The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim! Game of the year! Everyone's talkin' 'bout it! Get you some!
Maybe I got started due to hype, maybe that's why I didn't stop sooner. Whatever the reason, I made the choice to visit Skyrim and it's clear to me that I've overstayed my welcome. It's 2am, don't even get me started on how fucked up my sleep schedule already is, and now I lie down, sleepless after mailing Skyrim back to GameFly just hours ago. It's haunting me and calling me back, I have the urge to return to its foggy, sky-scraping mountains but I also feel stronger to resist now that I've put the nail in the coffin and shipped that fantasy to a place just as mystical - the inside of a blue post-box.
If it's not clear whether I enjoyed my 50 or so hours with Bethesda's current best-seller, that's because I'm not even clear on the matter. In fact, figuring it out is what's urged me to stay up past my curfew and write this. So let's start from the dreaded beginning, move to the ambiguous middle, and, hopefully, end with the satisfying conclusion...
Mass Effect 3, Sine Mora, King of Fighters XIII, Fez and Metal Slug. These were the games I was enjoying before I took on Skyrim. We have a game that's somewhat mastered narrative while, for the most part, got the whole action thing down, another game that has a wonderfully enrapturing story with beautiful set-pieces and tight action, one that's all about discovering a world without as much of an ounce of guidance, and two arcade games packed with "Go, go, go!" action. Then there's Skyrim, a game that strikes me as trying to be an older game with a new game feel.
You start out on a wagon as a prisoner having a chat with other prisoners. You see how beautiful the world is and immediately how visually unappealing and lifeless the characters are that surround you. It was a rather jarring experience but one I knew I could get used to after spending some more time with Skyrim and less time with other games. And who cares, that's never been enough to turn me away from a game, it's just an aspect you accept and move on. Then you find that the wagon is being pulled downhill, at such an angle that you question the reality of what's occurring. I'm being pulled by horses down a slope that almost rivals the vertical scope of a 90-degree angle and everyone's acting like this is perfectly normal. So I act as the NPC's do and try my best to just accept it and pay it no mind. Alright, we got some bumps but I'm more than willing to go for this ride. Every awesome rollercoaster's got a hill, right?
After the wagon stops, it's time to make your character. Now, I have a problem with fantasy games and it's that I have a hard time being interested in the races available. I like being a defensive or support/offensive (Tank) type character but the races belonging to those archetypes are usually bland and normal looking with bland and repetitive gameplay. The Khajiit made this situation more bearable being something I've yet to experience in a fantasy setting with a new type of gameplay I've always wanted to try in an action-rpg - stealth. I named my silver-tabby Khajiit, Rhanu and spent about 10 minutes or so customizing his looks to match up with his life story I was building in my head. Then I quickly put my head in my hands when I remembered that it didn't matter because it'd rarely show up or matter ever, this is a Bethesda game. So once again, I had to set it and forget it. This is a game, we haven't even got to the gameplay. I'm 100% certain all of these issues will melt away into nothing once the game's actually started. And for the most part, I was right.
The town you're in is quickly overtaken by a dragon and now you're a wrongly-accused prisoner with an opportunity for escape - if you can survive! And I did. It was fun taking shelter and hiding from the Dragon's line of sight and choosing whether to aid the villagers or escape with the rest of the convicts. Shortly thereafter though, you're dropped in the middle of Skyrim with not too keen an idea of where you're going. It's ok though, I'm excited for the opportunity to discover! I traveled around for about half an hour examining this and that, finding things here and there. Then I ran into a spriggan and was immediately hailed with bees. Looking back on the situation, I didn't have a chance at all. This didn't irk me until I was reset half an hour back to where I'd started my journey. After all those items I picked up, locations I'd discovered, and people I'd met, the game didn't once auto-save for me... I had to stop playing. I can't redo 30 minutes of gameplay so eagerly, I need time to mourn my loss and cringe over the future of doing everything I already just did. Just another aspect I need to properly adjust to before it isn't an issue later on.
So let's fast forward a bit. I redid my previous accomplishments, eventually made it to Whiterun, killed a dragon with the aid of some plucky knights, learned my first Thu'um (shout), and was on my way into side-quest heaven with some main-quests on the side. I was level 7 or 8 by the time I slayed that first dragon. It was then that my decided weapon was a bow with light armor. Magic was cool but it wasn't stealthy.
At this point, I'm feeling confident with the game. I have a general sense of where I'm going and what I should be doing, how most of Skyrim's various systems work (forging weapons and armor, enchanting, etc). The majority of the fun has come from going into a random dungeon and slowly uncovering its secrets, step by step. Looking out for traps, piecing together clues, solving puzzles, finding loot, I'm totally into it. These dungeon experiences are the best the game has to offer by far. Unfortunately, being that they don't contribute to the main story as a whole and require a good 20-40 minutes of dedication at a time, I couldn't always get up the resolve to enter every dungeon I could find which left me with everything I couldn't really appreciate about Skyrim. Without the dungeons and without a decent interest in the lore, you're left with a bunch of chores.
From thefreedictionary.com: Chore - n.: 1. a small routine task, esp a domestic one. 2. an unpleasant task. What are the chores of Skyrim? Forging, selling, buying, going through your inventory, dynamically-generated mmo-style busy-work quests, clearing out areas of enemies, working with partnered AI's, finding specific locations, manually saving, honestly it depends how minute a detail you want to dive in to. I won't go too far but let's look at what I think are the important ones.
Inventory in itself is a chore. You come across a lot of loot in Skyrim and because there's a weight limit, you have to be aware of how much stuff you have on your person at all times. You can do one of two things about this. You can either constantly swap out items from your inventory as you travel, going through the menus and deciding what you don't need or want anymore so you can pick up a new piece of equipment or you can trek back to town and manage your things, selling to shops and storing things in your home.
To go with the first option is a rather painful choice. You may choose to pick up an item because you are aware that it fetches a high price or it's a rare drop. If you're full up on inventory though, now you have to go through all the other items you've picked up and decide what means less to you than this new item you've found. Getting rid of junk can be tedious since it's all roughly sorted. There's no way to organize items in a specific fashion, only general options are made available such as weapons, apparel, potions, etc. Being an archer though, I could care less about magic, so I know I could dump a few magic potions but I have to actively seek them out in a list of over 90+ potions I've accumulated over my journey. It's sorted alphabetically as well so I can't just look at all the magic potions I have or see which ones are more valuable, I have to look under each potion title (Potion of plentiful-, Minor potion of-) and compare what I have to decide what is ok to drop. This can take a lot of time if you're not managing your inventory at all, being selective about what you pick up, and visiting your town to sell and drop things off which is tedious in its own right as well.
Every time you complete a major task, it would benefit the player to fast travel back to their town to lighten their load but with load times and limits inbetween, they don't make it a painless experience for the player. Not every merchant buys every item you have, they may not buy apparel from you or if they do, you can only sell jewelry to them, not your shields or armor. And to make matters slightly more confusing, they won't display what you can't sell. Perhaps including those items and highlighting them in red would be helpful as I tend to forget what I have or haven't gotten rid of inbetween all the loading and busywork I've tasked myself with so that when I go to the next dungeon, my pack is full and I realize I never sold that 30lb shield taking up all the space in my inventory! And then, merchants only carry a set amount of gold with which to buy items from you with and once it's depleted, you have to wait a day before they get more. Because you don't want to waste more of your time waiting for a day to pass, you'll end up going to your home and shoving junk into a chest where everything is now lost to a void that doesn't even care to categorize items apart from each other, a black hole of alphabetical organization is all that awaits you upon your next visit home.
And while you're in town, maybe you'd like to forge yourself some armor! Well, be prepared for the grind because if you're past the need for leather armor, you need to task yourself with grinding the same armor sets so that you can level up your forge skill to open up some new armor-forging options. Don't forget to level up though and use a perk point to enable the new armor set as a forging option. Then you have all these sets of armor you need to get rid of but the stores are out of money so you just stock them in your inventory blackhole at home, never to be seen again. Forging is the very essence of a chore.
I can't help but think that if I just didn't give a shit about items and wealth, I'd be fine but that's not fun to me. Somehow this was more tolerable in Fallout but they're taking the piss with Skyrim. There's more I could mention but I'd be rambling more than I am now. Unfortunately, these things feel more like time sinks. I have a file that says I have over 50 logged hours of gameplay but it feels like I've hardly accomplished anything of worth in that time. So, feeling burnt out by the habitual grind, I wanted to take solace in the gameplay. It's just not there though...
You'd think dragons would be more terrifying. I started slaying them on my own around level 12 or so without problem. They gradually increase the difficulty of the beasts but never in a way that you go, "OH SHIT, A DRAGON!" It's more like, "Oh my goodness, please leave me alone kind sir. You are pestering me at the moment by locking out my ability to fast travel and I'm already exhausted by the thought of looting your corpse and having to deal with everything associated with that..."
As I'm facing tougher and tougher enemies in dungeons, I want to adapt my play to a more skilled level. I've been using this bow forever, I should be able to use it with some adept ability. So my goal is to take on the harder enemies and lead my shots a few steps ahead of where they're moving so I can kill them before they reach me. Problem is, if they're a certain distance away from you, auto-aim steps in to be the blundering idiot of a hero to perpetually mess up every game-plan I build. I even have a focus shot ability to slow down time for more accurately aimed shots, an ability that I can only imagine exists to aid me in leading my volleys, and auto-aim still feels it has duty to perform. If I could utilize that skill to a further extent in my play, I'd be sold on the game but auto-aim says no... Auto-aim - the scourge of skill-based gameplay... Fucking auto-aim...
When a game employs auto-aim, it shuts me down as a gamer. I feel as though if auto-aim is involved and nothing else feels like it has any deeper substance, then the game was meant to strolled through, not played with any amount of thinking, skill, or tactics. At that point, the only players in my mind that can get a kick out of the experience are ones who are either fully invested in the lore or those who like to mess around with the limits the game imposes. That's not who I am as a player. I want my game to feel cohesive in its atmosphere and story or to have mechanics I can dive into and slowly master. I suppose that's why I usually keep away from sandbox-oriented titles. The gameplay almost never tries to do anything beyond good-enough and the story is disjointed in such a way that the player can pick and choose what activities they'd like to do without having the story being completely broken. It's just not my ideal experience.
I did my best. I put off all that I could and grabbed for everything that could interest me and pull me in. Skyrim had its moments and times that I won't soon forget but the cost was too steep for me. There were too many breaks in the immersion and not enough challenge to bring me out of the grind I so often found myself in. I could feel that I was simply going on with the game out of automation, not out of a true love for what I was experiencing. In a desperate attempt to break the cycle I'd put myself in, I uninstalled the game from my hard-drive, ejected the disc, and shoved it in the post-box in the middle of the night.
Skyrim's gone and now I have no idea what to do with myself. My body is still going through the motions; I turn on my 360 with nothing in the drive, a reminder that Skyrim is no longer an option. I can't go into the post-box and fish it back out, what's done is done and I have to find a way to move on. As rehabilitation, I'm taking shelter within the fighting game community, watching tournament vids and podcasts whilst mashing buttons in SNK arcade games. I still feel like an empty shell without 2011's game of the year, but I'm sure I can find myself again through my passion, videogames.
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