T w e n t y S i d e d

There’s usually a tradeoff in player agency. The more freedom you have, the less detailed the story. Minecraft offers freedom to go anywhere, kill anything, build whatever you want, but has no story”Maybe go kill the Ender Dragon if you want” does NOT count as a story in this discussion.. Tomb Raider has lots of story, characters, and dialog, but almost no freedom. Quests like the Bard’s College or the Mage’s College have this strange thing where you kind of have the worst of both worlds. The story is mostly generic “go to X, and kill Y or retrieve Z”. But then the mechanics are set up to keep you from breaking these boring and uninteresting quests. A majority of the NPC’s are invulnerable, the dialog is perfunctory, the story is bare-bones, and there’s usually no overarching theme or idea. It’s just a series of stuff to do.

If the quests are going to be this railroad-y, then we ought to get some rich characterization or thematic depthThis is not to suggest I’d actually trust Bethesda with a job like that.. Or if the story is going to be this barebones, then we should let the player break it. Heck, make the quests procedural. I understand that Bethesda wants to keep players from breaking quests by killing annoying / important people, but this is a sledgehammer approach. A better solution would be to only give plot armor to people involved with the two main quests. (The war and the dragons.) Who cares if the player breaks the questline for the Mages College? They’re certainly not at risk for missing out on anything particularly riveting.

And maybe – hear me out here – maybe the player wouldn’t be so keen to murder NPCs if the game didn’t go out of its way to make them so intolerable. Maven Blackbriar’s dialog can only be explained by saying that she knows she’s invincibleAnd enjoys being stabbed anyway..

Can you actually rescue Uncle Rogvir? Based on Josh’s shenanigans, it sort of looks possible. Although, maybe if you saved him the townspeople would still talk about the event as if he died.

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.

So yeah, the Greybeards are amazingly shallow. No young members. No indication of where new members come from. No history. No interactions with each other. No texts to study. No apparent philosophy, goals, or guiding principles. No chores to do. No goal. No interaction with the society below, other than the people bringing them food for no reason.

To a certain extent I understand why the characters are flat: Voice acting is ruinously expensive and time-consuming. But I don’t understand why the world needs to be this shallow. I’m not asking them to ram a bunch of exposition down our throats. They don’t even need to fill in the details. They just need to hint at the depth and let us extrapolate.

I propose some changes:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Skyrim EP12: The Innkeeper is a Spy!”

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.

Mumbles was so delighted that I knew who Gorgeous George was. But the sad fact is that I was actually thinking of George “The Animal” SteeleFamous for tearing apart the turnbuckle mid-match, and pretending to eat it., and got the names confused. So I don’t know wrestling. Sorry Mumbles!

The axe that Josh picked up in this episode is pretty heavy, has low damage, and by weight is among the most worthless trash items in the gameBy weight, it’s actually worth less than the ragged prisoner tunic you’re wearing at the start of the game. And just for fun, its hit box is quite a bit larger than the axe itself, meaning it’s possible to point directly at a coin that’s several centimeters away from the axe and end up grabbing the weapon anyway. Yet a level designer deliberately plonked one down in a pile of coins.

It’s sort of funny in this context, but over the course of the game this kind of thing actually gets to be really irritating. You go to pick up a free item, but accidentally grab the owned one beside it, thus stealing the object. You try to take the gems, but end up taking the worthless bowl that the gems are in. You try to pick up the coins but their hit box is fiddly and sometimes the game thinks they’re inside the desk instead of on it, so you end up crawling around, crouching, trying to find an angle that will let you grab them.

But where they really twist the knife is with the interface. The default Skyrim interface is ghastly. Horrible. A crime against usability. And picking up all this crap creates more trips to the inventory screen to scroll through all this crap and find that one thing you accidentally picked up.

I do wonder how deliberate the item placement is, and what the thinking is behind it. Is this supposed to be gameplay? Or is this mess the emergent result of a dozen different systems that are held together with duct tape and wishes?

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.