[HEADING=1]Why I couldn't be bothered to finish Skyrim[/HEADING]
(I've had this on my hard disk for some time, wanting to give it the finishing touches it needs. But before I delay it even more, I decided to post it here)
The title might not be ideal, but here we go:
Skyrim is just not immersive, while at the same time lacking a lot of the fidelity to create a believable world. Then there are also the aesthetics...
I've just always thought about this problem: Why don't I really like Bethesda RPGs that much? Most of the time I couldn't come to a conclusive answer. But now, I think I have it worked out.
Don't get me wrong: I love Fallout 3 and Skyrim is by no means a bad game. I've played roughly 120 hours of it (while having played over 100 hours of Fallout 3 in one go)... and thus I will try to explain why it falls short of being as great a game as most people make it out to be.
Let's kick it off with the question of immersion: it's a make-or-break factor for RPGs, as we are all well aware. So what does Skyrim do wrong here? Well, first we've got the User Interface. It's a bit clunky overall, but that could be forgiven by its design. The thing here is that the design isn't all that good. It would much more fit a futuristic game and feels out of place in a (very much medieval) RPG - it's transparent, with pronounced edges. It's normally nice that the elements get hidden away when not required, but with Skyrim's style, that's somehow even more immersion-breaking. And then there's the other problem of it not being navigable by using only the keyboard, such as to see less of it. Or that it constantly asks you "are you sure" in dialogues that can only be taken care of with the mouse, while my hands are all comfortably sitting on the keyboard.
Then you've got the textures... they're horrendously inconsistent. sometimes you'll get a really low resolution texture, then you're going to get treated to a very high resolution texture. And worst of all, sometimes you can see the texture tiling. And then there are the models... some of them lack a load of details, some of them are plainly in the wrong place. At some places, models that should be different are the same. Some of the models aren't even normal mapped for details where there should be some.
The everyday items are all too similar... except the plates, strangely.
Both first and third person perspective are messed up. One is always messing up your movements, while the other lacks any kind of feedback that you're actually somebody walking somewhere and not just a camera hovering 6 feet above the ground. Then you've got climbing... oh man that looks bad. And this ties in closely with the bad case of invisible wall syndrome the game has. It has the habit of walling you off at all times, only allowing you to travel along specific routes. The walling off nearly never feels natural, and is mostly artificial. Such as not letting you climb mountains above a specific grade of steepness and having you just slide down them when trying to scale them.
Artificial intelligence is worse than just messed up. Sure enough merchants go to bed and have their own working hours, but they still feel like lifeless puppets. When in Morrowind you could ask anybody about nearly anything you could type and sometimes receive an answer, here you've got very little and very rigidly defined topics you can talk about. The companions you can take with you also have caught that brain-damaging virus everybody else seems to be infected with. They're incredibly stupid and act very unnatural. I may have noticed this more than is usual because all the way up to level 22 of my first venture into Skyrim I kept Lydia with me (because I though it'd make the game easier).
Stupid difficulty I also have an issue with: I can respect a game like Two Worlds 2, that basically tells you "level up and then come back" through their monsters, but playing on Master in Skyrim is just irritating most of the time. AI directed idiots will randomly spawn in and beat you up, dragons will suddenly attack while you're busy doing the laundry et cetera.
At first you look at the screen shots and think: what's wrong with the fidelity? Well, for starters: bandits subsist entirely on cold air and the hopes of beating you up for your gold. Nobody reacts to anything you do to their belongings. This is especially weird when you consider that you can basically raid the Jarl's whole castle and sell everything, him watching in that pose of his all the time. This can again be attributed to be another uncanny valley problem, but it's more than that: it pushes the game farther into the uncanny valley.
Then you've got the aesthetics: the game wants to be a Nordic fantasy RPG. It fails miserably, starting with the pose of the Jarls and ending with the general tone it has. The people are at first made out to be tough and searching for conflict, but this falls apart rather quickly. Then you've got the astonishing amount of people with no face and no name. You've got the horrible amount of bandits, who aren't distinguished in any way and are just there, without any reason for it - they can't rob any caravans that'd pass through, THERE ARE NONE. The landscapes are mostly just more of the same, indistinguishable white-grey mountains. All soldiers look nearly the same, as do the bandits.
Getting back to the world: it feels devoid of life. All the NPCs just stand there being NPCs doing large amounts of nothing. You could equate it to watching from ther inside of a zoo cage: there are a lot of very stupid people you don't understand out there, waiting for you to entertain them. And sure enough, you do. But that doesn't change their hollowness towards you. They speak your language on occasion, only making a few select sounds before babbling away in their own. There are no caravans out and about like in Fallout 3, they just spawn in at random intervals. And when I say "they", I'm wrong. It's only that one Khajit caravan. All you ever meet out on the oh-so-busy streets are Imperial/Elven and Stormcloak patrols with their prisoners. There are no random NPCs just wandering around like they should be. And I also soon found that not taking the roads was the better option, because all the monsters are seemingly camping out one every single road in existence. Except the dragons, obviously. Those just wait for the most inconvenient moment possible to bug you.
Nearly no NPC ever lies to you. It's not like in Two Worlds, where you have to be constantly ready to draw your sword, here all rumours are true, all villagers friendly. It makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody ever tricks you into giving them huge amounts of money up front for something that never comes, or tricks you into a fight with a giant worm named Fluffy.
Combat: it feels cumbersome and sluggish, yet still everything in the whole game is either combat or intermission to combat. There's nothing to do in the world that isn't combat-related or done in preparing for combat. There's no feeling that these people live, you just get the feeling that everything is made for the adventurer business.
Please comment (feedback and criticism are appreciated).
EDIT 2013/09/10: Did away with the spelling mistakes.
(I've had this on my hard disk for some time, wanting to give it the finishing touches it needs. But before I delay it even more, I decided to post it here)
The title might not be ideal, but here we go:
Skyrim is just not immersive, while at the same time lacking a lot of the fidelity to create a believable world. Then there are also the aesthetics...
I've just always thought about this problem: Why don't I really like Bethesda RPGs that much? Most of the time I couldn't come to a conclusive answer. But now, I think I have it worked out.
Don't get me wrong: I love Fallout 3 and Skyrim is by no means a bad game. I've played roughly 120 hours of it (while having played over 100 hours of Fallout 3 in one go)... and thus I will try to explain why it falls short of being as great a game as most people make it out to be.
Let's kick it off with the question of immersion: it's a make-or-break factor for RPGs, as we are all well aware. So what does Skyrim do wrong here? Well, first we've got the User Interface. It's a bit clunky overall, but that could be forgiven by its design. The thing here is that the design isn't all that good. It would much more fit a futuristic game and feels out of place in a (very much medieval) RPG - it's transparent, with pronounced edges. It's normally nice that the elements get hidden away when not required, but with Skyrim's style, that's somehow even more immersion-breaking. And then there's the other problem of it not being navigable by using only the keyboard, such as to see less of it. Or that it constantly asks you "are you sure" in dialogues that can only be taken care of with the mouse, while my hands are all comfortably sitting on the keyboard.
Then you've got the textures... they're horrendously inconsistent. sometimes you'll get a really low resolution texture, then you're going to get treated to a very high resolution texture. And worst of all, sometimes you can see the texture tiling. And then there are the models... some of them lack a load of details, some of them are plainly in the wrong place. At some places, models that should be different are the same. Some of the models aren't even normal mapped for details where there should be some.
The everyday items are all too similar... except the plates, strangely.
Both first and third person perspective are messed up. One is always messing up your movements, while the other lacks any kind of feedback that you're actually somebody walking somewhere and not just a camera hovering 6 feet above the ground. Then you've got climbing... oh man that looks bad. And this ties in closely with the bad case of invisible wall syndrome the game has. It has the habit of walling you off at all times, only allowing you to travel along specific routes. The walling off nearly never feels natural, and is mostly artificial. Such as not letting you climb mountains above a specific grade of steepness and having you just slide down them when trying to scale them.
Artificial intelligence is worse than just messed up. Sure enough merchants go to bed and have their own working hours, but they still feel like lifeless puppets. When in Morrowind you could ask anybody about nearly anything you could type and sometimes receive an answer, here you've got very little and very rigidly defined topics you can talk about. The companions you can take with you also have caught that brain-damaging virus everybody else seems to be infected with. They're incredibly stupid and act very unnatural. I may have noticed this more than is usual because all the way up to level 22 of my first venture into Skyrim I kept Lydia with me (because I though it'd make the game easier).
Stupid difficulty I also have an issue with: I can respect a game like Two Worlds 2, that basically tells you "level up and then come back" through their monsters, but playing on Master in Skyrim is just irritating most of the time. AI directed idiots will randomly spawn in and beat you up, dragons will suddenly attack while you're busy doing the laundry et cetera.
At first you look at the screen shots and think: what's wrong with the fidelity? Well, for starters: bandits subsist entirely on cold air and the hopes of beating you up for your gold. Nobody reacts to anything you do to their belongings. This is especially weird when you consider that you can basically raid the Jarl's whole castle and sell everything, him watching in that pose of his all the time. This can again be attributed to be another uncanny valley problem, but it's more than that: it pushes the game farther into the uncanny valley.
Then you've got the aesthetics: the game wants to be a Nordic fantasy RPG. It fails miserably, starting with the pose of the Jarls and ending with the general tone it has. The people are at first made out to be tough and searching for conflict, but this falls apart rather quickly. Then you've got the astonishing amount of people with no face and no name. You've got the horrible amount of bandits, who aren't distinguished in any way and are just there, without any reason for it - they can't rob any caravans that'd pass through, THERE ARE NONE. The landscapes are mostly just more of the same, indistinguishable white-grey mountains. All soldiers look nearly the same, as do the bandits.
Getting back to the world: it feels devoid of life. All the NPCs just stand there being NPCs doing large amounts of nothing. You could equate it to watching from ther inside of a zoo cage: there are a lot of very stupid people you don't understand out there, waiting for you to entertain them. And sure enough, you do. But that doesn't change their hollowness towards you. They speak your language on occasion, only making a few select sounds before babbling away in their own. There are no caravans out and about like in Fallout 3, they just spawn in at random intervals. And when I say "they", I'm wrong. It's only that one Khajit caravan. All you ever meet out on the oh-so-busy streets are Imperial/Elven and Stormcloak patrols with their prisoners. There are no random NPCs just wandering around like they should be. And I also soon found that not taking the roads was the better option, because all the monsters are seemingly camping out one every single road in existence. Except the dragons, obviously. Those just wait for the most inconvenient moment possible to bug you.
Nearly no NPC ever lies to you. It's not like in Two Worlds, where you have to be constantly ready to draw your sword, here all rumours are true, all villagers friendly. It makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody ever tricks you into giving them huge amounts of money up front for something that never comes, or tricks you into a fight with a giant worm named Fluffy.
Combat: it feels cumbersome and sluggish, yet still everything in the whole game is either combat or intermission to combat. There's nothing to do in the world that isn't combat-related or done in preparing for combat. There's no feeling that these people live, you just get the feeling that everything is made for the adventurer business.
Please comment (feedback and criticism are appreciated).
EDIT 2013/09/10: Did away with the spelling mistakes.
