Note: this review looks incredibly long, but there’s a stopping point midway before I start laughing about the DLC’s. You can choose your own adventure.
The entirety of the Skyrim experience can be summarized by what it’s like to level the Enchanting skill. Starting the game, you know you want to create powerful magical gear, so you run through the starting quests to begin your collection process. You scrounge every soul gem, pick up all the enchantable items, delve into caves to find new magical effects, and slowly build up your capabilities. Watching the skill steadily rise and using it to make better gear feels immensely rewarding, and you keep on adventuring and working until you reach the very top. Once you’ve reached the goal and made powerful gear that lets you blast through everything with ease though, what do you do now?
As simple as the question is, it’s one I really didn’t have a good answer for when I did my replay for its upcoming 10th anniversary. Why bother exploring those caves and dungeons anymore, when they won’t give me anything better than what I just made? The only joy the simplistic combat offers is in toying with enemies who have no way of opposing you, but there’s only so many times you can shout bandits off cliffs or paralyze them into goofy poses before it starts getting old. There are tons of quests to do, but most of them involve putting you back into a dungeon full of boring draugr, all for the sake of gear you have no use for. The guild quests and main story are slightly better, but their narratives are incredibly basic at best, like the Mage’s College questline for a magical lampshade of no real significance. At worst, you have something like the Thieves’ Guild questline, which is laughably nonsensical at every turn. So, the only thing left for you to enjoy after establishing your build is the expansive wilderness, which to be fair, has a lot of wonderful locations that are worth discovering for their own sake. I applaud how each region feels distinct enough to where you can tell where you are without looking at a map, and the zones flow smoothly enough to where it never feels blatantly artificial. It’s a great place to explore, but walking around isn’t a very expressive activity. RPG’s are all about player expression, building a character, roleplaying, and making decisions, but once you get past those initial hours of setting up your build, there’s no escalation in challenge or roleplaying stakes at all. You just wander the countryside until you run out of interest, and then the experience ends with a whimper instead of a bang.
I don’t want to sound like I really hate this game though, or that I’m trying to be fashionable with criticism of a popular game. There are completely valid reasons it’s popular, with the aforementioned beautiful land to explore perhaps being the most significant. Simplicity can also be a draw of its own, and within the genre I have yet to find a better name for than “after-work-with-a-beer-and-a-podcast-games”, it’s hard to beat. However, I can’t praise a game because it leaves me unengaged enough to do other things at the same time. I was hoping for an RPG that was just a little more enchanting.
This might sound familiar if you’ve read my New Vegas review, but…
Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
The date listed for this completion is for a replay, which was also the first time I played the DLC, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just joke my way through, like a self-indulgent oversized dessert to the main course.
I just said I wanted to avoid sounding like I hate this game, but Dawnguard makes that job difficult. Knowing the first DLC would be all about vampires, I made my character a vampire at the first opportunity. However, the first mission of the expansion is to join the vampire hunters, who welcome a stranger with skin as pale as death and eyes aflame with lust for blood. This doesn’t paint a flattering picture of the organization this whole thing is named after, and the quest involves killing a pile of vampires I should be allied with. It was as if I was fully onboard with this elaborate scam of getting common folk to pay vampire protection money to people who had never actually seen a vampire before. This became doubly hilarious when I rescued the vampire companion introduced in this DLC, Serana. When speaking to her, my character seemed surprised she could tell I was a vampire, even with the aforementioned unmistakable features, and was equally shocked when being told Serana is a vampire herself, when it was painfully obvious after two seconds of looking at her. When following her to the spooky vampire castle, we ran across a few Dawnguard patrols, but since I hadn’t formally accepted the vampire lifestyle yet, they weren’t hostile to, or at all interested in, the two vampires leading the way to the ultimate vampire base. The first time my vampirism was fully recognized was when speaking to the Dracula stand-in, who declared that I wasn’t a REAL vampire, and had simply contracted a lesser version which doesn’t count. My first task after being correctly re-vampired would be to collect a special chalice containing the ultimate blood that was so special that it powers up super vampires. But here’s the kicker: that super blood is how I contracted vampirism in the first place, the game just didn’t have a contingency for that happening. The location with that blood also contained a reference to the magical chalice I was meant to use, but claiming I had seen it before resulted in being called a liar and that there was no way I could have known about it.
In short, the DLC had failed literally every single opportunity for roleplaying. I was utterly amazed at how something as simple as “this character is a vampire” was so thoroughly bungled by an expansion about being a vampire, in a game that already had vampirism to begin with. To make matters worse, the rest of the quest content is incredibly mediocre. You’re told to find an elder scroll, which leads into a quest to find two other elder scrolls, one of which is the same one that’s used in the main story. After another quest to actually read them, you learn where a magical macguffin is, and obtain it in a quest that requires you to run across the map to fill up a jug of water five times. Then, you kill Dracula. If I was amazed before, my reaction to the end of this DLC lacks adequate words. Did it really not include any interesting areas to explore? Did it really not include any deep quests at all? The Soul Cairn was cool to look at and all, and the vampire transformation is sorta cool (albeit mostly useless), but is that really all this DLC offers? Honestly, this might be my least favorite expansion Bethesda has ever released, but I won’t be able to confirm that until the 10th anniversary of Fallout 4.
Dragonborn starts off a lot better, with an original premise about an entire island being slowly brainwashed by someone of incomprehensible power, who is backed by the Daedric prince of knowledge that drives men to madness. Seeing Morrowind again was also a nice start, but as I got deeper into the DLC, I too began to go a little insane. When a quest began to run all over the island and purge the evil from five stones, nightmares of filling that damned water jug flashed in my mind, and the subsequent dungeon involved wandering around to collect five dwarven cubes. At the end of this journey into collectathon madness, what resulted was a final showdown that was the same as any other fight in the game, with the villain slashing at me ineffectually with a sword as I blasted him in the face with thunderbolts. For a DLC about the mind, control, and knowledge, reducing the final encounter to a slap fight feels like a missed opportunity.
Finally, Hearthfire. People may forget this DLC even existed, but Bethesda charged money for it, so it gets a review whether it wants one or not. It’s about building a house, and there are three plots of land to choose from. After that, you collect supplies like lumber and stone, and create the house via selection in a menu. When it comes to the aesthetic or architecture, you have no choice, and the only room for personalization is in which wings you add, such as armories or greenhouses. When it comes to furnishing, it works the same way: you collect supplies and simply buy the items in a menu, without an option for where they're located or what style they should be. For an expansion that exists thanks to the explosion of crafting games, the amount of player expressiveness is incredibly low, with options restricted to “yes” or “no” on a list of prefabricated inclusions. If you want a hunter’s lodge, too bad, you get a normal looking house. If you want to have a basic home attached to a large training ground for warriors, or to live in a specialized study all about research of the arcane, too bad, you get a normal looking house. Also included in this DLC is adoption, where you can furnish your home with a robotic facsimile of a child, who has no significance other than saying hello whenever you decide to visit. I would go on about the oddness of this inclusion, but this small, hilarious paragraph from the wiki says everything I could ever say about how absurd this whole mechanic is:
“If the child's parents are killed by the Dragonborn and the crime is noted by the guards or observed by the child, adoption may not be possible. Children may be "aware" that their parents were killed by the Dragonborn even if the crime was committed while hidden, rendering adoption impossible.
It is possible, however, to guarantee adoption after killing a child's parents. Immediately after committing the crime, by bribing the guards and (magically) calming the child for a certain period, it is possible for children to reach the "acceptance" phase, when it becomes possible to open dialogue with them again. They say things such as "(sigh)," and "What...what am I gonna do?" and at this point, it becomes possible to adopt them.”
If the main review and all this DLC ranting point to one flaw in Skyrim, it’s the total lack of meaningful player expressiveness. The roleplaying is minimal in every regard, and the game is only held up by the fun of exploring the wilderness. No amount of vampires, Morrowind callbacks, or robotic children can fix the fact that the RP part of this G is underwhelming. Whether the exploration actually does make it all worthwhile, well, I guess you’ll have to go on the journey yourself to find out.
And wow, at the end of my New Vegas review I noted that it was too long and hoped everyone reading would have a good day, but this is even longer than that one. To you heroes who love to read, I grant you a plenary indulgence. I really thank you for, appropriately enough, indulging me, and for trusting me with your time.
The entirety of the Skyrim experience can be summarized by what it’s like to level the Enchanting skill. Starting the game, you know you want to create powerful magical gear, so you run through the starting quests to begin your collection process. You scrounge every soul gem, pick up all the enchantable items, delve into caves to find new magical effects, and slowly build up your capabilities. Watching the skill steadily rise and using it to make better gear feels immensely rewarding, and you keep on adventuring and working until you reach the very top. Once you’ve reached the goal and made powerful gear that lets you blast through everything with ease though, what do you do now?
As simple as the question is, it’s one I really didn’t have a good answer for when I did my replay for its upcoming 10th anniversary. Why bother exploring those caves and dungeons anymore, when they won’t give me anything better than what I just made? The only joy the simplistic combat offers is in toying with enemies who have no way of opposing you, but there’s only so many times you can shout bandits off cliffs or paralyze them into goofy poses before it starts getting old. There are tons of quests to do, but most of them involve putting you back into a dungeon full of boring draugr, all for the sake of gear you have no use for. The guild quests and main story are slightly better, but their narratives are incredibly basic at best, like the Mage’s College questline for a magical lampshade of no real significance. At worst, you have something like the Thieves’ Guild questline, which is laughably nonsensical at every turn. So, the only thing left for you to enjoy after establishing your build is the expansive wilderness, which to be fair, has a lot of wonderful locations that are worth discovering for their own sake. I applaud how each region feels distinct enough to where you can tell where you are without looking at a map, and the zones flow smoothly enough to where it never feels blatantly artificial. It’s a great place to explore, but walking around isn’t a very expressive activity. RPG’s are all about player expression, building a character, roleplaying, and making decisions, but once you get past those initial hours of setting up your build, there’s no escalation in challenge or roleplaying stakes at all. You just wander the countryside until you run out of interest, and then the experience ends with a whimper instead of a bang.
I don’t want to sound like I really hate this game though, or that I’m trying to be fashionable with criticism of a popular game. There are completely valid reasons it’s popular, with the aforementioned beautiful land to explore perhaps being the most significant. Simplicity can also be a draw of its own, and within the genre I have yet to find a better name for than “after-work-with-a-beer-and-a-podcast-games”, it’s hard to beat. However, I can’t praise a game because it leaves me unengaged enough to do other things at the same time. I was hoping for an RPG that was just a little more enchanting.
This might sound familiar if you’ve read my New Vegas review, but…
Addendum on the DLC (includes spoilers):
The date listed for this completion is for a replay, which was also the first time I played the DLC, so here’s the DLC for the review. Just like last time, this will be longer than the actual review, and this is where I drop all pretense of being clever and just joke my way through, like a self-indulgent oversized dessert to the main course.
I just said I wanted to avoid sounding like I hate this game, but Dawnguard makes that job difficult. Knowing the first DLC would be all about vampires, I made my character a vampire at the first opportunity. However, the first mission of the expansion is to join the vampire hunters, who welcome a stranger with skin as pale as death and eyes aflame with lust for blood. This doesn’t paint a flattering picture of the organization this whole thing is named after, and the quest involves killing a pile of vampires I should be allied with. It was as if I was fully onboard with this elaborate scam of getting common folk to pay vampire protection money to people who had never actually seen a vampire before. This became doubly hilarious when I rescued the vampire companion introduced in this DLC, Serana. When speaking to her, my character seemed surprised she could tell I was a vampire, even with the aforementioned unmistakable features, and was equally shocked when being told Serana is a vampire herself, when it was painfully obvious after two seconds of looking at her. When following her to the spooky vampire castle, we ran across a few Dawnguard patrols, but since I hadn’t formally accepted the vampire lifestyle yet, they weren’t hostile to, or at all interested in, the two vampires leading the way to the ultimate vampire base. The first time my vampirism was fully recognized was when speaking to the Dracula stand-in, who declared that I wasn’t a REAL vampire, and had simply contracted a lesser version which doesn’t count. My first task after being correctly re-vampired would be to collect a special chalice containing the ultimate blood that was so special that it powers up super vampires. But here’s the kicker: that super blood is how I contracted vampirism in the first place, the game just didn’t have a contingency for that happening. The location with that blood also contained a reference to the magical chalice I was meant to use, but claiming I had seen it before resulted in being called a liar and that there was no way I could have known about it.
In short, the DLC had failed literally every single opportunity for roleplaying. I was utterly amazed at how something as simple as “this character is a vampire” was so thoroughly bungled by an expansion about being a vampire, in a game that already had vampirism to begin with. To make matters worse, the rest of the quest content is incredibly mediocre. You’re told to find an elder scroll, which leads into a quest to find two other elder scrolls, one of which is the same one that’s used in the main story. After another quest to actually read them, you learn where a magical macguffin is, and obtain it in a quest that requires you to run across the map to fill up a jug of water five times. Then, you kill Dracula. If I was amazed before, my reaction to the end of this DLC lacks adequate words. Did it really not include any interesting areas to explore? Did it really not include any deep quests at all? The Soul Cairn was cool to look at and all, and the vampire transformation is sorta cool (albeit mostly useless), but is that really all this DLC offers? Honestly, this might be my least favorite expansion Bethesda has ever released, but I won’t be able to confirm that until the 10th anniversary of Fallout 4.
Dragonborn starts off a lot better, with an original premise about an entire island being slowly brainwashed by someone of incomprehensible power, who is backed by the Daedric prince of knowledge that drives men to madness. Seeing Morrowind again was also a nice start, but as I got deeper into the DLC, I too began to go a little insane. When a quest began to run all over the island and purge the evil from five stones, nightmares of filling that damned water jug flashed in my mind, and the subsequent dungeon involved wandering around to collect five dwarven cubes. At the end of this journey into collectathon madness, what resulted was a final showdown that was the same as any other fight in the game, with the villain slashing at me ineffectually with a sword as I blasted him in the face with thunderbolts. For a DLC about the mind, control, and knowledge, reducing the final encounter to a slap fight feels like a missed opportunity.
Finally, Hearthfire. People may forget this DLC even existed, but Bethesda charged money for it, so it gets a review whether it wants one or not. It’s about building a house, and there are three plots of land to choose from. After that, you collect supplies like lumber and stone, and create the house via selection in a menu. When it comes to the aesthetic or architecture, you have no choice, and the only room for personalization is in which wings you add, such as armories or greenhouses. When it comes to furnishing, it works the same way: you collect supplies and simply buy the items in a menu, without an option for where they're located or what style they should be. For an expansion that exists thanks to the explosion of crafting games, the amount of player expressiveness is incredibly low, with options restricted to “yes” or “no” on a list of prefabricated inclusions. If you want a hunter’s lodge, too bad, you get a normal looking house. If you want to have a basic home attached to a large training ground for warriors, or to live in a specialized study all about research of the arcane, too bad, you get a normal looking house. Also included in this DLC is adoption, where you can furnish your home with a robotic facsimile of a child, who has no significance other than saying hello whenever you decide to visit. I would go on about the oddness of this inclusion, but this small, hilarious paragraph from the wiki says everything I could ever say about how absurd this whole mechanic is:
“If the child's parents are killed by the Dragonborn and the crime is noted by the guards or observed by the child, adoption may not be possible. Children may be "aware" that their parents were killed by the Dragonborn even if the crime was committed while hidden, rendering adoption impossible.
It is possible, however, to guarantee adoption after killing a child's parents. Immediately after committing the crime, by bribing the guards and (magically) calming the child for a certain period, it is possible for children to reach the "acceptance" phase, when it becomes possible to open dialogue with them again. They say things such as "(sigh)," and "What...what am I gonna do?" and at this point, it becomes possible to adopt them.”
If the main review and all this DLC ranting point to one flaw in Skyrim, it’s the total lack of meaningful player expressiveness. The roleplaying is minimal in every regard, and the game is only held up by the fun of exploring the wilderness. No amount of vampires, Morrowind callbacks, or robotic children can fix the fact that the RP part of this G is underwhelming. Whether the exploration actually does make it all worthwhile, well, I guess you’ll have to go on the journey yourself to find out.
And wow, at the end of my New Vegas review I noted that it was too long and hoped everyone reading would have a good day, but this is even longer than that one. To you heroes who love to read, I grant you a plenary indulgence. I really thank you for, appropriately enough, indulging me, and for trusting me with your time.
DELETED
2 years ago