{"id":23284,"date":"2014-06-05T14:48:07","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T19:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23284"},"modified":"2014-06-05T14:56:00","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T19:56:00","slug":"skyrim-ep41-stay-a-while-and-listen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=23284","title":{"rendered":"Skyrim EP41: Stay a While and Listen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/89GN0rffdFg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=89GN0rffdFg'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>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, &#8220;Whatever, I don&#8217;t care about any of this. Just tell me what I want to know.&#8221;  Is that not in the game? Am I thinking of another scene? <\/p>\n<p>Also, Josh was not pulling my leg. The voice of Paarthurnax is indeed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0553409\/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t12\">Charles Martinet<\/a>, the voice of Mario. <\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t care about lore or this is your tenth trip through the game, then it&#8217;s nice to just get your quest marker updated and be on your way. And if you&#8217;re a lore hound it&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Also, as great as Paarthurnax looks, this scene gets to be visually tiring kind of quickly. It&#8217;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&#8217;s recording a his own podcast. (Paarthucast?)<\/p>\n<p>Games shouldn&#8217;t try to be movies. But if you ARE going to try to be a movie, at least be an interesting one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) 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, &#8220;Whatever, I don&#8217;t care about any of this. Just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[209],"class_list":["post-23284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-skyrim"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}