First Person: Skyrim is Soulless

[Hal10k]

And like I said, Vault 11 was nice, but I can't really think of many other locations in the game that were as memorable. It felt to me like Obsidian had worked most of the story, realized that they only had a few side buildings, and then said "Screw it" and had interns copy and paste buildings to fill out the map.

Also, in my opinion, Obsidian really suffers from wanting to explain everything to the player, and they lose out on subtlety in the process. They can tell nice things about a setting with characters or computer logs to spell it out for you, but they can't really do it without that. Fallout 3 had a lot of little touches that really fleshed out the game world for me, like finding cherry bombs still lying in the toilets of a private school, or finding a skeleton with a case of beer lying in one of the personal shelters, or finding out that the ex-raider's house contained a teddy bear with a knife stuck through it. This is the sort of thing that New Vegas generally lacked, and, from my perspective, it suffered for it.

Maybe it's subjective, but I don't remember any of the places you're referring to. I don't remember much of anything about the wasteland of Fallout 3 except that Megaton makes absolutely no sense and to stay away from Old Olney.

I still remember Vault 11 though. And how going through the sewers near Vegas showed it was filled with NCR Soldiers, ready to invade. I remember going through one of the Vaults and having to decide whether to save the ghouls trapped in a room filling with water, or let them die to prevent the NCR Sharecroppers from inevitably starving. I remember exploring all of Zion tracking down the story of the Ranger. New Vegas was filled with stories.

That's the thing, though. When Obsidian wants you to tell you a story, they are damn well going to make sure that you see that story. All of the stories in New Vegas are out there in the open; walk through the sewers and find the soldiers, walk through the vault and decide whether to dick over the ghouls or dick over everybody, walk through Vault 11 and become sad. Everything I mentioned was the small, subtle bits of storytelling that were hidden in the corners of Fallout 3, something I think New Vegas sorely missed.

Maybe, but it's about the story, is it not? The locations would of course be boring without the story being there. And just because the stories invite you in, doesn't mean you have to pay attention to it.

I don't have to pay attention, but I still do. The more carefully engineered details that you put into a setting, the more it feels like an actual place as opposed to something that only exists because the writers had to plop down their story somewhere. Many of the locations in New Vegas felt like they were only there for the sake of filling space or being occupied by plot, which is why I consider New Vegas to be inferior in this regard, at least.

Obsidian and Bethesda really come from different schools of thought in game design. Obsidian builds a detailed story and then rearranges the setting to conform to it, whereas Bethesda fills in all of the details of their setting and then works the plot around it. Neither approach is superior, simply different, though I personally prefer Bethesda's approach in a game where exploration is a key gameplay element.

If you're looking for followers with motivations and backstories, I'd stay away from Lydia or hired mercenaries if that's who you've been using. You already know their motivation for helping you: it's their job. Most of the followers you meet in faction sidequests are pretty well rounded; I'd nominate Onmund or J'Zargo in the College of Winterhold as examples.

Yeah, I've definitely liked what I've seen so far of the College of Winterhold characters and questlines, but shouldn't that be the norm, rather than the pleasant exception?

It's pretty much the norm for the factions. The Bard's College is the only one that seemed shallow to me, and it still has one or two interesting moments. It's like the Arena from Oblivion in that regard.

Yeah Bards and Companions seem very light on content in comparison to the College stuff so far. Haven't delved into Thieves Guild or Dark Brotherhood stuff yet, but I've heard good things.

If you haven't already, I'd head towards Markath when you get a chance. It's got one of the best quests in the game.

 

[minimacker]

Soon enough, there will be the Agnis mod that adds reactions, storylines and factions battling it out just to have Agnis as their housefrau.

 

[Levethian]

It has gotten to a point, a couple of times, where the utter divorce from the scripted lines and what I've actually done gets a little depressing. People threatening to set the Dark Brotherood on me, for example, when I'm the damn Listener.

You wouldn't be a very good leader of the Dark Brotherhood if everyone knew who you were. My main annoyance in this regard was with the Companions - public heroes, yet even they talk down to you once you become leader.

And, spoiler box for your second paragraph probably appropriate.

60,000 lines of Dialogue in Skyrim,
65,000 in New Vegas
40,000 in Fallout 3
For no particular reason.

 

[SillyBear]

Skyrim is Soulless

Skyrim doesn't seem to care about you or what you do.

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Expecting a game as huge and as intricate as Skyrim to be totally flawless and to have no immersion breakers whatsoever is ludicrous. The game is teeming with things that other games don't have. You can't expect every single NPC to react realistically to every situation.

Yeah, Agnis is a bit of an immersion breaker - but so what? I can forgive them for that hiccup because I can admire the scope of the game.

If the game was linear like Mass Effect and it happened during a cutscene? Yeah, it would be a problem.

 

[BonsaiK]

Skyrim doesn't seem to care about you or what you do.

Of course it doesn't. Advernturer types think they're all unique snowflakes but really, you're not so special. There's so many of you these days, always doing the same thing. Agnis understands this, she's seen it all. Stop boring her to death and get on about your business.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

And this (both the article and comments), honestly, is why I have no interest in Skyrim.

It's weird. After hearing it hyped from the roof for so many months, I knew I would have been really excited for it if it were an MMO. But as a single-player game, I didn't care at all. Setting it in a living world would have been all it took to interest me.

That's the thing about sandbox games for me. I'm not exactly a roleplayer, but I usually end up in that category because I like writing backstories for my characters and making decisions that I feel they would make. But I don't actually roleplay. I prefer to be handed the blocks of the basic story and then use my imagination as the glue that ties it all together, like in Dragon Age: Origins, or in Final Fantasy XI where it was optional. (In the case of the latter your character just hangs out in the background during cutscenes, so it took it upon myself to work out what she was doing and thinking at any given point. It was a ton of fun for me, and she's still my favorite character I've ever created. I have no interest in doing that for every character in the game, though.)

If, like in Skyrim, I'm expected to create everything from the ground up, I just don't care at all. I like to be surprised, I guess. I like there to be elements that could have come from someone else's imagination, not just my own, since I already live with my own imagination.

Also, with fictional settings I tend to prefer "small but highly detailed" to "vast but fairly shallow."

 

[grammarye]

I'm surprised this is considered unusual, given all the preceding games that came before.

As I play through Skyrim, I mostly find myself wondering whether Bethesda were literally just doing more of the same for fans who will throw money at anything with Elder Scrolls on the side of the box, bugs & missing content & all. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed modded & patched Morrowind & Oblivion too, so it's not like I hate Skyrim or the concept - I just find myself thinking 'Have you finally had any concept of quality control? No apparently not.'. It's like there's been this Pavlovian conditioning where gamers (including me it seems) who will downrate & slam games for being released as buggy & unfinished won't notice it at all when it comes as a moddable game from Bethesda, even if mods can't fix some of the bugs.

It's not that Skyrim is soulless per se. It's that they made (again) a vast but ultimately haphazard world. I object to the shallowness really only when it comes across as lazy - when it's so obvious you end up thinking 'surely the developers would be embarrassed to leave it like this?'. I don't object to NPCs I listen to once only ever having one or two stock lines. I object when people I spend serious time interacting with don't evolve when my actions directly affect them! It's not lack of soul; it's lack of thought about how the individual game item interacts with the rest of the game world. Sometimes it's nailed perfectly; a lot of times it just hasn't been done. It makes the game look unpolished & unfinished, more so than dragons flying backwards, and more so than if the entire game had been entirely ignorant of my actions all the time. Consistency, that's the problem.

An example of where it went wrong - NPC 1 teases NPC 2 about sleeping with NPC 3 - subsequently NPC 3 dies, as part of a quest no less, but the teasing continues. It's like there was no overall 'producer' level oversight that said 'hey that's not going to make sense'.

Companions are another good example - here is a person I could easily spend 90% of my long long game time with, but they had one 'I've a bad feeling about this' line crafted in and that's it. Marriage apparently changes the entire personality & voice of some NPCs. I mean seriously, that's just plain lazy. Implement a feature properly or not at all.

An example of where it went right - NPC 1 is a well known blacksmith and gets killed. NPC 2 reacts and has entirely different dialogue.

So yes, I firmly believe Bethesda can achieve this because they can clearly get it right in some cases, and no I don't believe it's an excuse to say 'it's a huge world, you can't expect to get everything right'. I'm not asking for everything right, I'm asking for proper care, thought & QA in their actual content. Some quests currently play like an intern put them together and never actually ran through the finished product to see if it worked.

So, no, Skyrim isn't soulless - it's just badly put together in places, just like Oblivion was.

As a final thought - clearly Skyrim is filled with adventurers, given the number that turn up with knee related injuries later on, so being one is clearly nothing that special

 

[Brawndo]

I agree strongly with the author, but it's not just Skyrim, it's pretty much all Bethesda RPGs. Compare the consequences of the decisions you make in Skyrim to those you make in Witcher 2 and tell me which is better.

 

[CapitalistPig]

To start off, i felt that elder scrolls was devoid of emotion since morrowind. It seems no matter how hard they try i am a lone figure in an otherwise static world that changes based on my movements. I understand that this is what the game is trying to deliver but more then once in the wee hours of the night i felt very alone in their world. Its not a good feeling. No matter how much interaction they give the NPCs it is still a game based around me and my quests. Which most often dont end with their interests at heart. and as is explained in previous posts no one seems to react to that. Then to counter the author. How about we look at the context of the speech. The speaker said that many people come and go here. I find that a point of irony written in by the game developers in that she sees adventurers come in here and kill her people EVERYDAY while watching them all go by looting and killing. Waiting for the next adventurer to come in and do the same. Its a pretty metaphorical experience that the game developers would exploit this weakness within the gamer. The fact that she is conditioned to the experience shows an interesting viewpoint.

 

[RVzero]

So.. After saving the world from Alduin, not a single person save for the Blades members seemed to have anything new to say... And what happened when I went to talk to the Stormcloacks and said I'd help them take Skyrim back? They told me to prove my worth to them by killing what.. an Ice Wraith? Seriously? I eat dragon souls for breakfast, I saved the god damned world and you treat me like someone who has never fought in his life?

Oh and by now I hoped that they had added some sort of self preservation mechanism to the npcs... I'd gladly spare some of them if after begging for mercy for a second, they didn't always try to run at me with their weapons drawn yelling how they are going to murder me.

Or if they had the common sense of running away after seeing 4 of their friends getting blown to pieces by a single fireball instead of poking my heavily armored ass with a tiny knife followed by getting multiple ice spears shoved up theirs.

None of the NPC's seem even remotely alive.

 

[Vuliev]

I find that the soul he's looking for is mostly in the main plotline, especially when you talk to Paarthurnax. There was something absolutely enthralling about talking to an ancient wise-man dragon monk on top of a mountain while the Aurora glows brightly in the night sky. Yes, a lot of the basic dungeons/forts aren't going to have much in the way of "soul," and it's disappointing to hear that they dropped the ball on something like Agnis. That said, there's still a great amount of soul in the game, and it's right where it needs to be.

 

[Frankster]

Why would the game world care about you? Your a nobody

Respectfully disagree with ya here, are we talking about skyrim? The game where once it's made clear your a dragon born, it becomes a big deal and heck, the sky themselves at one point split open and call your name?
Where a good deal of conversations can be skipped by saying "im the dragonborn"?
Where story npcs rattle on about you being this born dragon slayer, the kind of which hasn't been seen in generations, the only hope for skyrim and the only one who can prevent the end times and imminent apocalypse?

In skyrim you are anything except a nobody, the main quest line and way certain npcs react to you makes that clear. Also how once you being dragonborn becomes more wideknown a fair amount of ancient and powerful organizations take an active interest in you due to your heritage.

Not taking any sides in the debate but felt this had to be corrected as it just doesnt ring true, but on topic skyrims the first ES game ive tolerated and managed to enjoy, it has just about enough soul to keep my interest (the previous games though...eek, if you lot complain about voice acting in skyrim, check the previous games...) and though i wish i could indeed see more sweeping changes based on some major plot points, what there is is just enough to keep me happy. For now.
And by for now, just wait until the development tools are released and modders start working their magic

 

[shawnchi]

SPOILERS:

Agnis is one of the last main targets you have to kill for the Dark Brotherhood. That's why she doesn't really have any uniqueness to her.

END SPOILERS.

 

[Terramax]

I always hate free roaming western RPG's. They give you all these "choices" that have no real impact and mean nothing.

Ogre Tactics I always thought had one of the best choice systems ever.

I like this!

If people really like games where they choose where the story leads, how come so few have played the 'Way of the Samurai' series?

Anyway, I don't think gamers who play Skyrim and the like don't play them for story or decision making. These games are just dungeon crawlers where the dungeons have been replaced by sparce, open environments, and you have to do more walking between battles.

 

[Sharp Blue]

I didn't think of Agnis as a prisoner, I mean she tells you that she just cooks and cleans and other people keep coming and deciding that they now own the fort/castle and they don't kill her because she isn't going to reveal their location she is just going to keep doing what she has always done, she just doesn't care who ocupies the fort/castle. I will admit however that they did miss out on a quest that explains why she is so attached to the place.

 

[snave]

Two columns on the same site, with the same name minus a single word and near-identical logos using the same imagery, themes and colours to boot? Please editors, try to distinguish the various parts of this site. It's getting very confusing for us more casual readers (sorry about the slight off-topic).

 

[The Maddest March Hare]

I don't know if this has been mentioned, I haven't read through all 6 pages, but if you clear out the Bandits from that fort then Agnis sends a bunch of hired thugs your way with a letter saying something along the lines of "he thinks he can just come in here and kill people, rough him up a bit" (paraphrased). Killing the bandits does actually have a consequence! It just isn't immediate.

And she gets killed as people have said.

 

[BonGookKumBop]

hmm, the only time I saw Agnis was when I was payed to kill her. I don't know what she did or why someone wanted her dead, but the dark brotherhood was asked and I was a blade for hire. It did seem odd to me that this non-combatant was in the middle of a fort full of bandits, but I was the type of assassin that didn't talk to targets. I snuck in eliminating all opposition silently and knifed the old lady in her sleep.

The thought did occur to me, "If I had come across this fort under any other circumstance, what would my interaction with Agnis be like?" Most of the places like that only have humanoids with the name "bandit" and all of those attack on site (if they see you). I might be an assassin, but I'm like the predator and only kill threats (or contracts in this case). I wondered what I would have done if I hadn't had the contract, but I also thought that the inclusion of Agnis in the dungeon was odd because it created this awkward situation for anyone that didn't have the quest associated with the person. Having her there regardless worked for continuity's sake, but she caused a jarring anomaly from the rest of the game.

 

[Atmos Duality]

You really have to have that "What's over the hill?" attitude of exploration in order to enjoy a game like TES, because there aren't any real "characters" to be found.

I played and enjoyed Morrowind IN SPITE of there being precious few NPCs with any actual personality; it was even worse in Oblivion where the only NPCs that people seem to remember regularly are the generic imperial guards, the Adoring Fan, and Patrick Stewart.

Mostly for being annoying, or being Patrick Stewart.

 

[MrBaguette]

Agreed but then again Skyrim is all about how you play and see it as a game. It is so huge and vast that you can not expect it to be overlooking every single detail, aspect and conversation you encounter. I find Skyrim quite realistic because it reflects the attitude of real life: No one cares really about what you do unless it affects them directly