these animations require too much on the player watching the animations themselves and thus being the right spot to see this action? Also definitely.
The problem is that the game gives us too much freedom to move around in the world when things are happening that we are supposed to be paying attention to. Do you want to know why conversations require you to be locking to contact with the other character? Because if we were allowed to converse with others freely, we would be delivering quest items to the Jarl of some copied-and-pasted village while standing on a table. This isn't a flaw of ours; it's a flaw in the game itself. I'm not going to try to provide solutions for every one of the game's faults -- believe me, it would take way too long -- but looking back on Oblivion, there are so many problems inherent to the core gameplay and way content is delivered to the player.
What I'm wondering is, why didn't they fix it?
Are we as gamers going to sit back and accept what big-name companies feed to us because it's the next best thing, because all of our friends have it? Are we going to gladly give away our well-earned money for some recycled, unimproved crap where the publishers hand the game to us with a smile and a handshake (and a hefty dose from the hype machine), and then get their friends to take pictures of them screwing us when we turn our backs?
To return to the more basic structure of my reviews, I do need to mention the storyline, which is probably about to get me fired right back up again. The last time that your stereotypical everyman archetype ascending to some exalted position without any sort of effort on his part, except to "fulfill the prophecy" (I think I just threw up), was Morrowind. And the only reason it worked there was because, without voice acting, there existed much more dialogue -- if you will -- and lore that was easily accessible to the player, and it didn't seem tacked on or contrived. Here, as soon as I even heard the first mention of some Dragonborn, I already knew the ending of the game. It was that disappointing. The game threw barely any surprises at me. There was no character development, no feeling of grandeur or fulfillment of some great prophecy. The story was delivered in a very bland, quest-to-quest fashion, that glossed over almost every aspect of the narrative except, in the most shallow form, what you had to do next. Gone are the days of mystery, intrigue, suspense; you're given everything right up front, with no difficulty in achieving your goal.
The world around you remains static and unaffected by your actions. I had a similar problem with Dragon Age. The entire world (hinged and) hinges on your actions, and it will teeter on the edge of that cliff for an eternity as long as you refuse to carelessly warp to your next objective. Characters react only in the basest ways to your actions -- you're given only the obligatory acknowledgement from the passing apathetic guard. Quests never relate to each other, and there are odd inconsistencies between them. For example, there are so many missed opportunities where the guilds (Companions, Mages, Thieves, Dark Brotherhood, etc.) could have assisted in main quest and the civil war. Why couldn't one of your missions for the Empire/Dark Brotherhood have been to assassinate Ulfric, the leader of the Stormcloaks? Maybe that's a bad example. Why couldn't there have been some politics between the Mages Guild of Winterhold and the Stormcloaks of Windhelm, only a fifteen-minute's walk from each other, in an attempt to garner some much needed aid? Everything being so disconnected and stagnant even upon completion, not to mention the absent character development of any single person in the entire game, really makes you feel like the only one who is actually alive in this supposedly living universe.
I simply cannot justify calling this game "Great." Regardless of how much content it has, do I really even want to come back to it? Would you rather have two bites of the best meal you've ever had in your life, or would you rather be presented with a steaming mound of fecal matter? There is too much here that is not improved. Sequels are made to improve upon past mistakes, not to wallow in the mire of stagnation.
But this goes beyond why the game didn't do better than its predecessors. This goes to the very heart of why this game was made. Was it made to appease fans? We were at the very least made to believe so. Was it made to be a masterful piece of art that will be remembered for (console) generations to come? Certainly not. Was it made to be pornography of the senses? Hopefully not, but that's how it turned out, like it or not. Was it designed to make tons of money that will allow its creators to continue on in the same fashion until we gamers expect from it the same thing that Call of Duty fans expect from their annual installments -- new map packs and a new campaign (see this parallel with Skyrim) with untouched (supposedly perfected) gameplay, simply new ways to level up, fulfilling in every way what Skinner's Principle predicted? Assuredly.
This entry has been edited 3 times. It was last edited on Jan 30th, 2012 at 22:50:10.
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wjm110's Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 11 November, 2011
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