Lovely to see that my comments are being reproduced here from over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. A little birdie told me that that was the case and I just had to drop by to see. >_> The comment about all of the genocide in Skyrim was mine, and I stand by it.
@JesterRaiin
Light that bulb in your noggin and think about this. The game encourages you to be a homicidal murderer at every turn - there are a bunch of bandits, but you can't arrest them, you can only kill them. The guards can arrest bandits, but can you haul them off to prison? Nope!
Does someone have something you want? Well, you could trade them for it, but no, the only option is to kill them for it. Is someone perhaps a possible threat in the future? Well, let's kill them! (That would be Paarthurnax.) It's all about genocide, it's like what a fantasy world would look like if you ran it through the head of a paranoid and incredibly extremist right-wing politician.
It's Palin Land, almost.
Sure, some deaths are unavoidable and I'll grant you that. But outright, cold-blooded murder should never be the first choice. It just shows the level of abhorrent anti-intellectuality that gamers have embraced over the years. But it's worse than that. This is a world that cannot possibly exist, because here we come to our ultimate conclusion - if everyone is killing everyone else at that rate, then you can't have a sustainable population.
If you have 90% of the population out to kill you, then that's some kind of popular revolution right there. Apparently most of the population of Skyrim is against what you're doing in one form or another. You're a scourge, a plague, you're passing through like a swarm of locusts, devouring everything and leaving nothing but an empty husk in your wake.
It just shatters the illusion of believability for me. My suspension of disbelief can stretch quite far being an imaginative person, but it can't stretch that far. It can't stretch far enough to honestly believe that you can make a sustainable society where every person in that society is a homicidal or genocidal maniac. Including the character.
This is what Skyrim asks me to buy into as a potential possibility, this is what it asks me to believe, but I just can't. No matter where you go in the world, whatever era you pick, there has never been a sustainable society of sociopaths and psychopaths. Yet this is what Skyrim is.
This is why it fails, for me.
All I ask for is a believable, intelligent representation of a fantasy world, but this is everything that Skyrim isn't. Fallout: New Vegas, for all of its post-apocalyptic furore, is a much more stable place. And there have been examples of RPGs set in snowy landscapes before, too. Check out the Icewind Dale series.
Really, the only way you could go into Skyrim and not come out of it realising what I've realised is if you enjoyed the genocide and homicide perhaps a bit too much. Which I didn't, really. It left me feeling hollow and saddened. Skyrim is a shallow experience because of this, and I hope that Bethesda will learn from this and perhaps try to create their next scenario around believable people, rather than, to say it again, a society of homicidal/genocidal maniacs.
