Many Thoughts On Skyrim.

With about fifty hours in, I've completed about as much of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (on the 360) as I'm likely to. It's been a great break from fixing bugs in our upcoming games. Skyrim is more fun that iOS development. You heard it here first.

I've done the main quest plus whatever side quests were interesting or insane enough to attract my interest. I don't want to write a full review because it would be entirely redundant. Everyone already knows it's an excellent game.

Instead, I wanted to say a few quick things about what worked (or sometimes didn't) in Skyrim.

The Quest Writing

For a game this size, with multiple quest chains long and involved enough to feel like full games in themselves, uneven writing is to be expected. Some of the major quests were, indeed, better than others in this regard.

I thought the best writing, going away, was in the Dark Brotherhood (assassin's guild) quest. It was over the top, deranged, and entirely fun. Alas, since players tend to shy away from the evil and deranged, most people won't get to enjoy this bit of concentrated insanity. It's a pity. In Skyrim, having a voice in your head telling you to kill people isn't a handicap. It's a career choice.

Sadly, I thought the least involving writing was in the main game quest, which was just another retelling of, "See that guy over there? He's evil. Kill that guy." Except, in this case, "that guy" is a dragon without much dialogue or presence in the story. The storyline would have been much more involving if the player were able to have more interaction with the main villain.

On the bright side, while the Empire and Rebel quest lines get a tad repetitive (with all those fort assaults), they also do a great job of depicting an epic struggle, full of sacrifices, risks, and hard choices. The bit where the Jarl of Whiterun tries to decide which side to support was really suspenseful and nicely done.

Selling Items

All fantasy RPGs have tedious inventory management and selling of stuff. It's just part of the genre. In recent years, designers have looked for ways to make the economic side of things go faster and eat up less precious play-time. The best example of this is in Torchlight you can have your pet dog take all your junk back to town and sell it for you.

Thank you! More killing, less realism!

But in Skyrim ... Look. If you want to have each shop only buy a limited range of items, fine. And if you want to have shops have a limited amount of gold, fine. And if you want to have stolen items only bought by one character, who doesn't have much money on hand and is well out of the way, fine. But having all three of these means that you hate me.

You might say, “Hey, they want a more realistic feeling world.” Fine. I get that. Just bear in mind that when someone says he played Skyrim for 60 hours, at least 20 of those were spent trying to find someone who will buy eleven pairs of elven boots.

(Yes, I know you can buy feats to change how this works. I prefer to spend my feats on the sort of combat skills that keep me from getting slaughtered the moment I try to ride to the next town, thank you.)

Killing Elves

You spend a lot of time in Skyrim killing elves. In this world, elves are obnoxious and ugly, and you kill them.

This is awesome.

The World Map

The roads in Skyrim are really nicely laid out. I spent just the right amount of time wandering around lost. In a big world like this, you want the player to get lost sometimes. It's a rare pleasure to have a game you can actually get lost in.

On the other hand, I've looked at a lot of maps in my life, and I've never seen one where the cartographer drew in the clouds. Having the in-game world map be a depiction of Skyrim as seen from space, clouds and all, is malicious. It really obscures where you can and can't go.

(Also, the printed map that comes with the game has inaccurate and incomplete roads, and the roads are the most important part of the map. Paper maps are awesome, but the developers should give them a once-over to make sure they’re accurate. This is just the sort of extra that gets people to buy instead of rent.)

Arrow In the Knee

I know I'm supposed to think the whole "Arrow in the knee" meme is overplayed. Sorry. Still cracks me up every time. Especially whenever a guard passive-aggressively says it to me as I run by.

Awesome Evilness

If you are ever in Markarth and some guy asks you to help investigate an abandoned house, do that quest. It's really, really, really evil and deranged. Its audacity should be rewarded with play. In fact, play through it in front of your loved ones. My wife watched me play it and, a few weeks later, she can almost make eye contact with me again.

It's a Great Game

OK. Done nitpicking. It's buggy, sprawling, uneven, and an entirely brilliant game experience. It overwhelms you with sheer size. You can't go for a horsey ride for five minutes without the game trying to distract you with some new cool thing. You can simply get lost in it.

After what seems like an endless parade of games where you mindlessly shoot/slash your way down a corridor, see a cutscene, and then are funneled down another corridor, Skyrim is a delight.

Skyrim Is Buggy and Awesome

I have been slow updating my blog recently. Part of this is fatigue from my recent game release. But most of the blame, of course, falls upon Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Which ate the brains of everyone in our house.

I love it when a role-playing game breaks big and actually infects regular humans. Sure, it's heavy competition for a while, but it also manufacturers hordes of new, fresh RPG fans hoping for more.

We love the game despite all of its considerable frustrations. I love this video, because it captures so much about what makes Skyrim fascinating.

(Video summary: It was possible to steal from shops by taking pots and putting them over the heads of the shopkeepers so they couldn't see you. Yes, this was actually possible. Though I can't get it to work anymore in the newest version.)

Some people mock Skyrim for things like this, which is a truly startling case of missing the point. Sure, it's a flaw. But imagine how cool and detailed this sandbox is to make such a thing possible. It means that they programmed in exact sight lines for detecting theft, which is why sneaking around a shop and robbing the owner blind is such a satisfying minigame.

I've been an Elder Scrolls fan for decades, because of what makes these games so fascinating: Their reach always exceeds their grasp.

The Elder Scrolls series is about making a game so huge and detailed that it overwhelms you. You have to be a shut-in of terrifying proportions to experience everything. You go on a journey to find a dungeon somewhere, and there are so many dungeons and towns and people and quests on the way that you get lost in a maze of perpetual distraction until the real-world sun rises over the horizon.

Of course, computers aren't strong enough to simulate a world, even a small one. They just can't do it. With that level of ambition and that number of moving parts, there will be bugs and flaws. Tons of them. You don't have to scratch the surface hard to find them, even after multiple patches.

This is inevitable. Yes, Bethesda makes buggy games, and they've probably shipped certain games sooner than they should have. However, with that size and complexity and level of ambition, it can't be avoided. There is just too much STUFF, and too many crazy things that can be done with it. Until real artificial intelligence is invented (it won't be), a sandbox of this level of detail can't be represented by a computer without weirdness around the edges. When the range of possible things that can happen is large enough, even the largest, most dedicated group of testers won't find everything that can go wrong.

It's their crazy version of something like reality, and you have to meet it halfway (because there really are a lot of glitches). Elder Scrolls fans accept this, and, in return, they get a computer game experience that's truly unique.

My Two Gaming Pet Peeves For the Day

Our newest game, Avernum: Escape From the Pit, has reached Release Candidate status. This means that we've made a version that seems complete and ready to sell, and we are touching it as little as possible while beta testers spend one more week trying to break it.

This means that I have a very, very important job: Doing nothing. Don't touch the app. Hands off. Anything I change has a chance of breaking something. So I'm spending this week catching up on my game-playing.

(I also made a really spiffy trailer for Avernum. Turns out, there's this site called YouTube. Who knew?)

This has given me a precious chance to find new pet peeves to complain about. And isn't that what blogs are for?

I Need To Drop Three Pounds Of Gloves So That I Can Walk Again

Of course, like everyone else in the world, our house has Skyrim-fever. As you may have heard, it's a good game.

But, like all RPGs Bethesda makes, you spend sooooo much time sorting through items. Looting the dungeons takes ten times longer than killing the monsters within. And you can only carry so many pounds of treasure. So every item you find requires tiresome "Is this hide shield worth enough money to justify the weight. OK. It weighs eight pounds and is worth 20 coins, or 2.5 coins per pound, so that is an efficient piece of treasure to pick up and ... AHHHH. MY BRAINS!!!!!" And then you pick up one suit of armor too many and you have to drop two pounds of stuff so you go through your pack to find something top drop and ...

Does anyone ever find this fun?

This is one of those things that gets hardcore gamerz mad at me, but screw realism. In my newest games, I give the player a Junk Bag. You can put infinite items in it, their weight isn't counted, and, when you reach a store, you can push a button to sell everything in it.

This is great for people who find even the awesome Dog Takes Your Stuff Back To Town To Sell It system in Torchlight too taxing.

It's the opposite of realism, and I really don't care. When I design a game, the first thing I do is decide what I want the player to spend most of his/her time doing. Hopefully, that part is where the fun is. The second thing I do is minimize time spent doing absolutely everything else.

If I can keep even one player from spending a hour picking through his or her backpack and trying to shed those three extra pounds, I have done my good work as a citizen of the Earth.

I Did Those Jumps In 61 Seconds Instead Of 59, So I Should Totally Be Punished.

In any game with a lot of jumping on platforms, it seems like a legal requirement that there has to be at least one room with a timed sequence. You're at the bottom of some shaft with sheer walls and a tunnel at the top. You push a button. Ledges slide out of the walls. And then you hear that accursed, stress-inducing ticking that lets you know that you have to get to the top quickly, or not at all.

"Tick. Tick. Tick. TICK. TICK. TICK. TICKTICKTICKTICKTICK. [Sound of ledges sliding back into walls.] [Sound of you falling to earth, swearing all the way.]"

Is there anyone, anywhere, who pushes that button, hears the telltale ticking sound, and thinks, "This is so AWESOME!"

This isn't fun. Here is why. Gaining a heroic skill (Fighting. Leaping.) is fun. Using that skill is fun. Perfecting a skill is far less fun. Repeating a series of jumps until you can do them perfectly is even less fun than that.

There. I Feel Better.

Very therapeutic. Now I can finish my game in peace.

Also, I was going to write about how every shooter now has you go down one long corridor with no branches (or alternate paths to victory, or variety), but this design trend is contemptible enough to deserve its own post. I just need time for my blood to get more angry.