Skyrim from Like/Hate

[Jonathan Meer]

the 10 years since morrowind sure has allowed for some amazing advancements in character behaviour

This sort of attitude annoys me. 'Because this aspect of the game isn't 100% like real life, it's bullshit. You can't present this aspect of the game as groundbreaking because it's still gamey.'

But what we already have is pretty damn significant. Some NPCs will fight you if they see you commit a crime. Some NPCs will run in terror, depending on the crime. There's special dialogue for either case. Injustices you inflict on one character may be referenced by that character's friend ('You've got some nerve coming in here. What you did to [X] was despicable').

Each of the characters in those videos (with the possible exception of Sapphire; not exactly sure what happened there) are storyline-required. If these people die, the storyline ends. By the same token, having them hate you and attack on you sight would have the same effect; you have to talk to these people and have them cooperate with you.

It's an icky scenario, sure. Morrowind solved this by letting you know that the dude you just killed was storyline-centric, and by killing him, the story cannot continue. Oblivion and Skyrim have instead made a very small number of NPCs invulnerable. Neither solution is perfect.

More importantly, in my murderous romps through Skyrim, I haven't found any weirdnesses like that.

Conversation flowcharts are not hard to program. Or "you attack me, I attack you" behaviour. And it's all well and good to have a bunch of objects in the game, but it's not like they do anything. I can't use a fork as an impromptu lockpick, or a chair as a makeshift shield. That'd be ambitious - physics engines and movable objects ain't. Call them forks and chairs, they're still just 3d models that you can move around.

Complex conversation flowcharts, many of which integrate multiple variables (has the player finished X quest yet? Has the player met Y yet? Has the player encountered any dragons yet?), are not trivial.

I can't even imagine how difficult it would be (or performance-intensive) to create a game that allowed such things as using a force as an impromptu lockpick, as an emanative fact about the game, rather than a prescriptive fact about the game. By that I mean this: it's trivial to program a certain class of items to invoke a certain function on a certain mechanism; eg, lockpicks programmed to bring up the lockpicking mini-game on doors. But to program a fork as having specific properties (that it is somewhat pliable, that it conducts electricity, that it weighs 0.05 kilograms), and then to program mechanisms in such a way that they can be manipulated by virtue of those properties, rather than a 'this item does this' way of coding, would be monumental. As in, huge. As in, seriously. You could do that for a very small set of items, but to create a massive world where this sort of item manipulation was robust...no. Too big. I don't see this happening any time soon, without a boon in the third-party licensing world, and huge steps forward in computer processing.

Rose_the_sequel: Well sure, you can manipulate locks by virtue of emanative facts about the fork, but when I burn wood underneath a cauldron, the water doesn't boil. this game is mediocre

I won't ever argue that the games have a lot of 'depth' in that there's an incredible amount of shit to do, but quantity =/= complexity. I do get what you're saying - there's a whole ton of shit in the games and it would take longer to do properly. I guess I'd rather they did less stuff and made it higher quality than aiming for a million quests and items that have little variation.

The quests have a ton of variation. There's a subset of quests that are pretty lame ("Hey, go get me 10 bear pelts." As if I'm ever going to have 10 bear pelts at one time just to bring you so you can give me 200 gold or w/e), but most of the quests are pretty damn big and unique. The story satisfies.

I can understand that approach to gaming; the desire for a smaller, polished masterpiece over the sprawling, rumbly epic. Everyone wants polish. But the other side of the coin is the territory that Bethesda is exploring: the open-world, extremely detailed epic. It's buggy, but it's also one-of-a-kind, and is both fun and astonishing.