6 months late - thoughts on Skyrim

On May 18 2012 04:41 Talin wrote:
Here's the thing.

Elder Scrolls took a turn in the wrong direction since Daggerfall for the most part, and definitely since Morrowind.

The whole point behind sandbox-y roleplaying games is the emphasis on the so-called low-level and mid-level stories - stories which are not designed in detail and explicitly served to the player, but rather the stories that the player formulates and builds himself based on the experiences his character has in the world. Think Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress as the games that create and exploit these stories brilliantly without having a single line of narrated text or dialogue, let alone predefined characters, written anywhere.

Daggerfall was a brilliant game in the sense that it used - at the time very impressive - procedurally generated world. Daggerfall world is still one of the physically largest worlds ever created in video games. Interaction between characters was also mostly "primitive" looking (not in the sense of bad primitive, but simple building-block primitive), and instead of having dialogue options to choose from, you instead had to "construct" your query from a list of topics and a set of options, which included a lot of different things including the "tone" you speak in. Like so:



This interface alone gave you a possibility to personalize your character, what he is like and how he behaves, more so than a vast majority of modern RPGs does. Morrowind already started going in this weird middle-way direction by dropping the procedural world generation in favor of a premade (albeit huge) continent and NPC characters. It still retained some of the Elder Scrolls charm by keeping their conversation inteface fairly basic and sticking to the "list of topics" dialogue system.

And then everything went downhill from there when Bethesda decided to make their games a visceral experience benchmark and stripped the series-defining features entirely in favor of making an artificial "emulation" of an open sandbox world mixed with heavily scripted quests, story, and a ton of elements that made the games seem less immersive and less realistic.

In short (!), I really have to disagree. Open world sandbox games do not go well with scripted narrative and well fleshed-out characters. The more the authors try to (pre)define the story and flesh out the characters, the less potent and influential the open world elements are and the less inherent freedom and personality the player has in the game. The more detail you put into the story and characters, the more static the game world inevitably becomes, and with that, so does your gameplay experience.

Ideally one should go for one OR the other, but Bethesda with Oblivion and Skyrim is the perfect example of why trying to do both at the same time can never turn out well (which is not to say that it can't sell well, which is a motivation behind a lot of the decisions they've made).