T w e n t y S i d e d

Wow. Blackreach, right? We dump on this game a lot, but places like this really remind me why I keep coming back to Skyrim. Vibrant. Colorful. Fantastical. Surprising. Varied.

The inventory problems are baffling to me. The thing with non-stacking soul gems goes back to Morrowind at least. And here is where all the terrible design choices really find a lot of synergy, so that many minor issues can combine to form this inexhaustible fountain of maddening annoyances.

1. They designed an interface that’s incredibly inefficient and eats a ton of screen real estate to show very little.
2. And then they designed a game the encourages hoarding large numbers of disparate items.
3. They created a loot system where just about every foe in the game drops something of value and also something heavy and worthless, thus creating numerous little caches of loot that need to be sorted. (As opposed to only having loot in chests that appear every five minutes, it appears also in foes which occur several times a minute.)
4. They made this intensely binary encumbrance system that necessitates many trips to the inventory screen to prioritize and discard.
5. They decided to hide the most important attribute – value per weight-unit – from the player so you’re constantly needing to do math in your head to figure out if this item is above or below the threshold of what you consider “valuable”.
6. They made classes of items that are functionally identical but don’t stack, thus causing a massive inflation in the total number of items you have the scroll through.
7. They put a limit on the amount of cash shopkeepers have, thus making it more difficult to unload valuable items, a problem that results in more travel through more loading screens and more sorting through massive lists of items.

Some of these flaws are just a natural part of the game. (Like item hoarding.) But others are trivial to fix and others could be mitigated with a bit of work. But instead we have this long list of questionable decisions that creates an inventory system that doubles as a torture device.

Still, Blackreach is amazing.

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.

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.