"You must know life to see decay
[...]
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more"
And now I cling to what I knew
I saw exactly what was true
But oh no more"
I've finally finished TES5: Skyrim, to the extent one can finish an endless game.
 |
| I feel so good I feel so numb, yeah! |
Ironically, it's because I've never found it quite exciting enough to
breathlessly dive into it that I got this far. Since I finally gave in
and bought it six years ago I've kept getting bored then returning to it time and again,
telling myself each time I'd get around to the main quests at last, only
to realize each time that I enjoyed Skyrim more as a more playable incarnation of Morrowind, for the basic Elder Scrolls atmosphere, than for its dumbed-down content. It also filled the gap left by Mount&Blade, turning every outing into a trade run around the map, selling enchanted loot in each town and loading up on more soul gems and elvish/ebony gear as I passed by new dungeons. That this makes more entertaining use of the game than storming Valhalla speaks rather damningly of the series' decline. Oh well, at least along the way, young Alesan and Lucia got the most wholesome upbringing a drow and a lycanthropic lizard can provide:
You know what really ties that whole image together? The obviously unused broom in the back.
Anyway, though I've played Skyrim far more than I ever played Morrowind, it's always been a matter of improved graphics, physics and controls. An uninspired imitation with better production values is still uninspired.
In other news from last year around this time, I also finished Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Unlike Oblivion, which convinced me to hold off on buying Skyrim for several years, and Skyrim which has convinced me to wait until TES 6 lands in the dollar bin, Shadowrun: Dragonfall left me with such a pleasant impression that I immediately dove into the third game in the series.
I did manage to break myself out of my usual elvish support role by playing a melee bruiser for once and enjoyed seeing SHK improved over its two predecessors from any technical standpoints.
The environments are more lush, level design more careful with less wasted space, character skills better integrated, gear and enemies more varied. Most importantly for a story-based RPG, the writing was both expanded and clearly went through more rewrites. Dialogues flow more naturally, instructions are clearer, descriptions more vivid and characters' backstories expounded more smoothly. Yet... though more fleshed out than Dragonfall, Hong Kong is a worse story.
The one outstanding character (though I never tried Racter) was Gaichu.
Take his comment before the finale: "I have the opportunity to kill a god. I cannot allow the opportunity to pass unanswered." It's the essence of roleplaying which characterized Dragonfall's tenser moments but mysteriously vanished from SHK, that extra layer of awareness which makes a worthy companion defined by internal choices instead of circumstance. Unfortunately most others dove headlong into that trap, like your supposedly hyperintelligent hacker chick suddenly taking an
utterly nonsensical strawman skeptic position to fill that perceived
narrative role of a rationalist being proven wrong, despite living among mages all her life and the fact her
best friend summons rat demons!
Worst of all though, Dragonfall's moral ambiguity also vanished. SHK presents almost every situation in simplistic good vs. evil terms, up to and including the ending complete with a shallow act of redemption through martyrdom. Harebrained Schemes pulled the usual bait-and-switch of sequels: using praise from nerds like me to try pushing the next installment into wider appeal... by dumbing down what made the previous one great to begin with.
Fortunately it didn't work for them; unfortunately it worked for Bethesda.
Solstheim, as Skyrim's last expansion zone, shows a fair bit of nostalgia not only for Morrowind itself but for the more interesting design which should've gone into Skyrim.
I ran into this little ceremony of rieklings worshipping a frozen cart and horse in some random cave or another and got more joy out of it than any of the big dramatic quest chain endings. I don't know whether they're referencing something specific and it doesn't matter, because the joke works perfectly as in-universe humor, something the crazy little goblins with the most randomized loot tables in the game might actually do. I required neither a quest marker nor a barrel of loot to enjoy this. It's a sponteneous self-directed discovery, the accepted great selling point of open-world adventuring and TES' claim to fame... so why was I outright surprised to actually find such a surprise?
Gameplay complexity is often the most obvious victim of a company's attempt to dumb down a series for wider appeal, but this goes hand in hand with blander storytelling, characters with more conventional attitudes and less varied environments. While TES started out as overambitious in Arena and Daggerfall, straining too hard for massive (and monotonous) environments and first person slasher combat that didn't particularly function, it hit a sweet spot with Morrowind, which if I recall the chatter, turned out so well precisely because the company was in financial trouble and its developers took a chance on actually making something good, not just marketable.
One of my recurring complaints about Skyrim concerns its generic medievalish towns. Even the ones with more interesting terrain like Markarth and Riften were themselves copied after each other's notion of an island in the center and castle at the far end. The rest might as well be interchangeable. Compare that to Morrowind's variety, from clusters of yurts to Dagon Fel's bucolic thatched roofs to Vivec City's monolithic cantons, the Telvanni's absurd mushroom houses, the martial rectilinearity of Imperial outposts, or Ald'ruhn hunched out of the ash waste like a monstrous half-slumbering swarm in congress with itself. Bethesda deliberately chose to be less interesting than that for TES4 and 5, to restrain themselves so as not to scare away more mundane customers. When you aim for mediocrity, everything suffers.
Role-playing games distinguish themselves from genres which simply present players with pre-chewed tasks by enabling individual choice. They cannot retain their best features, whether it's the spirit of exploration or post-conventional morality or what-have-you while being marketed for mass appeal, to the subhuman degenerates incapable of individual thought. The very notion of a mass-market RPG contradicts itself.
Well, maybe we need, once in a while, to observe failure in success to be reminded to renew our expectations.
A toast, then, at the end of all things, for what should never have been, to make us pine for what might be.
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