I contend that The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is more than a little overrated, and these are my reasons why. As always, this is purely personal opinion.
I’ll start with Fable 3. This was the last main game in the Fable series, and the most disappointing, not delivering on big promises, and received a lot of criticism as a result. I personally thought the attacks on head developer Peter Molyneux a little over the top, and a touch two-faced, given that another game released not long after also failed to deliver on big promises, yet got away with it. That game was Skyrim.
Its immediate predecessor in the Elder Scrolls series, Oblivion, had received not unwarranted criticism for the copy-and-paste nature of its dungeons, many of them made by gluing the same selection of pieces together in different ways. For Skyrim, Bethesda promised many more individual dungeons, hand-crafted by the coders. They also boasted about a ‘radiant quest system’ that would generate unlimited quests.
Technically, they delivered on the latter, but in the most basic way possible, as it turned out to be a bare-bones fetch-quest generator – talk to NPC, be asked to find something they lost, be directed to tiny cave you’d almost always already cleared out, grab item from chest, return to NPC. They’d take five minutes, ten tops on the rare occasion it was a new, tiny cave, and much of that was loading screens. Underwhelming, to say the least.
They definitely didn’t deliver on the former. In fact, if anything, the copy-and-paste approach was even more pronounced, especially in the Nord tombs; you see one Draugr-haunted ruin, you’ve seen them all. On top of that, the one new dungeon type – Dwarven Ruins – wasn’t actually that new at all, just a more drawn-out and annoying variation on the prior game’s Ayleid Ruins.
Even more disappointing were the enemies. The Falmer were little more than mildly reworked, more elflike Goblins. There was markedly less visual variety, with the vast majority of enemies being a mild variation on the theme of human. Worst of all, the interesting range of undead foes had been replaced by levels of Draugr you had to strain to see the difference between. In case it wasn’t obvious, I really didn’t like the Draugr; boring, repetitive glorified zombies that made the samey Nord tombs even more wearying.
Another thing reduced were the cities and player houses, just five of each, half of what Oblivion provided. True, this was somewhat redressed by a DLC, but it was still DLC, paid extra content, and not very good DLC, to boot. More on that later.
Then there were the questlines. I’ve recently read that I’m far from alone in being disappointed by the knuckleheaded Civil War quests, but I’d go further. I’d say most of the major questlines, the main story included, are disappointing, for a range of reasons. The fighter’s guild involves the ever-cool element of werewolves, but does hardly anything with it, beyond likely making the player a killer of innocents, just because. It’s short, and unfulfilling.
The College of Winterhold is a shadow of the Mages Guilds from Oblivion; the Thieves Guild has become a Thugs Guild; the Dark Brotherhood is the only decent questline, but seemingly at the expense of others, and it still isn’t great – who ever thought a child wanting to murder their guardian was a good idea? And the ancient vampire in a child’s body isn’t exactly original.
The main quest illustrates one of the more serious issues – the total lack of engaging characters. This is in spite of some top-notch actors, including Christopher Plummer and Terence Stamp. The closest the game gets is a couple of traders in Riften, and guess what? You have to screw them over to start the Thieves Guild quest line. Something pretty cynical about this game, it has to be said.
The biggest problem, though, was the combat. Oblivion made it more prominent than it had been in its predecessor, Morrowind, but at least still provided a decent variety of gameplay, including solid sneak mechanics. Skyrim, in contrast, amped up the combat to such a degree it suffocated everything else. This is clearly illustrated right at the start – your stilted execution is interrupted by a Big, Evil Dragon, cueing up a relentless barrage of combat, just fight, fight, fight and kill, kill, kill until you escape the town. Only at the very end is there a token shrug towards sneaking, with a dozing bear in a cave, but you could easily kill it instead. It’s “MURDERDEATHKILLSLAYKILLMURDER!!!” followed by “oh, and you can sneak, too, but why bother?”
This game’s idea of play variation is choosing what kind of killing machine you want to be – sword-slinging, axe-swinging, arrow-firing or magic-throwing? No more nuance than that. It also makes exploring the overworld a chore as 95% of what’s in it wants to eviscerate you, and they come for you thick and fast, with little to no respite. The only real breathing space is the towns, but a DLC changes that, because of course it does.
Speaking of DLCs, the one mentioned earlier perfectly illustrates the combat obsession. It’s a house-building mod, but like the quest generator, done in basic fashion – you only get to choose from very limited preset options. You also get, free of charge, regular bandit attacks, because what’s a home without viscera smeared over the porch? Further, you have the ability to adopt children, and give them gifts. I once found a drum, and thought it ideal for my digital kid, but the game wouldn’t let me give it to them. The dagger I also happened to have, however, was fine. Musical instruments bad, lethal weapons good. Welcome to Skyrim!
The only thing that made the game tolerable for decent lengths of time was fan mods, three in particular. One changed the behaviour of the animals – skeevers became small and harmless, while bears and wolves only attacked if provoked enough, and could be non-lethally deterred if they did. The second corrected a big oversight in the main quest (spoilers): the leader of the order you largely work with turns out to be a dragon, and at the admittedly pretty great ending, promises to talk to other dragons, so they’ll stop being so aggressive, but it never actually happens…which is where the mod comes in. Now many are peaceful, and actually being able to appreciate the superb designs is pretty awesome. The last mod was a non-lethal weapon in the form of a club, which you could use to knock enemies out, and I recall it being a very popular download.
Unfortunately, Bethesda seem to have taken exactly zero notice of these, since Elder Scrolls Online is not only still combat-crazy, but also throws in nasty quests that end horribly no matter what you do, and leave a bad taste in the mouth; a cynic’s idea of realism. Also, if the leaks of Elder Scrolls 6 are at all accurate, they’re going even bigger on the civil war theme with it.
With Oblivion, the Elder Scrolls games became full action RPGs. With Skyrim, they became action games with RPG trimmings. ES6 sounds like more of the same, or even worse. It’s not entirely out of the question Bethesda might surprise us, and dial down the combat, and bring the RPG back, and maybe even provide some proper gameplay variety, but I doubt it.
If it’s not action-fixated, they, and the rest of the mainstream gaming industry, just aren’t interested. They haven’t the courage to try anything different.
Foxy Musings 