Anyone who knows me in real life knows that I have a very well developed sense of preconception, and that those preconceptions are very rarely overcome. Having played about an hour of Morrowind and enough Fallout 3 to grow frustrated with it, I came into Skyrim with very low expectations.
I was going to skip the game altogether. I could follow the progress of my friends through conversation, ask a few pointed questions to learn what I want to know, and move on with my other thousand hours of gaming to catch up on. After realizing that, play it or not, I was going to be surrounded by Skyrim discussion for weeks, I decided I'd rather participate in them than be annoyed by them, and I joined in. Besides, the new laptop runs the game at 'Ultra High' on my 50-inch plasma, and I get to use an XBox controller to play it on my couch; at least I'd be comfortable.
So, here's the short of it: the game is not a rank pile of soiled athletic supporters, and it does inspire more of an exploration desire than I usually have in open-world games, but I would stop well short of claiming to 'love' it. I find myself shaking my head at many of the apparently intentional game design decisions, and I don't know if the fandom for the game and series are based more on hype or a shared agreement to ignore flaws. [If it's the latter, then many better games have been sorely victimized by the public, being lambasted and shunned for a smaller set of more minor flaws.]
So, in no particular order, is a list of points both positive and negative about my short [~5 hours; level 5] time in Skyrim so far:
1) The conversation engine is horrible. After the very tightly scripted opening sequence, I followed the road to a town. Entering the town for the first time, I approached the first villager on the road. I clicked on him to start a conversation. The first dialogue option was "I hear you and [name of someone I've never met] are both sweet on the same girl" [or something to that effect]. I have no idea who this yokel is, who he's courting, or who that other yokel is. Why is this an option? To be clear, there was no 'incidental dialogue' going on when I walked up; this was all out of the blue.
Jump ahead to entering the second town I encountered in the game. This time, I walk into the end of an argument. Dude A says that his troops need more swords, and that Smith B needs to make them all and hurry up about it. Smith B says she can't handle an order that size. She'll get started, but don't expect any miracles. This could be cool. I run up to Smith B ready to introduce myself and accept a quest to help her make swords - I could use to learn the crafting system. But lo and behold, there's no related quest. There is a 'smithing tutorial' quest, but it doesn't reference the earlier dialogue. I don't even make a sword in this tutorial quest.
If this game is meant to be consistent and coherent, why are there misfires and missed opportunities like these? I mention only 2, but about 1 in every 3 of the dialogues I've participated in has a similar illogic to it. The quest for the 'Golden Claw' was done correctly, where the incidental dialogue matched the content of the concurrent directed conversation, so I know they can [and probably want to] make this work.
The image at the end of the post goes along very well with my favorite anecdote. I entered a cave guarded by aggressive bandits expecting that more hostile bandits would be inside. I shot the guy sitting just inside the door with 2 arrows and he ran at me, sword drawn. When I put away my bow to switch to my melee weapon, he stops in his tracks, puts away his sword and calls out 'Is that you?" Apparently he's 'Old Blind Guy' and so he thinks I'm one of the bandits, but he noticed that I put my bow away [by scent, maybe?] and instantly stopped minding that there were arrows currently lodged in his skull. My response options were 'Yeah, it's me" and "No, I killed him, and you're next." I chose "Yeah, it's me" to which he responded 'Oh, okay" and sat back down. Apparently, all of the bandits sounded just like me. I know lots of NPCs share voice actors, but I expected a little consistency or verisimilitude on part of one of those NPCs.
2) Inventory. Ok, so if one of the 'selling points' of the game is that you can collect every plate, spoon, and tankard in the game world into one place, or that searching every chest, barrel, and wardrobe is fun because of the cool stuff you could find, why does the inventory system make me want to punch the developers in the database?
a) Why can't I sort items by their value/weight ratio?
b) Why are ingots [a smithing ingredient] and linen wraps [vendor trash which I mistook for a crafting material] both listed in the 'misc' category?
c) What are the little triangles that follow some of the weapons and armor pieces in my item list? Items that are 'better' than what I currently have equipped have them, but only sometimes. Items 'worse' than what I'm using sometimes have them, too.
d) Why is there no 'buyback' in the merchant interface?
e) Why do I get to know how much money a shop has on hand?
f) Why does the confirm button advance me one step forward at a time, but the cancel button drop me completely out of the menu?
g) Why do 2 of the buttons on the D-Pad take me to the same favorite items list, while the other 2 do nothing?
f) Why are the interfaces for cooking, Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy all different, with different sets of menus, flow between them, and process for selecting components and confirming crafting operations?
g) why does my character inherently understand how to create a piece of fine jewelry out of rocks, or how to duplicate enchantments after disassembling any enchanted item, but Alchemy is a frustrating trial-and-error brute-force system full of frustration and failed combinations?
h) Potions and some healing spells give discrete amounts of HP, but the only place on screen to see a discrete value for my current HP is on the skill tree screen. Why hide the HP total from the player?
I could go on, but it's clear to me that the people designing these menus never sat down in a room together to talk about how they wanted them to work.
3) Magic - so far, the magic system is one of the blandest I've ever seen in a fantasy game. Damage spells come in very standard, formulaic varieties, and there's only one real staus effect that differentiates them. You can summon spirit animals, which is neat, as well as weapons; a summoned weapon that costs MP to create and Stamina to swing but has no capacity for enchantment like a real weapon seems to be simply worse than the regular versions.
4) Models, animations and physics - I'm pretty sure that Bethesda's art director is someone's brother-in-law who tries really hard and is just so excited that no one can bring themselves to tell him that he's no good at his job. The environments look pretty great, when everything clicks. When it's nighttime, or if there's snow on the ground [this is a wintry setting, so that's all.the.time] or when the faraway low-res texture is used at close distances [this bug is not exclusive to the XBox version], or if anything is casting a volumetric shadow, or if the swaying grass is placed too close to a tree or rock, or… You get the idea. Sometimes the vistas are great, and other times, there are the same sorts of errors that games had trouble avoiding 10 years ago.
The player and character models are, by all rights, hideous. Heaven help you if an NPC decides to get smelly-breath close before talking to you, especially if she wants to talk about her husband Grey-Mane. I know why that dude rotates between the smithy and the taproom; I wouldn’t look forward to going home to that craggy, doughy, creased leather pouch full of incredibly potent silica desiccating gel. I gave up on making an attractive player character after 30 minutes, and it looks like the game developers did, too. Even the kids have this variable-chromosome malnourished look about them that reminds me of the Save the Children TV ads. I’m not sure if nature or nurture creates these ugly little wart kids, but I do know why no one will play Hide-and-Seek with play-doh boy in Riverrun. [Aside: is Bethesda run by some harsh Puritanical anti-libidinous religious sect? It would explain a lot.]
The Physics engine is… interesting. I’m sure you have seen some shots of horses standing at angles perpendicular to gravity hanging to cliff-faces with magnetic hooves. But worse than that, people and objects that are meant to be sitting still jitter, slide, and occasionally rocket across the environment with little to no provocation. NPCs who were standing directly in front of me start sliding down the 3-degree slope [without any animation, mind you] and then take a step every few seconds to move back to the scripting marker they were assigned to in the first place. This means that the devs prioritized how cool it is for your recently-slain boss to slide down the side of a mountain at 30 miles an hour, making his body inaccessible and unlootable, over realism in interaction with NPCs. Is this the right direction for a story-telling game?
5) I realize at this point in my writing that I really skimmed over the positive points. Here are a few:
a) The water looks very good.
b) I like the lack of character classes and the ability to swap between benefits at will.
c) I appreciate that the game is not a ‘be what you do’ system, like Dungeon Siege was. Using one weapon type or spell type consistently doesn’t improve it to the point that other options are trivial.
d) I like that after reading a book about places to go visit, those places were pointed out on my map.
e) I like that the first perk in a lot of trees is ‘half MP cost’ or ‘big damage/chance of success improvement.’ It makes splashing in skills viable and lets the player feel powerful early on.
f) I like that they abandoned the old weapon-swinging system. Skyrim’s combat is boring and simple, but way better than Morrowind’s or the other Elder Scrolls games.
I’ll continue playing for a while – it’s a week or so until Zelda comes out, and I’ll need something to play in the PS3-only land that is Spokane [the girlfriend’s family is weirdly Sony loyal]. I’m still baffled, though, that people who have played better games and given them short shrift can so completely beguile themselves into believing that each game in this series is somehow redefining a new pinnacle of gaming achievement. I give it a 65/100, just on par with Fallout 3.
I was going to skip the game altogether. I could follow the progress of my friends through conversation, ask a few pointed questions to learn what I want to know, and move on with my other thousand hours of gaming to catch up on. After realizing that, play it or not, I was going to be surrounded by Skyrim discussion for weeks, I decided I'd rather participate in them than be annoyed by them, and I joined in. Besides, the new laptop runs the game at 'Ultra High' on my 50-inch plasma, and I get to use an XBox controller to play it on my couch; at least I'd be comfortable.
So, here's the short of it: the game is not a rank pile of soiled athletic supporters, and it does inspire more of an exploration desire than I usually have in open-world games, but I would stop well short of claiming to 'love' it. I find myself shaking my head at many of the apparently intentional game design decisions, and I don't know if the fandom for the game and series are based more on hype or a shared agreement to ignore flaws. [If it's the latter, then many better games have been sorely victimized by the public, being lambasted and shunned for a smaller set of more minor flaws.]
So, in no particular order, is a list of points both positive and negative about my short [~5 hours; level 5] time in Skyrim so far:
1) The conversation engine is horrible. After the very tightly scripted opening sequence, I followed the road to a town. Entering the town for the first time, I approached the first villager on the road. I clicked on him to start a conversation. The first dialogue option was "I hear you and [name of someone I've never met] are both sweet on the same girl" [or something to that effect]. I have no idea who this yokel is, who he's courting, or who that other yokel is. Why is this an option? To be clear, there was no 'incidental dialogue' going on when I walked up; this was all out of the blue.
Jump ahead to entering the second town I encountered in the game. This time, I walk into the end of an argument. Dude A says that his troops need more swords, and that Smith B needs to make them all and hurry up about it. Smith B says she can't handle an order that size. She'll get started, but don't expect any miracles. This could be cool. I run up to Smith B ready to introduce myself and accept a quest to help her make swords - I could use to learn the crafting system. But lo and behold, there's no related quest. There is a 'smithing tutorial' quest, but it doesn't reference the earlier dialogue. I don't even make a sword in this tutorial quest.
If this game is meant to be consistent and coherent, why are there misfires and missed opportunities like these? I mention only 2, but about 1 in every 3 of the dialogues I've participated in has a similar illogic to it. The quest for the 'Golden Claw' was done correctly, where the incidental dialogue matched the content of the concurrent directed conversation, so I know they can [and probably want to] make this work.
The image at the end of the post goes along very well with my favorite anecdote. I entered a cave guarded by aggressive bandits expecting that more hostile bandits would be inside. I shot the guy sitting just inside the door with 2 arrows and he ran at me, sword drawn. When I put away my bow to switch to my melee weapon, he stops in his tracks, puts away his sword and calls out 'Is that you?" Apparently he's 'Old Blind Guy' and so he thinks I'm one of the bandits, but he noticed that I put my bow away [by scent, maybe?] and instantly stopped minding that there were arrows currently lodged in his skull. My response options were 'Yeah, it's me" and "No, I killed him, and you're next." I chose "Yeah, it's me" to which he responded 'Oh, okay" and sat back down. Apparently, all of the bandits sounded just like me. I know lots of NPCs share voice actors, but I expected a little consistency or verisimilitude on part of one of those NPCs.
2) Inventory. Ok, so if one of the 'selling points' of the game is that you can collect every plate, spoon, and tankard in the game world into one place, or that searching every chest, barrel, and wardrobe is fun because of the cool stuff you could find, why does the inventory system make me want to punch the developers in the database?
a) Why can't I sort items by their value/weight ratio?
b) Why are ingots [a smithing ingredient] and linen wraps [vendor trash which I mistook for a crafting material] both listed in the 'misc' category?
c) What are the little triangles that follow some of the weapons and armor pieces in my item list? Items that are 'better' than what I currently have equipped have them, but only sometimes. Items 'worse' than what I'm using sometimes have them, too.
d) Why is there no 'buyback' in the merchant interface?
e) Why do I get to know how much money a shop has on hand?
f) Why does the confirm button advance me one step forward at a time, but the cancel button drop me completely out of the menu?
g) Why do 2 of the buttons on the D-Pad take me to the same favorite items list, while the other 2 do nothing?
f) Why are the interfaces for cooking, Smithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy all different, with different sets of menus, flow between them, and process for selecting components and confirming crafting operations?
g) why does my character inherently understand how to create a piece of fine jewelry out of rocks, or how to duplicate enchantments after disassembling any enchanted item, but Alchemy is a frustrating trial-and-error brute-force system full of frustration and failed combinations?
h) Potions and some healing spells give discrete amounts of HP, but the only place on screen to see a discrete value for my current HP is on the skill tree screen. Why hide the HP total from the player?
I could go on, but it's clear to me that the people designing these menus never sat down in a room together to talk about how they wanted them to work.
3) Magic - so far, the magic system is one of the blandest I've ever seen in a fantasy game. Damage spells come in very standard, formulaic varieties, and there's only one real staus effect that differentiates them. You can summon spirit animals, which is neat, as well as weapons; a summoned weapon that costs MP to create and Stamina to swing but has no capacity for enchantment like a real weapon seems to be simply worse than the regular versions.
4) Models, animations and physics - I'm pretty sure that Bethesda's art director is someone's brother-in-law who tries really hard and is just so excited that no one can bring themselves to tell him that he's no good at his job. The environments look pretty great, when everything clicks. When it's nighttime, or if there's snow on the ground [this is a wintry setting, so that's all.the.time] or when the faraway low-res texture is used at close distances [this bug is not exclusive to the XBox version], or if anything is casting a volumetric shadow, or if the swaying grass is placed too close to a tree or rock, or… You get the idea. Sometimes the vistas are great, and other times, there are the same sorts of errors that games had trouble avoiding 10 years ago.
The player and character models are, by all rights, hideous. Heaven help you if an NPC decides to get smelly-breath close before talking to you, especially if she wants to talk about her husband Grey-Mane. I know why that dude rotates between the smithy and the taproom; I wouldn’t look forward to going home to that craggy, doughy, creased leather pouch full of incredibly potent silica desiccating gel. I gave up on making an attractive player character after 30 minutes, and it looks like the game developers did, too. Even the kids have this variable-chromosome malnourished look about them that reminds me of the Save the Children TV ads. I’m not sure if nature or nurture creates these ugly little wart kids, but I do know why no one will play Hide-and-Seek with play-doh boy in Riverrun. [Aside: is Bethesda run by some harsh Puritanical anti-libidinous religious sect? It would explain a lot.]
The Physics engine is… interesting. I’m sure you have seen some shots of horses standing at angles perpendicular to gravity hanging to cliff-faces with magnetic hooves. But worse than that, people and objects that are meant to be sitting still jitter, slide, and occasionally rocket across the environment with little to no provocation. NPCs who were standing directly in front of me start sliding down the 3-degree slope [without any animation, mind you] and then take a step every few seconds to move back to the scripting marker they were assigned to in the first place. This means that the devs prioritized how cool it is for your recently-slain boss to slide down the side of a mountain at 30 miles an hour, making his body inaccessible and unlootable, over realism in interaction with NPCs. Is this the right direction for a story-telling game?
5) I realize at this point in my writing that I really skimmed over the positive points. Here are a few:
a) The water looks very good.
b) I like the lack of character classes and the ability to swap between benefits at will.
c) I appreciate that the game is not a ‘be what you do’ system, like Dungeon Siege was. Using one weapon type or spell type consistently doesn’t improve it to the point that other options are trivial.
d) I like that after reading a book about places to go visit, those places were pointed out on my map.
e) I like that the first perk in a lot of trees is ‘half MP cost’ or ‘big damage/chance of success improvement.’ It makes splashing in skills viable and lets the player feel powerful early on.
f) I like that they abandoned the old weapon-swinging system. Skyrim’s combat is boring and simple, but way better than Morrowind’s or the other Elder Scrolls games.
I’ll continue playing for a while – it’s a week or so until Zelda comes out, and I’ll need something to play in the PS3-only land that is Spokane [the girlfriend’s family is weirdly Sony loyal]. I’m still baffled, though, that people who have played better games and given them short shrift can so completely beguile themselves into believing that each game in this series is somehow redefining a new pinnacle of gaming achievement. I give it a 65/100, just on par with Fallout 3.
