The Dangers of Abundant Praise - Skyrim thread

[isometry]

Stop trying to over-extend half-learned ideas from psych 101 and make mountains out of molehills. Just because the story and NPC interaction are not the strongest points of Skyrim doesn't make the game into a mindless conditioning chamber.

Skyrim is a roleplaying game because it presents a setting that sparks many of our imaginations. It's a roleplaying game because I can make choices that effect the way my character interacts with the world.

Some people just don't care so much about plots. By the time someone reaches adulthood all plots are boring and predictable, we've seen them all. When people praise the "plot" of Bioware game's like Mass Effect, they are actually just praising the presentation of the story elements. That's what the OP is really about, complaining that the story elements are presented in a slick way like a modern Hollywood blockbuster, which has nothing to do with whether the game is deep or intelligent.

 

[Zhukov]

Do you even know what role-playing is? As in real role playing. The sort of role playing where kids used to meet up at weekends, get out their Dungeons and Dragons, and act out these vast, epic adventures, using only a rulebook and their own imaginations?

Are you so brain-dead that you need the game to spoonfeed you every last detail, up to and including your own character's motivations, despite the fact that the characters traits intentions are supposed to reflect you? Are you completely unable to fill in a few blank details with some imagination?

Bethesda do nothing with their games except cater to the role-playing crowd. And by that, I mean the old-school role-playing crowd. The D&Ders, the guys who used to meet up for weekend-long Warhammer 40K campaigns, the guys who spent their free evenings playing Magic: The Gathering. What Bethesda do with the Elder Scrolls is no different to what Gary Gygax did with the original Dungeons and Dragons: present the player a world, show them the rules of that world, then allow them to go out and make their own story in that world. Imagination has always been the fundamental ingredient for role-playing, and that's no different for the videogame generation as it was for the pen-and-paper generation.

That's like handing someone a sheaf of blank paper and a pen and calling it a book. Then when they point out that there's nothing written in it you say, "Jeez dummy, are you too brain-dead fill in the gaps with you imagination?"

If my imagination is doing all the work, what do I need the game for? Because there is no way to express any imagination through the game. The closest you can come to role-playing is choosing how to decorate your house. The dialogue certainly doesn't allow for anything of the sort. The only options available are 'wander the land helping assorted strangers' or 'wander the land murdering assorted strangers'.

 

[NeddyxBear]

I can garentee that few people have as much love for TES than me, for example one of my first tattoos is the daerdric lettering from the oblivion box art. although i got into TES when playing oblivion on the release day at a friends house, i have since gone back to play morrowind and daggerfall, purely because of my genereal appreciation for the rich lore and amount of work and detail which goes into each game.

before skyrim was released i didnt know many people who knew of, or even liked TES, but now with all the over simplification of the classic RPG elements all the douchey people whome i was glad to not have playing TES now are, and i cannot describe how much that pisses me off. skyrim is wonderfully made, the streamlining is good, but they could have left the clunky interface and i would still have loved it just as much. i find it pretty hard to actually enjoy many other vieogames, my entire videogame collection is literally just TES and a couple of sandbox/other RPG titles.

oh, and in reference to the wankers who have no appreciation for the other TES titles, i'm talking about people who i have heard say things like 'did you hear, um that, um a mountain called hist, um exploded in valenwood?'

 

[Fappy]

I am pretty sure Dennis is a freelancer, not a writer for the Escapist. Anyway, I've defended the TES series regarding this issue numerous times already. The RPG genre is incredibly broad and different games offer different aspects of the RPG experience. TES games fall flat in some areas and excel in others. I happen to love the open world experience where you make your own story, while I also enjoy really deep character-driven RPGs. It's all about what your looking for in the game.

Also, I didn't like Dennis' article at all. I thought he had extremely preposterous expectations for how the game should operate.

 

[Squilookle]

Could this be the beginning of the conditioning of a whole new generation of gamers? A generation that does not need genuine reasons, ambiguities, subtleties, only clear targets and shiny loot? A murdering, looting mass of magpies...of the Dovahkiin variety.

I seriously doubt this as the starting point for that. Personally I thought GTA IV suffered a crippling amount of this kind of thing, and there's a lot of people out there who would say that Call Of Duty has suffered this ever since COD4.

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

The Escapist's own Dennis Scimeca called Skyrim soulless: it doesn't give a shit about who you are or what you have done.

User "Vault101" says in his thread that the game makes him feel there's no reason to do anything ("Why am I wandering around adventuring?") and that all the quest-givers are more than happy to burden you with requests even though you are technically a stranger and they therefore have no reason to trust you.

User "Anthraxus" says that Skyrim relishes in shallow, mindless violence and presents it as the predominant solution to almost all problems.

And so on.

So the picture that emerges is one of a game that, at its core, fails utterly in the role-playing department.

And yet, it is praised into the sky (no pun intended).

Do you know what a confirmation bias is?

From Wikipedia: Confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias, myside bias or verification bias) is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypotheses regardless of whether the information is true.

You've supplied us with three "quotes", two of them from users, discussing elements of Skyrim they personally found wanting.

You then reference the fact that the game was "praised to the sky"...it was both critically and popularly acclaimed. You HAND WAVE this, and go on to speculate about how all those "overzealous fans" aren't smart/insightful enough to appreciate why two Escapist users and Dennis Scimeca had the right of things.

I think you need to rethink your post.

How dare you ninja me?!

Yes, I was wondering how the OP made any sense considering it was all based on two opinions and all other opinions waved away as meaningless.

 

[DeathWyrmNexus]

That's like handing someone a sheaf of blank paper and a pen and calling it a book. Then when they point out that there's nothing written in it you say, "Jeez dummy, are you too brain-dead fill in the gaps with you imagination?"

Again, since when do you read a book to get a role-playing experience. You read books to experience a narrative, not to actively take part in it.

Back in the days of D&D, what you described was pretty much what happened: you were given a sheet of paper, a couple of dice, and had to do all the legwork from there. That was roleplaying. If you weren't able to fill in the blank sheet of paper with details of your character/the setting/ etc, then it was because you were too braindead to roleplay properly.

Skyrim is exactly the same kind of experience as Dungeons And Dragons, except with pixels to help visualise everything. People didn't get into D&D because they wanted to read the latest fantasy story, or experience the greatest fantasy tragedy, or witness the greatest fantasy battle. That's what books like Lord Of The Rings and A Song Of Ice And Fire are for. Role-playing exists to allow you to create your own adventures, and that is something that the Elder Scrolls has done ever since the first instalment.

If my imagination is doing all the work, what do I need the game for? Because there is no way to express any imagination through the game. The closest you can come to role-playing is choosing how to decorate your house. The dialogue certainly doesn't allow for anything of the sort. The only options available are 'wander the land helping assorted strangers' or 'wander the land murdering assorted strangers'.

Your imagination doesn't have to do all the work. The game is there to provide the visual element, to inform you of the world, the setting and the characters. However, as with all roleplaying since D&D, it is up to you the player to create your own motivations, your own goals, and your own backstory. The game cannot do everything. Part of the appeal of role-playing is the thrill of creating your own character and injecting it into a new world. If this character is going to be your character, then the game has to relinquish some of the work to you. The game cannot tell you everything about your character, otherwise the character ceases to be yours, and simply becomes the game's character instead. And for a game that is essentially trying to be the virtual equivalent of a D&D session, that is absolutely anathema.

You seem a little naive of how much effort it requires to make a game. It's quite true to say that with Skyrim, Bethesda pulled off a Herculean task. They created an entire country, riddled with cities, towns and villages, populated it with characters, then filled that country with caves to explore, quests to achieve and secrets to discover. Quite simply, Bethesda did just about everything they could have done with the technology currently available. Claiming that they should not only have created Skyrim in its entirety, given you all the available quests and side-quests to achieve, but also allowed you more options than the one presented is simply hopelessly naive. The game already offers you a stupendous amount of choice regarding how to play. What more do you want? There is no third option between 'murdering a stranger' and 'not murdering a stranger' as you so put it. You either murder someone or you don't. What other options do you want?

As a 14 year D&D vet, I thank you for this statement, I couldn't do better myself. If you need motivation for YOUR OWN CHARACTER, then perhaps you should have the game pick what you will play instead of trying to do it yourself.

Then again, perhaps I am crazy for thinking that the near execution of my character is motivation enough to figure out what is going on and that perhaps having the option to turn down quests means I can decide if it is in character for me to do them.

But I am the crazy person who has actually been making characters and playing them for over a decade.

 

[Skin]

Skyrim is to RPG as MW3 is to FPS. Recycled, unoriginal and lacking effort in the development process. But both seem to be universally loved (when we look at raw numbers) as if God forged the disk himself.

Eventually TES is going to end up like the Zelda games. Bethesda will be putting out the same game and people will still buy it.

I am glad I stopped at Morrowind. Yes it sucked out many hours of my life, but I never played it again. I tried both Oblivion and Skyrim and I can safely say they are all the same.

 

[theamazingbean]

Of course Skyrim has terrible role-playing. You can't role-play on computer games, unless you're generic enough that the arc of your character was thought up by the developers. Want role-playing, come on over to the tabletop. Other than that, as a representative of the most procedural parts of tabletop RPGs, yes Skyrim copies those effectively and has enough detail added to the world to make it an effective time-sink.

 

[Zhukov]

[snipped for science]

My problem with role-playing in Skyrim is not that the game doesn't tell me enough about my character. You are correct in saying that would be the opposite of role play.

Rather, I cannot tell the game about my character. In D&D I can perform pretty much any action that I can put into words. In Skyrim I can only perform a select few actions within the game's framework. Mostly fetch quests and various degrees of murder. Playing through the content on offer with one character is exactly the same as playing with another. The only differences lie in which murder implement I use and whether or not I'm abusing the stealth system.

As for Bethesda's Herculean task... ehhh. The only thing Herculean about Skyrim is the sheer quantity. And that just results it the quality being incredibly thinly spread. It's the difference between a perfectly composed sonnet and a paragraph of unremarkable prose that has been copy-pasted several hundred times with the words slightly rearranged.

 

[him over there]

I don't know what everyone is getting upset about. To me it's a boring, crappy yet highly praised game that everyone favours over the other crappy boring games that receive praise because it is larger with more content making it a better monetary investment.

 

[Fappy]

Could this be the beginning of the conditioning of a whole new generation of gamers? A generation that does not need genuine reasons, ambiguities, subtleties, only clear targets and shiny loot?

You mean... like the original Super Mario Bros.?

Kids these days... wait a minute... what?

 

[ZeroMachine]

Could this be the beginning of the conditioning of a whole new generation of gamers? A generation that does not need genuine reasons, ambiguities, subtleties, only clear targets and shiny loot?

You mean... like the original Super Mario Bros.?

You got loot in that? What, the mushrooms?

... Now I want mushrooms in Skyrim that make me grow to the size of a giant. And give me their Atmosphere Smash Attack.

Anyways, yeah, the writing in Skyrim is pretty damn bad. Some of the worst I've seen in a game that's otherwise good. And the voice acting definitely doesn't help. Honestly, the voice acting in it is more varied then Oblivion but that somehow just makes its lack of quality more apparent...

But I still feel that it's the best game I've ever played, and in actuality has an amazing role playing element. I still feel as though I'm my character, no matter what I do. I just feel that the people around me are dull, so I go off exploring to escape the ho-hum of society. And I don't do the quests for the people involved, but more for the feel of accomplishment or because it's a dire situation.

Role playing isn't always dialogue based. Although I loved Dragon Age 2, I felt more immersed in Dark Souls because of how visceral an experience it is and how nerve wracking it is to worry about what's around the next corner.

But, give me a game with the world of Skyrim and better writing and characters, and I'd say the game would be pretty much as close to perfect as we can get in this day and age of gaming.

Oh, and I have a feeling they're paying attention to the people critiquing the writing. Maybe TES 6, years down the road, will be a true masterpiece of writing and environment.

 

[ZeroMachine]

Skyrim is to RPG as MW3 is to FPS. Recycled, unoriginal and lacking effort in the development process. But both seem to be universally loved (when we look at raw numbers) as if God forged the disk himself.

Eventually TES is going to end up like the Zelda games. Bethesda will be putting out the same game and people will still buy it.

I am glad I stopped at Morrowind. Yes it sucked out many hours of my life, but I never played it again. I tried both Oblivion and Skyrim and I can safely say they are all the same.

Ah, another one of the "THEY'RE ALL THE SAME" trolls.

Yeah, that never gets old.

Fuckin' love people that ignore details.

Oh yeah. Love it.