It’s 11/11/11, which for many of us means a day full of dragon-slaying and tomb-robbing. I thought it might be nice to take a break from all the MOBA talk and see how some RPGs are treating you these days.
I really thought I was going to take a pass on Skyrim. I do love me some dragons, but the gameplay looked essentially the same as Oblivion, and frankly, graphical improvements to a game do little to impress me. In the end, though, the dragons were enough, so I’m playing alongside all of you.
What do you think so far? Personally, I’m feeling a bit ambivalent. Parts of the game are certainly fun. There’s nothing quite like launching a bandit across the room with a well-placed arrow. I still find sneaking to be fairly thrilling, if a little too rewarding. But there are things about the game that I simply wish were more engaging, most notably the combat. Combat has always left a bit to be desired in The Elder Scrolls series, but I thought by number five we’d see some improvement. My biggest problem is that the combat system is pretty much just a spam of clicks or a one-shot sneak attack. Very rarely have I found myself in any sort of mortal danger (although my efforts to kill the friendly Nord who helped me out of Helgen proved futile).
With the shift to console-centric development there has been a noticeable decline in control and menu quality. It’s not that I can’t adapt to these things – I absolutely can – but more that the game takes no advantage of a PC’s particular strengths. Why can I only see a scrolling list of my items or my spells at a time, particularly when they expand from opposite sides of the screen? Why do we not have a better method for displaying some kind of summary of the things we should know about our character?
I do find the open world playstyle very appealing – it’s nice to not have to follow any one quest should I get bored or interested elsewhere. At the same time, it’s still difficult to ignore the ways the open-ended world hamstrings the story behind the game. [ Extremely Minor Spoiler Ahead ] In an early quest, I was tasked with looking for a dragon that had been spotted just outside the town I was in. I was to find it nearby and kill it – an epic task for an early quest, indeed. But I could have postponed the dragon’s demise indefinitely. I could have run off and tried to become a vampire and spent 400 days trying to infect the rest of Skyrim but on day 401 I could still return to my original quest and the dragon would still be there.
The end result of this sort of “pausing” of quest lines is that questing has no real urgency. Nothing is at stake. If I don’t feel ready for the task at hand, either because I’m not strong enough or not interested enough or just want to do some other things, I can spend all the time I need to get ready for the quest. It really trashes my immersion with the game to have that sort of external power of the story.
Nonetheless, I’m enjoying Skyrim. How are you finding it?
