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My problem with Elder Scrolls games.
See, my big problem with the Skyrim games is that they just try to do too much. Open-world games try to give more options, certainly but always within certain paramaeters. In Red Dead Redemption, despite all the things you can do, you're still a cowboy. In Mass Effect you're always going to be Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear Shepherd. My big problem with Elder Scrolls is that it tries to eliminate as much guiding as possible to just plop you into a Lord of The Rings-y world and let you cut loose.
"Malkavian, you paragon of all that is right with the world!" I hear you say. "Isn't that a good thing? Shouldn't gaming strive for a entire detailed world and a place where we can do anything?" to which I say no. Skyrim to me, makes the mistake of thinking that more is automatically better. Instead of being the best swordfighting game or best game where you're a wizard or the best game for sneaking up and killing people or the best game where you have a rollicking roller coaster of an adventure through post-Tolkien fantasy, Skyim tries to go across the board and ends up doing okay at them all. There's also a whole bunch of ancilliary nonsense in the game that some people lauded but I really can't see anyone genuinely finding the ability to be a real estate manager more immersive. This leaves me with a game that pulls me in every which way and rather than giving me a sense of freedom gives me a sense of confusion.
See, in any good piece of narrative a guiding hand is required so that you can focus on the emotions related to the specific events going on. A great game should not automatically focus on freedom as it should how it wants the player to feel, and how to guide it there. This isn't a case of tutorials and guiding the player by the hand, as a game like Symphony of The Night shows. Rather it's a sense of aesthetic choices and making goals and atmosphere clear.
It's like the difference between a really good steakhouse and a T.G.I. Fridays. While there's nothing wrong with the T.G.I. Fridays the steakhouse leaves a more impactful impression because the cooks, waiters, and even decorators have put their effort into a specific experience rather than trying to include a billion.
Comments
Jack of all trades, but master of none
Yet ofttimes better than a master of one
Stop reminding me of games I can't play, you evil, evil person.
Yes there was.
Wikipedia says it was added later.
...which somehow makes it not true?
(Huh. Didn't know that.)
I'll have to agree with Malk. Yes, even on that quip about Symphony of the Night.
Ica: Minecraft is a very focused experience. Its focus is building. That game's just not my thing.
Them: Platitudes=/=an actual point.
How many games let you be a lizard man?
Okay, Soul Calibur and probably some game I'm forgetting and Skyrim. That's signifigant./has not played Skyrim to any real extent.
That's sort of my problem with Skyrim, too, though I don't think its allowance of multiple playstyles is a bad thing; it's just too much content for me. I want to play other stuff, too, but if they give me the option to play a buff warrior with imposing armor, a sneaky archer, or a mage of any number of schools, it's actually really tempting. To say nothing of the quests you can take.
I think that, overall, it's really cool that the game has so much content, but I'm not the sort who plays video games fast enough to reap the benefits of such open-ended games entirely. I don't think allowing the game to be played in multiple ways is inherently a bad thing, but if all those ways are executed poorly (not that I think that's the case in Skyrim, though I haven't played it enough to make that assertion), I wouldn't see a problem with case-by-case judgment.
Shining Soul and its sequel let you be a dragon man, which is more or less the same thing as a lizard man.
It's not.
IT IS NOT EVEN REMOTELY THE SAME AND YOU KNOW IT
@Myrmidon: Argonians are playable in all the TES games except the first one.
But the quests all over the world make up for that in my opinion
Ica, clicking on your togglebox seems to make the page unload or something. I don't know what you did, but please fix it.
Why can't you people just white your text?
With that said, I don't mind a game that simply gives me more content and lets me do just as much as I can. the problem is that it doesn't make it automatically perfect and the narrative and storyline is bound to be mediocre simply because of the fact that the story focused and going somewhere.
I dunno about anyone else, but I don't know how to on the mobile site.
>Not stealing a computer from someone else to browse IJBM instead of using the mobile site
>Laughingbitches.jpg
I'm lazy sometimes. :V
Didn't Malk already make this thread, incidentally? I seem to remember something like this before.
Malkavian always makes lenghty rant threads about stuff. is why we keep him around and in a cage. sometimes we even feed him!
very few times, but enough for PETA to not bother us.
I've made statements to a similar extent, but I've never to my knowledge made a thread about it.
I think for what it does Skyrim succeeds more or less, but a game that expanses is going to lose out on contextuality and gratification. I played Skyrim for about four or five hours and I still don't really know what my primary goal was other than to faff about. Without that context a lot of victories tended to lose the ever-important gratification aspect of gaming.
Maybe the problem might also be that 'game' isn't quite the term for something like Elder Scrolls. Maybe 'electric playground' is better.
I just realized that Skyrim's openness doesn't bother me while I could never get into Minecraft.
Minecraft doesn't have much in the way of actual content, is the thing. Give Terraria a shot.
Ah, Terraria's fun, yeah. Enjoy that one quite a bit.
It is true, that, once I got out of the introductory sequence, Skyrim gave me this feeling that I was in a huge unfriendly world and I had no fucking clue as to what I should do.
And then I realized I couldn't see shit with my crappy TV screen and started playing Saints Row 3
Extra Credits did a piece of Skyrim's intro sequence, and how it's not very good:
http://extra-credits.net/episodes/skyrims-opening/
I think that might be part of the alienation you guys refer to.