I've been running around Skyrim the last few weeks, and I'll gladly admit that I'm having quite a time. Between the massive environments and seemingly unlimited quests and characters, there's practically no end to the things I can see and do.
Unless I want to have a remotely convincing interaction with another character.
The visuals and world design have reached a pretty high standard at this point, but the actual gameplay, the conversations and interplay between the inhabitants of the game? That stuff hasn't advanced much at all in the five years since Oblivion. You still get the same small handful of canned responses. The quests are still mostly fetch. The characters are overly scripted, and the scripts are terribly short.
I've felt this way for a while, but Skyrim really cements it: game design is moving in the wrong direction. They're building these massive worlds and populating them with thousands of people, but none of them are remotely convincing. Your interactions with them are repetitive and predictable. Blame it on poor AI or limited writing, but there's no denying that the substance of gaming hasn't progressed at the same pace as the style.
Before everyone burns me at the stake, imagine Bethesda announces TESVI tomorrow. The setting is a single village and the surrounding countryside, forest, mountain, etc. The cast of characters numbers maybe two dozen. Quest lines? Let's say ten. Sounds just awful, right?
But they're going to give this game the same five years they gave Skyrim. They're going to pour the exact same budget and effort into this single location, this intimate cast, and these paltry few quests. Can you imagine the detail? The authenticity of the environments and your interactions, the depth of writing and character for each and every person, the depth and length of your quests...
I guess the easiest way to put it is this: games have expanded into massive open-world sandboxes with thousands of characters before bothering to master the basic interaction between just two people. If they'd focus their efforts on smaller locations and fewer characters, we'd at least end up with more detailed and convincing slices of a world. Then, with that base established, they can think about expanding the scene.
Just some random thoughts. Feel free to discuss or ignore.
Unless I want to have a remotely convincing interaction with another character.
The visuals and world design have reached a pretty high standard at this point, but the actual gameplay, the conversations and interplay between the inhabitants of the game? That stuff hasn't advanced much at all in the five years since Oblivion. You still get the same small handful of canned responses. The quests are still mostly fetch. The characters are overly scripted, and the scripts are terribly short.
I've felt this way for a while, but Skyrim really cements it: game design is moving in the wrong direction. They're building these massive worlds and populating them with thousands of people, but none of them are remotely convincing. Your interactions with them are repetitive and predictable. Blame it on poor AI or limited writing, but there's no denying that the substance of gaming hasn't progressed at the same pace as the style.
Before everyone burns me at the stake, imagine Bethesda announces TESVI tomorrow. The setting is a single village and the surrounding countryside, forest, mountain, etc. The cast of characters numbers maybe two dozen. Quest lines? Let's say ten. Sounds just awful, right?
But they're going to give this game the same five years they gave Skyrim. They're going to pour the exact same budget and effort into this single location, this intimate cast, and these paltry few quests. Can you imagine the detail? The authenticity of the environments and your interactions, the depth of writing and character for each and every person, the depth and length of your quests...
I guess the easiest way to put it is this: games have expanded into massive open-world sandboxes with thousands of characters before bothering to master the basic interaction between just two people. If they'd focus their efforts on smaller locations and fewer characters, we'd at least end up with more detailed and convincing slices of a world. Then, with that base established, they can think about expanding the scene.
Just some random thoughts. Feel free to discuss or ignore.
