Why Skyrim Sucks

it's the writing thanks for watching [Music] yeah i know each bomber guy did the same joke back in 2018 so i'm gonna pretend that bethesda making the same game since 2008 justifies me stealing the same joke like it's some clever commentary on their inability to innovate on their overdone design tropes i ultimately concur with h bomber guy's apathetic conclusions about why this game doesn't work for me but this time we're actually going to talk about skyrim a lot because i think it's worthwhile to dissect the game's issues in exacting detail see skyrim doesn't suck just because of the writing but rather it sucks because everything about it is surface level and bethesda built it that way on purpose they marketed skyrim as the definitive open world role playing game and to many it was as a sweaty pompous rpg nerd i take offense to that because it barely qualifies as a role-playing game sure it's got skills and npcs and a dialogue box to foster the illusion of agency but the reality is that you've been sold a walking simulator with stabbing and magic crudely grafted onto it that sounded harsh and it was but i promise i'm not here just to belt out a gratuitous screed of groundless gamer rage at you because i love open world games especially ones that let you make your own character and lose yourself in deep complex and fantastical worlds i love questing exploring and dungeon rating i love difficult choices and compelling characters and weird byzantine lore because i'm a sweaty pompous rpg nerd hi i'm gunmetal stoog i make high effort posts this is one of them it's also well traveled ground for those of you who are familiar with bethesda games and the problems that permeate them skyrim's flaws are well established and well documented there's already been a lot of high quality videos and think pieces dedicated to dissecting the game's failures so i want to try adding something to the conversation emphasis on try because i want to see what the elder scrolls series could be rather than wallowing in the failures of the past decade now despite being mythically unqualified to offer constructive criticism to a massive billion-dollar corporation i feel like it's necessary without it i just feel like i'm being a petulant contrarian so while the ultimate purpose of this video is to have a productive discussion about the future of the elder scrolls games i still have to drag skyrim through the snowy dirt it casts too large a shadow over not only the open world rpg genre but the franchise itself its design flaws are so entrenched into bethesda's development ethos that it's impossible to talk about how the upcoming elder scrolls 6 could succeed without first establishing why skyrim sucks and why todd howard is the devil okay sorry couldn't resist he's such an easy target it's like a reflex at this point while i will use todd's name and likeness quite frequently in this video i'm not some moronic man child who thinks he's personally responsible for everything wrong with modern bethesda titles i just use his name because it's easier than saying public face for a corporate monstrosity single terrible appendage when i refer to todd howard i'm actually referring to upper bethesda and zenimax management as a whole because normally when terrible corporate decisions are made the meeting in which they happen looks more like this than this or this well maybe not that last one right now that that's out of the way i feel the need to clarify my position a little loving the open world rpg genre might sound insane after we've all been collectively gaslit for years by an entire industry to think that like this is acceptable but i can't help it i love them when they're done right and skyrim almost single-handedly contributed to the genre morphing into an amorphous nightmare of regurgitated corporate border-proof schlock ubisoft's yearly glut of assassin's creed games contributed heartily as well but the dna of those games is firmly rooted in skyrim's success it wasn't a success because of any intrinsic merit but rather its profit margins skyrim amassed a pile of money instantly besides funding numerous hooker and coke parties for bethesda execs it did one very important thing it confirmed for bethesda that their games were fine as they were fallout 3 had its critics sure but why listen to them when you're doing numbers like this turns out that if you promise people an absurd amount of content for an ipv they enjoy it doesn't matter what that content consists of blow a couple million on marketing throw todd up on stage to lie about how this one won't be as buggy as the last and you're well on your way to print a billion even though the internet lambasted fallout 76 and swiftly turned on fallout 4's driveltastic excuse for a story i'm genuinely confused as to why anyone expected anything better when people keep buying this but the reason i'm picking on skyrim in particular is because other people have torn the fallout games apart more thoroughly and i believe that skyrim is where bethesda's worst habits calcified into a giant pile of rock hard awful allow me to explain skyrim utterly fails as an open world rpg because everything about it is broken and that's not just a dig at the game's now legendarily terrible performance and innumerable bugs the otherwise visually engaging continent is nonsensically designed the leveling barely matters there are no characters to care about the last dragonborn has no stake or agency in its mindlessly linear narrative despite being its nominal centerpiece even if skyrim wasn't explicitly designed as an rpg but rather as a casual hack and slash explore em up the combat is so atrocious it feels like an afterthought because it was because there's one aspect of open world game design which was prioritized above all others one that received so much focus attention and resources that it left everything else to starve the map the oft memed see that mountain you can climb it marketing speak lather blurb was not a promise but a threat skyrim's touted scope was revealed to be a dragon jealously guarding its pile of development resources and manpower whenever i criticize skyrim this is what i find myself coming back to the oroboros of suck nothing in skyrim works nothing in skyrim works because of the focus place on the map the map itself doesn't work because of the lack of effort everywhere else leaves the map devoid of worthwhile content the lack of worthwhile content means the focus plays on the map was wasted so nothing works on and on for infinity i'm not going to dig through the background details of the game's development interviews etc to dissect if this is exactly the case i'm only going off what's presented to me in the game and by that metric the evidence is overwhelming bethesda filled its admittedly impressive map with a glut of boring superficial content to justify its insane size by doing so they fundamentally misunderstood what makes the genre and subject matter so beloved nothing in skyrim works because it is a cold corporate tech demo built around easily marketable innovations and it was built that way so that your brain can lie to you and say that those hours you spend approaching your inevitable death weren't wasted poking around todd howard's winter wonderland this elaborate deception is carefully crafted so that you'll buy more dlc and maybe the remaster and maybe the next fallout more slop please mr howard my trough is empty however before we can look at how the elder scrolls franchise might move forward before we can examine skyrim critically we first have to talk about game design specifically open world game design so broad big picture snobby stuff then nitty gritty whining then unqualified advice let's go open world role playing games are by their nature ambitious projects they are broad sprawling adventures but they demand significant resources and technical competence to pull off convincingly more than most other video game genres open world rpgs need to be smart about how their systems interact because that's the key to their expansive enthralling majesty to arbitrarily oversimplify a number of complex interwoven game design principles open world rpgs generally have four core design pillars writing exploration combat and art direction of course you can break these down further but these are just broad terms for generalized concepts different open world games emphasize these pillars to varying degrees but ideally speaking these four aspects are intertwined they work together in harmony in order to present an experience that can't be replicated in any other medium a freely explorable world to adventure and immerse yourself within sometimes different aspects receive more focus than others due to time or budgetary constraints and sometimes developers make carefully considered artistic choices on what to prioritize every pillar is important for different reasons and not every player responds to each pillar in the exact same way for instance some people love to dissect the lore of dark souls they dig through the weapon descriptions the characters and environmental clues to piece together its cryptic narrative others are dodge roll goblins that streak through the game to dab on gods and flex their elite gamer skills these are both valid ways to enjoy the game as for skyrim there is very little effort to engage the player beyond a nordic theme map and vague destinations on the horizon like a show headed by steven moffat or a bad robot production you're not being sold an experience but rather the expectation of one as i mentioned earlier it was frequently stressed by developers that you could go anywhere do anything people imagined themselves exploring skyrim splunking every cavern plundering every ruin and climbing every peak they got their wish kind of this breath of exploration came with the tiny tiny inconvenience of having nothing interesting to do once they'd arrived none of the four pillars were considered beyond how they could be welded onto the map as cheaply and efficiently as possible combat is pathetically simple because it was intricate or challenging or both a significant pool of potential players would be turned off in a similar vein none of the stories in skyrim are very complex because if they made you think it'd break this spell it'd be like if contestants on the bachelorette started discussing metaphysical ethics or dialectical materialism it'd be so jarring that 95 of the core audience would just turn the show off the game is so thoroughly dull and uninteresting it created a phenomenon i'll call anti-immersion by resisting any attempt to engage the player it paradoxically keeps them playing the mental effort required to play the game is so low it makes thought of playing or doing anything else tiresome to consider this is the crux of the issue for me rpgs at least rpgs in the traditional sense are a fantastic genre to construct interesting stories and experiences that literally cannot exist in other artistic mediums their interactivity and reactivity are utterly unique when done well so what does a good open world rpg look like you might ask well have you heard of this underrated gem jokes aside witcher 3 remains a really good game it's also a very flawed game and it doesn't map cleanly to what the elder scrolls offers but the point stands it's also the broadest most easily recognized quality title in the genre i think the witcher 3 got a massive pass on release however due to how well it managed to present all four of the aforementioned pillars of open world game design and present them well consistently when it released the witcher 3 was a massive jolt to fans of open world rpgs like myself much like how mr plankett remarks that hearing jar jargs claim weesa going home reminded him that he was a human being that was alive the love of craft displayed in witcher 3 felt like the return of christ himself the game is far from perfect but by treating all these pillars as important parts of the experience and taking care to ensure that they were well integrated with each other the game became a massive genre defining success that hasn't been matched since definitely nothing since then not a zip despite its flaws witcher 3 is the best open world fantasy game to come out and there's nothing you could say i mean what else is there to say really alvin ring is a colossal magisterial masterpiece it's by far and away from software's most successful title to date selling 12 million copies in the first month alone it's already being hailed as one of the greatest games ever made and i have to agree despite its lackluster final third but it isn't just better than skyrim because its story combat and exploration and art direction are superior but because all the ring is a game that its creators cared about deeply the entire souls born genre was revealed as a series of experiments in preparation for making something like it it was made with clarity of intent and a deep abiding passion they worked really hard at weaving together the four core design pillars of open world rpgs that's why witcher 3 and elder ring work where skyroom doesn't but all three games are their own separate kind of rpg and each model is valid although they're very different games and different subgenres of the broader fantasy landscape they are at their core the same genre of game so i think it's fair to compare them witcher 3 raised the bar for fantasy rpgs alden ring exploded it so if the next elder scrolls game wants to have even a shot at measuring up todd has to take a brutally honest look at bethesda's game design ethos esx doesn't have to be more like the witcher 3 or more like a soulsborne it just needs to be more intelligently constructed needs to shed the auroboris of suck but in order to understand how fundamentally broken skyrim is we first have to unravel the oroboros of suck and why it exists in the first place see i called the aforementioned pillars of open world game design pillars for a reason they support what is arguably the most important aspect of a game its purpose the desired experience a game developer wants to instill in the player for bethesda games this experience begins and ends at the steam checkout page now look all aaa games only exist to generate profit for shareholders but that doesn't mean games built purely for profit can't have artistic merit are they talented coders artists and writers working on aaa titles don't genuinely want to create memorable art within their given parameters but a game's purpose affects every other aspect of its construction skyrim's size and scope of exploration was designed from the ground up as a flex on other games in the genre the triumphant clarion called the sucker customers in so the sheer size of the experience the mountains demanded so much time and resources that the rest of these very important pillars didn't receive the level of support they needed hence the auroboris have suck i'll admit it's much easier to say all this with hindsight it took a decade of boring collect-a-thon open-world games with zero redeemable elements set in maps that kept getting bigger and bigger before i and i suspect many others collectively realize that a giant map means absolutely all if there's nothing interesting to do within it this is perfectly encapsulated by the repugnant concept of radiant quests todd forced this idea down our throats like it was some gift from god when the idea is so fundamentally flawed it boggles the mind how it got off the drawing board real quick in case you don't know what radiant quests are they are endlessly repeatable quests built by an algorithm that will point you at a generic dungeon give you a generic goal and then when you've completed it you'll have a suspiciously similar quest given to you you might not know the exact term but if you've played fallout 4 you've seen a radiant quest they're a huge problem how about the settlement problem another settlement needs our help i'll mark it on your map this is offensive to me these aren't quests these are chores i don't play an rpg to do chores but their actual purpose is not to engage you but rather send you exploring so you can stumble on some other stuff that lets you stumble onto yet more stuff a matryoshka doll of dismal pointless an excuse to avoid designing competently written quests that point you towards interesting locations with purpose and intent however some games with a dominant focus on exploration can be really good fantastic even but these games are also generally smart enough to invest in some game design pillars besides exploration breath of the wild had a fantastic level of freedom and emerging gameplay mechanics giving the player a number of interesting intriguing choices to make before and during exploration it didn't hurt that hyrule was beautiful and the game often pointed you at tall vantage points so you could soak it all in hollow knight has an interwoven metroidvania style world with serviceable combat and platforming challenges that can be ramped up to absurdity in the late game at the player's discretion as well as a unique and enthralling art direction the otter wilds is a blend of genres but its exploration systems were a delight to unravel and experiment with as well as a bunch of other fantastic stuff i really don't want to talk about because you deserve to go into that game as blind as possible skyrim does not have anything else if it had it might have made exploration worth it but it didn't let's explore why to unfuck just how poorly managed the project was we have to look more closely at those four pillars of open world game design writing exploration combat and art direction you might think after all the hate i'm about to dump on skyrim that i think todd howard personally poisoned the water supply burned our crops and delivered a plague into our houses that i have a deep personal grudge against this game and the elder scrolls series in general that this entire video is nothing more than an angry impotent graffiti oso screaming into the vast uncaring void about how much of a contrarian he is i mean that part about the video is true but i made it because again i love open world rpgs and morrowind proves that the elder scrolls franchise holds an insane amount of untapped potential in the modern gaming landscape oh yeah i'm one of those boomers some quick disclaimers first nothing i'm about to say is wholly original as i said earlier many people have reached similar conclusions about the game in the decades since its release so i won't claim to be some enlightened pathfinder or lone truthsayer this diatribe is also predicated on the understanding that due to the ouroboros of suck nothing about skyrim was ever going to be good it feels unfair of me to criticize work that was done under what i assume were crushing inhumane conditions imposed by out-of-touch executives but i'll do it anyway mostly because i'm an but also to illustrate how gross mismanagement and thoughtless profit driven directives can only produce mediocrity let's roll i'm going to start off with the strongest case against my argument skyrim's art direction i use the term art direction here instead of graphics because having a look is more important than that look looking well really basically all the polygons in the world can't make a game interesting to look at there are decades-old games that look more engaging and distinct than even the most recently produced aaa titles simply because the art team knew what they wanted and how to get there and that's certainly true with skyrim especially with the remaster despite being constrained by its northern setting skyrim's environments are striking and evocative mountaintops forested valleys rivers caves and tombs are confidently woven together and are infused with a primal rustic vibe that suits its story about the return of primeval beings everything looks weathered and cold which is contrasted nicely by the homes and residences of skyrim's inhabitants which are warm and inviting what's more is that for the time this was a technical marvel bethesda's notorious bugs exist for a reason the scale of their games is legitimately ambitious and making it one cohesive experience was no easy feat however while everything in skyrim looks good the novelty evaporates quickly the first jogger tomb is a creepy delight but by the time you've plundered 20 you wish that the nords had burned all their dead and save you the trouble environments inevitably begin blending together until you're forced to nitpick terrain details and other graphical minutia just so you can entertain yourself or just breaks entirely so skyrim's very best feature is an inherent failure the game's scope was too large to accommodate enough locations that were distinct or memorably constructed if the combat was fun or the writing was really solid you wouldn't have noticed as much but as it stands the exploratory nature of skyrim's quest forces the player to acknowledge that the vast majority of the places they're sent are identical every labor of love from the art and environment teams are squandered by repetition their hard work is pissed away by the fifth hour and the handful of unique locations eventually lose their lust here when you realize there's nothing there worth doing i've talked a lot about exploration and how the breadth of skyrim's map sucked up so much time and attention that everything else fell apart so let's discuss what exploring and traversing skyrim's map is actually like uh it sucks the majority of praise i have for poking around skyrim is what i just talked about the art direction the only real reason to explore is to see new stuff a handful of locations have a strong artistic flair that lends slices of the continent vibrancy and variety when it is otherwise utterly bereft of either however i'll continue the positivity for a little while longer and discuss my favorite skyrim experience the plunge into cagronzo this is the one time everything in the game was firing on all cylinders overconfident due to how i was being treated like a toddler for the first 10 hours of gameplay i blundered into the most obvious trap in the history of ever hey glowing ore neat i was stuck at what felt like the bottom of the world and i could hear the growls of foamer in the distance there was no way to fast travel out of my newfound predicament either sure i could have saved scum to avoid falling into the obvious trap but the point is that i didn't want to i was hooked crawling my way out of cochran's all was the best content skyrim had to offer it barely lasted 10 minutes there was nothing there besides a few falmer camps and some mediocre loot but it felt like a genuine adventure the only time in the game i was actually experiencing what the the genre is built to emulate now that was all very anecdotal and also conditional if i was higher leveled or had encountered some more falmer beforehand i probably wouldn't have gotten the same level of enjoyment out of it the reason cabrans all feel so unique and special is because while sometimes you might stumble upon some other unique locations or uncover a hidden away alcove with its own story and vibe the actual act of exploration that is moving around the world is mind-numbingly dull the trap that sends you plummeting into the depths of the east march is the most exciting traversal ever gets because it wasn't just walking in skyrim you can only explore by holding down w if you want to get to the quest marker faster you sprint or you get a mount but these aren't real choices because there's no meaningful difference between them one of them isn't more interesting or engaging than the others your overall root doesn't change and none of them require any input from the player other than the occasional course correction it's all walking all the time and by walking i mean gliding now i hate talking about how games feel because it's such a subjective concept but i want you to tell me that the movement in skyrim feels good go ahead do it unless you're a die-hard contrarian you can't because in every modern bethesda studio game walking around the game world feels like you're vivic hovering a half inch off the ground pills even steep ones just change your walking pace from a janky glide to a slow frictionless grind now there's a ton of facets that go into presenting movement in a cohesive and engaging way animation does moving look good does your character look like they're reacting appropriately to changes in the terrain what about sound do they sound like a part of the environment they're traversing does their equipment rattle against their armor you can probably see where i'm going with this there are a dozen ways to make an in-game avatar feel like a part of their world and bethesda employed exactly zero you roomba your ass from quest marker to quest marker from the moment you escape halgen until you finally deign to dab on alduin it never changes the world design is so adverse to interaction that the only avenue for player expression is to jump around the level geometry until they break it completely when they trotted out that tiresome climb the mountain line what they actually meant is that they carved a nice path into it so you can gently hover your way up there way to go sport this is what i was talking about earlier when i praise breath of the wild its gameplay mechanics are seamlessly intertwined with its primary gameplay modality exploring hyrule climbing gliding riding swimming and combat are all player driven exploration methods bound to the omnipresent stamina wheel and they're built so that even a new player can conquer formidable challenges with adequate planning and foresight traversing hyrule and seeing its sites gave the player real agency making them feel like they were planning actual expeditions skill patience and preparedness were rewarded but even the lack thereof could make for a memorable experience in breath of the wild when a player reaches the top of a mountain they think i did it in skyrim when a player manages to bunny hop their way to the top of a mountain todd doesn't actually want them to be at they think i broke it it might be unfair of me to compare breath of the wild's mechanics to skyrims but man morrowind had better ways to facilitate actual player driven exploration hell thief feels better to play and in gaming time thief is practically ant deluvian compared to skyrim this is why i keep coming back to the aura boris of suck to todd it was more important to have stuff rather than let the stuff be any good or fun to find quantity over quality even the morsels of well-made content are impossible to fully enjoy because they're laid out in a way that's so coldly calculated it feels as organic as oblivion's facial animations everything is paced out in a way to constantly distract and divert the player's attention away from the quest at hand with mathematical immersion shattering precision even witcher 3 wasn't totally immune from this but at least the stories you kept tripping over were worth experiencing and felt like a deliberate meaningful part of a greater whole when exploration failed to feel immersive the writing picked up the slack there was a balance skyrim's endless drip feed of places to poke around in is so bizarrely constant that the world itself falls apart under the lightest scrutiny which presupposes the rate of discovery itself it's all focused to keep you distracted from the fact that nothing about the locations makes sense like how oh bandit cave sick time to murder everyone for their inexplicably magic pants this is an exploration this isn't world design it's dangling keys in front of an infant the skinner box where the prize is a bin of fetid garbage and all of this is aggravated by patronizing ui choices by chaining the player to an unerringly accurate ever-present quest marker exploration as a whole suffers because the player doesn't have to think about how they're doing it i do as the crystal guides not only does this undercut bethesda's own cage angling by focusing the player on a definite goal but it means you can't have a unique adventure that results from failing to plan ahead or getting lost you're never in danger of getting into fun situations that bethesda didn't intend for your experiences are limited to exploring the depth of some random cave in some stoney-faced npc's backyard to find the perfectly marked legendary cod piece of lord fuckwitter in an epic journey that lasts 5 minutes and involves killing tons of bandits or if we're feeling really spicy more draugr you walk a minute down the road to repeat the process digging up more revered artifacts that barely raises vendor trash hey at least killing those bandits was fun right what is there to say really skyrim's combat sucks everyone who's played it knows it it has all the weight and impact of a spring breeze sure you could liven things up with magic but it's mechanically identical to swinging a sword or axe the difference between them basically boils down to the number of targets you can hit in the particle effects attack bar go down wait for bar to refill or drink potion take hit drink health potion here's my health potion it'll fix skyrim it'll fix everything like the worst mmos the only challenge skyrim offers comes from either an enemy's numbers being higher than yours or the minutes of your life it sucks away to whittle down their health bar but none of this matters because if you're using melee weapons or hurling spells you are playing the game wrong this is because every dragonborn in skyrim is a stealth archer and anyone who pretends otherwise is lying to themselves the combat is so awful that todd decided to be better to teach everyone to avoid it at all costs being a stealth archer would be fine if it was an option and it is one on paper in practice it's so effective that you're actively making the game worse for yourself by avoiding it this isn't a choice because ignoring an objectively better strategy feels awful in every game where this crippling flaw is evident shoot your way through human revolution enjoy all the npcs spitting on you and no xp put skill points into energy and diablo 2 your build is now broken choosing a deeply flawed non-optimal gameplay strategy is only fun if it's a legitimate choice or you're challenging yourself or when you're doing so to dunk on noobs or tryhards in multiplayer games but in skyrim you're a stealth archer because the thought of pulling out your sword induces nothing but a yawn it's a drain on resources it's riskier and more damningly it's slower after all you have more content sludge to wade through given the most generous interpretation melee and magic are fallback options after you've lost stealth or when a random dragon encounters forced on you thanks for all this equipment and crafting systems and spells and skills and perks that mean nothing because their fallbacks at best and an obtuse method of self-flagellation at the worst what's that combat has to be this way because of level scaling that's worse you do get how that's worse right let's break it down first of all level scaling is awful and i hate it that's a very personal subjective take i admit that but increasing enemy difficulty to evenly match player progression is like treading tar it has never felt good it's a concrete objective reminder to the player that because their numbers are going up their enemies must as well it's a lazy slapdash way of scaling enemy difficulty granted oblivion was worse about this than skyrim but good lord is it still present not only is your immersion shattered once you notice you're only getting marginally stronger but you also realize that you have to maintain the grind otherwise you might fall behind and be forced to sit still while some bozo whacks you with the sword so you can dig through the god-awful ui and eat 30 wheels of cheese because that's what difficult encounters look like designing a combat system with the bearish hint of heft or skill am i right hey but this way the player always feels like they're being meaningfully challenged i feel meaningfully challenged whenever i hop on a treadmill but that doesn't make it an accomplishment maybe i'm the odd one out here but always being appropriately leveled and equipped doesn't feel like the game meeting me on fair terms it feels like i'm being forced to wear water wings in a game about adventure there's no character progression here no escalation of tension or stakes the only arc of improvement you get is if you break the level scaling over your knee by doing so much pointless that you can bitch-slap a world-ending threat in a cabal of ancient vampires like their bylines on a to-do list which they are turns out defeating apocalyptic threats isn't an issue you just got a genocide a nation's worth of filthy endlessly responding hobos and mythic armor as they squat in their decrepit caves with two bottles of wine and a chest that contains three soul gems 200 gold and a lockpick masterful timeless but gun this combat system lets a player go wherever they want and do whatever they like have have you been listening by refusing to give skyrim any sort of structure beyond a precisely defined grid that's regularly studded with shiny objects all the player freedom in the world means for dick when they're not met halfway being able to go anywhere doesn't count for anything if the developers can't meaningfully structure content around player effort investment or systems mastery it just means that location a has to be as boring as location b that the challenges facing location c can only be superficially different from the ones in location d every single enemy can be fought and cheesed in the exact same way sure giants might send you to the stratosphere if you look at them wrong but all you need is a temporary distraction to eat elon tusk's calcium-based booster rocket for you so you can dump enough damage into him and call it a day a plateau that can be swiftly reached and promptly eclipsed with the barest investment into stealth that's it this random enemy is the pinnacle of challenge in the player's combat mastery alright so wandering around skyrim feels like rollerblading over featureless asphalt and finding its monsters barely raises your pulse above just sat down at the cubicle that means that at least you have a good reason to be suffering these boring bits right the narrative is full of fun memorable characters the quests are layered and interesting the continent is rife with engaging resonant stories i'm i'm not even gonna bother with a bit you already know the answer skyrim's writing is on the same level as its combat which is to say it's technically present and that words are both read and spoken aloud during the course of the game others have dissected its writing failures much better than i can but i'll sum it up real quick any choice you're allowed to make is utterly inconsequential the first real decision you're given is so abrupt sudden and without consequence i'll bet that thousands of players made it by accident and never even noticed it ends up not even mattering you're led to the exact same place and directed towards the exact same follow-up quest the character's cameo later for a line or two wow this is the theme for the entire game all of its quests and all of its characters for an open world rpg all of its stories are exceptionally linear event x happens then event y followed by event z there's stuff you could call twists if you're in an exceptionally generous mood but nothing feels connected so it doesn't matter nothing you do has any appreciable effect you can murder the emperor and has no effect on the imperial versus stormcloak plot nothing happens in the background of these stories and none of them change or affect the others it's all so inert and lifeless but you want to know the real reason why bethesda's writing sucks it sucks because it's given the same economical consideration as everything that's not easily marketable it's treated as nothing but beige flavored filling again i have no idea what it looked like inside bethesda studios during the development of any of these games but because they all feel remarkably similar i suspect they were all built in the same way the writers are given the setting then the broad strokes of the main plot then two or three supporting plots todd comes in tells them how big the map is and demands an absurd amount of content in order to fill the space not stories content now this content needs to be focused around exploring the map and can't get the player off from going anywhere i also suspect this all happened way later in development cycle than any of the writers would have preferred they now have to create a avalanche of quests of very limited scope within a very limited time frame there's no time to do quality assurance or more than a handful of drafts nothing can be interrelated because that would require way more work and force even more labor onto the slaves in todd's crunch dungeon now because the writers are working within this rushed perfunctory scope and cannot functionally constrict the player these stories can't be about anything sure events happen in these stories but they don't have anything to say there was neither time nor incentive for the writers to explore ideas with more than the barest degree of nuance it's all surface level because it had to be the most interesting story threat in skyrim is the implication that the uprising of racist religious nationalists was being manipulated by foreign influence the very thing they resent here's an unrelated picture of america that's a really good idea to explore but again the writers were never given any time to sink their teeth into it it's brought up maybe three times and every other dialogue related to the civil war is stilted unsubtle and utterly focused on shuffling the dragonborn from one quest marker to the other the player is never given the agency to ask pointed questions engage a debate about events or just talk to anyone even if you could they probably wouldn't have anything worthwhile to say there wasn't time for any of that and it wasn't just a plot that suffered this way every facet of writing suffered the quests the characters the lore they're all bare bones and they have the exact same problems there wouldn't be much point to discussing them separately but to keep hammering this point home i'm going to do it anyway i've called skyrim boring in so many ways at this point i've likely begun to bore you that's what a writer would probably call irony as to what a writer would call the quest in skyrim i'm not sure you'd have to ask a real one the closest approximation i can make is threadbare the actual writers of skyrim's quest however would likely use a more corporate friendly word something like streamlined or efficient there's no purpose to the quests other than getting you to wander around the map fight things and occasionally loot them none of them attempt to engross you in the world of skyrim or presented as a real place where people live the overwhelming majority of them are fetch quests the ones that try and have a plot make a point or reveal something about the world are usually composed of linear fetch quests where every character involved acts like a brain dead or the events that happen don't follow any sort of logical progression or some combination thereof you can't role play within this ruthlessly linear framework the entire appeal of rpgs is making choices in how your character interacts with the world and how they affect it but the only room for player expression in skyrim's quest is when you do them i'd walk you through one to better illustrate my point but i'd just be wasting your time you could point to virtually any quest in the game it'd be like trying to find hay in a haystack again this is all because quests are primarily designed to fill gameplay hours and lead you around the map rather than tell actual stories as quests are the primary method of building an open world rpg narrative this undercuts the entire game if any of the quests were thoughtful suspenseful layered or even just occasionally interconnected then the world would be worth exploring because it's the place how this interesting plot is happening you'd be engrossed in its fate even if other aspects of the writing failed but nothing is more important for ensnaring players in a good rpg than quality character writing i would argue that it's the most important part in any narrative no matter the medium because if a story lacks characters you can root for or empathize with or enjoy experiencing nothing else about the story works it all comes tumbling down if you don't care about any of the characters in the story you can't get invested the pathos falls flat you don't care about the plot and any interesting technical aspect of a story's production say stellar cinematography impressive effects etc they're wasted passed away into the wind so what about skyrim's characters it's major players it's companions there are no real characters to speak of everyone's just an aloof i can guarantee no one finally remembers pharyngeal secret fire or as inept boss who is the gaming equivalent of this tired meme the only characters anyone remembers are memorable because they're annoying nazeem for obvious reasons and lydia too because she's inevitably the player's first companion she says the exact same line and a dry bored voice every time you ask her to be your pack newell i am sworn to carry your burdens fantastic meme fuel but not anything with substance you can marry her in this line doesn't change there's never any character arcs or personal quests this is basic stuff but nope not a zip there's something sheamus young said about skyrim that i feel really applies here the npc's only personality trait is their tone of voice and they don't seem to have any life outside of explaining things to you what's really funny about that line is that he actually said it about fallout 3 but it applies to skyrim too it applies to oblivion and most of fallout 4 but you want to know why every character in skyrim is a bland featureless robot it's because every voice actor did their lines alphabetically that's right every line in the game was done in the order of which letter began the sentence i can't even imagine how frustrating it would be to perform under such conditions but this choice was made simply because it was the most economical todd wants content sludge for the trough so better get it done now to be fair i can only concretely establish that the alphabetic lineries were done for oblivion but you've played skyrim did you notice the difference i couldn't it feels petty and toxic to speculate like this but if i can't even tell the difference what the was the point look bethesda's voice acting has been memed to death the horse has been beaten to death and then further processed into a thin gruel not even armor could save it however i feel like everyone missed the core issue here the auroboris have suck if more time effort and resources had been dedicated to building a roster of interesting characters there'd be more voice actors even if they hadn't hired a single extra actor maybe the ones they'd already onboarded would have had room and incentive to put in a quality performance or execute an actual character arc if there were characters worth experiencing then skyrim would be a much livelier place you could enjoy exploring with your favorite companion learn more about them as they live and grow as people you might even care more about the grander story if they were invested in it themselves if they expressed any emotion beyond dull surprise or a canned repetitive battle cry see every character in skyrim has a sharply delineated role in the game that only relates to how they interact with the player they are either a follower a shopkeeper a quest dispenser a lore dispenser a wanderer or an enemy these are not characters they're mmo npcs i'll give bethesda some credit here in that they really really tried to course correct here in fallout 4. the companions sort of have personalities and character arcs they'd even try to emote about events in the story it was just the execution that was utterly lacking as well as the greater story at hand which was so brain-dead nonsensical and patronizing that it demeaned everything else in the game hey i remembered some of their names at least that's that's progress as for the actual story itself well everything i said about skyrim civil war applies to the central quest too but other rpg's tremendously dull main stories can have interesting side quests or spectacular presentation that fleshes out the world sometimes that's enough to anchor you in the game simply by providing context to the world and the characters that inhabit it the problem with skyrim is that the main quest is really just the main quest because the quest log says so they receive the same amount of care and attention as the other major quest lines which is to say barely any at all the only thing different about it is the number of unique assets dedicated to this linear yet meandering and uninspired tale that has zero visible consequences honestly once you've killed a dragon outside whiterun you've finished skyrim you've seen how every combat encounter is going to go when you've seen the maximum level of craft achieved when it comes to visuals writing and presentation it never gets more interesting or elaborate playing beyond that is just doing yourself a disservice however nothing i've said so far is really news to anyone even most skyrim stands have long ago accepted that the upfront writing is pretty poor instead they praise the background lore that can be found across skyrim's 337 books hey the lusty argonian made is fun all those history books immerse you in the world yeah they did when they were written for morrowind a more cohesive and interesting breakdown of skyrim's lore books can be found here polygons own bubbly brian david gilbert doing his thing by revealing every single lore attacks found in skyrim it's a really fun video i recommend it however for the sake of time let's look at his conclusion how about it brian should we read all the lore books no look some of them may be worth reading it's entirely possible that your primary enjoyment from skyrim was in finding and reading these lore books that's fine but having your best writing be easily missable ancillary content is not good game design it says more about the larger story skyrim has on offer than it does about the world of tamriel in the previous moving forward i praised mass effect's story for using its lore in intelligent ways but the difference between the codex in that game and the books in this one is that only very rarely do the books have any direct relevance to anything happening in the game itself they're supposed to enhance your enjoyment of the larger story at hand not replace it reading an in-game book about dramatic exciting events doesn't make the rest of the game engaging it just makes me wish the game had been about one of those other stories even worse is that the elder scrolls series has interesting lore it's complex multi-layered and deeply deeply weird but since the vast majority of skyrim's writing is so bland and tiresome to experience many first impressions of the franchise is that it's just another generic fantasy setting there's an interesting discussion about this in one of matt colville's videos basically he asserts that anyone can write lore but it's the job of the storyteller in an interactive medium to present an experience worth sprinkling with background details for players that are already engaged i hate constantly harkening back to dark souls but think about it like this if dark souls wasn't as good as it is fauci video wouldn't be lighting cuban cigars with benjamins on his patreon funded yacht in the maldives everything about the lore could be exactly the same but if the game itself wasn't worth playing no one would care so the books if skyrim's writing had even approached the level of craft displayed in other classic rpgs i wouldn't be making this video even with dog combat and repetitive exploration sharply written quests can keep players guessing expert character work can gaslight people into thinking a game has a good story even if its main plot is amateurish draws conversely a well-paced plot with interesting ideas or a neat premise can sink its hooks into the player's brain filling the gaps for lackluster characters or simplistic presentation with a game as massive as skyrim a few scattered pebbles of interesting quest does not overturn towering mountains of bland boring and convoluted if only skyrim's writing had been a bit sharper it would have been easier to ignore its other flaws but it wasn't so i can the reason i'm harping on about this so much is because there's a game that someone literally hacked together out of skyrim's bones and it was actually pretty good endriel sure the creators weren't burdened with the work of building an entirely new game but it does illustrate that some good writing is all you need to overcome shortcomings in other areas because all of skyrim's non-writing issues are still present in enriel to some degree but they matter so much less when you're engrossed in a well-presented and well-executed story real quick while we're talking about a famous mod if you've been sitting through this rant and thought hey but mods can make everything about skyrim better then you've missed the point mods can't fix bethesda's writing and even if they could free unpaid labor shouldn't be required to unfuck a triple a game with millions of dollars behind it the only reason skyrim's modding community is so huge and talented is because it needed to be there was so little of value in the original product that literal legions of fans took it upon themselves to fix the existing content never mind wholesale system revisions or new stuff like entrio so if ten beer-swelling crowds can make a good game out of skyrim why couldn't bethesda it's because the oar boris suck is inimical to good storytelling above all else the writing is by far and away the most critical damning flaw of skyrim but since the top level directives demanded by management forced the writers into bland uncomfortable boxes the writing was never going to be good even the most talented writer can't make art and conditions that don't support their work or lead to inspiration with more time and resources allowing for a sharper focus some quality writing was literally all skyrim needed to be a well-regarded classic it still is but again that's thanks to bethesda's marketing department rather than any actual intrinsic merit people could have said yeah the combat kind of sucked and the creation engine held it back a little but damn do you remember story event x or character y or that one quest where everything went to if you did z instead we're left with the imagine dragons of video games but you don't have to imagine them they're right there being boring so it's finally time to speculate a little more time to flex our own creative muscles a bit now that the fanboys have smashed that dislike button and left a typo laden comment we can actually talk about how we can move forward with elder scrolls six what it would take to realize tamriel's immense potential this section will be shorter than its equivalent my mass effect video because the problems with the elder scrolls series are far more structural and offering anything other than broad suggestions feels like talking to a brick wall with my forehead first off i want to address an off-discuss expectation that this new elder scrolls game having the new version of the creation engine will automatically have a positive effect on the game's quality this is hilariously misguided thinking that a newer more advanced engine will make elder scroll vi any better than the previous avalanche of trash is pornographically naive it absolutely has the potential to improve things and i'll talk about that but it's not technology that's holding the franchise back the problem comes down to resource allocation and developer priorities frankly speaking i do not give a about how big a game world is how good it looks or how much raw content it has i would be gobsmacked that after a decade of ubisoft games and bethesda sandboxes if anyone else did either open world game maps have gotten as big as they ever need to be it's time to start using that technical prowess and big dick microsoft money towards expanding the depth of their content instead of just its breadth so let's take a look at how they can do that before anything else we have to throw the aura boris of suck away we have to press on with the assumption that elder scrolls 6's open world will serve to elevate the stories within it not supersede them the ultimate sin of the auroboris and thusly bethesda studios open world games is that they are terrified of telling the player no again this is a deliberate decision anti-immersion by giving the player total unrestricted freedom they have gutted any meaning that freedom might have had but the illusion remains and thus keeps butts in seats in dollars and todd's pockets this is the most important aspect to fix we don't really need giant intricate game maps dramatic mass effect choices protagonist voice acting or pre-rendered motion cap cutscenes that is like the lore books it's just there for flavor what really counts is that the player's decision should matter regardless of how big or small they are or whether they're diegetic or non-diegetic it's all about meaningful player agency with consequences skyrim and fallout 4 both have this issue where it can be the leader of each major faction in the world and it just feels ridiculous the story tells you that you're an immensely skillful super special boy but all the power you amass isn't acknowledged or respected within the world once you achieve it because you've never allowed the agency to actually employ it so my advice here the guiding principle of any new elder scrolls game is to discard the notion of total unrestricted freedom make the players squirm close off companions guilds quests and items based on how they play the game give them tough choices let them fail quests or make bad decisions based on incomplete information show the ramifications later in the story a role-playing game with no consequences or meaningful choices whether in the story or in how a character interacts with the world results in a world that feels shallow boring and not worth experiencing twice it's not an rpg at that point it's just a non-linear stab-a-thon and one of the very best mediums to experience an adventure you can't have an adventure without the player facing some sort of challenge if the player never faces significant pushback no part of that experience will feel valid because the world is handicapping itself to accommodate the player and secure the largest possible audience in short bethesda should remember the genesis of the open world game dungeons and dragons d d is a natural point of comparison for any open world fantasy rpg but the game's aesthetics are the least important part rather being a dungeon master for any tabletop rpg can serve as a fantastic crash course in factoring for player agency when designing games the best dms understand that their players aren't story receptacles to be talked at and shepherded from one plot point to another but rather active participants in a shared narrative while that degree of reactivity and interactivity is impossible to fully achieve in a video game it's more so about understanding good campaign design principles a scaled dm will structure their quests and the greater narrative as a whole to allow for player creativity and agency without letting them run roughshod over any challenges or obstacles they might face given that framework the greater control a player has over their experience and the more consequences they see as a result of this control the more they'll feel a sense of authorship over it games that are really good at spinning this illusion of authorship are often well-regarded classics and it's important to strive towards this in role-playing games it's in the genre's name after all so let's get a little more specific let's talk about some pillars of open world game design and how bethesda could do them better when it comes to all the stuff that goes into game development writing is somewhat unique in that you can't just throw money at the problem to fix it i mean writers should get a lot more money but that's besides the point sure skilled competent writers cost more but the crux of the issue is that even talented well-paid writers who create good stories can get tangled up in corporate mismanagement and create stories that feel toothless and bland even if their core is solid almost constantly video game writers are forced to make changes and adjustments based on what suits want some piece of tech not panning out as planned or a shift in director priorities which results in a disjointed or incomplete narrative these are failures of management not writers themselves so in order to be a true rpg and craft a story that players can feel like active participants in the writing staff needs much more creative control over the content creation pipeline and should probably be placed more towards the top of any related org chart this way they have a much better shot at telling stories that are cohesive sensibly designed and properly integrated into the greater open world experience however the topic of why writing in video games is generally ass and how it could be better is much too big to cover in this video maybe in the future in any case i admit that writing open world stories isn't easy even the witcher 3 struggled with it you have to make sure that the main plot feels appropriately dire but not too dire so the player feels like they have room to do side quests which themselves can't be too distracting yet also might break immersion if every single quest has a direct connection to the main plot you also have to keep track of countless npcs and companions and character motivations and account for the players wandering etc it's kind of a nightmare honestly but as for how to address these issues and what the story of elder scrolls vi could be about i really have no idea i don't have enough moon sugar pumping through my veins to take a dive into the lore and surface with a potential plot if i had to pitch plot ideas i think the most interesting core directive would be the player character not being the subject of a chosen one prophecy now i understand that's kind of the series whole vibe and that they often play with the interpretation of said prophecies however i still think it would be vastly more interesting to play as someone who has to live with the fallout of such a person or perhaps engage in events that are less grand than a world shaking prophecy but still supremely significant say open warfare between the empire and the thalmor again the empire undergoing something like the crisis of the third century or a cataclysmic magical disaster that creates a political paradigm shift across tamriel maybe the dwemer returns somehow like i i really don't care i should note that i still want the player character to become powerful and play a huge role in these events it wouldn't be an elder scrolls game if you couldn't however the chosen one stick has worn really thin for me and i'd like to see something new maybe the pc is some up homunculus experiment person that starts the game as a prisoner servant of their insane creator boom narrative reason to start as a prisoner with a limited skill set yet potential for explosive growth and a nice setting for the inciting incident to happen or maybe they receive some kind of curse that makes them powerful or they have some sort of relationship to the magical catastrophe devastating the land um just do it better the idea isn't terrible speaking of whiffed execution let's talk about character writing as i said earlier bethesda really tried to make the companions in fallout 4 reactive and engaging they had likes and dislikes loyalty quests and occasionally had something to say about the greater story at hand but their actual writing the stuff that matters the most felt like an afterthought like a first draft that got rushed to print i realize that's pretty subjective so let me at least walk you through my thought process let's look at kate kate is a rough and tumble cage fighter with an inexplicable irish accent cartoonishly tragic backstory a drug addiction and a bad attitude however she warms up to the player character as you adventure with her she eventually reveals that she's heard of a vault that was jammed full of addicts and it held an advanced device within it that could cure any addiction a fantastic bit of world building that shows how descendants of the great war have begun to mythologize the pre-war society's technological prowess when you arrive at the vault you are instead greeted with a silent tomb full of centuries-old corpses the device was always a lie a means to manipulate the residents with the promise of a miraculous impossible cure crushed by these revelations kate is nevertheless undaunted she's resolved to get better and that's the most important step immensely grateful for the sole survivor's help she now understands that getting better is possible and is finally willing to accept the support of others brighter days are distant but they are ahead hey that doesn't sound so bad you might be thinking and you're right because i lied to you again instead the vault is full of respawning generic bandits in the device is a magic chair that instantly cures her addiction i just i don't even know anymore can you see what i mean these are first draft errors like the blueprint is there but the execution is stilted and lacking i don't feel like kate's quest exists because her story is an important part of the narrative that needed to be told but rather that todd saw mass effect's loyalty missions were popular so he wanted them in his game too very cold and corporate which is really the problem with bethesda's writing as a whole i hope a better understanding of the auroboris who suck might help them prioritize their writers more and put them higher up in the design process give them more time for additional drafts better qa better integration with the other parts of the development team the writing needs to be a higher priority rather than just a vehicle for subpar gameplay however good gameplay can not only smooth over weaker writing moments but can elevate the writing that does work crafting a much stronger experience as a whole it can also serve as its own unique aspect of writing as the primary vector for ludo narrative so for the gameplay pillars let's look at combat first there are nested interconnected issues with elder scrolls combat that require a bigger re-evaluation of the gameplay as a whole but i'm going to try and stay focused on the hacky slashy casty casty for now let's start off with the elephant in the room first person melee based systems are notoriously hard to design and often feel terrible to experience as skelogrim fans know the most important skills in melee combat are your sense of space parsing the distance between combatants and tactile feedback from meeting said opponent these are extremely difficult to convey when playing a first person video game the first thing i would suggest here is to fully restrict the elder scroll 6 to the first person perspective it was always a unique selling point for the series and no other series really attempts it however they still give you the option to switch to third person this is pretty cool until you realize that by including this feature the combat was pulled in two different directions by necessity and suffers because of it in third person you'll have a better idea of the space between yourself and your target but the animations are now stiff awkward and have no impact the camera angles kind of suck and the terrible feeling of movement is amplified by how you can now see yourself gliding around with no resistance from the environment in first person the attack animations look and feel a little better but now it's very difficult to judge distance the way weapons are held clutter the screen and further restrict your situational awareness landing a blow gives little to no visual or audio feedback forcing first person lets bethesda direct all of their focus into making a combat system that works for that perspective sure this development tactic doesn't always result in a good combat system but it'll help now i can't build a new combat system from the ground up but hell skyrim released 10 years ago and games have changed a lot since then instead of trying to pull an entirely new system out of my ass i think it'll be more valuable to look at what a couple of games have done since and how they can work to improve combat in the next elder scrolls title first off i want to address something that i consider another common misconception that making elder scrolls combat more like a soulsborne game is a good idea i've seen this in a lot of online speculation and even mods expressly built to fulfill this purpose but no it comes from a well-intentioned place but these games are diametric opposites of each other soulsborne games don't work just because they're in third person or that their combat is really weighty and tactical but rather how these aspects are reinforced by death and healing mechanics bonfires and estus strongly emphasize how dangerous combat can be and death is just as strong of a narrative device as it is a gameplay one all of this would not translate cleanly to the elder scrolls and would result in its combat feeling extremely disjointed from everything else souls foreign combat works for soulsborne games for good reasons imitators fail more than they succeed because they don't understand the hows and whys of this instead let's talk about a game very much in the tradition of elder scrolls but strongly divorced from it in interesting ways kingdom come deliverance its combat is really good because it's central to the game's thesis as a grounded historically minded open world adventure but you can't just pour it wholesale into the elder scrolls because it's so grounded the world of niren is firmly rooted in mythic fantasy king come deliverance's weight and vulnerability would come off as clunky and would eventually become far too restrictive as the player character becomes more powerful however kingdom comes still has valuable insights into the genre of first person sword and boarding a version of its armor larrying system would be really fun in elder scrolls as it would allow for more varied and interesting character equipment combinations this in 2002 kingdom comes health and stamina systems are also important to examine because they offer melee combat a tremendous degree of heft and skill that would scale well in a fantasy setting in kingdom come you have to carefully decide how and when to strike due to your limited slowly regenerating stamina bar hits are punishing yet fair because they further restrict the combatant stamina limiting their options and therefore their striking capabilities you know because they're wounded i think this would be a solid starting place for elder scrolls 6's combat because it's not tied so closely to reality characters could recover more rapidly from these wounds after the fight but still be hampered by them during it this would drive encounters to be more tense and tactical without turning a hero of legend into a bum bohemian peasant however this is just a starting point a game i want to look at more closely is dark messiah of might and magic not only because it shares a fantastical setting like the elder scrolls but how important environment design can be to combat the high lethality of combat and dark messiah forces the player to consider their surroundings and use everything they can muster to overcome challenges traps barrels enemy placement explosives etc it didn't go full immersive sim but it didn't have to and neither should the next elder scrolls dark messiah was instead a clever twist on the first person melee combat genre by giving the player more tools to engage with where skyrim's leveling system just made your stab numbers go up with perks for variety dark messiah made sure that leveling while making stab numbers go up also expanded your repertoire of combat options and that's just melee combat as for stealth magic and archery it's important that these are similarly treated like tools rather than just different combat aesthetics or just not broken if stealth is going to be an option there has to be a better way to employ it than just as a damage multiplier you also have to give the player more options to quietly maneuver around the environment rather than just crab walking around the world with a bow magic however has always been a to balance in any fantasy game because more than any other option in a player's tool belt it has the potential to radically alter the combat environment stabbing people the sword can only make them die but a fire spell can set someone aflame cause panic work is area denial burn environmental objects etc in really dynamic combat systems it can spread causing unintended consequences this is one instance where the new creation engine would actually be really useful a more advanced engine can render environments with additional physics objects and integrate gameplay systems with greater fidelity so not only could you throw barrels at people to give yourself some breathing room but evocation spells could turn rooms into hurricanes of debris and furniture radically altering dueling spaces in an instant with a flash of fancy new particle effects but magic like the other tools needs to be balanced against other skills dabbling in them should provide useful options but focusing on them needs to be rewarded properly as it stands being a dedicated magent skyrim is awful due to how slow casting is and how late the fire for effect spells become effective choices not to mention that less complex less resource of intensive play styles are far more readily available really though i think the idea of elder scrolls leveling is noble where doing thing makes you good or a thing but is again mired in the oroboros of suck by refusing to show the player an ounce of resistance bethesda committed the same mistake bioware did with andromeda not only is there no reason to ever use different tactics because some are so effective but they make it so that trying a new character is pointless because every character can be awesome at everything and i don't exactly know how it could be improved i think the best option is to front load the stuff that's good for basic utility and leave the crazy for players that fully dedicate themselves to a play style in order to not totally gate off useful options you could give players diegetic yet accessible methods to improve skills aside from just paying an npc to instantly up your stats for instance maybe finding and reading progressively more advanced books about magic theory will make you a better caster maybe winning an argument with a character improves your speech if you can pay npcs for training maybe the inevitable beau expert bosmer will take you on a small hunting quest while this is sort of how bobble heads and skill magazines work in fallout they're just pieces of loot that provide flat increases they exist solely to incentivize exploration and don't actually reward you for being good at the thing they improve yet all that means nothing if the enemies the foes being combated at are boring to fight it's tough however to provide suggestions beyond generally improving the ai and having combat itself not be brain dead stupid more dynamic combat options for foes could be interesting maybe having well trained sentience fight in formation even a small looser one would help alleviate skyrim's issue where melee inevitably devolves into a mindless mosh pit give different creatures different strategies when attacking or ambushing the player you don't necessarily need to challenge players on a mechanical level but making them think a little bit about each encounter goes a long way towards making enemies feel like worthy opponents other than that i think the more relevant question is considering how to use enemy difficulty placement and scaling if bethesda is totally married to the idea of level scaling i think it's at least well within their capabilities to employ it more responsibly the famous example of clever enemy usage within the sphere of creation engine titles is oblivion's new vegas where claws would murk your ass if you thought you were being a real smooth by making a beeline to the city what made that work wasn't the part where you around and found out but rather that the npcs fairly warn you of the dangers the world contains not only is this good world building but it creates a sensible expectation of the threats the player will face without railroading them by directing the player towards a more balanced path before letting them loose obsidian clearly defined the difference between early game enemies and late game ones except those cats doors now however we're talking more about exploration i hope you're getting a sense now what i mean when i say that skyrim's issues are interwoven and how one pillar of open world game design can radically affect others there's layers here so if exploration is once again going to be a primary focus of the new elder scrolls it has to be done better or at least more thoughtfully as for the map itself it's obviously going to be larger and better looking than the previous titles but that misses the point entirely i'm worried that the only real reason todd is upgrading to the new engine is to push the boundaries of map content again if that ends up being the case i hate it i belabored the point earlier but it must be said again the size and fidelity of the map is irrelevant however this is not a tractable problem basement dwelling nerds constantly whine about oh this new games map is only as big as other games those kinds of nerds do not have worthwhile opinions but they do tend to be very loud about them instead i believe it's more important to utilize this new engine's power in other areas of graphical direction and environment design no matter which slice of the world we end up in dramatic new weather effects could shake up exploration with sheets of rain or rolling particle particle-dense sandstorms better dynamic lighting systems could swath tombs dungeons and caves in realistic darkness that'll require a torch or magical light to explore enhancing their tense mythical atmosphere while also enhancing stealth gameplay these are the kind of experiences that stick with the player a large map is only impressive if exploring it is memorable speaking of which i can't stress how important it is that bethesda abandons their grid methodology for map design or at least i hope they get better at hiding it locations that are more authentically integrated into their surroundings are more interesting to explore and tend to stick out in the player's mind i'm not saying every single town ruining cave needs to be a masterwork of world building that's filled with unique assets just that the world should be created with a more thorough consideration for how people there would actually live and adapt to it because as we established earlier building the world around gameplay convenience and shiny objects between quest markers can make legitimate pieces of world building art blend together rendering the effort pointless by reducing the glut of content and shallow radiant garbage bethesda will not only leave more space for the writers to make more layered interwoven quests but give the location these quests take place at more impact and memorability this also ties into the actual mechanics of exploration that is the character movement in inventory systems because of how weightless and still the traversal is combined with the ironically cumbersome encumbrance system exploring feels more like being a living garbage truck than an adventurer i think a re-evaluation of how the player collects stores and transports items is in order as those mechanics help form the basis for how they choose to navigate the game world instead of this reframe exploration as a series of expeditions again this is something breath of the wild did really well by cooking meals waiting for the right time and considering your angle of approach getting somewhere wasn't just checking an item off a list or following a quest marker but a legitimate achievement in and of itself besides just preparatory measures giving the player less freedom in looting forces them to make more impactful and therefore interesting decisions when encountering treasure this also ties into why better traversal mechanics are needed as i said earlier exploring skyrim is really dull because the only way for the player to forge their own path and explore beyond the very clearly defined trails is to just break the level geometry now i don't know exactly how they can make moving around feel better but they should definitely add more player driven method of exploration rope arrows climbing crawling vaulting levitation big magical ups giving players the tools to let them feel like they're breaking the game provides a tremendous sense of authorship over their experience while also rewarding clever thinking that's really the crux of it give players more agency in determining why they explore how they explore and what they get out of it and that goes for all of elder scrolls six without building the game to accommodate a stronger sense of player or authorship it's just gonna be yet another version of skyrim there'd be no point in making it besides hovering up money from suckers that is alright so that was a lot of whining a lot of non-specific advice that probably isn't enormously helpful but i said it anyway because the potential is there the elder scroll 6 could really be something astounding i feel like an abuse victim when i say that because while games as a whole have come really far since skyrim's debut bethesda has not utilized these advancements beyond sanding their games down to the simplest most mass-market-friendly as possible i picked skyrim apart but i could have just as easily leveled the same criticisms against fallout 4. nothing's changed since 2011. they keep making the same mistakes and aren't advancing the medium like they could it's important to remember that mass market appeal and quality game making are not mutually exclusive the ideas technology resources and talent are out there but it's on bethesda to make use of them and re-evaluate their game design for the better as i mentioned at the beginning there's also no shortage of quality constructive criticism unlike the agonizing hour-long slog you just sat through i am happy to report however that much of this criticism is more thoughtfully constructed and worthwhile to consider than similar stuff people have made for mass effect if you want some further reading as well as seeing where i distilled my arguments from i'd suggest following with links in the description sheamus senpai is back with his analysis of the mind-bendingly nonsensical thieves guild quest line as well as a series on fallout 3's questionable writing there's also his video on how bethesda missed the point of fallout entirely stoneworks has a fantastic analysis of skyrim's map this is great for seeing how designing a map purely around gameplay considerations and marketing hype causes the settings very similar to collapse the closer look also has a video on this that analyzes this on a smaller scale even if his secondary point is scrolls lore wizard fudge muppet has a fantastic and extensive treatise on skyrim's lore failures it's not only good for analyzing how skyrim's lore crafting failed the greater franchise but also why the elder scrolls series is so cool in the first place he's also got a bunch of other huge videos that go into fantastic detail about the setting now i didn't actually watch this video until i was nearly done with this essay but the fact that the nocturnal rambler says pretty much the exact same things i did is very telling about skyrim's flaws he also included a much more specific and thorough teardown of the game's rpg mechanics or lack thereof in case you don't have the patience for longer videos avarti has a 10 minute evisceration of skyrim's factions quests and storytelling but as for my video if you get nothing else out of it i hope you take a more critical eye to skyrim during your next playthrough i hope you think about how risk-averse corporate mismanagement and missing priorities can damage an otherwise legendary series and the impact that can have on a grander scale with the benefit of hindsight i hope you start thinking about exactly how other scrolls can move past skyrim's failures and what those improvements might look like hell starfield's due out next year and i think that'll be an excellent watermark for how bethesda tends to move forward okay that ended up being longer than i planned thanks so much for watching i really appreciate that you made it through such a long video skyrim and the elder scrolls in general needed a much larger re-evaluation than mass effect did also despite that last meme i do think starfield has some potential as an entirely new ip it has the ability to shed a lot of the baggage and retreaded mechanics that exist in bethesda's other properties i also need to give a huge shout out to young scrolls who gave me permission to use his music throughout this video and is playing right now it's talented fans of the series like young scrolls that make elder scrolls still worth discussing there's a deep and abiding love for the franchise that hasn't been rewarded as of late but if you want to give young scrolls the appreciation he deserves i've linked both his youtube channel and his bandcamp in the description lastly if you really want to enjoy what the elder scrolls has to offer play morrowind if you haven't already there's a small modding guide in the description that'll clean up visuals performance and bugs while still feeling like the intended experience the game isn't for everyone but it's absolutely worth trying for yourself if you like this video and want to hear more let me know and making the previous one i discovered a real love for this stuff and i'm definitely going to do more i keep people updated on projects through twitter and i regularly stream on twitch if you want to see my editing process ask some questions or just chat now i was going to end this video with a quick joke but while i was making it seamus young passed away i talked about him a lot more in the mass effect video but if it wasn't for his work we wouldn't be here he was one of the sharpest most insightful games writers out there and he will be missed

Channel: Gunmetal

Views: 634,635

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Id: hots4EKXi2U

Length: 75min 17sec (4517 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022