An attempt to review Skyrim

Where does one even begin with an entity like Skyrim? Do you go by the same lists of individual merits like you would a standalone game, or do one primarily see it in regards to the rest of the Elder Scrolls series? Or maybe start with the fact that the five years after its release has brought a seemingly never ending stream of (more or less) openworld sandboxes?

Skyrim was, in my opinion, the last truly great game Bethesda Game Studios made. And, I know, I am beginning to sound like the bitches who complain about how the Elder Scrolls have been “dumbed down” since Morrowind (which I have a hard time understanding the reasoning behind, because Morrowind is a stale, shallow game that is redeemed by its world-building). And I am sorry I do come across like one of those bitches, but Fallout 4 (FO4) simply do not engage me the same way.

Bethesda Game Studios has a bad habit of not learning the correct lessons from their previous installments. When the Radiant Story (RS) in Skyrim didn’t ignite people’s pubes in excitement, what they should have done is to tone that aspect down, not have more of it. It is really quite annoying to see the extent to which RS is used in the game.

I do like a lot of the things they did with FO4. I like the return to the more traditional outlook for the Brotherhood of Steel (BoS), while being a more engaged player in the development of an area. It strikes me as a good way to marry the ideas of the traditional and Lyons interpretations of their mythos. I like the Institute and their rather unambiguous moral character. I like that the Railroad, while having good intentions, appear entirely detached from the reality of the synth situation, both as it pertains to who they are and what threat they can pose. I like the Minutemen, in that it makes sense for me that people would organize themselves.

I like that there is not an obviously wrong side to the conflict of the main story, I like that it is not about the mustache twirling evil Enclave. I like that the BoS and Institute both engage in some messed up things. I like the Commonwealth Wasteland, with its creatures and people.

Gameplay wise, it is far stronger than FO3 was. Guns handle better, the customization of equipment is fucking awesome and they made a very meaningful distinction between regular armor and Power Armor, which I think was about frikkin’ time. The levelling is, well, it’s there. Kinda. I can’t say whether or not I like it, even now. It’s just a new way to do it. And, honestly, I’d rather they try this stuff than never evolve.

In short, I have a lot of good things to say about FO4. So why don’t I consider it alongside Skyrim, FO3, Morrowind and even Oblivion? It is entirely possible that I am just weary of the BGS style sandbox RPGs, but I don’t think that is it. I still have some fun in FO4, running around shooting people, after all.

There are a few prongs to the reasons why the game leaves my mind almost the instance I turn it off, unlike Skyrim which made me go over things and plan what I wanted to do next when I turned it off again. Or what sort of character I wanted to roll next, because I knew there would be a next character. In FO4, on the other hand, I have 1 character. Total. Never restarted the game.

Indeed, it is so hard for me to stay with FO4 that this review has been in the making ever since the release of Nuka-World. Comparing to my “The Orderless Paladin” article, which I wrote in a couple of hours after thinking it though a little bit beforehand, that is quite bad.

FO4 breaks tradition on one thing (not as jarring an article shift as it seems right now, trust me), compared to previous BGS titles: Expansions. As much as I dislike what they did to Cyrodiil in Oblivion, the Shivering Isles is a fucking awesome place with an awesome character driving the plot: Sheogorath. They have tried to recapture his awesomeness in both Skyrim and the Elder Scrolls Online without much success. As much as I love Skyrim, Dragonborn surpasses it in most regards. Bloodmoon and Tribunal for Morrowind are great.

Then there is Far Harbor, Automatrons and Nuka-World. Eh… Well, I liked Far Harbor until it kinda just stopped with no real ending. It was atmospheric and brought up some interesting questions about the player character. I like the ideas behind Nuka-World. Automatron is, in a word, lackluster.

I think Nuka-World is a micro-scale example of why I think FO4 do not engage me. On paper the thing is fucking brilliant, but the story elements and lack of interesting quests makes the game a lot shittier than the sum of its parts.

For the main game, one of the things that really drive me nuts is that you’re given too much investment in following the main quest. This is something I touched on a bit for my New Vegas rant, but it is important for a game to understand what it is trying to be. This is why it is such a nice detail that Hadvar/Ralof suggest to split ways after Helgen, just as the road forks off in two directions. Your character doesn’t have any personal investment, you just escaped from a Dragon attack. Getting the fuck out of dodge is a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

And, yes, FO3 suffers a bit from the same issue as FO4 here. Oblivion not as much, as your character do not necessarily have the motivation to oppose Dagon or help the Septims. But I think it is a major problem when the game gives me a sandbox with a great deal to explore, after it has established that my character’s child has been kidnapped.

Enjoy the sandbox nature of the game and be the worst fucking parent ever, or ignore most of the game running after the kid? I get that BGS wants to do better storytelling, I do. It is necessary as more and more developers branch out into the open world game niche. Like the Witcher 3, which pulled off the whole “looking for your daughter(well, sort-of adopted daughter, in that Geralt loves her like a daughter)” story in a sandbox game. Man, Witcher 3 is an awesome game. I think it is the first nominee for the “Best Game” award I have played. It has fun gameplay, great storytelling, likeable characters, an interesting world… you name it. I hope it will be topped, because that means more absolutely fucking awesome games. But back to FO4.

When it comes to Nuka-World the story elements are tones down. You’re basically given an offer to become the boss of some Raider gangs and has to help them conquer the rest of the Nuka-World. There is a safari zone, bottling plant, wild west place, castle for children and a futuristic place. Nice spread, on paper this would be brilliant. Shame they didn’t put any content in these places to make them interesting. I don’t think I have ever played a BGS expansion with so little content in it. Even fucking Knights of the Nine, which is just a questline DLC added to Oblivion, felt more fleshed out than this.

At the end of the day, I’d describe Nuka-World like this: Pick it up if you want to kill mostly the same enemies to new scenerie.

This is what happens when I try to review Skyrim. I can talk about specific things in Skyrim, like how I think people are oversimplifying the change in religion that has occurred, or the civil war, but I can’t write an actual review for it without going off about something else.

I hate Fallout: New Vegas

I continue my trend of catching up to 2016 after covering one thing in Skyrim by going back a few years to Obsidian Entertainment’s take on a Bethesda Game Studios RPG. Or their take on a BioWare RPG. Whichever strikes your fancy, really, since it fucks up both.

Now, let me start of by saying that I tend to really enjoy Bethesda and BioWare RPGs. Even Oblivion, which I can’t fucking stop using as a prime example (because it fucking is) of missed potential, have given me hours upon hours of enjoyable gameplay because it had shit worth doing not attached to the main quest. Indeed, the main quest was maybe 10% of the total content amount in the game. Maybe. Probably more like 5%.

I enjoy linear and semi-linear stories too, like your typical BioWare RPGs, where everything major is in some way tied to your main quest, with a few side quests strewn in between. I can forgive stale repetitive gameplay if the world draws me in, like in Morrowind. So why do I hate, and I really do hate, New Vegas?

On paper the game looks absolutely brilliant. Post-apocalyptic New Vegas is the stage for a conflict between Caesar’s Legion from the East and the New California Republic from the West, with a pre-war genius trying to keep control of the New Vegas he built. It set’s BioWare characters and storytelling in a Bethesda sandbox, while improving on some of the niggles of Fallout 3’s gameplay. Another thing that makes perfect sense on paper is for Donald Trump to open Trump’s Mortgage shortly before the housing market collapsed. That is to say, it only makes sense until you actually think it through.

It is no secret that Bethesda Game Studios are not great at the whole “storytelling” aspect of developing a game. We saw them give a real good attempt with Fallout 4, and a token entry with Fallout 3, which were anticlimactic as hell. Much like New Vegas, come to think of it. But Fallout 3&4 have something NV do not: The option to fucking escape from the main story.

See, the thing that actually makes a BGS RPG is 1) the freedom, and 2) the world-building. These two ingredients are why Morrowind, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and to a lesser extent Fallout 4 are good games. BGS knows (or at least used to know. Cough, F4, cough) that their engine and approach to gameplay does not lend itself to lengthy conversations directly engaged in by the player. This is why all the best dialogue with, say, Ulfric Stormcloak is between him and Galmar Stone-Fist and not with the player. You can actually have the two of them react in some way to what the other person is saying.

What it does lend itself to is letting the player explore and to let you build a world. The former because it gives you a shit-ton of locations to explore and the latter because you can put books, journals, mini-quests, visual storytelling, interesting loot/rewards and more NPC to NPC dialogue in these places as the player murders their way through legions of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in their way.

If you want to play a game that lends itself to story-telling, I’d recommend most BioWare RPGs over any BGS RPG any day of the week. They use a very different engine, with more linear stories and more character focus. They also remove a lot of the freedom associated with BGS games, have more “cinematic” conversation systems and a very, very strong focus on the overarching story. Except in Dragon Age: Origins. That was an “unfortunate coincidence”-fest I might have to revisit in a post of its own someday.

The point I am ultimately making, since it obviously needs to be spelled out, is that the different game systems and designs lend itself to different things. When you remove the cinematic effect (which in older games, and some new ones, were given to you in textbox descriptions, which is fine), you remove a lot of the humanity of a character. You remove the option to showcase a lot of their quirks visually. Like Jack’s restlessness and unease and pain in Mass Effect 2, which are made more impactful and believable by the way she moves when interacting with Sheperd. Boone stopping you in the middle of nowhere to engage in a “who can go without blinking the longest” contest, while standing perfectly stiff, is not engaging, no matter how interesting and touching his story is. They do that shit in Oblivion and Fallout 3 too, but at least has the courtesy of being fucking brief about it.

This is, in my opinion, the worst of the flaws NV makes. The thing that cannot be fixed, because it is not a matter of the furniture (don’t worry, I have plenty of things to complain about there too), but of the foundation of the house. Even if it looked lovely inside, I am not buying a house that is collapsing in on itself. Or, since I did when I bought NV, I will complain about it.

The TL;DR of this first part about NV is this: Forcing me into endless amounts of Oblivion and Fallout 3 style conversations is a quick way to get me really fucking bored. Now to throw the furniture (and babies in bathwater) into a burning fire.

As I can’t stop ragging on about when giving my opinions on Morrowind and Oblivion (and later on when I get around to talking about Skyrim), world building is really fucking important to me. It can make or break a game by itself. And I really fucking hate the world building in New Vegas.

The first obvious problem is Caesar’s Legion. Not only are they a rip off of something I am really fucking sick of, the Romans, but they are also so mind bogglingly evil that it is hard to comprehend that they were introduced as one of the two major parts of a conflict that could be really interesting. They enslave people, force women into bearing children, force men to fight, destroy any semblance of self-identity and engages in torture, terrorism and genocide. And this is only by their own description of what they do. At least Skyrim’s Civil War keeps the obviously evil group as a looming threat, not a side to pick. Heck, the Thalmor being mind bogglingly evil isn’t even fully established in the canon of the series yet, just interpretations based on a former developer’s writings that are not part of the games.

I also hates the casino families. Nero (really going for the subtle approach, Obsidian) and his Gamorra are your stereotypical Italian gangsters, Benny and the Chairmen are stereotypical American gangsters and the white masked freaks are high society perverts and cannibals. Nice spread, shame only the least fleshed out one is the most interesting. Hint, it is the ones eating people. You’d think I didn’t have to specify that, but a lot of people seem to like this game, so I am apparently living on a planet of morons. Once upon time I started cooking food for a living and prayed to the Eight and One that the waiters and waitresses I worked with were not representative of humanity’s overall spread in intelligence, but the Eight and One apparently hate me.

In a short summation, because there isn’t a lot to say about them, I find the Boomers to be very silly, the NRC to be boring, the BoS to be poorly executed and the Followers of the Apocalypse to be numbingly dull. The slums outside of New Vegas and the Enclave veterans are alright-ish, but there are like 3 things to do there, so that’s nowhere near close enough to make up for the boredom the rest of the game leaves me with.

Most of the major sidequests are, in some way, tied to the main quest. And I absolutely hate this too. This is where the mixing of BGS and BioWare game styles really begin to run into one another. I do not play an openworld sandbox RPG (that is not the Witcher 3) to be forced to play the main questline and quest in a particular order. I play is for freedom. The linearity of FO:NV is further emphasized by the jerkish enemy placement that steer you in 1 path around the world that just happens to be the one with the most NPCs explaining what is going on in the world. You can sneak through these high level areas, but you’re not rewarded for it. You just end up in areas before you have the gear and level to deal with them. Whop-de-fucking-do.

On the topic of quests, most of them seem to be designed to give the middle finger to anyone who do not care to have a high speechcraft skill. And don’t get me wrong, I think that having a viable path through the game based around the ability to be persuasive is fine. What I am not fine with is making it so that you fuck up a quest in some way or another if you don’t have that skill on your character. Making something viable is not the same thing as making it the only fucking solution that doesn’t resemble a “thank you for trying” award. Name me 1 quest in the game that does not net you a benefit with speechcraft that is unobtainable otherwise.

The character could be interesting, I don’t know. I don’t know because I am taken out of the immersion with a bucket of cold water by the dialogue system past the 2 minute mark, so the game wouldn’t even get points for that if they were the best written characters I had ever encountered. Which they are not. Which I know because I can still hear what they are saying after the immersion has taken the first train to Sweden. Stereotypes and flat-faced popculture-references, a reliance on “silly mutants” and a Companion quest system that, should you actually want to get to know them, will miss no chance to mess with you as you need a bloody spreadsheet to not miss the triggers. And don’t get me started on the DLCs. Too late, I suppose, so let’s give each of them a quick look.

Dead Money: Oh, great, a claustrophobic heist mission in an open world game. Exactly what I want. No, New Vegas, I do not want more linear shit from you and I definitely don’t want more casinos.

Big MT: Running around an experimental facility while a bunch of mad scientist robots shouts nonsense at you in really annoying tones of voice. Hint: It worked for Portal because 1) it was short, 2) it had a strong central game mechanic that was incredibly (blatant brown-nosing) well implemented, and 3) it was clever and funny. It does not work in Old World Blues because I want to tear of my ears 5 minutes into the first conversation and things are only going downhill from there when they introduce the most annoying enemies from New Vegas again. Oh, and don’t try to pass it off as “original”. Running around an experimental science lab gone wrong is not original.

Honest Hearts: It was alright. I think. I remember engaging in a little tribal warfare and that was pretty much it. Honestly, I remember next to nothing about it, so I know for a fact that it did neither engage nor infuriate me. So it was probably alright. If I’m charitable.

Lonesome Road: Oh, great, retroactively unmaking every roleplaying decision the player has made by attaching a past to them in the last expansion of the game. Great way to end things guys. At least FO 3&4 give you your backstory at the start and don’t invite you to make up your own on a supposedly near-blank canvass. Oh, and then there is the dull-voices antagonist that is inexplicitly obsessed with the player because you changed the course of history for an area you just heard about for the first time like 2 hours ago. And this place too is very linear and I have ragged on about how well that goes with the engine four or five time by now.

DLC TL;DR: It does not fix any of the game’s faults, nor give you the option of a more interesting place to spend your game time. Like the Shivering Isles for Oblivion did, by adding an open chunk of land with bright colors, weird people and its own wildlife to hunt to your heart’s content roughly one fourth the size of the original landmass. Which is pretty damn good in terms of value.

I suppose a couple of positives towards the end are mandatory, if only in interest of being fair minded: There are a couple of improvements on FO3’s gameplay, with the added armor typing, adding of a threshold for weapons and armor condition before they start affecting performance and food crafting. The added weapon and armor variety is nice.

Naturally, with that, we also have to mention that for the first few months, the game had technical issues the same way a child rapist has a few personality flaws. Most of which was fixed in post, but fucking hell that launch resembled the Skyrim launch for PS3. It just happened across all platforms.