What I Hate Most about Skyrim

I know you're all looking forward to me moving on from Skyrim and getting back to my regular blogging, and I promise it's coming up soon. I'll win this game this weekend, and then the X-box goes to the nearest yard sale. In the meantime, I thought I'd commiserate with you on my biggest pet peeve of the game.

***

I'm walking outside of some place like Solitude, enjoying the sunshine, the birds flying overhead, the architecture, and the conversations between NPCs working the farm. I'm dangerously close to lollygagging.

I come upon a Khajiit sitting cross-legged on the ground. "Huh!" I say. "I don't think I've spoken to him before. Let's see what he has to say."

ME: "Greetings"

KHAJIIT: "Be wary, my friend, for you greet S'am the Murderer!"

GAME: Ba-da-BUM.

ME: "Wait. What? I don't want another quest."

KHAJIIT: "S'am the Murderer is tired of murder today, though. Perhaps you can fulfill my latest contract for me? I'll teach you everything I know about stealth."

ME: "No! I don't want to help you murder people! Get off my quest board!"

KHAJIIT: "How...unfortunate. I'll remain here until you decide to be reasonable."

ME: "I'm not going to 'be reasonable'! I'm going to turn you in to the nearest guard!"

KHAJIIT: "Ha! As if you have any dialogue options when talking with guards. No, I'm just going to hang out here. You'll come back eventually."

ME: [ends conversation]. "Well, maybe it won't be so bad. Maybe he wants me to kill some Thalmor or something. Let's check..." [opens quest log].

Yeah, I don't have Photoshop, all right? I did this in PowerPoint.

ME: "The hell with that! I'm not murdering young lovers! My character is supposed to be good!

A peal of thunder ripples across the sky as every Daedra lord in the game simultaneously chuckles.

I run up to the nearest guard. "Hey!"

GUARD: "...I'm not kidding you. Not for one second. Curved. Swords. I mean, how the #&*# do you forge a..."

ME: "AAAAARGH!"

I run back to the Khajiit, whip out my Blade of Woe, coat it with poison of lingering damage, sneak up behind S'am, and score a 15x damage hit.

S'am falls to his knees and catches his breath. Again and again I strike him, to no avail.

KHAJIIT: "Have you changed your mind about the contract?"

GUARD: "Stop right there, criminal scum!"

I go charging off into the distance. Pausing the game, I grab my notebook from my desk and vow to write down my own quests from now on and never look at the quest log again.

Three hours later, after all my quests are completed except one.

ME: "You know, I never really did like Mjoll the Lioness. She's probably secretly working with the Thieves' Guild..."

***

Now, I made this one up, of course, but there are plenty of quests that you literally cannot avoid, and the only way to get them off your list is to do something horrible. [Spoilers follow.] Perhaps the worst is in Solitude, where you almost immediately get a miscellaneous quest to "Talk to Jaree-Ra about possible employment." Say three words to him, and you're locked into a quest to put out the fire in a lighthouse, run a ship full of innocent people aground, and loot the wreckage. Even though a nearby guard talks about wanting to arrest Jaree-Ra, you can't talk to him about it. You can't kill Jaree-Ra. There's no way out of it except to ignore the quest in your quest list, which is really hard. I'm not the only one who has that problem, right? Right?

I don't think I'm racist, but if I was, it would be towards Argonians. Just...look at them.

It gets even better. Read a freaking book and you get tagged with "Boethiah's Calling," which ultimately requires you to sacrifice a follower on Boethiah's altar. I couldn't get it off my list even when I massacred all of her followers in front of her shrine--she apparently enjoys that. Want to avoid joining the Thieves' Guild? Ha! Not if you want to solve the Stones of Barenziah quest. Not to mention that you get roped into the Thieves' Guild the moment you have to talk to one of its members during the main quest. Oh, and if a noble-looking knight asks for your help clearing evil from an abandoned house in Markarth, don't do it; you'll end up having to kill not only him, but an innocent priest. Have a problem murdering old ladies? Don't talk to Aventus Aretino in Windhelm. Don't even go near his house.

The problem is so prevalent that when I did find a way out of two quests--joining the Dark Brotherhood and eating dead people--by turning my sword on the quest-givers, I was astonished that it worked. I've never played a game that simultaneously amazed me with the scope and variety of its quests and infuriated me with the inescapability of them. What makes it worse are the quest items that you can't get out of your damned inventory. I'm carrying six or seven things that, because of bugs or some non-traditional approach that I took, I can  neither use nor drop.

The kind of hand-holding evidenced by un-killable NPCs and un-droppable items drives me mad. Morrowind had neither of these "features" and did fine. If you killed someone that broke the main quest, you got a warning, but otherwise you could backstab anyone that offended your sense of morality. Even Oblivion, though it had a few un-killable NPCs, just told you that the quest was over because some key person had died. It didn't try to protect everyone in the game who might some day give you 150 gold pieces. (My favorite approach was in Baldur's Gate, where if you killed a crucial NPC, he'd be replaced in all his future scenes by "Biff the Understudy.") On my current Skyrim playthrough, I got so mad at the citizens of Markarth that I decided to kill every one of them (I partly justified it because I was a vampire at the time) and found that half of them just wouldn't perish, no matter how long I stood over them, swinging my blade, screaming "Why...won't...you...die?!"

Okay, calm down, Chester. It's just a game. And it's a good game. I'm going to give you a mock GIMLET on it when I finish, and I'm sure it'll rank high. But damn, it's got some annoying quirks and bugs. With the effort that they put into all other aspects of the game, I don't understand why they couldn't have put just a little more into the quest options and given me the opportunity to FUS-RO-DAH Jaree-Ra off the castle ramparts.

Too Much of a Good Thing

Over the long weekend, I took CRPG-playing way too far by spending at least 30 hours on four separate CRPGs--and I have almost nothing (blog-wise) to show for it.

The first game was, of course, Skyrim. I've taken a hit on some discussion boards for praising this game, but honestly, the only reason I can think not to like it is that you deliberately want to be contrary. Sure, there are things not to like about it, but to not like it as a whole? Do you like games at all?

Running into dragons keeps cramping my style, though. I get stocked up on potions to make a run at some dungeon, and on the way there I have to drink them all fighting a dragon.

       

The second was Dragon Age: Origins, and playing it has entirely been against my will. My wife, Irene, went and picked up Dragon Age II a few weeks ago, but she insisted on replaying Origins, and all its expansions, this time as a female PC, so she could marry Alistair. Much of my weekend was a fight with Irene about playing Skyrim longer versus stopping it for Dragon Age. First-world problems, I know.

I've had a curious reaction to Dragon Age. On the surface, it seems to have all the things I like about CRPGs--an original game world with lots of lore, memorable NPCs, copious dialogue options, loads of side quests--and yet I find it curiously soulless. Few CRPGs are brilliantly original in their game worlds--most are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons in some way--but Dragon Age more than most feels somehow...assembled. It has that characterless feeling of "master-planned communities" in the mid-west and west, where the streets are all arranged in a grid and there's a strip mall at every major intersection.

It's interesting to compare the two modern games in respect to their approaches to role-playing. In Dragon Age (like most Interplay and Bioware titles), role-playing is almost entirely through dialogue. You decide who you are and you speak accordingly. Someone says something and you get maybe five choices:

1. The "good" option
2. A slightly lamer good option
3. The selfishly-evil option
4. The psychotically-evil option
5. Something to kill the dialogue in case you hate dialogue

    

Sometimes there are fewer, but they basically boil down to good, selfish, bad.

    

Thus:

A young girl approaches, crying. "I've lost Mr. Snuffles!" she wails. "If you can find him, I'll give you these five shiny pieces I found in my da's desk!"

• "I'll do it! And don't worry about the gold. Use that to buy more bread for your family." [Morrigan disapproves]
• "I'll see if I can get to it."
• "Sure, I'll find Mr. Snuffles. But why don't you go home and see if you can find some more shiny pieces first?"
• "I'll take those 'shiny pieces' off your corpse!"
• "Go away, kid."

Again, this is normal in a lot of games from these developers and publishers, but it just feels so much more formulaic in Dragon Age. While I generally like dialogue, I agree that basing role-playing and quests around it forces you along a limited selection of paths. Dragon Age way overdoes it both the dialogue and romances for my tastes, anyway. The fact that I like both doesn't mean I want to spend 20 minutes reassuring Leliana that she's good in the sack.

In Skyrim, on the other hand, role-playing is based on how you interact with the game world--on what you do rather than what you say. The dialogue options, though better than in Oblivion, can't hold a candle to Dragon Age. More than once, indeed, I've found myself forced into accepting quests because I had no dialogue option to tell the quest-giver to sod off. In one city, a knight asked me to accompany him into a haunted house and started me on a path where the only option to get the quest off my quest board was to beat a helpless priest to death with a rusty mace.

I care more about clearing my "to do" list than I do about role-playing!

    

But what happens in between the dialogue in Skyrim is priceless. In Dragon Age, no matter how you role-play, combat and exploration go the same ways. You fight the same enemies in the same places for the same results, and all that matters is your overall motivation. Skyrim offers essentially limitless possibilities in combat and exploration. I'm just outside a bandit chief's room and I need to get a key off him. I could:

• Snipe him with a poisoned-soaked arrow
• Sneak up behind him and try to slit his throat
• Sneak up behind him and pickpocket the key
• Use an invisibility potion to walk up next to him and then let him have it with lightning blasts from both hands
• Summon a wave of skeletons
• Send a follower to take care of him
• Lead him outside and use a "shout" to send him spinning off a nearby cliff, then take the key from his corpse
• Lead him to the nearest guard outpost and let them deal with him
• Get him to chase me into a room full of his bandit friends, then use my "rage" scroll in the room, causing everyone to attack each other

The only way they could make it better is if I could talk to the bandit chief before attacking him, then try to persuade or bribe him for the key. Unfortunately, the game features two types of NPCs: those that you can talk to, and those that come charging at you, swords drawn, the moment they see you. Dragon Age usually has dialogues even when combat is inevitable.

Aside from combat, role-playing in Skyrim manifests itself in doing things like running from animals rather than killing them, ambushing every wandering Thalmor patrol you find, happily stealing from jarls' palaces but not the homes of townsfolk, and of course choosing to specialize in certain skills. The game doesn't generally acknowledge any of this, so you're essentially role-playing for yourself, which I guess some people find lame.

If you're curious about the third and fourth games I was spending time on, well, they're the ones this blog is supposed to be about. If you haven't been following, last Wednesday, I decided I couldn't get any further in Wizard Wars because of copy protection issues, only to have Skirie immediately find the information I needed. I had done a GIMLET and everything. So I spent some more time trying to win that game, and I determined that knowing the ingredients that go into certain spells means nothing if you can't find these ingredients. I visited every territory several times, ending up no further than I was on Wednesday. I'll keep trying.

I need five items to progress, but a golden potion isn't one of them.

      

The last game was Wizardry V, and I confess I devoted the least time to it. I got hung up a bit on the character creation process, which I will detail in the next posting, and I barely got out of the gate.
              

Hint: bonus points of 28 are only possible in 1 out of every 3,426 rolls.

         

Travel has again made both Skyrim and Dragon Age impossible this week, so I should have some more stuff on Wizardry V and maybe Wizard Wars for the next few days.

Skyrim: Mid-Game Review

Because I can't take images from my television, I've stolen these screenshots from The Unofficial Elder Scrolls pages. If they ask me to remove them I will, but I hope my theft is mitigated by my earnest plea that everyone visit TESP because they've done an awesome job cataloging every game, including some I never knew about.

         

When you're a CRPG addict, most games help you temper that addiction by having a certain limit to their duration. I could love Pool of Radiance, and want to play it from sunrise to sundown, but if I did the game would be over in about two days, and I could go back to doing other things. The Elder Scrolls games, on the other hand, go on forever. They're like single-player MMORPGs. I could see marriages ending and players losing their jobs because of Skyrim.

I'm reaching that point that I've noticed before in Morrowind and Oblivion where the game starts to exhaust me. They all have a way of dragging me in with their non-linearity, immersion, compelling plots, and constant character progression. But, ultimately, I tend to burn myself out on them. I've won both Morrowind and Oblivion, but I've started about 6 times as many games as I've won. I've only finished the Morrowind expansion packs once, and I've never finished the two major Oblivion expansions, as much as I liked the game.

All of this sounds negative, but I still maintain that Skyrim is a great game. Maybe not the best I've ever played, but certainly one of the most addictive. Today, as I was playing, I made a quick list of the things I like and don't like about the game:
        
Good Things in Skyrim
          
1. The world is dynamic and chaotic. More than any other game series I've played, The Elder Scrolls represents something of a simulation rather than a tightly-scripted game. The creators established the rules of the engine, seeded the world with objects and characters, and sat back to watch them interact. Thus, every player encounters situations that no other player does. For instance, while traversing the countryside, I came upon a dragon, who immediately engaged me in combat. I fought him for a while, but my hit points dipped dangerously low, so I decided to duck into a nearby house and see if I could recharge. As soon as I got through the front door, the owner--some mage--took exception and started throwing ice shards at me. I ran back outside, pursued by the mage, and ran headlong into the side of the dragon. The mage and dragon apparently decided that I was the least of the threats and started attacking each other. I watched from a distance, cast "heal" until my hit points were restored, and watched as the mage got stomped to death. I then finished off the dragon, whose hit points had been satisfyingly reduced, with a poison-soaked arrow.

It works against you too, unfortunately. I had just left a pleasant farmstead, having promised to deliver a letter from the owner to his son in another town. I suddenly got a message that I had "failed" in the quest. Returning to the farm, I found the owner and his wife dead in their field with a sabre-toothed tiger standing over them.

How many other games allow this kind of randomness in gameplay? NetHack comes to mind, but that's about it.

2. There is a satisfyingly complicated political situation that gives lots of opportunities for role-playing. None of the factions come across as "good" or "evil." You might want to support the empire, but why do they allow bands of Thalmer to roam the kingdom persecuting Talos worshippers? You decide that the Forsworn are barbarian throwbacks, but then hear about all the atrocities the local Nords have been committing on them. Thus, you can pick a side and be lawful neutral, you can adopt a chaotic stance and refuse to pick sides, or you can craftily use the situation to your financial advantage.

3. You have to read to really get a handle on what's happening. Characters tell you about the Stormcloaks, the Thalmer, the Forsworn, and other factions, but you only really understand them if you take time to read the associated books. Like many Elder Scrolls players, I usually start the game determined to read every book--a resolve that collapses the first time I encounter a substantial bookshelf. But I make sure to at least skim everything and make sure I'm not missing some key element of politics or intrigue.

My wife: "You just spent two hours reading books in a game?"

    

4. Combat is realistic and brutal. I'm not saying it's like real melee combat; otherwise, we'd spend most of the game crying. But it's about as real as you can get and still have fun. Swords connect in sprays of blood. If you get too close to enemies, you end up hammering at them with your pommel instead of swinging. Shields can bash as well as defend. Two-handed weapons do more damage but are much harder to wield and aim, as you would expect.

5. I never get sick of fighting dragons. Some seem to have fixed posts, but others roam randomly, much like the Oblivion gates in the previous game.. Realistically, they sometimes ignore you and go flying off as you stand beneath them howling in frustration.
            
6. When I first read about smithing, I thought it sounded stupid. And now I'm addicted. The game offers a set of complicated, interrelated processes by which you can tan leather, smelt ore, improve weapons and armor, and create weapons and armor from scratch. Part of why I like it is related to the economy (below); it's very satisfying to turn two pieces of ore and an amethyst worth 40 gold pieces into a silver ring worth 200. There are also very tangible benefits to improving weapons and armor.
            

7. As far as I can tell, they finally got the economy right. I blogged about game economies early in my career, and it remains a major category in my GIMLET. In Morrowind and Oblivion (as well as countless non-Elder Scrolls games), I find it too easy to get rich too quickly. Skyrim offers so many ways to spend money that 20-30 hours into the game, I'm basically dead broke. (Although I did buy a house in Whiterun.)

8. The alchemy system is cool, but it doesn't break the game. I've liked mixing potions in all the Elder Scrolls games, but Skyrim is the first one to get the balance right. You can't do it anywhere: you have to find an alchemist's lab. The potions aren't quite as strong as the ones in previous games, reagents aren't quite as plentiful, and you don't level up quite as fast. This means that you rarely have a stock of 100 healing potions waiting to bail you out of any battle. I also like that you have to "catch" some of your reagents, like butterflies, fireflies, and fish.

"And now you're spending a half hour making potions? What kind of game is this?"

            
9. The monsters are monstrous. I've mentioned dragons, but there are also giants, sabre-toothed tigers, giant spiders, mammoths, bears, and trolls that are suitably intimidating in their size and prowess. I've played plenty of CRPGs in which I buffed myself before dangerous combats; I don't think I've ever played one in which a foe actually made me turn around and run. My character is level 23, and these creatures still crush me--crush me to goo.

Skyrim's giant spiders are suitably giant and terrifying.

          

10. If you commit murder, you can avoid a bounty by killing all the witnesses. You might wonder who would do this, but if you're roleplaying an imperial loyalist or a Stormcloak separatist, you have plenty of opportunities to ambush and slay roving bands of guardsmen or rebels on the road, which would otherwise count as assault and murder.

11. Although they're nowhere near the level of the Interplay/Bioware titles, NPCs are a lot more interesting than in previous Elder Scrolls games. You have some real dialogue options, not just "topics," with them, and they have very realistic conversations with each other as you walk by--not just a bunch of nonsense about seeing mudcrabs the other day.

12. The world is full of animals, including snowshoe hares, elk, moose, foxes, chickens, cows, fish, dogs, and bats. (Though, strangely, no cats that I've seen.) None of them are threatening, although you can kill them for food. I find that they give the world a lot of ambiance. I've also heard you can create chaos by casting "frenzy" on them in the middle of town, but I haven't tried it yet.


Jury's Still Out

         
1. Occasionally, as you strike the final blow, the game cuts to a brief killing animation, showing you slashing the enemy's throat, or driving your sword through his chest or something. It happens about 1 out of every 10 kills, which is enough to still be fun and not routine. However, my character is often teetering on the edge of death himself by the end of combat, and it's easy, when the game suddenly takes control, to assume for a second that I've been killed. My wife keeps hearing me yell, "OH GODDAMN--oh, wait. Cool."
           
 2. You find a lot of food in the game, and if you have a mind you can find a cookpot and whip up stews, roasts, and apple pie. Cooked meals grant more hit points than their raw materials, but it still seems silly.

3. I realize the lockpicking system is much more realistic in this game, but I don't like it.

4. In Oblivion, you could set one active quest at a time and you'd see a marker pointing your way to it. In Skyrim, you can set any quest as "active," and you see multiple markers. It's not that I don't like the ability to have multiple active quests, but I think quest markers are lame. What's the fun of sneaking into a house to search for some juicy bit of evidence if there's a big arrow pointing you to its exact location? I turn them off and set a custom marker when I want to go to a specific place.

5. The game world is huge, but it's dominated by mountains, which you can't easily scale. Going from one town to another often takes a long time as you try to find passes and climbable slopes. I realize it's more realistic this way, but I still find it annoying.

6. I still haven't quite reconciled myself to the loss of attributes, particularly speed.


Could Do Without Them

1. Almost every dungeon wears out its welcome before I've finished. I find them way too big. I don't mind tough combats, but don't make me wander through two hours' of corridors to find an amulet.

2. The speed and pathfinding of followers in Morrowind was atrocious. You'd get a quest to lead some Argonian to Ebonheart, and it would take hours of slowly--oh, so slowly--walking there, all the while protecting him from Nix hounds, which he was likely to charge, unarmored, with a dagger. Oblivion greatly improved upon followers, making it so that you literally couldn't lose them; if you got ahead of them, they'd appear by your side when you entered a new location. One of them, the infamous Adoring Fan, not even death would shake. Skyrim has reverted to Morrowind's level of pathfinding. While it's nice to be able to swap inventories with a follower, it doesn't do me any good if I have to carefully lead him around every rock and bush. And just like Morrowind and Oblivion, followers have a way of lunging in front of your sword thrusts.

3. In Oblivion, you could hotkey various items and quickly switch among them in combat. In Skyrim, this has been replaced with a "favorites" menu that, while functional, breaks the immersion a bit.

4. Skyrim makes a distinction between alchemical "ingredients" and food, the latter of which can't be used in potions but can be eaten for minor gains in hit points (between 1-5, usually). If you have a lot of food, you can stop in the middle of combat to wolf it down and heal. I'm not sure what's more absurd: the idea that my stomach could hold 26 heads of cabbage, or that an enemy would stop and wait for me to finish gorging myself on them.

5. While I appreciate the dialogue in the game, the voice acting isn't very good and, like Oblivion, depends on too many of the same voices. Claudia Christian, who played Susan Ivanova on Babylon 5, seems to have voiced all the females in the game. It's nice that they got celebrity voice talent, but if you're going to rely on one actress for so many voices, it ought to be someone capable of sounding like different characters.


20-30 hours into the game, and I've barely done anything on the main quest. I've yet to visit the capital, Solitude, nor to find the Imperial Legion, the Blades, the mage's college, the bard's college, or the Thieves' Guild. Haven't encountered a Daedra yet, but I know they're out there. I know there's vampirism and lycanthropy, but they remain in my future. This is a huge game.

I apologize for those of you who think I should stick to my chronology and only look at historical games, but I promise I won't play new releases that often. I may give you one more posting--perhaps with a GIMLET--once I've won, but until then, let's finish up Wizard Wars and get on to Wizardry. I was just about to note the coincidence in names, and then I realized it's because I was playing in alphabetical order. Duh.

One More Skyrim Posting

Dragons don't actually exist, so I can't say with any authority what it would be like to fight one. But I suspect, at least, that it would be harder than in most CRPGs that feature dragons. Such games seem to easily forget that a) dragons are much bigger than people; and b) dragons can fly. I don't care how armed, armored, and experienced you are, I want you to imagine the likely result of taking on a grizzly bear in melee combat. Now imagine if the grizzly bear was 8 times bigger, had wings, had natural scale armor, and could breath fire. Yeah.

Yet in games like Might & Magic and Ultima V, they just casually show up in lists of monsters that you manage to slay with swords and arrows. There are plenty of games that feature dragons, but there are no games that have made me feel like I was truly fighting #&$@#ing dragons!

Until Skyrim, that is. This is the first CRPG I have ever played in which battles against dragons proceed pretty much how I would expect them to proceed, with the dragon taking advantage of its air superiority, and my character hiding behind things and feebly sniping at it with a bow until it gets tired and lands, at which point I go charging with my axe, and most of the time get burned to a crisp in mid-stride.

And if you think that's cool, you should see how the game handles giants. They're actually giant. And they wield weapons that, quite sensibly, kill you in a single hit.

Two days ago, I said: "This will be my last word on the game until about 2023, though: Tomorrow, it's back to Wasteland. I promise." The disheartening thing is not that I'm breaking my promise, but that I didn't even try very hard to keep it. For the last 48 hours, I have done absolutely nothing but play Skyrim, except to feed the cats--but only then because they were howling at me so much that it was interfering with my playing of Skyrim.

I rescind my earlier reservations: the game is fantastic--perhaps the best CRPG I have ever played. More than any other game, the combats make you feel like you are truly fighting for your life. The game world is impossibly detailed, and exploring the dungeons is the most immersive experience I've ever had playing a game. NPCs have real conversations with each other as you wander through cities. The quests, far from the mostly fetch-and-carry missions of Morrowind and Oblivion, are original and nuanced, and offer real role-playing choices. Unlike previous Elder Scrolls games, there are real dialogue options here (although not as extensive as in the Bioware/Interplay titles).

And then there's the back story, which reveals itself only slowly, and brilliantly, in dialogue and books. Set 200 years after Oblivion, the game features a world in which the fabled Empire is truly falling apart, and it's hard to tell at this stage whether this collapse is related to, or independent of, the crisis facing Skyrim. I can't remember another game in which I was so eager to see the main quest unfold, or to try what I've already accomplished with different character classes and choices.

I was wrong about the "dumbing down" of the skill development system. As killias2 said earlier today, "it's like they subtracted 4 and added 10." I wouldn't have minded if the attributes were still there, but overall the "perks" system is a decent replacement for the previous systems. I confess, though, to some paralysis about which perks to choose, so I've been racking up points without spending them.

Did I mention the spells? This is literally the first CRPG I've ever played that really made me want to be a mage. Blasting the bandit with fire from one hand and lighting from the other never gets old.

I haven't quite reached a verdict on how I feel about the smithing process (you can smelt your own ore, tan your own hides, and--using the ingots and leather strips that result from these processes--create and upgrade your weapons) or the alchemy system yet. But I can't say that I hate them.

My one major quibble is the way that a strike from a giant sends you spinning into the stratosphere. It's amusing the first few times, but I suspect that in real life, the hammer would just turn your body into paste. I don't know for sure whether this was intended or a bug.

Anyway: Sorry. I will be back to Wasteland tomorrow, and I can promise this because--after trying every possible way to trick and wheedle my way out of it--I've had to leave my home to go to Rochester, New York for the week. As I couldn't bring my Xbox with me, Skyrim is not an option until I return this weekend. I should have won Wasteland by then; I feel like the end is very close.

The rest of you need to be playing Skyrim. Someone tell me how it is on the PC.

Skyrim Break

Yesterday, I drove home from D.C.--about eight hours--and as I got off the exit for my town, I realized it was almost midnight. Out of idle curiosity, I decided to swing by the local GameStop and see if they were going to be open at midnight for people wanting to purchase Skyrim.

Ho boy. There was a line stretching so far that the people at the end could have probably had the game shipped to them faster than they were going to get it at GameStop. I stopped and chatted with a few of them. Oddly, they weren't all in line for Skyrim, though I was pretty sure that was the only major game released today. Most of them were, though. A lot of them had pre-ordered it, and the consensus seemed to be that expecting to waltz into GameStop and purchase it today was the height of folly. Reasoning that I had plenty of other things to do this weekend, I just drove home and forgot about it.

This morning, I drove down to Wal-Mart to get a universal power adapter for a laptop, and what did I see? An entire case full of copies of Skyrim. Ha! I guess the people who pre-ordered and waited in line got to play it a few extra hours last night, but otherwise I can't imagine why you'd spend a couple hours standing in the cold for it. Anyway, I paid $60 for it and spent most of the day playing it. (I should mention that I bought it for the X-Box 360, not the PC, which is why I couldn't just download it.)

This is the first game that I've bought on opening day, and the first new game I've played in which I didn't read anything about it first. Thus, the plot and gameplay elements were complete surprises to me--and not necessarily happy ones.

I know you don't come to my blog to get breaking news and reviews of current CRPGs, so I'll keep this brief. As in all Elder Scrolls games, you start as a prisoner--this time in a wagon, trundling to your execution in the Nord city of Helgen. The conversations of the other doomed souls in the wagon reveal them to be "Stormcloaks," followers of a lord named Ulfric Stormcloak who has styled himself the rightful king of Skyrim and is in rebellion against the Empire. As the wagon pulls into town and you disembark, the game asks for your race, sex, name, and appearance, and I was happy to see that at last I had the ability to create a bald character.

The executions begin, but just as you put your head down on the chopping block, a dragon appears and starts attacking the town. To hear the locals describe it later, there hasn't been a dragon 'round these parts in a thousand years. As everyone flees in panic, you have the option to follow the Stormcloaks or the Imperial Guard. I chose the Guard--I've never been much of a fan of separatists--and was rewarded with my freedom for helping to save the guard captain. After that, as is par for the course with The Elder Scrolls, the game opens completely up and allows you to go anywhere on the map, though it's strongly suggested that you start in a nearby town. Like Oblivion and Morrowind, the world is vast, with numerous towns, forts, ruins, caves, and other areas to explore, and there promises to be dozens of quests.

The game so far hasn't given me any indication of how long after Oblivion it takes place. I've been avoiding spoilers on that. But clearly some weird stuff has happened, because the folk speak of the "eight divines"--apparently worship of Talos (the ascended Tiber Septim) has been outlawed throughout the empire. Whether this has anything to do with the main quest, involving dragons and civil war, I don't know. [Later edit: I realized that the starting date, in-game, is listed as year 201 of the 4th era. Since the 3rd era ended at the close of Oblivion, I guess this game takes place 201 years later.]

Having played it for a few hours, I'm honestly not sure if I like it. The graphics are beautiful, the sound is first-rate, and the world is very evocative. But the dumbing-down of the character development system that began in Oblivion has continued in Skyrim. In particular:

• You don't choose a class. Instead, you just focus on the skills you want to improve on and sort-of self-define your class. (Increases in any 10 skills lead to a level increase.) This isn't horrible, since you could essentially do the same thing in the previous games (no matter what your initial selection, you could choose to specialize in other skills); however...

• Some of the skills are gone. Particularly irksome are the loss of athletics and acrobatics--I really liked improving those in the previous games. Combat skills have been reduced to "one-handed" and "two-handed" (a far crime from Morrowind's spear, axe, short blade, long blade, and blunt) and there's no more hand-to-hand skill. Overall, Morrowind had 27 skills, Oblivion had 21, and Skyrim has 18.

• Perhaps most shockingly, there are no attributes! Strength, speed, endurance, and so forth are fixed and immutable. Instead, when you increase levels, you make direct boosts to your health, magic, or stamina--these are no longer derived.

Balancing this somewhat are "perks," which are tied to specific skills and are chosen by the player during level-ups. For instance, players who want to specialize in the block skill can choose a "shield bash" perk and marksmen can choose a perk that allows them to zoom. There are hundreds of these, so you have to make more choices than in previous games when it comes to focusing your skills.

Still, many of the things I used to like about Morrowind and Oblivion--incrementally increasing my maximum encumbrance; getting to the point where I can race, leaping across the countryside because of high athletics and speed levels; mixing attribute-boosting potions--are no longer available.

There are some gameplay elements that make up for the changes in character development. Combat is much more realistic and, consequently, much more brutal. You have the option to dual-wield both weapons and spells. Spells are cast continuously, so when you choose to cast "flame" on someone, you can just hold down the trigger and become a human flamethrower (expending magic points constantly, of course). The physics are very realistic, and you can set things on fire (although it doesn't seem to permanently damage them). I like the conversations marginally better, and there's more depth and complexity to the quests. I haven't quite decided if I like the new "smith" skill which allows you to create and upgrade weapons and armor given the right raw materials (unlike previous games, you don't need to repair things), and I'm still struggling a bit with the lockpicking minigame.

Health regenerates continually, like mana and stamina, which I think is somewhat lame.

Oh, and apropos of our recent discussion on the issue, there are children in the game, although I have confirmed that you can't harm a hair on their heads. (Trying counts as a crime and rouses the entire town to slaughter you, however.)

So, a mixed bag, but I still have plenty of things left to discover and may end up liking it in the end. This will be my last word on the game until about 2023, though: Tomorrow, it's back to Wasteland. I promise.


Note: Sorry for the lack of images here, but I don't really know how to capture them on my TV.