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Wife-less in Whiterun

January 23, 2014September 2, 2022 Brandon 3 Comments

For reasons even I don’t understand, I recently started playing Skyrim again. That’s not entirely true. I fully understand the reasons. A friend got the legendary edition of the game, complete with all of the DLC, so there was no monetary price to pay to be able to get the rest of the achievements and obtain the same 100% I did with Oblivion. I say “monetary” cost as there’s a substantial cost still to be paid in time and self respect but when it comes to games I typically have plenty of the former and very little of the latter so back to Skyrim I go.

When you haven’t played a game for close to two years, coming back in can be a painfully disorienting experience, even more so for a game with such obtuse systems and interfaces as Skyrim. How do I equip things? Why does this button store one thing when looking at my stuff to put into a chest but takes everything when looking at what’s in the chest? How do I access favorites? Why would I want a favorite in the first place? Why am I just sitting in this chair? Where’s my wife?

That last question is of particular importance because in order to get all of the achievements, I have to become a werewolf so that I can get all of the werewolf perks. I also have to become a vampire at some point and get all of the vampire perks, Bethesda plumbing the considerable literary depths of such classics as “Underworld” and “Twilight” for one of the DLC’s plot points. While becoming Head Companion, or whatever it’s called, I cured myself of lycanthropy because I was tired of not getting a resting bonus and of being told I smelled like a wet dog as I traversed Skyrim. The only person who can cure me is Aela the Huntress, who also happens to be the person I think I married.

I say think because from what I can tell, I’m married. I have the achievement and I have a wedding ring in my inventory. I wouldn’t have married Lydia because that would have been creepy. I didn’t hang out with any other women and I certainly don’t trust anyone in the Thieves Guild or that freaky club of assassins to marry one of them. A quick search of the house doesn’t turn her up which means she must be in my other home.

Unfortunately I don’t remember where my other home is. I also don’t know why I have a full set of orcish armor in my inventory. Such are the risks of two year absences. Lydia is around, doing whatever it is Lydia does when she’s not following me and getting killed, namely pacing, but Aela is nowhere to be found.

Fine, I’ll go find her. At this point, all of the “quirks” of Skyrim start flooding back. Unlike Fallout, where DLC was accessed by getting a new radio transmission and then heading to the place mentioned in the transmission or Dragon Age where DLC was accessed by purchasing it from Bonfire Bob, Skyrim starts its DLC by having people talk to you. Many people. All at once.

As soon as I left the house, here’s a courier telling me I can now adopt kids, an idea I can only label as “catastrophic” due to my inability to keep track of my wife and my general insistence on putting myself into situations in which men and beast alike want to kill me. Fine, whatever dude, I’ll swing by and pick up a kid later. Next up is a cultist. He wants to know if I’m Dragonborn. Yeah, I’m Dragonborn but apparently I’m not the “true” Dragonborn as he starts talking shit and then tries to kill me. This would have been fine if some huge Ebony Warrior guy didn’t decide to tell me that he’s got nothing to do at the same time that a summoned demon thingy is trying to show me my insides. I tell the guy that I’ll come fight him later, try to hit the demon, miss, hit the Ebony Warrior and now he’s also trying to kill me.

Sigh. Reload.

This parade of quest gives goes on in a similar fashion for a couple of reloads until I got smart enough to leave my house and immediately run away to put some distance between me and the Welcoming Committee. This works well enough and soon I have a new white arrow to follow once I figure out where my wife is.

I go to the Companion Hall thinking maybe I didn’t marry Aela and she’d be there. It was nighttime so I knew she wouldn’t be off doing whatever it is she does during the day but a quick rousting of everyone from their beds doesn’t turn her up. Bummer. Then I head to Riften because I think I bought a house there. I did and in it I find a woman I don’t ever remember meeting. Apparently she’s my housecarl, whatever that is. When I talk to her she doesn’t mention any spouse-y things, so I’m assuming I didn’t marry her, a good thing as shit was about to get awkward.

Defeated, I go back home to Whiterun and who’s walking around the house but Aela. I don’t have the option of asking her where she was the last time I was here so instead I ask her to make me a werewolf again. I also ask her for my cut on her store’s earning, a whopping hundred bucks. Don’t quit your day job, Aela. Newly beastified I leave Whiterun to begin my journey of eating dead people as that’s what it takes to become a better werewolf, eating dead people.

I’m not going to bore you with more stories of what has happened since I restarted playing but friends were made, people were eaten, friends were lost, dragons were killed and my Xbox locked up completely because Skyrim. The game is just as irritating and soulless as it’s always been, a series of trips to the Great White Arrow with instances of monster killing and pointless dialog in-between. Nothing happens if you don’t talk to people, the whole world sits still waiting for you to get up out of that chair and go adopt some kids.

It’s also satisfying to torch raiders and capture souls, to shout a dragon out of the sky and hack it to bits, to see what the next silly quest is going to be, to marvel at the landscape and the interiors. It’s Skyrim. It hasn’t changed. The DLC just adds more of it. It’s also a great game to play while exercising in the morning, which is the only time I play it. As this current generation winds down, I’m starting to run out of options for the morning so if I can wring another twenty to thirty hours out of the game with no cost to me, yeah, I’m going to do it. At night I’ll play all of the games in my backlog until March comes with its bevy of next-gen riches.

It Takes a Simple Man to show the Complexity of Role-Playing

July 20, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 9 Comments

By happy coincidence, I happen live and work in Bath, which is not only a lovely city but a mere stone’s throw from where most of the UK’s best video gaming magazines get written and published. So, obviously, I keep a pretty close eye on the material they put out. And thus I came to discover in CVG the saga of Olaf, a simple denizen of Skyrim, and his quest to accumulate enough gold to buy a manor house without adventuring, just exploring and doing day-to-day jobs like hunting, mining, chopping wood and picking cabbages.

Olaf’s tale is incredibly compelling. Of course the narrative arc and writing style are good but what makes it particularly absorbing is its innate contrariness. Skyrim is a game environment crafted to allow mighty-thewed warriors and wise mages to become famous through deeds of high and daring adventure, not a cabbage-farming simulator for peasants. That the intent of the game designers can be subverted in such spectacular fashion is perhaps the acid test of genuine “role-playing” in a computer RPG, a genre that’s more commonly synonymous with stat-crunching power builds than actually stepping into the shoes of a fantasy character. Previous experience with Bethesda’s open world RPGs has demonstrated that simply giving players freedom is insufficient: most will still power-game, and most non-adventure related activity quickly becomes boring.

So what makes Olaf different? The answer is that he has very clearly defined rules to his role-play, and an equally clear goal. When you look at what’s going on, it seems so simple as to make you wonder why people hadn’t done it before. And it turns out they had. Olaf was inspired by the Living in Oblivion series, where a journalist tried to live the life of a non-player character in the predecessor to Skyrim. The rules employed weren’t quite as a draconian as Olaf’s, and the goals less clearly defined. but the intent was the same. But having learned this lesson, what struck me is how difficult it is to come up with a set of rules and restrictions that allow you to role-play and still have a fun time doing so.

I had assumed that Living in Oblivion began as a random leap of imagination. But it turns out I was wrong. Its creator, Chris Livingston, got the idea after finishing the main quest in Oblivion but, not yet feeling ready to leave the game world behind, spent time exploring the houses and non-player characters in the game. While doing so he discovered that one particular NPC actually went on holiday: she would periodically visit someone in a different city. During that time her house would stand empty, and she would be found in the dwelling of her distant friend. Inspired by the idea that NPCs could have social lives of their own, he decided to create his own NPC, an ordinary citizen doing ordinary things whilst trying to survive in a dangerous fantasy world.

So it took a particular trigger and a special flash of inspiration to send someone who was both an experienced journalist and an experienced Oblivion player down that path. The lesson is that role-playing imaginatively, outside the usual confines of the game, is hard work. We can’t all suddenly just come up with our own versions of Olaf and Nondrick. The last time I tried something like this in a video game was in the predecessor to Oblivion (seeing a pattern here?), Morrowind. Rather than follow the main quest (which I never finished with any character) I built a mage and set out specifically to immerse myself in the immoral but curiously fascinating world of the House Telvanni, one of the noble families of the game world cast in the long fantasy tradition of secretive, insular, power-hungry wizards. It was great fun for a while, but ultimately it fell flat. There was too much temptation while out and about to go poking my nose into places it didn’t belong and start exploring side-quests, or getting sucked away into the main quest by one of the many points of interface between the House and other areas of the game.

Effectively the problem was that I hadn’t placed sufficient restrictions upon myself. But the more rules you put in place, the harder it is to find a fun combination. I suspect that, unless I’m simply terminally unimaginative, there aren’t many interesting paths through open-world RPGs other than ones similar Olaf’s, or ones that involve sticking fairly closely to the original intent of the game.

But it got me thinking. Ultimately one of the things that makes Olaf absorbing is that in spite of all his rules, he has an awful lot of freedom. Without the need to follow a scripted path, or to indulge in the usual RPG pastimes of stat-building and inventory-accumulating, his story becomes far more compelling and his actions actually more open-ended. Casting my mind back through all the role-playing games I’d ever played, I tried to think of others that had had that same effect, and encouraged me to simply explore and experience rather than pressuring me to build and collect. There were surprisingly few, and none of them were Elder Scrolls games. In fact I could think of only three: Fable, Ultima VII, and a relatively obscure old 8-bit game called Questron.

What those three games had in common was that the story was sufficiently compelling to make me not care about making a power-build. Instead I wanted to rush from quest to quest, to consume the plot, uncover the next twist and turn in the same way that cunningly written thriller novels do. In fact it’s interesting that two of those three games – Fable & Questron – are actually pretty weak as far as gameplay goes. But they still succeeded admirably in capturing my imagination.

As I have observed before, open-world games like the Elder Scrolls series suffer from that lack of focus. What I’m observing here is that they also suffer from trying to please gamers with both a realistic world to explore and a compelling plot to engage with. They’re trying to be all things to all people. This doesn’t make them bad, or not fun, it’s just that ultimately a game that’s spread so thinly across so many different goals is going to have trouble being truly satisfying for most players.

So it made me wonder, how would an Elder Scrolls type game be if it just gave up on an overarching quest and became an open sandbox world for you to play in? There would be quests, of course, and sometimes quests that interlinked into short stories. But without a plot the player would be truly free, truly encouraged to set their own rules and their own goals. They could act like the Nerevarine, Morrowind’s mythical god reborn, or they could be Olaf, or Nondrick or a follower of House Telvanni or anything they wanted, free of the constraints imposed by having had to craft a world in the service of following a particular heroic plot. They’d be free to role-play in the proper sense of the word. The question is, how many players would really be ready for that challenge of making their own value from a game instead of having it imposed from outside. Sadly, I suspect the answer is very few. Are you one of them?

Less Content, More Game

June 1, 2012August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 45 Comments

Last weekend, I had the enormous pleasure of gathering up all my old Xbox stuff and passing it on to a friend for his children to enjoy. Pulling my old games off the shelf, I encountered Morrowind and quite suddenly was struck by what an enormous waste the game represented. A fantastically detailed, living, breathing fantasy world over which you could walk or fly in its entirety, exploring to your hearts content. And yet, in spite of running several characters over many hours of play, I never finished it because the game was fundamentally flawed.

Some of those flaws are well documented. The character building system was fatally undermined by the ease with which you could build super-powerful characters, and by the way it sidelined mages. A senseless economic system that forced players to either beggar themselves or utilise built-in Easter Eggs. But those, surely, should be nothing more than a minor annoyances in a game that’s defined largely by its immense scope and story. As I stood there gazing down at the box it occurred to me that the game was in fact simply crushed under the weight of its own ambition.

Morrowind sold itself on creating a realistically immersive fantasy world, and invested immense time and effort to that end. Every square inch of the island was mapped, every inhabitant named and given a home, different people in different places had fates that would intertwine in unusual and evocative ways. I cannot begin to imagine how on earth all that detail was authored and programmed and managed before making it into the game. But the illusion which all that detail was supposed to maintain was constantly shattered at fundamental levels. When you talked to all those individually named people, they just repeated things from a tiny stock of phrases related to their location and allegiances. Many of them never left their homes, or never went in them. No-one ever went to bed. When you were on a quest, the quest giver would wait in perpetuity for you to complete the task. Worse, you could often completely undermine the quest and still complete it. Wherever you went, whatever you did, you were constantly reminded that you were just playing a game in a computer generated world, with all the limitations that implies.

Skyrim was supposed to change all that with its radiant story technology, but it largely failed to live up to its promises. What was supposed to happen was that characters in the game world would react to your actions and reputations in a more realistic manner. What actually happened is that the game engine tied itself in knots over trying to understand your intentions, exemplified by the lovely anecdote from one player about the time he accidentally stole a book, put it straight back on the shelves, and then spent several hours fighting off hired thugs that the bookstore owner kept sending after him to recover the book. And radiant stories could do nothing about the fundamental unrealities that still riddled your interactions with the game environment, such as the now infamous exploit where you could put a bucket over someone’s head and they would stand quietly while you looted their house or shop. Simply put, modern technology has never been, and is still not, anywhere close to the level where it can mimic a vaguely realistic web of human interactions on the level that Bethesda keep attempting and as a result the central conceit of the Elder Scroll series has always been, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, false.

The same is true of the wealth of side quests in the game series. One of the key reasons I never progressed very far in Morrowind is that I spent inordinate amounts of time wandering off the beaten track and fulfilling tediously boilerplate side quests for petty rewards. The game sold itself on the number of these sorts of things on offer, but the reality was that they felt rushed, being badly scripted and badly balanced and usually adding nothing to the wider narrative of the game.

The point I’m driving at here is that when it comes to game design, all too often less is actually more. Contrast the Elder Scroll series with, say the Fable games. The Fable designs failed in equally fundamental ways being generally too easy and having certain powers and abilities that were far more useful than others, resulting in stereotypical figher/wizard character builds but in their limited scope they succeeded far more than the Elder Scrolls games in creating believable, entertaining fantasy worlds. They were incredibly shallow worlds, of course, but in a curious way the fact that you were literally unable to poke them and find out they were only skin deep stops you from noticing or caring about that fact. By contrast, the attempt in the Elder Scrolls games to make them seem believable when computer technology is still so far short of that capability just leaves them looking ridiculous. If all the effort that had been put into radiant stories and side quests had simply been put into plot, imagination and characters instead, the result would have been a more believable, immersive and simply better game.

This doesn’t undermine the validity of sandbox games though. It’s simply that there’s very little point in trying make a sandbox game realistic: instead the value is in making it as reactive and as explorable as possible, a lesson that Rockstar seems to have learned but Bethesda has not. The Grand Theft Auto games have always been fundamentally daft, and very little effort was made to make them seem otherwise. The result was that designers were able to leverage that stupidity to make their task easier, such as the closing off of central bridges for long periods of time in order to draw out the thrill of discovery, while the player was still largely free to explore and destroy things to his hearts’ content, which is basically the essence of a sandbox game.

One possible solution to this problem is simply to limit the scope of the sandbox. Limiting the scope means less to model, which in turn means less to go off the rails and end up looking ludicrous. This seems such an obvious fix that I’m amazed it hasn’t been tried more often. One game that does fit this model is Dead Rising, which I’ve never played but when I read about it, I was struck forcibly by how limiting the action to closed shopping mall filled with mindless zombies and only a very limited human cast inherently overcame many of the problems with realism in a sandbox world. It sounds as though the failings in the game had very little to do with its environment and I’d be interested to know if there are any other extant or planned examples of this approach. And again, it’s worth repeating that it’s yet another example in which a game is actually made better by putting less content in it and tightening the focus on what matters.

I can’t resist closing this column by contrasting the problems that video games have in creating a believable setting and atmosphere with board games. Oddly this is because board games are a less immersive and immediate environment. A video game occupies all your attention and makes you feel like you’re right there in the world that it’s creating, so even small anomalies can destroy the suspension of disbelief. In a board game most of the work in terms of setting and narrative is done by the imagination of the players and as long as you’re engaged with the game and enjoying it, that imagination will fill in all the blanks for you as you go along. Perhaps that is ultimately the reason why less is more when it comes to content in video games too. If so, then it’d do everyone good to avoid games like Skyrim in favour of more crudely drawn, but ultimately more thrilling fare.

Skyrim Dawnguard Trailer

May 31, 2012November 12, 2020 Todd Brakke 3 Comments

This morning brings us the first trailer for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim DLC, Dawnguard. Looks like we’ve got vamps in the hizzy, and from the sound of the narration you’ll have the option of joining them or suiting up with the Dawnguard to stop them. This one actually interests me a bit; probably not enough to actually play more Skyrim, but it looks rather cool.

Dragon’s Dogma in Review

May 30, 2012July 21, 2020 Michael Barnes 19 Comments

Had Dragon’s Dogma presented itself as a Japanese-style action game with light RPG trappings, I might be writing today about one of my favorite games of 2012. With a development team including alumni from some of the better Resident Evil and Devil May Cry titles, it’s a game with a great pedigree and huge ambition. Brilliant ideas abound like the Pawn concept, which essentially simulates playing a MMORPG asynchronously with vaguely intelligent party members that learn how to fight more effectively over time and speak incessantly in a faux archaic patois. If your main Pawn gets hired by another player, he or she comes back with items or knowledge about quests or how to deal with certain monsters. There’s an excellent item enhancement system that’s as streamlined and straightforward as any I’ve seen, there are well-designed dungeons rich with atmosphere, and you’d be hard pressed to find a more exciting video game moment than scaling a hydra wound around a watchtower to lop off its head.

But it’s not exactly a Japanese-style action game, although elements are present. Despite offering some singular, possibly innovative hack-and-slash RPG concepts Dragon’s Dogma makes the mistake of thinking that it can compete with Western RPGs like Skyrim. It’s a shame because this is a far better and more compelling title in terms of action and gameplay than Bethesda’s OCD morass of enervating sidequests and unfocused narrative. Yet here is a Japanese-developed game that trucks in the worst qualities of the open world genre. The story, such as it is, is almost completely an afterthought and the world-building offers little more than a bland pastiche of Western fantasy tropes. NPCs are little more than Westworld-like automatons, standing by patiently for you to interact with them in their lifeless world. Nowhere is this more apparent than when you stand on a rock outcropping overlooking a vast valley and you can see bandits literally standing around doing nothing.

The world of Gransys is empty and soulless to the point where it makes Kingdoms of Amalur’s setting look inspired. Vast areas of nothing, tediously coupled with no fast travel option in the early game, mean lots of walking and wishing that there was something- anything- to fight or do. The quest log tracks laughable you-gotta-be-kidding-me gigs like finding flowers, killing X number of rabbits, and escort missions. The story missions have no more urgency or dramaturgy than menial, void-filling tasks issued by question mark-haloed quest dispensers, urging you to the next spot marked on the map- if you can find it before you tire of lumbering around the map looking for a route. As for the narrative line, after twenty hours of play I’ve got that a dragon ate my heart and that’s irritating the local royalty and that’s about it. There’s probably something about a prophecy in there somewhere, and your character is called the Arisen- as if any of that matters when the game is at its worst when it’s pretending that it has a story to tell or game world to express.

Yet in its best moments, most of which have nothing to do with the paltry narrative or sandbox aspirations, the game celebrates its Eastern lineage. The patrimony of the Souls games is evident in its sometimes staggering difficulty and its willingness to punish the unprepared, hasty, or unskilled player. Fighting some of the larger Monster Hunter-like beasts in the game- Chimeras, Hydras, Gryphons, Cyclopses- is grueling, awe-inspiring, and you can climb on them to hit weak points a la Shadow of the Colossus. Fussy details abound like worrying about keeping your lantern dry, food in your inventory from spoiling, and a Giant from seeing the women in your party. The ladies drive him crazy.

And oh, that fighting. Eschewing the sludgy tank battles of the Bethesda titles, the ersatz Gears of War pop-and-shoot of Mass Effect, and the ever-present MMORPG cooldown ability trope, the combat system is brutal, complex, and completely successful. It’s not tactical or measure like in the Souls or Witcher games. It’s much closer to the Japanese brawler idiom and it’s a better game for it- there’s combos, juggling, charge attacks, and more. Swinging a sword, slinging a spell, or blasting a goblin with ten flaming arrows is completely satisfying and all actions are tied to stamina, weight, speed, strength, and other traits. Classes, abilities, and specializations are strict- the trend toward characters that can do whatever in the name of accessibility is here refuted.

The idea is that you’ll hire, fire, and rehire Pawns by either entering “The Rift” at Rift stones or by running across them wandering the game world to suit your current needs and to augment your character’s abilities. You might run an all-Fighter/Warrior party to handle conventional foes, or recruit a team of Striders and Rangers for some long-distance bow-work backed with up-close dagger-work. Of course, without a supply of curative herbs and potions you’ll want to bring mages to provide healing and combat support. The AI isn’t terrible and the abstract simulation of learning works, I just wish that they wouldn’t constantly remind you to cut off a Saurian’s tail first once they figure it out.

Too often, these chatterbox Pawns ruin the game’s moments of sensory grace with their unasked for advice or commentary. And there are wonderful moments where the game is immersive. Before you go hacking the tails off of those Saurians, you might stop for a minute to admire the vista, with the alligator-men sunning themselves on the rocks in a creek. Or a swarm of bats might explode up a shaft circumferenced by a massive spiral stairway, leading to a horrible Thing in the Pit-style creature. Castles are imposing, the flicker of a lantern feels warm, and the sound of the clash of arms is impactful. This is a very well made, good-looking game with an art style that is more Elmore and Hildebrandt than Blizzard and Games Workshop. Framerates aren’t always the best and the camera, of course, goes haywire when you clamber onto a gryphon, but technically this a very polished, mostly well-appointed game that a lot of care and attention went into.

But the problem with this sometimes brilliant, utterly hardcore, and relentlessly clumsy trainwreck of a game is much the same as we’ve seen with any number of Japanese-developed games where the creators stray from the unique qualities of their national design idioms. Attempting to emulate the successes of Western designers is a tragic mistake. When this game looks, feels, plays, and even sounds like a classic, AAA-class Japanese title I’m loving it. When it’s trying to be an Elder Scrolls game, befuddling me with labyrinthine menus, or constantly reminding me with pop-up messages that I can buy more quests or special weapons through DLC I’m hating it. I don’t recall another game in recent years where my opinion has swung so wildly, often within a single hour of playing it. I do like this game, and quite a lot sometimes. But not always. It’s the dilemma of Dragon’s Dogma, a game that too often turns away from its own strengths and character in pursuit of elusive and unlikely foreign success.