T w e n t y S i d e d

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.