T w e n t y S i d e d

This is the Elder Scroll series Rutskarn is doing: The Altered Scrolls. He’s going through the whole series, starting with Arena (1994) and talking about each game in turn.

It seems like every time we bring Morrowind up it’s a conversation about how it completely sucked but is also the cast favorite. I’ve been trying to figure this out since I began Skyrim. I think the power delta is a big part of it. I like games were you grow in power by orders of magnitude. It’s also a reason I love Minecraft. On day one you’re naked and foraging with your bare hands. By day 100 you’re running around in enchanted diamond armor killing stuff with an enchanted diamond sword, gazing out over the conquered wilderness from atop your glorious doom fortress.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We’re not going to do the Quests for the Winterhold Community College, so let’s talk about that. How bad are the WCC quests? Twice I’ve tried to give them a write-up like I did for the Thug’s Guild. But the whole thing is SO. BORING. that I just couldn’t make it happen. I usually play through content multiple times, and the WCC quest is like some sort of Man vs. Coma endurance challenge.

The dialog is all generic obtuse wizard-speak: A shallow and obvious villain with vague goals tries to steal a mystical orb with vague utility and you, aided by a secret order with vague goals attempt to stop a vague prophesy from doing… something. There’s no stakes. No interesting characters. And there are lots of scenes where you just have to stand there while people ram exposition into your face. Some of it is even unskippable. And of course that stuff is delivered in an Overly! Dramatic! Voice… that… takes FOREVER! to get. to. the. damn. POINT!

It’s a chore. It’s awful, even by Skyrim standards of flavorless storytelling.

But that mage librarian? He’s cool. I like that guy.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Am I going crazy? I have this vivid memory of going to see Paarthurnax and having him give me a little exposition that I was really enjoying, and instead of being able to ask him for more, I was railroaded into saying something like, “Whatever, I don’t care about any of this. Just tell me what I want to know.” Is that not in the game? Am I thinking of another scene?

Also, Josh was not pulling my leg. The voice of Paarthurnax is indeed Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario.

But I think the important thing is that Skyrim mostly abandons the multiple-choice dialog, and in scenes like this is really hurts. If you don’t care about lore or this is your tenth trip through the game, then it’s nice to just get your quest marker updated and be on your way. And if you’re a lore hound it’s great to be able to do a self-directed wiki-walk through the lore, picking topics and exploring what interests you. A linear conversation is miserable for both types of players. I think we get one multi-choice break at the end, but this conversation should have been much more compact, with more options early on.

Also, as great as Paarthurnax looks, this scene gets to be visually tiring kind of quickly. It’s not like a movie scene where we get exposition characters emote, change view, and the camera hops around to show us interesting things. What we have here is basically a mostly static image while Paarthurnax rambles on like he’s recording a his own podcast. (Paarthucast?)

Games shouldn’t try to be movies. But if you ARE going to try to be a movie, at least be an interesting one.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.