Before I get going, let me say this: it should be obvious, but these are my opinions. I'm stating this now, at the top, before I say anything else, so that I don't need to keep repeating this all the way through. If I say something you don't agree with, don't come back at me with, "well that's just your opinion," because you are simply stating the obvious.
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Now that Skyrim has been out for some time, I thought it'd be good to finally get up and play it. I've made it known on several occasions that I'm not a big fan of the Elder Scrolls games. It's nothing against the series or the developers, it's just the type of gamer I am. I enjoy very structured games where sidequests are easy to find and relevant to my current interests. If you plop me in an open world and simply say 'go', I'll probably quit shortly. This is the reason I haven't bought Minecraft, and the reason I tend not to enjoy the Elder Scrolls games.
But never let it be said that I won't give anything a try. So, I popped in the copy of Skyrim I got for Christmas and installed it, and I just finished playing for 45 minutes. But rather than tell you just what I thought about the game itself, I thought it'd be good to compare it to my experiences in the first 45 minutes of both Morrowind and Oblivion as well.
Let's start at the very beginning. All three games start the same way: you're in shackles, and you are rather quickly let free. Of the three games, I would have to say Morrowind is by far the strongest in terms of opening. It actually all makes sense in the setting of the story: you've just been released from prison, and the magistrate wants to know all your vital information. It all flows rather nicely and doesn't even feel like a character creation.
Compare that to Oblivion, which is far more clunky and contrived, yanking you out of your escape for the uncanny valley conversations to blatantly ask you about your birthday or what you did before you were locked up. It's quite jarring to finish fighting off some assassins only to have the NPCs (proverbially) shrug, turn around, and casually ask you to talk about yourself on multiple occasions. Skyrim does the same thing, though luckily only once and before you have complete control of your character.
Another reason why Morrowind's opening is better is simply because there is less going on. For all the praises you can lay at The Elder Scroll's feet about open worlds and complete freedom, it does lead to serious problems when it comes down to scripted events. Whether it's the player not looking in the right direction or NPCs falling over each other or lines of dialogue delivered at the weirdest times, one of the trends of this series seems to be that the more complex the scene is, the less immersive the world becomes. Morrowind gets points because the opening involves about 3 people besides you, none of whom have to talk at the same time as anyone else.
But for all the praise I've heaped on Morrowind up to this point, it's also the game I was able to play the least. Why then? Because even though it has a stellar opening in terms of balancing length, complexity, immersion, and cohesion, it started to lose me the second I stepped out of the magistrates office and into the world. We're now on my second point: tutorial, and this is where Oblivion and Skyrim begin to reclaim some ground.
There is no tutorial at all in Morrowind - or at least none that I could find. It plops you into the world, with only the warning that your actions now have consequences. I'm sure I'm not the only one who walked up to the nearest townsfolk and accidentally punched him (and subsequently got fined) because I still wasn't sure what all the controls were. The saving grace of this is that because the opening sequence is so short, you can quickly just quick and boot up a new character, only having lost 10 minutes.
Oblivion takes the tutorial to the extreme, outright telling you through text boxes to 'shoot that bucket with a bow and arrow' or 'sneak up on this goblin'. Quite frankly, in a game where you're supposed to become completely immersed in its world, having these boxes pop up is again a very good way of breaking experience up. While it does tell you all about the control mechanics, it also detached me even further from the events of the opening. But, at the very least, you'll know which button swings your sword and which button makes you open your mouth, so I feel like it's a win over Morrowind if only for the 'you are less likely to commit a felony within the first 30 seconds of being free' factor.
Skyrim again has the balance of the two. It has the tutorial that tells you about the mechanics, but it's done in a way that actually relates to the events at hand. Items and world mechanics (such as locks) are put blatantly in your way, and NPCs may suggest you do something about them. Much how like Morrowind's character creation made sense and flowed naturally, so too I found Skyrim's tutorial level to do the same.
About now is a good time to discuss some of the mechanics of the games, as at this point they're pretty much all opened up for the player. So let's start with combat. As far as I can tell, all three games had roughly the same combat system: a simplistic-yet-clunky first person deal. I found through trial and error that playing a melee class is just outright stupid because collision detection and depth perception are completely out of whack. So I mainly played either mages or archery-focused characters so that I could trick myself into thinking I was playing an FPS. In the end, though, this is one area where you can clearly see at least some evolution in the gameplay.
Morrowind's combat was horrid, and it wasn't just the clunky controls. It was the enemies as well. Most of the enemies I met within the first 45 minutes killed me very fast. There were the bandits/smugglers/pirates/whatevers (never really found out who they were or why the mattered) in that one random cave with their telescopic vision. There were the skeletons in that other random cave that reduced my stats to 1 so that I couldn't move unless I was naked. There were the birds on the road that I couldn't see and simply pecked me to death as I tried to run away. There were the rats in that one attic (probably the only enemies I encountered that I was actually supposed to be fighting at that level) that simply killed me.
Oblivions combat was better, due to being able to hotkey certain things, and because the enemies actually felt defeatable? until I got to the first Oblivion Gate (spoilers: there are Oblivion Gates and you go through them). I had basically built my character to be the best archer you could be at level 1, and yet the enemies in the Oblivion Gate simply would not die. They couldn't really hurt me, but taking 5-6 arrows to kill a little imp is just ridiculous - and need I remind everyone that this is only the second place you are urged to go in the main quest. You can very easily make it here within half an hour of starting the game if you hurry.
Skyrim is probably the best, due to the fact that the enemies died with ease AND the increase in fluidity of the combat UI. I can't really think of a rant here, so I'll rant about something else: menus.
I played Morrowind on the Xbox. Mistake, because it was a PC game ported to a console, so trying to navigate the menus was a painful process. I played Oblivion on the PC. Another mistake, because it was a console game ported to the PC. Both games have labyrinthine menus that are absurdly hard to navigate. I don't fault Morrowind too hard, because it seemed like it literally was just lifted off the PC version and the developers had no time to adjust it for consoles. Oblivion annoys me, but at least once you got used to where everything in the menus was located it simply became tedious rather than a frustrating game of Where's Waldo.
Then Skyrim came and made the menus even worse.
Yes, that's right. I hate the menus in Skyrim even more than I did the previous two games. While Skyrim's combat has improved, even if it was ever-so-slightly, its menus seem to have completely regressed to? I don't even know what. Rather than there being tabs and sortable lists and subheadings, items are just listed. Rather than being able to look at the list and see its attributes in nice neat columns so that you can compare it with others, the only way to compare items is to highlight one and then highlight another. Rather than being able to sort your items so that, say, you can look at all your helmets and pick the best one, they're simply listed alphabetically with every other piece of armour, helmet or not. These were features that were available in Oblivion, so why were they removed? Hell if I know.
But now that we've gotten ourselves into the world and have managed to not get arrested, what do we have in front of us? This is where I felt like Morrowind completely dropped me, and I lost all incentive to continue playing - I had no interest in seeing where my travels would take me. There was so little impetus to do anything in this game that I simply gave up on it after 45 minutes. "Go and see this person who lives here" is all the instruction you get in Morrowind. This is simply not enough. There is no hook there. You aren't even encouraged to walk there to see this huge world; they tell you to take the beetle bus (or whatever it was).
Oblivion tries the same plot of, "go and see this person who lives here," but at the very least it gives you a sense of urgency and tries to involve you in what's going on. The King is telling you to go there because you must start the chain of events that will Save the World (tm). There's an impetus. Do you want to save the world? Yes? Then get moving. It's still a bit contrived, but at least there seems to be a reason to go.
Skyrim, though, blows both of them out of the water. It personally invests you in the plot by putting you alongside principle characters. It's a rebellion. You're at the same execution party. Things go loopy. You're pulled into the rebellion. Go and see the leaders of the rebellion. There. Vested interest. Impetus. A reason to play. No hand-wavy 'go there and do things' bull. It makes me want to go and see these places, talk to these people, and fight alongside them.
Sidequests, too, felt better in Skyrim. Summing up my Morrowind sidequest experience: what sidequests? I simply could not find any that looked like they had any sort of immediate (or even semi-immediate) solution. They all seemed to be very random in nature and inconsequential to even the localized community of the game they were in. Oblivion's sidequests were better in terms of actually being present and accessible, but turned me off for one big reason: the 'follow this person' type quest. One of the first sidequests is to spy on a certain shopkeeper, which seems fine until you actually do it. I followed the shopkeeper from the moment he left his shop after closing until he met with his shadowy contact, which took several minutes. Minutes. Minutes spent not doing anything but watching NPCs chatter inanely at each other. That is not a game, that is a really really bad reality TV show.
Skyrim wins this department quite handily. The first sidequests I gathered happened to be either in the way of or only slightly off the path of the things on my main quest. This is how I like the bulk of my sidequests: they require extra effort, but not so much that you have to go hours out of your way to complete them. I've always felt that a game that tries too hard to pry you away from its main elements is a game that' hiding something.
It's for these two reason (the story hook and the accessible sidequets) that, unlike Morrowind and Oblivion where I simply gave up moved on after 45 minutes, I think I'll actually continue playing Skyrim. Morrowind I quit because I was bored and it felt like the game was punishing me just for existing in its world. Oblivion I quit because it kept breaking me out of the experience with glitches and horrendous balancing. How far I actually go with Skyrim before I encounter something that pisses me off enough to make me want to quit remains to be seen, but for the time being I am content to continue playing.
Thank you all for taking the time to read my ramblings. Feel free to discuss your own experiences with the first 45 minutes of Elder Scrolls games.
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Now that Skyrim has been out for some time, I thought it'd be good to finally get up and play it. I've made it known on several occasions that I'm not a big fan of the Elder Scrolls games. It's nothing against the series or the developers, it's just the type of gamer I am. I enjoy very structured games where sidequests are easy to find and relevant to my current interests. If you plop me in an open world and simply say 'go', I'll probably quit shortly. This is the reason I haven't bought Minecraft, and the reason I tend not to enjoy the Elder Scrolls games.
But never let it be said that I won't give anything a try. So, I popped in the copy of Skyrim I got for Christmas and installed it, and I just finished playing for 45 minutes. But rather than tell you just what I thought about the game itself, I thought it'd be good to compare it to my experiences in the first 45 minutes of both Morrowind and Oblivion as well.
Let's start at the very beginning. All three games start the same way: you're in shackles, and you are rather quickly let free. Of the three games, I would have to say Morrowind is by far the strongest in terms of opening. It actually all makes sense in the setting of the story: you've just been released from prison, and the magistrate wants to know all your vital information. It all flows rather nicely and doesn't even feel like a character creation.
Compare that to Oblivion, which is far more clunky and contrived, yanking you out of your escape for the uncanny valley conversations to blatantly ask you about your birthday or what you did before you were locked up. It's quite jarring to finish fighting off some assassins only to have the NPCs (proverbially) shrug, turn around, and casually ask you to talk about yourself on multiple occasions. Skyrim does the same thing, though luckily only once and before you have complete control of your character.
Another reason why Morrowind's opening is better is simply because there is less going on. For all the praises you can lay at The Elder Scroll's feet about open worlds and complete freedom, it does lead to serious problems when it comes down to scripted events. Whether it's the player not looking in the right direction or NPCs falling over each other or lines of dialogue delivered at the weirdest times, one of the trends of this series seems to be that the more complex the scene is, the less immersive the world becomes. Morrowind gets points because the opening involves about 3 people besides you, none of whom have to talk at the same time as anyone else.
But for all the praise I've heaped on Morrowind up to this point, it's also the game I was able to play the least. Why then? Because even though it has a stellar opening in terms of balancing length, complexity, immersion, and cohesion, it started to lose me the second I stepped out of the magistrates office and into the world. We're now on my second point: tutorial, and this is where Oblivion and Skyrim begin to reclaim some ground.
There is no tutorial at all in Morrowind - or at least none that I could find. It plops you into the world, with only the warning that your actions now have consequences. I'm sure I'm not the only one who walked up to the nearest townsfolk and accidentally punched him (and subsequently got fined) because I still wasn't sure what all the controls were. The saving grace of this is that because the opening sequence is so short, you can quickly just quick and boot up a new character, only having lost 10 minutes.
Oblivion takes the tutorial to the extreme, outright telling you through text boxes to 'shoot that bucket with a bow and arrow' or 'sneak up on this goblin'. Quite frankly, in a game where you're supposed to become completely immersed in its world, having these boxes pop up is again a very good way of breaking experience up. While it does tell you all about the control mechanics, it also detached me even further from the events of the opening. But, at the very least, you'll know which button swings your sword and which button makes you open your mouth, so I feel like it's a win over Morrowind if only for the 'you are less likely to commit a felony within the first 30 seconds of being free' factor.
Skyrim again has the balance of the two. It has the tutorial that tells you about the mechanics, but it's done in a way that actually relates to the events at hand. Items and world mechanics (such as locks) are put blatantly in your way, and NPCs may suggest you do something about them. Much how like Morrowind's character creation made sense and flowed naturally, so too I found Skyrim's tutorial level to do the same.
About now is a good time to discuss some of the mechanics of the games, as at this point they're pretty much all opened up for the player. So let's start with combat. As far as I can tell, all three games had roughly the same combat system: a simplistic-yet-clunky first person deal. I found through trial and error that playing a melee class is just outright stupid because collision detection and depth perception are completely out of whack. So I mainly played either mages or archery-focused characters so that I could trick myself into thinking I was playing an FPS. In the end, though, this is one area where you can clearly see at least some evolution in the gameplay.
Morrowind's combat was horrid, and it wasn't just the clunky controls. It was the enemies as well. Most of the enemies I met within the first 45 minutes killed me very fast. There were the bandits/smugglers/pirates/whatevers (never really found out who they were or why the mattered) in that one random cave with their telescopic vision. There were the skeletons in that other random cave that reduced my stats to 1 so that I couldn't move unless I was naked. There were the birds on the road that I couldn't see and simply pecked me to death as I tried to run away. There were the rats in that one attic (probably the only enemies I encountered that I was actually supposed to be fighting at that level) that simply killed me.
Oblivions combat was better, due to being able to hotkey certain things, and because the enemies actually felt defeatable? until I got to the first Oblivion Gate (spoilers: there are Oblivion Gates and you go through them). I had basically built my character to be the best archer you could be at level 1, and yet the enemies in the Oblivion Gate simply would not die. They couldn't really hurt me, but taking 5-6 arrows to kill a little imp is just ridiculous - and need I remind everyone that this is only the second place you are urged to go in the main quest. You can very easily make it here within half an hour of starting the game if you hurry.
Skyrim is probably the best, due to the fact that the enemies died with ease AND the increase in fluidity of the combat UI. I can't really think of a rant here, so I'll rant about something else: menus.
I played Morrowind on the Xbox. Mistake, because it was a PC game ported to a console, so trying to navigate the menus was a painful process. I played Oblivion on the PC. Another mistake, because it was a console game ported to the PC. Both games have labyrinthine menus that are absurdly hard to navigate. I don't fault Morrowind too hard, because it seemed like it literally was just lifted off the PC version and the developers had no time to adjust it for consoles. Oblivion annoys me, but at least once you got used to where everything in the menus was located it simply became tedious rather than a frustrating game of Where's Waldo.
Then Skyrim came and made the menus even worse.
Yes, that's right. I hate the menus in Skyrim even more than I did the previous two games. While Skyrim's combat has improved, even if it was ever-so-slightly, its menus seem to have completely regressed to? I don't even know what. Rather than there being tabs and sortable lists and subheadings, items are just listed. Rather than being able to look at the list and see its attributes in nice neat columns so that you can compare it with others, the only way to compare items is to highlight one and then highlight another. Rather than being able to sort your items so that, say, you can look at all your helmets and pick the best one, they're simply listed alphabetically with every other piece of armour, helmet or not. These were features that were available in Oblivion, so why were they removed? Hell if I know.
But now that we've gotten ourselves into the world and have managed to not get arrested, what do we have in front of us? This is where I felt like Morrowind completely dropped me, and I lost all incentive to continue playing - I had no interest in seeing where my travels would take me. There was so little impetus to do anything in this game that I simply gave up on it after 45 minutes. "Go and see this person who lives here" is all the instruction you get in Morrowind. This is simply not enough. There is no hook there. You aren't even encouraged to walk there to see this huge world; they tell you to take the beetle bus (or whatever it was).
Oblivion tries the same plot of, "go and see this person who lives here," but at the very least it gives you a sense of urgency and tries to involve you in what's going on. The King is telling you to go there because you must start the chain of events that will Save the World (tm). There's an impetus. Do you want to save the world? Yes? Then get moving. It's still a bit contrived, but at least there seems to be a reason to go.
Skyrim, though, blows both of them out of the water. It personally invests you in the plot by putting you alongside principle characters. It's a rebellion. You're at the same execution party. Things go loopy. You're pulled into the rebellion. Go and see the leaders of the rebellion. There. Vested interest. Impetus. A reason to play. No hand-wavy 'go there and do things' bull. It makes me want to go and see these places, talk to these people, and fight alongside them.
Sidequests, too, felt better in Skyrim. Summing up my Morrowind sidequest experience: what sidequests? I simply could not find any that looked like they had any sort of immediate (or even semi-immediate) solution. They all seemed to be very random in nature and inconsequential to even the localized community of the game they were in. Oblivion's sidequests were better in terms of actually being present and accessible, but turned me off for one big reason: the 'follow this person' type quest. One of the first sidequests is to spy on a certain shopkeeper, which seems fine until you actually do it. I followed the shopkeeper from the moment he left his shop after closing until he met with his shadowy contact, which took several minutes. Minutes. Minutes spent not doing anything but watching NPCs chatter inanely at each other. That is not a game, that is a really really bad reality TV show.
Skyrim wins this department quite handily. The first sidequests I gathered happened to be either in the way of or only slightly off the path of the things on my main quest. This is how I like the bulk of my sidequests: they require extra effort, but not so much that you have to go hours out of your way to complete them. I've always felt that a game that tries too hard to pry you away from its main elements is a game that' hiding something.
It's for these two reason (the story hook and the accessible sidequets) that, unlike Morrowind and Oblivion where I simply gave up moved on after 45 minutes, I think I'll actually continue playing Skyrim. Morrowind I quit because I was bored and it felt like the game was punishing me just for existing in its world. Oblivion I quit because it kept breaking me out of the experience with glitches and horrendous balancing. How far I actually go with Skyrim before I encounter something that pisses me off enough to make me want to quit remains to be seen, but for the time being I am content to continue playing.
Thank you all for taking the time to read my ramblings. Feel free to discuss your own experiences with the first 45 minutes of Elder Scrolls games.
