@Lies said:
And here's what's so clever about Skyrim: it uses that scale to distract you from the fact that it actually spends a good 80% of it's time being a pretty mediocre first-person combat game. The role-playing elements are simply trappings: they hang around, colouring and contextualizing the combat in a clever display of sleight-of-hand. And the combat's simply not that good. Better than we've seen in Elder Scrolls previously, no doubt, but the combat in Skyrim is not by any stretch of the imagination, the strong suit of the game. Yet that is where the meat of the game lies, elements of story and world stringing you along from combat to combat. Combat is your only method of SIGNIFICANT interaction with the world of Skyrim. And herein is the issue.
The categorization of Skyrim as a role-playing game is almost disingenuous. I can't say it's a lie, but there's an element of tilt to the statement: it's an action game with extremely complicated and interactive interludes between levels. Which, ultimately, appears to be the direction the modern RPG is moving in, so perhaps I'm spilling words into an issue everyone already knows about. But for a game to get this level of acclaim solely for scale is ridiculous. What you spend your time doing in Skyrim is fighting. Fighting clunky controls and heavily scaling enemies. Sure, you have the option of fighting with magic or swords or archery, but none of those systems are as good as they would be if the scale of the game was less. Ultimately, I don't understand why we should praise Bethesda for managing to cram a bunch of mediocre gameplay systems into one game. Sure, it's an undertaking of impressive scale, but the scale doesn't excuse the mediocrity of the actual gameplay. If what you're doing for a good 80% of the game is simply average (if anyone here will argue that Skyrim's combat is great, I will fight you), does scale really excuse it?
First, I want to know how you're defining scope in this post because I can't pick out exactly what you mean in context unless you mean market penetration.
I would guess that a good bit less than 80% of my time spent in Skyrim was spent fighting. I crafted, picked herbs, talked to folks, tried to cause strange things to happen, broke into houses to see what was there, and most importantly, explored the world on foot--I almost never made it straight to where I was going because something else was interesting enough to make me look at it first instead. I found myself often having spent almost the entirety of my daily time with the game just walking around towns or the overworld and resolving a bunch of quests that didn't necessarily involve fighting.
I don't think that it's bad that Skyrim stands on its surprisingly functional world. Could the combat portion be better? Absolutely. In fact, I don't believe that, until we have some more immersive display and control technology, that first person melee can work super-satisfyingly (I'd love to be proven wrong), and the ranged combat here is not its strong suit either. So. if the importance of Skyrim to me was for its combat alone, I think that your point would resonate better (for me).
Skyrim is built to be a spectacle, I completely agree with you there. Skyrim is full of an insanely huge set of complex moving parts. I think it's beautiful and interesting. It has great stories, buckets of lore, and is incredibly fun to explore. If what you want out of it looks like an action RPG, yeah, you're going to be very reasonably disappointed. If what you're looking for looks more like a tabletop RPG, you're also going to be very reasonably disappointed. But Skyrim's world is a giant set piece that tricks you into believing that you have far more agency than you actually do, and that's even when there's already a fairly huge amount of open-world stuff. It does a great job of bounding what you can do with parallel, sensible constraints.
Broadly, and knowing that this is seriously reductive, I think that an RPG is about giving a player a fleshed-out world and telling them to progress in some fashion that advances player power in their chosen areas over the course of a narrative. These limits land on things like character abilities that affect how the character interacts in the fiction, combat ability increase, customization in gear, etc... Skyrim does that, but also gives you the option to progress in exploration, and it's on a scale that the exploration part doesn't just ring hollow or exclusively as a function of progressing in the narrative. That's an achievement, and why I think it succeeded as well as it did.
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