- Jun 3, 2011
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Skyrim has good visuals, to a point. Oblivion had them too, not quite as modern, but Oblivion was revolutionary.
So Skyrim is a game where you play as a fantasy hero, sword and shield, magic, potions, all that stuff. It's got experience points.
Now you see i'm not new to experience points; i was a Dungeon Master (no sado) back when i was barely 13yo. I'v played just about every RPG from back when the only people who knew what a RPG was were RPG players, to today.
(insert list of RPGs known to man here)
So, i know my RPG stuff. I was around before FF tried to destroy everything we RPG players loved.
Back in the days there was a kind of player who we used to call the Roll Player, which is today the stat padder, the munchkin, you name it. But true as it may, RPGs' main appeal was that your character grew stronger, found magic items, and did things you could not do. In short, Roll Playing (i.e., focusing more on throwing dice, killing orcs and leveling up, rather than getting into the imagery) was fun and it still is.
Now the MAIN problem Skyrim has is that it's a bad game. The first rule has been broken, when i can do things my character cannot do.
See in Skyrim the most powerful enemies are the dragons, the dremora lord and maybe the mammoths, and i'm a quake player, which means that pretty much if you give me a ranged weapon and two dodge keys and i can kill anything. Add a quicksave / quickload button and you're making it silly.
Of course, *I* can kill anything; my character couldn't, in the hands of any other player.
Fallout 3 has the same issue, when i can kill at level 1 the toughest mob in the game, something is wrong. Could you take on a Brotherhood of Steel enemy at level 1, in Fallout 2? nope. You would have been torn to shreds.
See in RPGs there is a level of separation between player and character.
Too often as a DM/GM i would run into a player who would say "ok my character makes some gunpowder"
("no, you don't know how")
"ok, i take 75% saltpetre, 15% charcoal, 10% sulfur and mix them together; what happens?"
See the problem here is that the player knows something .. but his own character doesn't.
And in the same way that in Skyrim - which is essentially a FPS - i can own any mob i move faster than (or that i can get stuck into the world's geometry), regardless of how much of a pussy my character is.
The very core of RPGs is being faced with difficulties that are temporarily insurmountable; something which makes it worthwhile trying to grind and level up. Grinding is a bad word now, but it was at the core of untold slaughters of hobgoblins back in the golden age of RPG.
Skyrim's combat mechanics are simply not suited to a RPG, like turn-based isn't suited to a Street Fighter game.
But it's not over yet.
The world is nice, although not the nicest i have seen. Unfortunately it has the same problem as Minecraft.
See that mountain? Well, it's sixty feet tall. See that huge valley? You can walk across it in around five minutes. Half hour to cross the whole world.
Not bad for say, Tomb Rider, but pretty bad for "immersion". Even the ancient DAoC has maps so vast that if one of your mates messages you from the other side of the world, you will think twice before trying to get there.
Naturally the whole thing makes absolutely no sense anyway since you will just fast travel there anyway.
But the problem lies in the way the design is implemented.
If you are going to make a mountain, it's got to be a mountain. Slopes that slow you down. Ice storms that really damage you (especially if you're a half orc running around in a loincloth).
The whole game is overambitious in design scope but in the end it's just a 3d map of some small pointy hills and some textures on top. Excluding the awesome effect inside rivers, there is really zero immersion when you see horses climbing straight down a cliff's face. To me, Skyrim's external map design is the same as if in a FPS like ME3, you could walk up to a half wall and your character would just start climbing on its side, horizontally.
(while we're at it, let me say how much i hated Fallout's "post-apocalyptic" desert; how many f* people live in this radioactive wasteland? where is the despair? where is the hopelessness?)
Going on;
Skyrim has two faults everyone has pointed out which are annoying, but not game breaking.
Fault one, is the "arrow in the knee" thing, where every guard has to blurt out his deepest fears and most hidden secrets every f* time you walk by; this, along with the "still Disney, still PolCo, but now with swear words" writing are yess annoying, but what did you expect? It's still a "major American company"'s product, did you really think you were gonna get something like Prey, or FEAR?
These are some things which make the game poor on a writing level, but what makes the game bad on playability is that essentially you have but ONE game mechanic and everything else rotates around that; if we exclude the quest of the god Sheogorath, everything else bar nothing that you do in the game is "kill this one mob";
Think about it, there is NO way to fail in this game unless you die. And, if you kill the mob, you will ALWAYS advance in your quest.
Seriously how can anyone call this a RPG rather than an Adventure game (or a FPS, or a 3d Arcade) is beyond me to understand. Has anyone here played a Vampire PC-RPG?
Anyway, this is surely what i would define a game-breaking issue; killing mobs is childisly easy, and killing mobs is the only think you have to do. Like Minecraft, if you want a challenge, if you want to *beat the game*, it's all too easy. never you mind the many (less than Oblivion) ways that you can kill someone, sneaking, arrows, backstab, poison, etc .. the point is that it's simply not a game in the classic sense of the word.
On the one hand you have a player who wants to actually have a quest to beat, and finds himself just faced by the chore of having to fast travel to yet another well-lit cave, kill the mob in an instant, then fast travel for yet another identical quest.
At least, in classic computer RPGs, different mob encounters would present you with different strategic challenges, expecially because old RPGs had way deeper mechanics than Skyrim, where arrows+ magic = identical, and all swords = identical, and no stats / no stat effects, no hard hp, in other and shorter words, nothing which makes RPGs different from Cowboys n Indians pew pew.
And unfortunately on the other hand you have the Minecraft player who will build castles ignoring the fact that the walls are made of wool, who builds endless minecart lines to grab diamonds in a pictoresque mountain cave when all he needs to do is dig down. Those players play Skyrim in the same way that you'd play Barbie Dressage. To those of them who claim Skyrim is beautiful, i say they are judging the book exclusively by the cover.
And finally we come to the one thing that Skyrims fails at so badly that it angers me; there is no sense of time whatsoever.
You get asked to bring some food up the mountain. "Sure", you say, taking the food, and completely forgetting about if for a few in-game months. The NPC still smiles at you like you just talked to him first five minutes ago; nobody up that mountain has staved to death yet, and there is no situation where you cannot simply walk out of and then come back to in days or weeks, and find that everything is as you left it. Skyrim has no time scripting in any of its quests, and having the experience in 3d makes it even worse. Even Doom had more of a sense of urgency that Skyrim does. I'm sorry, but this is not how you do a Role Playing game, a Roll Playing game, a Munchkin's Oddysey, a Monthy Haul, Powerlevelling, or whatever your idea of RPG manifests as. Skyrim = fail.
I didn't like Skyrim; i liked nothing at all about Skyrim and i would not play it again, nor would i play another game using the same engine, game design, mechanics, or written by the same writing team.
So Skyrim is a game where you play as a fantasy hero, sword and shield, magic, potions, all that stuff. It's got experience points.
Now you see i'm not new to experience points; i was a Dungeon Master (no sado) back when i was barely 13yo. I'v played just about every RPG from back when the only people who knew what a RPG was were RPG players, to today.
(insert list of RPGs known to man here)
So, i know my RPG stuff. I was around before FF tried to destroy everything we RPG players loved.
Back in the days there was a kind of player who we used to call the Roll Player, which is today the stat padder, the munchkin, you name it. But true as it may, RPGs' main appeal was that your character grew stronger, found magic items, and did things you could not do. In short, Roll Playing (i.e., focusing more on throwing dice, killing orcs and leveling up, rather than getting into the imagery) was fun and it still is.
Now the MAIN problem Skyrim has is that it's a bad game. The first rule has been broken, when i can do things my character cannot do.
See in Skyrim the most powerful enemies are the dragons, the dremora lord and maybe the mammoths, and i'm a quake player, which means that pretty much if you give me a ranged weapon and two dodge keys and i can kill anything. Add a quicksave / quickload button and you're making it silly.
Of course, *I* can kill anything; my character couldn't, in the hands of any other player.
Fallout 3 has the same issue, when i can kill at level 1 the toughest mob in the game, something is wrong. Could you take on a Brotherhood of Steel enemy at level 1, in Fallout 2? nope. You would have been torn to shreds.
See in RPGs there is a level of separation between player and character.
Too often as a DM/GM i would run into a player who would say "ok my character makes some gunpowder"
("no, you don't know how")
"ok, i take 75% saltpetre, 15% charcoal, 10% sulfur and mix them together; what happens?"
See the problem here is that the player knows something .. but his own character doesn't.
And in the same way that in Skyrim - which is essentially a FPS - i can own any mob i move faster than (or that i can get stuck into the world's geometry), regardless of how much of a pussy my character is.
The very core of RPGs is being faced with difficulties that are temporarily insurmountable; something which makes it worthwhile trying to grind and level up. Grinding is a bad word now, but it was at the core of untold slaughters of hobgoblins back in the golden age of RPG.
Skyrim's combat mechanics are simply not suited to a RPG, like turn-based isn't suited to a Street Fighter game.
But it's not over yet.
The world is nice, although not the nicest i have seen. Unfortunately it has the same problem as Minecraft.
See that mountain? Well, it's sixty feet tall. See that huge valley? You can walk across it in around five minutes. Half hour to cross the whole world.
Not bad for say, Tomb Rider, but pretty bad for "immersion". Even the ancient DAoC has maps so vast that if one of your mates messages you from the other side of the world, you will think twice before trying to get there.
Naturally the whole thing makes absolutely no sense anyway since you will just fast travel there anyway.
But the problem lies in the way the design is implemented.
If you are going to make a mountain, it's got to be a mountain. Slopes that slow you down. Ice storms that really damage you (especially if you're a half orc running around in a loincloth).
The whole game is overambitious in design scope but in the end it's just a 3d map of some small pointy hills and some textures on top. Excluding the awesome effect inside rivers, there is really zero immersion when you see horses climbing straight down a cliff's face. To me, Skyrim's external map design is the same as if in a FPS like ME3, you could walk up to a half wall and your character would just start climbing on its side, horizontally.
(while we're at it, let me say how much i hated Fallout's "post-apocalyptic" desert; how many f* people live in this radioactive wasteland? where is the despair? where is the hopelessness?)
Going on;
Skyrim has two faults everyone has pointed out which are annoying, but not game breaking.
Fault one, is the "arrow in the knee" thing, where every guard has to blurt out his deepest fears and most hidden secrets every f* time you walk by; this, along with the "still Disney, still PolCo, but now with swear words" writing are yess annoying, but what did you expect? It's still a "major American company"'s product, did you really think you were gonna get something like Prey, or FEAR?
These are some things which make the game poor on a writing level, but what makes the game bad on playability is that essentially you have but ONE game mechanic and everything else rotates around that; if we exclude the quest of the god Sheogorath, everything else bar nothing that you do in the game is "kill this one mob";
Think about it, there is NO way to fail in this game unless you die. And, if you kill the mob, you will ALWAYS advance in your quest.
Seriously how can anyone call this a RPG rather than an Adventure game (or a FPS, or a 3d Arcade) is beyond me to understand. Has anyone here played a Vampire PC-RPG?
Anyway, this is surely what i would define a game-breaking issue; killing mobs is childisly easy, and killing mobs is the only think you have to do. Like Minecraft, if you want a challenge, if you want to *beat the game*, it's all too easy. never you mind the many (less than Oblivion) ways that you can kill someone, sneaking, arrows, backstab, poison, etc .. the point is that it's simply not a game in the classic sense of the word.
On the one hand you have a player who wants to actually have a quest to beat, and finds himself just faced by the chore of having to fast travel to yet another well-lit cave, kill the mob in an instant, then fast travel for yet another identical quest.
At least, in classic computer RPGs, different mob encounters would present you with different strategic challenges, expecially because old RPGs had way deeper mechanics than Skyrim, where arrows+ magic = identical, and all swords = identical, and no stats / no stat effects, no hard hp, in other and shorter words, nothing which makes RPGs different from Cowboys n Indians pew pew.
And unfortunately on the other hand you have the Minecraft player who will build castles ignoring the fact that the walls are made of wool, who builds endless minecart lines to grab diamonds in a pictoresque mountain cave when all he needs to do is dig down. Those players play Skyrim in the same way that you'd play Barbie Dressage. To those of them who claim Skyrim is beautiful, i say they are judging the book exclusively by the cover.
And finally we come to the one thing that Skyrims fails at so badly that it angers me; there is no sense of time whatsoever.
You get asked to bring some food up the mountain. "Sure", you say, taking the food, and completely forgetting about if for a few in-game months. The NPC still smiles at you like you just talked to him first five minutes ago; nobody up that mountain has staved to death yet, and there is no situation where you cannot simply walk out of and then come back to in days or weeks, and find that everything is as you left it. Skyrim has no time scripting in any of its quests, and having the experience in 3d makes it even worse. Even Doom had more of a sense of urgency that Skyrim does. I'm sorry, but this is not how you do a Role Playing game, a Roll Playing game, a Munchkin's Oddysey, a Monthy Haul, Powerlevelling, or whatever your idea of RPG manifests as. Skyrim = fail.
I didn't like Skyrim; i liked nothing at all about Skyrim and i would not play it again, nor would i play another game using the same engine, game design, mechanics, or written by the same writing team.