@project343: as in a threesome?
Chriseg's forum posts
Like millions of others, the game I'll play more than any other this year is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The only reason this is worth mentioning is because I really, really don't like RPGs.
All that leveling up, those tiresome stats, all those dreary fantasy tropes, the endless tinkering with skills and items. Yawn!
Quasi-Medieval fantasy leaves me cold. When I trouble myself to read George R.R. Martin, my eyes roll at his absurd olde worlde lingo. I've never been tempted, not for one second, to actually play World of Warcraft. There are very few people in the world less qualified than me to write about RPGs.
But this Skyrim? This one is different. It's an RPG for the rest of us. It's a land made for you and me; we innocents who care little for warlocks and wizards, guilds and ghosts.
The guys at Bethesda are no mugs. Every single time you see Todd Howard or Pete Hines or Craig Lafferty talking to a journalist, the first thing out of their mouths is the line about Skyrim's accessibility, its universal appeal, its ability to be all things to all men, and women. And this isn't merely a marketing-made dogma shaped for the masses. It's the game's central design principle.
The reason why I can't wait for Skyrim is that it is not an RPG, it's an escape-hatch to another world. All games, especially RPGs, offer this possibility of escape, but Skyrim's detail, realism and the sense of wonder it exudes makes it more tempting for non-RPGers than stat-heavy, graphically-limited rivals.
Here are six reasons why Skyrim will break through to the RPG ambivalent masses.
Beauty and Atmosphere
Bethesda has never failed to create believable worlds that draw us in with their majesty and beauty. Skyrim comes five years after the extraordinary Oblivion, it arrives in the wake of the very different Fallout 3. It's been made during a golden age of this console generation's declining years, a time when artists and programmers have become intimately involved with the technology at their disposal.
Take a walk through those opening scenes of the game and compare this world with anything else on current generation consoles or even PC. As the game progresses, you'll wander through valleys, tundra, cave-scapes, cities and mountains. The music, composed by Jeremy Soule, adds to the grandeur.
When Oblivion came out, I used it to show off 'how amazing games look now' to older family members. They were blown away. Skyrim represents a high point in video game universe creation. It's the sort of game where you wander around, just taking in the scenery, reveling in the detail of every shrub, rock and broken tree.
Exploration
I'll play along with the main quest and probably grab a strategy guide to get through the trickier puzzles, but it's inhabiting the world that grabs my desire, not following an ordained narrative.
Bethesda loves for players to just wander off and pick flowers or chat with washer-women and blacksmiths. This is what makes the game so special.
Lead producer Craig Lafferty recently said, "We make these huge open world games so you can go where you want, be what you want, play what you want, so if you don't ever finish the main quest you're still having a great time."
Executive producer Todd Howard explained, "We really try to give you a big vast world to play in. Be who you want. Do what you want. We don't know what you are doing to do. We just want to give you a load of tools."
Things to Do
Freedom is the central promise of the game. It's not built as a straight line. And there's no shortage of stuff to do: 280 perks, five major cities, 300 books, 150 unique dungeons and 500 individual activities.
The main quest is probably going to be about 30-40 hours long, but that's just a tiny part of the experience, which also includes guild activities, experimentation with potions, herbs and foods, crafting and working. Skyrim is about wandering off and stumbling across caves and abandoned towns and just stuff the designers have placed there on the off-chance that you'll stroll by. Most games still do not behave this way. They don't invest in wanderlust.
And if you really are the sort of person who likes to be taken by the hand, there's a 'Clairvoyance' spell that draws a path along the ground to your next quest objective.
Dragons
It's a good thing the game looks so great. Players busy rubber-necking the gorgeous vistas won't be completely surprised when the dark shadow of a dragon sweeps above their heads.
Obviously, dragons themselves are nothing new in games, or in fantasy worlds. But Bethesda has given us a genuine core mystery in the relationship between your character and these 'enemies.' I'm curious enough about how your dragon-born character will interact with the beasts, above and beyond slaying them on his / her travels and inheriting some of their powers.
We know that the character can speak to the dragons and that is cause for curiosity. There is, of course, speculation that we will get to ride the dragons at some point, and although this has been ruled out by Bethesda, we live in hope.
Simplicity
Here's the killer pitch. When you first create your character, you get to make just one decision - what kind of creature do I want to be? After you've plumped for Argonian, Nord or Orc, or any of the ten races, you make your future choices according to the environments and enemies you encounter. There are no 'classes' forcing you down a particular path. This all plays into the Bethesda ethos of freedom.
Your character will not so much level up as evolve according to choices you make on the fly. Bethesda has taken out the number-crunching and replaced it with an intuitive, believable graphical overlay that includes your weapons choices, the way you interact with other characters and your perks tree.
This last is a particular delight; the constellations become personalized as you choose the perks that will round out your character. That's totally mystical and awesome, even for someone who thinks that spiritual connections with random stars is a big box of hogwash.
People
We can get all excited about environments, combat, quests and dragons, but the thing that we all love most in fiction is people. Skyrim is full of characters going about their daily business, helping you familiarize yourself with their world and their troubles, moving the plot along but also creating personal relationships.
I know there is something odd about Bethesda's 'people' behavior models - the distinctive turning of the head, the creepy gaze - but no-one really does this stuff better. The hours I'll spend just bothering people in the street is actually pretty scary. And in Elder Scrolls, it really matters how you treat people, not just in the way the game pans out, but in how you feel about your character and yourself. If a book makes me feel that way, I count it as great. In a game, it's a real achievement.
Skyrim is an RPG, insofar as you take on the role of a character and battle your way towards specific goals, improving your abilities along the way. Fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's more. It's a world within which we can all willingly lose ourselves.
On 11-11-11, my life, my real life, is going on hold. I have a role to play. For me and many of the people who play this game, it won't matter that Skyrim ticks all the boxes under the rubric 'RPG'. Bethesda's skill is in taking a well-worn mechanic and repackaging it as an adventure, in the old-fashioned sense of the word.
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