Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.
Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.
He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.
What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.
Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.
It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.
You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.
Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.
~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.
Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.
He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.
What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.
Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.
It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.
You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.
Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.
~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.
17 Comments
I'd be grumpy too if I was a kh*jiit. Though mine often looks unimpressed too.. Just part and parcel of the policy of Dunmer wives for Stormcloak men.
DELETED
1 year ago
Deleted
DELETED
1 year ago
Deleted
DELETED
1 year ago
Deleted
Ulfric trained under the Greybeards for years to learn how to dish out only the least valuable loot. With any luck there'll be a book in TES VI telling of how he used the thu'um to make Pretty Kitty real, or else stop the civil war from getting Numidium'd to validate Imperial players' poor decisions. Drem yol lok.
Hm, this is a great review. I've always had trouble articulating exactly "why" i like Skyrim so much. A lot of the other RPG's I'm into are the usual "choice and narrative over everything" darlings of old school fans (New Vegas, Fallout 2, Mass Effect, etc.) but I've always had an appreciation for the simplicity and wonder in Bethesda open worlds.
Your quote about Todd Howard at the end is poignant. Before I read this review, I had a certain love/hate relationship with Todd. I respected his chops and legacy, but I always felt he fell behind some other game designers in certain areas. But really, I think it speaks more to his genius that Skyrim even works in the first place. How do you make such a straight forward, simple narrative and world so engrossing even to the most hardcore of old school RPG fans? People say Skyrim is shallow, and maybe that's true to a point... But there really is a lot more going on under the hood and behind the scenes than people give it credit for, I think.
Anyway, it's reviews like this that sort of make me feel bad whenever I write a short quippy review (I try to avoid it but I'm not perfect) when I could be giving more genuine care and thought for something that potentially took tens of thousands of man hours to create.
Your quote about Todd Howard at the end is poignant. Before I read this review, I had a certain love/hate relationship with Todd. I respected his chops and legacy, but I always felt he fell behind some other game designers in certain areas. But really, I think it speaks more to his genius that Skyrim even works in the first place. How do you make such a straight forward, simple narrative and world so engrossing even to the most hardcore of old school RPG fans? People say Skyrim is shallow, and maybe that's true to a point... But there really is a lot more going on under the hood and behind the scenes than people give it credit for, I think.
Anyway, it's reviews like this that sort of make me feel bad whenever I write a short quippy review (I try to avoid it but I'm not perfect) when I could be giving more genuine care and thought for something that potentially took tens of thousands of man hours to create.
Thanks for reading @Snappington1. You’re spot on about there being more going on under the hood in these games than people tend to recognise or give credit for. I already mentioned radiant AI and how few other games bother even attempting to make their worlds feel alive on the level it’s aiming for, but it’s also other things like being able to manipulate any object in the environment (all with their own collision properties), to take & equip any equipment you see another character wearing, to enter pretty much any interior, NPCs having their own specific weekly schedules and opinions of your character, etc. Nobody has to find these kinds of things cool or interesting because I do, but I’m at the point where I can only assume somebody wants something really, really different out of open world games than I do if they’re able to write all of that off as shallow.
In my experience, it’s pretty common for people to dismiss the popularity of games like Skyrim (or ones transparently influenced by it, like BOTW & TOTK) based on the idea that their fans haven’t played enough other games, but for me it’s been the opposite and playing more games has only made me realise how few others are like this in the grand scheme of things. I actually remember once asking a friend how anyone could think Skyrim was the best game ever ages ago, and it’s only a decade+ later after playing hundreds more games since then that I get it. Like you said, it’s a bit of a wonder that it works at all.
Don’t worry too much about your reviews coming across as too short or quippy or whatever else either, there’s no rules for this kind of thing. Brevity, wit, etc.
In my experience, it’s pretty common for people to dismiss the popularity of games like Skyrim (or ones transparently influenced by it, like BOTW & TOTK) based on the idea that their fans haven’t played enough other games, but for me it’s been the opposite and playing more games has only made me realise how few others are like this in the grand scheme of things. I actually remember once asking a friend how anyone could think Skyrim was the best game ever ages ago, and it’s only a decade+ later after playing hundreds more games since then that I get it. Like you said, it’s a bit of a wonder that it works at all.
Don’t worry too much about your reviews coming across as too short or quippy or whatever else either, there’s no rules for this kind of thing. Brevity, wit, etc.
I acknowledge the points you make but personally I see no point to Skyrim's grand ambitions when the result is a mediocre mess of a lot of different things. What point is there to a living world when I have no interest in exploring it?
Unfortunately I can only see this kind of game as overly ambitious and always aiming for the big things but with no real interest in anything. Some artists want to create something in particular, to evoke a feeling or transmit a message but I feel like all Bethesda wants to do is make the biggest, GREATEST games and there's no further depth to it.
Unfortunately I can only see this kind of game as overly ambitious and always aiming for the big things but with no real interest in anything. Some artists want to create something in particular, to evoke a feeling or transmit a message but I feel like all Bethesda wants to do is make the biggest, GREATEST games and there's no further depth to it.
@Katsono I try to judge games based on what they’re setting out to achieve and in the context of TES striving to be a fantasy life simulator, I kind of find it hard to think of any mechanics I’d consider extraneous. I guess you could consider that too vague or all-encompassing of a design goal, but I think it’s a clever one since it ties together all these features that might’ve otherwise been disparate into a singular purpose. I’ve never bothered much with pickpocketing, cooking or fishing in Skyrim, but I still think it’d be a worse game for not having those (regardless of how better they could be implemented) since the amount of activities which I myself might do if I were in my character’s shoes would be lower. I also think I was actually being a bit uncharitable to it in this respect when I said its character building was watered down compared to its predecessors, because that’s only really true in reference to stats and wasn’t taking into account everything it added that they don’t have – getting married, chopping wood, adopting kids, building & customising the layout of a house, smithing, etc.
For what it’s worth I also extend this kind of thing to other games too, Nioh (plus its sequel) and Jak 2 come to mind as other examples of stuff which ironically become more unique in a roundabout way for having everything but the kitchen sink shoved into them. I've noticed my favourite parts of certain games get written off as "bloat" a lot. Kinda reminds me of how I need to take a moment whenever I read "like a PS2 game" used in a negative way since I instrictively interpret it as "good."
For what it’s worth I also extend this kind of thing to other games too, Nioh (plus its sequel) and Jak 2 come to mind as other examples of stuff which ironically become more unique in a roundabout way for having everything but the kitchen sink shoved into them. I've noticed my favourite parts of certain games get written off as "bloat" a lot. Kinda reminds me of how I need to take a moment whenever I read "like a PS2 game" used in a negative way since I instrictively interpret it as "good."
I think you have misunderstood me. I agree with you that in its attempt to be a fantasy life simulator, Skyrim doesn't make wrong choices and many elements when analysed through this lens are actually impressive (your review pointed out this fact for me). However, what I think is a wrong choice is the type of game they decided to be. This is where I criticise the "BIG" emphasis in their design and marketing. What is the point of this game is what I ask myself, because of how every individual element is mediocre and unfortunately so is the overall result, in my opinion.
Regarding this "BIG" aspect, if I had to criticise something it's probably not the inclusion of side elements like cooking or getting married. I may be wrong but I don't think those elements are the reason why their games lack polish, I don't think it takes that much effort to include a jank minigame the way they do. On another hand, they probably invest an insane amount of effort into trying to make a giant open world full of hundreds of quests, characters, etc. and this is where I think they strayed off. Instead of making something smaller scale so that they can guarantee every quest is unique, every character worth talking to, Bethesda aims to impress by using gigantic scales. This could be compensated by the gameplay if it was a gameplay focused game. Having a lot of content is desirable in, say, a roguelike/lite where the main gameplay makes you want to play longer. However, I think Bethesda also heavily sacrifices the gameplay to offer what it does and this may be part of the reason they have been simplifying things like the character creation.
If we remove the matter of scale, then I could compare Skyrim to the Yakuza series which is also full of jank and average content. The main difference is that, first of all, Yakuza is much less tiring with its smaller structure (the map is smaller, quests are much shorter, there aren't thousand of empty talk NPCs...) but also because it has its own identity of being a Japanese drama with goofy elements. This identity is core to everything in the game: the side contents exist because someoen at the studio had an idea and they thought it would be funny and amusing without worrying much about the quality, whereas it feels more like they were trying to create content for the sake of having content in the case of Skyrim AND a lack of quality (which is not surprising if you don't have anything in mind when making content). A very simple way to compare would be to say that Yakuza would never use a system like Radian AI to create quests because it would be very difficult to create either comedy or drama through that, it could not explore individual ideas like pretty much every side quest does (no matter how shallow or stupid those ideas might be, like carrying an ancient and very heavy "shoulder phone" in the eighties)...
If I had to compare to another medium, this is the same as a very long TV series where everything gets diluted to a degree where it's not enjoyable anymore and we're talking about "filler content" because the makers have a set schedule and need to think of how to make their series last long enough. Bethesda is definitively the king of video game fillers.
Regarding this "BIG" aspect, if I had to criticise something it's probably not the inclusion of side elements like cooking or getting married. I may be wrong but I don't think those elements are the reason why their games lack polish, I don't think it takes that much effort to include a jank minigame the way they do. On another hand, they probably invest an insane amount of effort into trying to make a giant open world full of hundreds of quests, characters, etc. and this is where I think they strayed off. Instead of making something smaller scale so that they can guarantee every quest is unique, every character worth talking to, Bethesda aims to impress by using gigantic scales. This could be compensated by the gameplay if it was a gameplay focused game. Having a lot of content is desirable in, say, a roguelike/lite where the main gameplay makes you want to play longer. However, I think Bethesda also heavily sacrifices the gameplay to offer what it does and this may be part of the reason they have been simplifying things like the character creation.
If we remove the matter of scale, then I could compare Skyrim to the Yakuza series which is also full of jank and average content. The main difference is that, first of all, Yakuza is much less tiring with its smaller structure (the map is smaller, quests are much shorter, there aren't thousand of empty talk NPCs...) but also because it has its own identity of being a Japanese drama with goofy elements. This identity is core to everything in the game: the side contents exist because someoen at the studio had an idea and they thought it would be funny and amusing without worrying much about the quality, whereas it feels more like they were trying to create content for the sake of having content in the case of Skyrim AND a lack of quality (which is not surprising if you don't have anything in mind when making content). A very simple way to compare would be to say that Yakuza would never use a system like Radian AI to create quests because it would be very difficult to create either comedy or drama through that, it could not explore individual ideas like pretty much every side quest does (no matter how shallow or stupid those ideas might be, like carrying an ancient and very heavy "shoulder phone" in the eighties)...
If I had to compare to another medium, this is the same as a very long TV series where everything gets diluted to a degree where it's not enjoyable anymore and we're talking about "filler content" because the makers have a set schedule and need to think of how to make their series last long enough. Bethesda is definitively the king of video game fillers.
@Katsono Thanks. This just seems up to personal preference really. I enjoy Yakuza quite a lot but I don’t think TES has anything to gain from looking to it for pointers or vice versa, they’re so far apart in terms of appeal they’d be separate circles on a Venn diagram. I personally haven’t found that the former being smaller scale’s helped it any when it comes to having an identity or being more focused or whatever else either, since part of why I largely prefer Judgment’s specifically because Yakuza proper had started to feel pretty directionless to me by the time the first one released. Yokohama as it was in 7 would also be pretty up there when I think of open worlds I find tiring.
I’ve always felt radiant quests are blown out of proportion a decent bit, because the amount of handcrafted content here’s still more than the average person’s gonna be able to complete in their lifetime, but they are part of TES’ own distinct identity however minor. These kinds of RNG content concepts stretch back at least as far as Daggerfall, I'm assuming because they like the idea of how randomness can feed into the sandboxy, player-directed experiences sort of stuff that these games are predicated on (and which Todd Howard talks about in that interview). I dunno. To me that’s a clear thing for a game to have to say/offer to people and I think if it genuinely was mediocre in every way that it sets out to do all that, it probably wouldn’t be so culturally enduring that I occasionally overhear it brought up unprompted by strangers at the office a decade plus later. And I'm in semi-rural Northern Ireland, so it's not like we don't have our own real life hills to go adventuring in or sheep to ragdoll off of cliffs.
I’ve always felt radiant quests are blown out of proportion a decent bit, because the amount of handcrafted content here’s still more than the average person’s gonna be able to complete in their lifetime, but they are part of TES’ own distinct identity however minor. These kinds of RNG content concepts stretch back at least as far as Daggerfall, I'm assuming because they like the idea of how randomness can feed into the sandboxy, player-directed experiences sort of stuff that these games are predicated on (and which Todd Howard talks about in that interview). I dunno. To me that’s a clear thing for a game to have to say/offer to people and I think if it genuinely was mediocre in every way that it sets out to do all that, it probably wouldn’t be so culturally enduring that I occasionally overhear it brought up unprompted by strangers at the office a decade plus later. And I'm in semi-rural Northern Ireland, so it's not like we don't have our own real life hills to go adventuring in or sheep to ragdoll off of cliffs.
Well yes Yakuza and Skyrim are very different, the reason I was comparing both of them is for one thing only: both games have a lot of extraneous elements to their core gameplay. While I don't think the Yakuza games are perfect, I think its accessorial elements are better integrated and don't contribute to ruining the main experience (do their minigames require so much time investment that the developpers could not produce a good enough main story? Probably not, and they're completely optional and well separated from each other/the core game).
The main problem I see with radiant quests is not how much space they take in the game itself but how much of the dev's efforts went into things like that. Mediocre procedurally generated content, maps... it doesn't compensate for the time they could have been working on a smaller scale game with higher quality content, so we ended up with mediocre elements on all sides of the game which is not very satisfying. Not everything is bad and they do impressive things like you point out in your review, but a lot of it is uninteresting and superficial and the things they do well are hard to enjoy on their own (for example I like a few quests throughout the Bethesda games, but I have to play an entire game to get to them and it's clearly not worth it as a price).
I kind of like Daggerfall because I find the game to be more focused than the next ones with a simple gameplay loop and quality content, especially for its time. The game has a huge emphasis on dungeon crawling and it was pretty succesful on that part. The big open world, towns filled with NPCs are mostly used as decoration and the point is made clear to the player: for example, going to a town you know that only a few buildings that are colored on the map will contain a very precise feature of the game. This type of procedural generation is much more like what roguelike/lites do to add flavour to the game, renew replayability... whereas with Skyrim we've really reached a point where the idea of padding content is omnipresent. You don't go to a random town any more to sell your gear and walk away, now the game emphasizes walking into these cities or the empty plains (something you never do in Daggerfall as you always fast travel) to get the content of the game and yes, there is a huge upgrade since Daggerfall when it comes to these things but I still think it's fairly average and as such, Daggerfall stays a better game to me because it doesn't make me do things I don't enjoy or waste my time. Roguelikes have a lot of purely procedural content but they know their limits: I don't think anyone plays them because they have a thousand quests and characters to talk to but because the gameplay is fun and the procedural generation gives an incentive to keep playing. I have rarely heard anyone praising the core gameplay of Skyrim, by the way (as in its combat or inventory management for example).
Ultimately it's my opinion. I don't have anything to say about its popularity, I don't say people are wrong or stupid or something for liking it. I do think however that the Bethesda strategy has reached its end and they're not producing such good results any more. By the way, they started answering back to negative reviews of Starfield on steam recently and they really show a caricature of themselves and the things I was criticising.
The main problem I see with radiant quests is not how much space they take in the game itself but how much of the dev's efforts went into things like that. Mediocre procedurally generated content, maps... it doesn't compensate for the time they could have been working on a smaller scale game with higher quality content, so we ended up with mediocre elements on all sides of the game which is not very satisfying. Not everything is bad and they do impressive things like you point out in your review, but a lot of it is uninteresting and superficial and the things they do well are hard to enjoy on their own (for example I like a few quests throughout the Bethesda games, but I have to play an entire game to get to them and it's clearly not worth it as a price).
I kind of like Daggerfall because I find the game to be more focused than the next ones with a simple gameplay loop and quality content, especially for its time. The game has a huge emphasis on dungeon crawling and it was pretty succesful on that part. The big open world, towns filled with NPCs are mostly used as decoration and the point is made clear to the player: for example, going to a town you know that only a few buildings that are colored on the map will contain a very precise feature of the game. This type of procedural generation is much more like what roguelike/lites do to add flavour to the game, renew replayability... whereas with Skyrim we've really reached a point where the idea of padding content is omnipresent. You don't go to a random town any more to sell your gear and walk away, now the game emphasizes walking into these cities or the empty plains (something you never do in Daggerfall as you always fast travel) to get the content of the game and yes, there is a huge upgrade since Daggerfall when it comes to these things but I still think it's fairly average and as such, Daggerfall stays a better game to me because it doesn't make me do things I don't enjoy or waste my time. Roguelikes have a lot of purely procedural content but they know their limits: I don't think anyone plays them because they have a thousand quests and characters to talk to but because the gameplay is fun and the procedural generation gives an incentive to keep playing. I have rarely heard anyone praising the core gameplay of Skyrim, by the way (as in its combat or inventory management for example).
Ultimately it's my opinion. I don't have anything to say about its popularity, I don't say people are wrong or stupid or something for liking it. I do think however that the Bethesda strategy has reached its end and they're not producing such good results any more. By the way, they started answering back to negative reviews of Starfield on steam recently and they really show a caricature of themselves and the things I was criticising.
@Katsono I don't really think anything of them replying to Steam reviews because they've done that sort of thing for years now, just on platforms other than Steam and through their dedicated PR people instead. Not saying they should or shouldn't be doing it but it's not really news, it's more a combo of "this entire company is doing X silly thing" making a more eye-catching headline than "person Y you've probably never heard of is being dismissive about inconsistent tidbits of Fallout lore he had no involvement in writing" plus the internet being both smaller and not quite as prone to getting its knickers in a twist about this stuff in the early 2010s.
You're probably right but it came as a surprise to me as I haven't really followed Bethesda over the years, just played a few of their games. I thought it was funny and worth mentioning, I haven't seen any other developper do this so far. I find it fascinating how there's almost an entire Bethesda culture of the "big game" thing.
Just wanted to say that this review persuaded me to start my second Skyrim playthrough after a decade. Back then, I first fell head over heels for Oblivion and much preferred that to Skyrim and in the years since I was introduced to Morrowind, probably my favorite western rpg, so Skyrim has always been the odd one out for me. I think the way you pointed out the value of Skyrim's experiental values helped me push past my bugbear with going back to Skyrim's introduction, overly scripted main quest and erasure of friction (fast travel, lack of stats, what they did to magic). In truth, I think those things will always be a mark against Skyrim but I'm a few hours in and I've found real and substantive enjoyment in my no-fast travel orc playthrough. I was worried that the game would try to undercut this premise the way Fallout 4 did but its as you said, Skyrim is holistic enough to make it work. Anyways, great review!
@Arus Thanks very much, hope you have a good time with it. My very first playthrough ages back on release was as an orc, though when I revisit one of these games now I tend to go high elf for magic funmaxxing.
DELETED
1 year ago