Skyrim
I used to wait like a month between writing two blog posts. Then I took an arrow in the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with a temporary lack of inspiration and a general not feeling like writing something. I don’t know. Either way, I’m going like crazy – this is the second post that is actually being queued up when I’m writing it (this is when I set it not to publish immediately but some time in the future, in this case, a week in between posts so that I don’t burn through material too quickly – up until now I’ve never done this, actually).
Anyway, I used to play Skyrim, like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.
Or maybe, it had more to do with the fact that I got fed up with it.
Don’t get me wrong. I played Morrowind for waaaay too many hours, and loved it. I played Oblivion waaaaaaay too much, and I loved it. And in many ways, I love Skyrim, but in some ways…
To start off positively, Bethesda is still a major champion in terms of open-world RPGs. I just love to be able to say, screw you fate of the world, I’m going home, or somewhere else, and do whatever it is I like to do next. A big world with lots of places to visit, plenty of NPCs to talk to, lots of side quests (and often pretty good ones too, not the overly generic ‘go drop off/pick up this item’ or ‘talk to this guy’ and you’re done), and so on is something that I appreciated back in Skyrim’s predecessors, and I can certainly appreciate it a lot in Skyrim.
Compared to Oblivion, the main quest (or, as far as I got with it) is much better. Oblivion’s main quest sits in memory as being very repetitive: you have to close a bunch of Oblivion gates, and each of them is pretty much the same. It’s uninteresting, to say the least. There’s more to the game than that of course, but it kinda sticks. Skyrim does a way better job at it.
But as great a game as Skyrim can be, it lacks. It’s pretty good, but it just misses on the final details, the finishing touches, the last little bits that would have made it really great.
The engine, for instance. Things like their Radiant AI and such are awesome (in short, NPCs wander around, they go to their homes and sleep and go somewhere else to work, stuff like that – they have lives, rather than just standing at their shop or wandering the same bit of street for all eternity), but in other details, Bethesda could have paid a little bit more attention. For instance, when you swim underwater, the screen gets a sort of color overlay to show that hey, this is underwater, it’s more difficult to see here. Which is great, except that it suddenly appears when the camera is submerged under water a certain amount (and up until that point you can see underwater as clear as you can see above it). This flaw dates back to at least Morrowind, and back then it was perfectly acceptable for a game, but in 2011, I think they should be able to do better.
The game’s controls are horrible. You get used to it, and once you do it’s managable, the controls are very annoying and un-intuitive. They are console-controls on a PC, but mapped to the wrong keys. Not great.
Then, bugs. Especially with a game that is as big and complicated as Skyrim is, there’s bound to be a couple of glitches now and then. If I ran accross such a glitch when doing some obscure side-quest I wouldn’t mind that much and just carry on. The thing is, I had several major problems with the main quest. One NPC’s dialogue was missing (apparantly a very common problem, you have to use some tool and unpack a datafile to fix this – the NPC is quite important and without doing this, he says nothing, you have no idea to what you’re responding, and all dialogue involving him gets terribly bugged). Several times I had to resort to using the console to get past a point that was impossible to complete by playing normally. In a sidequest, I can understand, but having several of these issues in the main quest…
It actually got to the point where I just got tired with having to switch back and forth to a web-browser (which reminds me: it doesn’t handle alt-tab’ing well, which is pretty much unacceptable for a 2011 release, if you ask me) in an attempt to find a workaround for some game-breaking issue in the main quest. As a result I just shut the game down and decided I was done with it.
Bethesda, did you test your game? At all?
(I used to be a playtester like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee. Yeah.)
Another thing – which has evolved into a bit of an internet meme. All of the guards in Skyrim have a small combined pool of lines that they’ll say if the player gets nearby. It turns out that a lot of the guards in Skyrim used to be an adventurer, until their fate brought an arrow on to a collission course with their knee. It’s fine the first time you hear this line. After hearing it from five different guards…
Well. Yeah.
My overall thoughts on Skyrim: it’s good. In many ways, its pretty damn good. But with a little bit more effort, it would have been so much better.
And now, back to playing Tetris.
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