Harebrained Mead at the Elders' Ragnarok

"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"

 

Mumford and Sons - After the Storm
 

 

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.

The Idiot's Guide to Dawn and Dusk

"And by the way, N'Sync, why do they sing?
Am I the only one who realizes they stink?
Should I dye my hair pink and care what y'all think?
Lip sync and buy a bigger size of earrings?
It's why I tend to block out when I hear things"

 

Slim Shay-Dee - I'm Back

 

 

Continuing my years-overdue wrap-up of Skyrim, I'm pleasantly impressed by the Dark Brotherhood storyline, with its twists and turns and ups and downs and ups again outshining RPG quests' predictable standard trajectory. I was as counterpoint unimpressed by the Dawnguard expansion and its clutter of forgettable, redundant filler NPCs, loot ranging from chores (soul husks) to cheesy (Arvak) and exaggerated build-up to a lackluster boss fight, etc. The high point of it all came shortly before the end:

 

The Forgotten Vale plays expertly on its Lost World appeal through everything from playing cosmetic changes to monsters right for once (symbolic evolutionary divergence in an isolated environment) to a satisfyingly unsatisfying little dip into Falmer history to the terrain... but especially the terrain. Adventuring across a melting glacier scratches this wolfe's extremophilic itch. In the spirit of exploration, they even reward you for thoroughly exploring the various crevasses with minor but otherwise rare rewards like bird eggs.

That spirit of exploration was banished from the game industry over a decade ago in favor of focusing entirely on keeping customers addicted via "kill ten rats" random loot drops in otherwise as inoffensively bland a casino as possible to house said slot machines. When I first tried Skyrim, one of my first complaints was being ordered to the map's best vantage point as soon as the main quest chain started, instead of being allowed to seek the mountain myself because it's there. Especially jarring in The Elder Scrolls which offer landscapes and exploration as chief selling points. And yet...

 

Azura's statue at dawn

After finally making my way down to Blackreach, I came up through a lift I hadn't used before, which placed me relatively high on the northeastern range. About to transform into mule form and run to Dawnstar to begin selling my dwarvish loot, I noticed another possible path upwards, to the east. While from up close it's too large to appreciate, this little vantage point leading from the lift seems to have been positioned specifically to view the statue of Azura in its full glory. That I exited the cavern just in time to witness the statue of the deity of dawn and dusk outlined against a breaking sunrise was just icing on the cake.

Please, sirs, I'd like some more.

Fast forward to Solstheim. If Dawnguard ultimately disappointed, the Dragonborn expansion builds more successfully on TES' strengths and was obviously given more attention. Voice acting, architecture, quest structure, everything has improved... slightly. Apocrypha alone is a nerd's delight. As is my wont, I set out exploring before running through the main quest. After unraveling the mystery of the exploding spiders I noticed an accessible slope running slightly northwards, suggestive of a map location... but with no marker. Sure enough a glance at my map confirmed an unmarked gap in the mountains.

A hop and a skip later I found myself looking down on a barrow opened to the elements, sarcophagi overgrown with a layer of Skyrim's newest, most wonderfullest ersatz mithril, stalhrim!

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it ain't no trick to get rich quick if you dig-dig-dig with an ancient nordic pick, in a mine, that's all mine, where a million molars... shiiiiiiine!

 

I thought it would've been a nice touch to have all the draugr aggress just as you finish chiseling the last of them out of their mineral cocoons, but must admit it feels even more right climbing back out with my treasure to leave them largely as I found them:

- windbeaten atop their lonely but peaceful mountaintop. Rest easy, noble warriors of yore. This humble lizard-wolfe thanks you and bids you a-dieux.

The stalhrim mine felt perfect: a remote unmarked location with a modest reward, enough to show recognition, conveying an air at once of secrecy, solemnity, giddy discovery and that vague nostalgia for heroic ages past on which high fantasy is built. I immediately minimized to jot down a few notes... and this is where the story turns sour. I had originally intended this as unequivocal praise of the Dragonborn expansion's return to open-world exploration, not only for this episode but for the many chests hidden under waterfalls, the carefully sculpted terrain tempting you with forking passages, the more witsful Morrowind-reminiscent music tracks, all the little gimmicks which make immersion, which make a world out of a plaything. However, in looking up the correct spelling of the word "stahlrim" I ran across a little detail. There is indeed a quest and a marker appended to this barrow. They just don't show up until you've advanced the storyline. Otherwise there's nothing special about the location. You're dragged there by your nose-ring a.k.a. map marker like a good little domesticated, castrated farm(ing) animal, as you're dragged everywhere in Skyrim. Instead of a self-driven discovery, a shared secret between the player and the makers of the universe, a personal challenge to the unknown, it's degraded into a gaudy little tourist attraction complete with folksy tour guide and economic incentivizing.

Why?

Why did this place need a quest and a marker?

As I said before, both the terrain as you exit the hatch from the spider lab and the map itself suggest that cleft in the mountains was intentionally level-designed. Intent = content. Investigate.

 

Why not leave it at that? Bethesda, you possessed a team talented enough to convey information with the elegance of a Sistine Chapel storyboard, yet you treated them like five-year-olds whose tangled crayon ouevres must be explicitly interpreted at every step. You just had to demean your grandest offering, to wreck the effect, to appeal to subhuman imbeciles who need to have everything spelled out for them.

The mass market.

What a mass.

Cheat and Obey

"A little cheat while you turn away
Things we repeat one more time
Day after day

[...]

Go take my place
One more time
Then we can resume"

 

Shivaree - Little Black Mess

 

 

My recent triumphant return to Skyrim hit a small snag along one of the main quest's branches when the old pookven up on the mountain sent me to find a wordwall at Bonestrewn Crest, a location I'd already explored on my own several years ago, cluttering my journal with a broken quest. Gnashing my fangs a bit at the indignity I nonetheless pressed forward with my various other heroic epics, shelving the bug for later. That is, until the courier delivered me a note to find a wordwall at... you guessed it, Bonestrewn Crest.

 

Whew.

Okay, okay, deep breath, deeeeeeeep breath, not gonna get mad, just gonna keep dovahkiining things up elsewhere and not worry about those hideous unfinished quest markers. Let's see, what have the Companions been up to lately? Vilkas wants to hunt dragons with me? Right on my shaggy snarly brother, let us away to... oh, fuck me... nonononoNOOOOOOOoooooo!

(Bonestrewn Crest)

Yes of course it's bugged and doesn't complete upon the dragon's death. How could it even be otherwise?

So at about this point I started wondering why that location name rings a bell from way back six years ago. Oh, right: that one dragon whose death animation doesn't trigger its actual death and continues hammering you with attacks as an invincible supersonic flying skeleton had spawned at... where else but muddafuggin' Bonestrewn Crest?

Let's recap: that's at least four bugs in one location in one playthrough, unaddressed since the game's launch, and while I could just leave the word wall quests unfinished, being permanently stuck with Vilkas in tow would prevent me from completing any stealth-based content so it definitely falls into game-breaking territory and can only be fixed by CHEATING and autocompleting via console commands.

Never ask me to cheat.

Admittedly, Skyrim boasts a pretty good success rate in bug-squashing considering its staggering scope, the content amounting to entire series' worth of other games, but when it fails it fails spectacularly. Bonestrewn Crest is not just bugged in itself, but as far as I can tell one of its problems is not setting completion flags correctly, and thus acts as a magnet for other bugs as well, like the word wall quests which apparently lack a separate flag for locations already visited.

Here we edge from a justifiable margin of error (though after so many years, someone should really be taking another look at this pile of hardcoded incompetence that is Bonestrewn Crest) into developers' disdain for their own customers. Ensuring word walls are flagged separately from (respawning) dungeon completion should've been a core feature of those quests. Did no-one at Bethesda think RPGamers might explore all they could before tackling the climactic epic? Is polishing off side quests before the main event not a core RPG strategy since the '70s? Did you expect me to run clapping my handsies in excitement to execute the greybeards' edict as soon as I got it just because you slapped a damn quest marker on my map?

See, we keep returning to my chief gripe with Skyrim: instead of making the most of its sandbox side (which was TES' claim to fame anyway) it was retooled to appeal to tools, to morons who do what they're told, who chase quest markers instead of plotting their own course in a brave new world.

The Elfemism Treadmill

"those of the after days shall scoff, saying who are the fairies - lies told to the children by women or foolish men - who are these fairies? And some few shall answer: Memories faded dim, a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees, a rustle in the grass, a glint of dew, some subtle intonation of the wind; and others yet fewer shall say... 'Very small and delicate are the fairies now, yet we have eyes to see and ears to hear, and Tavrobel and Kortirion are filled yet with [?this] sweet folk. Spring knows them and Summer too and in Winter still they are among us, but in Autumn most of all do they come out, for Autumn is their season, fallen as they are upon the Autumn of their days. What shall the dreamers of the earth be like when their winter come."

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Book of Lost Tales

 

 

When I first played Morrowind I remember being outraged at hearing Orcs were not their own race but had been narratively elevated to some degenerate form of elves. For about five minutes. Then I remembered my Silmarillion and Tolkien's own explanation: Melkor, unable to create life but only to pervert it, "twisted" some early elves into the first orcs - and the rest is imaginary history. In fact, for all we (justifiably) scoff at every fantasy setting having like, 17 types of superfluous elves now, the sundering of the elves seems one of the earliest stable core concepts of Tolkien's mythology, along with the exile of the gnomes a.k.a. Noldor, from the time Sauron was just an overgrown housecat with a shiny gold collar. Moreover, early versions take the "diminishing" of the firstborn literally, with statuesque, superhuman elves shrinking to toadstool fairy proportions and fading to intangibility as humanity rises to power. Given Tolkien's influence in modern fantasy, maybe we can't blame fantasy cosmologies like The Elder Scrolls for interposing more races of "mer" of varying stature among its other borrowed gimmicks.

For instance something named after the Falmari for no particular reason.

Well... maybe we can blame them just a little.

The snarling troglodyte peppering me with arrows is a "Falmer" or supposedly former race of snow elves, who now run bug farms deep underground in abandoned dwarvish (Dwem-Mer) ruins, with Moria architecture and Minas Morgul lighting. For bonus points, descriptions of the Falmer make sure to reiterate that they were "twisted" into their current form. But they're Totally Not Klingons -errr, Orcs. Orcs are a race of straight-backed, square-jawed noble warriors and blacksmiths who believe in trial by combat, which are completely different from the other straight-backed, square-jawed noble warrior Nords who believe in trial by combat. One kind has boar tusks. Get your noble warrior races straight.

I've already bemoaned here the denigration of Elvish superiority in modern games, but it bears mentioning you run into the same escalation in the other direction. Once you've demeaned elves to being indistinguishable from humans with pointy ears, you immediately need to supply your audience with ultra-elves like fairies and half-dragons. At the other end of the spectrum, once you've elevated orcs to being indistinguishable from humans with tusks, you suddenly require infra-orcs to fill all those empty caves. I'll leave aside the more practical game design question of balance for now in favor of another issue: given that Tolkien himself set the precedents for the sundering and diminishing of elves and their twisting into orcs, how do his modern copycats fail where he succeeded?

Mainly, would-be designers of fantasy worlds now tend to miss the point that many of Tolkien's comments were meant to integrate Christian and pagan mythology and to present Middle-Earth as our own world (place names in early drafts were initially meant to link to the geography of the British Isles) both concerns being utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of fantasy writers whose cosmology tends to be overtly and explicitly set in alternate worlds.

When we encounter them at the end of the Third Age, the elves remain decidedly super-human to act as communal hero's mentor to humanity's quest against Sauron. Their fading has been creeping up on them yet still looms mainly in the future, serving to explain why we future inhabitants of Midgard no longer notice them these days. Are you planning to turn the Tevinter Imperium into Sussex at some point in Dragon Age 17: Hackquisition? No? Then your elves need not fade. Slow birth rates and a lack of concern with realpolitik serve equally well to explain why a race of brilliant immortals hasn't taken over the world.

 

The sundering of the elves served to explain an otherwise odd distinction between "light" and "dark" elves in northern mythology. However, while Tolkien limited himself to Nordic myths (Atlantis aside) his imitators place no such restrictions on themselves. Words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "fairy" or "troll" and "ogre" and "goblin" have always been interchangeable across times and cultures anyway, and if you're already mixing mythologies then splitting one race just bogs you down in gratuitous thematic overlap. Is there a point to Dark Elves when you could just give devils their own culture? Sundering also allowed for some political conflict between elves instead of painting them as a single monolithic voting bloc, but we'll get to that in a moment.

Moreover, the various elvish peoples served to fill in the boundaries beyond Tolkien's narrative. The Teleri at Alqualonde filled a very specific narrative purpose, but shoehorning them and the Vanyar into the action of The Lord of the Rings would've only muddied the already tenuous distinction between Mirkwood and Lothlorien. Turning them all into playable races in an RPG runs the same risk of effacing relevant distinctions instead of outlining them. Or worse, of overlapping too heavily with human provincialism. Do you really need a race of elves defined by turnip-farming?

Painting orcs as malformed elves fed Tolkien's need to adhere to Christian doctrine of a singular creator. Couldn't very well have The Devil matching God's craftsmanship, now could we? But do you, oh modern fabulist, fear angering the almighty Ya-Wee-Wee should you let different gods create their own races? Does OrsiMering the Orcs fit any narrative purpose whatsoever that wouldn't be better served by more straightforward origin stories? Granted, adventure stories usually need boogeymen and the whole fallen angel schtick works wonders but then how do your elf-derived orcs differ from either other elves or from naturally barbaric monkey-men? What's the point?

Stop inventing a "new" race every time you want to tell a story. One could defeat both this specialness inflation and the other major fantasy world foible of medieval stasis by allowing cultures instead of breeds to change. After all, the wistful, somewhat fatigued, fatalistic Noldor who welcomed Bilbo and Frodo are a far cry from the fiery crusaders who crossed the Helcaraxe - and they didn't need to turn into either orcs or turnip-farming hu-mons to achieve that effect. Unfortunately, the common expectation of fantasy races is that each comes pre-built with its own fixed set of cultural beliefs and practices, unto eternity, and different cities populated by the same race are expected to look exactly the same. Occasionally, if we discover that players want to play orcs we might retcon and legitimize orcs... only to replace them with Falmer and discover that NewOrc tastes suspiciously similar to OrcClassic, or that the Fairies singing among the branches are just covering old Elvish Top40 hits.

____________________________________________________

P.S.

Granted, it may seem unfair of me to focus on The Elder Scrolls for this topic, as they've inserted change in a more natural fashion than most game series (Red Mountain, peace treaty terms for political change, etc.) but the series' races and geography were set in stone during the half-assed pre-Y2K period when nobody really expected video game lore to make sense.

P.P.S.
I suppose the title warrants an explanation, as not everyone has necessarily heard the term "euphemism treadmill"

Zu'u Meyz Mey

- because I couldn't find the Draconic translation of "d'oh!"

 

After a few years' on-again, off-again casual visits, I've been trying to polish off my playthrough of Skyrim, a game I've loved to hate in the past. On one hand, I love just wandering around those beautifully immersive landscapes which have elevated The Elder Scrolls to escapist paragons. On the other hand, I'm outright insulted by the console-tailored interface, simplistic skill system and "action" focus and especially the endless quest markers ordering me to and fro instead of letting me schedule my own looting campaigns a la Mount&Blade. What do you get after five years of randomly exploring, crafting and homesteading and little interest in following the idiot-friendly quest chains?

level 175

1.5 million gold pieces

several thousand potions

enough dragon scales to pave a highway

a basement full of skulls, bloody rags, torture / embalming tools and writing implements

... but I've only now witnessed a dragon being resurrected and the civil war... must be doing fine without me, I guess??

 

No more! -quoth the duvet-kink.

I shall finish this game to my satisfaction once and for all, starting with guild storylines, then all this vampire and dragon cultist nonsense, then finally the oversized cliff racers and crushing the rebel scum in the name of nonhuman supremacy. Of course, after all this time, I don't actually remember where anything is. My quest log informs me two of my outstanding tasks had been plucking some weeds in the gigantic cavern of Blackreach, and finding one of the the titular Elder Scrolls. After a couple of weeks of wandering about on other errands, unable to locate the scroll's quest location and having forgotten where all the unicorn-fart-powered elevators to the cavern were located, I consulted the cheat-sheet.

Aha!

The scroll can be found in a "Tower of Mzark" which also functions as one of Blackreach's elevators. Time to kill two birds with one stone, thinks I, clearing my inventory of ingredients and reloading it with enchanted crafts for sale, strapping on my finest equipment and pumping myself up for another lengthy thrust into Tamriel's nether regions.

Then I looked up Mzark's location.

Then I looked out the window of my house, Heljarchen Hall.

Ooohh, you meant THAT tower of mzark...

 

I've been back here a hundred times over the past years. Ever get the impression that virtual worlds serve only to provide new and exciting ways to ask ourselves: "crap, where did I leave my keys?"

Athletic Swarm +1

I've picked up Skyrim again recently, determined to at long last work my way around to finishing the main quests. (I'm over level 100 and haven't ridden a single dragon yet. ("Muffle" that's how. (Shut up.)))

 

Inevitably, it brings to mind Morrowind, which was such a monumental accomplishment for its time, and its differences from Skyrim which is mostly just... eh, acceptable. I do miss spells like levitation, for instance, though I'll admit it would ruin Skyrim's more consistently low(er)-fantasy setting. Nothing breaks immersion in most settings quite like seeing people flitting around willy-nilly like drunken cherubs. On the flip-side of immersion, I don't miss the Athletics skill the least bit.

"Increase:

1 second of Swimming: +0.03
1 second of Running: +0.02"

 

Improving your running by running is perfectly logical. In fact it's pretty much fact. In a game though, getting points for walking ranks one of the most ridiculous notions possible, frequently mocked even by people who think nothing of shooting nuclear wands at space goblins with laser teeth. The problem isn't whether it fits the setting or not, but that characters should advance due to actions the player deliberately undertakes, not for merely performing basic protoplasmic functions. What's next? Experience points for hydrolysis? Ten donuts to level up?

 

Well, occasionally, yes, you do run into such stupidity.

 

 

Backtrack to last year when, not having played Magic:the Gathering since high school, I finally got into the online "arena" version to see what the kiddies are into these days. For the game which introduced most of us to the microtransaction system before it had a name, I was expecting a bit of escalation. It's hard to find any creatures without special abilities now, and drawing extra cards per round is pretty much a must. Some changes I find quite welcome (multicolor lands) while others have reminded me why I haven't considered MTG a worthwhile pastime since junior year lunch hour.

 

A perpetual problem in Arena, for several years from what I hear, has been lifelink procs. As a basic concept, players in MTG have 20 health each and use creatures and magic to whittle each other down to 0. With such a low starting total, anything which increases your life is obviously highly useful in itself. In other words, it's something you'd probably do anyway. So naturally instead of balancing against it, endless cards have been added which proc off life gain itself. I thought nothing could be dumber until a few months ago the "Landfall" ability came in, rewarding you for casting land cards - which, for a point of reference, you're expected to do on average at least once a turn. Scute Swarm is a particularly hilarious form of pandering, as it routinely allows you to instantly summon 8X 3/4 cards in turn 5 or 6 - this in a game with a 20-point base health total. To say nothing of the run-of-the mill free win cards like Victory's Envoy.

 

Mind you, the problem goes beyond imbalance, which is more or less a constant in online games. The trend that's made me grit my teeth over the past decade is a proliferation of "I win" buttons which don't even need to be pressed, which simply trigger automatically by performing feats as mundane and self-sufficient as walking. This is snowflake gaming: participation trophies, victories handed out simply for existing, just for you being you!

 

Not everything needs to be an idle game!

Virtually Real Industry Standards

"Now remember, and I can't stress this enough, this is a talkie, so I want the full gamut of emotions from every actor in every scene."

Futurama, Season 3 Episode 8 - That's Lobstertainment


I felt in the mood for some fantasy roleplaying before diving back into Shadowrun and decided to revisit some oldies while I'm at it. First up was Beyond Divinity. I was rather unenthused by my first exposure to the Divinity series, Divine Divinity, an unimaginative and highly repetitive hack'n'slash Diablo clone with slightly more freeform character advancement and some decent atmosphere. Neverthelessthe more recent Original Sin releases have intrigued me enough to go back and witness the series' early years. Second was Daggerfall, a.k.a. The Elder Scrolls 2, which Bethesda has started offering for the appropriate price of free.

For once, I don't think I'll be getting far past either's tutorials. Daggerfall seems more playable than its predecessor Arena (to wit: mouselook instead of keyboard turning) but it's a bit telling that reviewers praised it almost exclusively for the size of its world and not for its interactive qualities. I've died three times so far to a rogue (? - pixelated to shit) in the very first dungeon simply because I cannot tell how combat works: when does my weapon actually connect, what is its range, when is my opponent capable of blocking, when is he actually swinging his weapon? From what I can tell damage mostly just seems to... happen, regardless of where you and your opponent are actually standing or other details. Don't get me started on swiping the mouse across the screen to swing your weapon, a mechanic which I doubt has ever worked in computer games. Leave that moronic LARPy bullshit to the Wii-wiiis. Yes, I'm sure that by lengthy practice I could learn to abuse such a primitive combat system, and if this were last decade's long RPG drought I just might... but we have better options now.

Beyond Divinity on the other hand actually seems worse than the first title in its particular series. While its superior music stands out (Larian really lucked out with their old composer) it only took me ten seconds to be reminded of the horrendous voice "acting" insulting your eardrums at every turn. It's amazing to see a single game display both positive and negative extremes even within a single facet of its design like sound. Also, while the first installment was a repetitive grindfest, the second gives you two characters to micromanage (one to hack, the other to slash) and deliberately increases the grind: for instance by attacking even one rat I've seemingly declared war upon all rat-kind, set their AI to aggressive so they jump me at every step. Both the two-character setup and the obsession with pervasive (and often cheap) voice acting would crop up much later in Original Sin 1 and 2 respectively, and I wasn't crazy about them even then, but their more amateurish first showing makes them stand out even more as misconceived gimmicks.

I can't help but contrast such gimmickry to my recent experience in Shadowrun: Dragonfall, which has no 3D combat or voice acting despite being put out 15-20yrs after these other games, yet stands as both more immersive and better written from its very introduction. The necessary realization: in retrospect, the problem is not that Dragonfall didn't offer those "features" but that Daggerfall and Beyond Divinity did!

The problem with Beyond Divinity and Daggerfall isn't their poor handling of voice acting or 3D real-time combat, but that neither developer accepted their limitations in pushing for fluff they couldn't deliver. There were good voice actors in video games in 2004 (Bloodlines! holy shit... Bloodlines) if you were willing and able to pay for them. There was better FPS combat in 1996 (Doom and Quake) if you were willing to focus your program on delivering fluid, responsive interactions between character models. Daggerfall could have been an expansive fantasy world with more playable 2.5D turn-based dungeons a la Albion, or Bethesda could have devoted more development time to its combat system and held off generating a gigantic world. Instead of recording interns and acquaintances groaning through terrible dialogue, Larian could have invested more work-hours in its scripts or world-building.

As video games gradually leave their "Betty Boop" stage of neophile appeal, that giddy race to qualify as the latest craze, it becomes more and more obvious just how much the previous four or five decades' products have ignored quality in favor of ticking off lists of nominal features. Self-interest on programmers' part is in some cases blatant, as gaining experience with the latest machinery and procedures improves hirability and job security in any technical field. Who cares that the product doesn't sell (or sells but is remembered as a rip-off) as long as a few code-monkeys got their customers to bankroll their post-graduate studies? However, too often designers' choices merely track the industry's idiosyncrasies, with no obvious benefit to anyone involved. Not every single game needs to recite every single tenet of the accepted definition of its genre.

And I'm not just saying all of this because so many companies are jumping on the 3D goggles bandwagon.

TES 1: Arena

Man, I am so stoked to... be uninstalling this game.

Like most people who found the series before town guards began mysteriously taking arrows in the knee, I came in to The Elder Scrolls circa 2003, when Morrowind had won so much acclaim as to be impossible to ignore. That cRPG, despite its lack of balance, simplistic animations and clunky chore of an inventory system, was a delightfully free and immersive adventurer's realm of adventure set against an intriguing high fantasy take on European incursions into Asia with quaint discoveries (and those damnable cliff racers) lurking around every corner.

This is not that cRPG.

Arena manifests primarily as a Might and Magic clone, and a not particularly creative one at that. It's basest Dungeons and Dragons hack and slash crossed with an untamed randomizer. As you trot about town at night, figures jump out of the shadows at you: rats, goblins, thieves, wolves, orcs, swashbucklers, mages... it doesn't particularly matter, as excepting the odd fireball toss, they'll all perform identically. If you're lucky, you might see a two-frame weapon swing animation as chunks of your HP start disappearing. Lather, rinse, repeat. Don't ask me why the imperial dungeon is patrolled by random goblins instead of actual gaolers. Must've gotten privatized. In the case of rats or even goblins, sometimes you won't even be able to see them as they're short enough to be obfuscated by your skill bar at the bottom and apparently nobody foresaw that problem! And no, in classic 2.5D shooter fashion, of course you can't look up or down. That's crazy talk.

In some ways I'm impressed by how many Elder Scrolls elements were already in place, albeit very awkwardly implemented. The series' directional melee attacks were already in place in 1994, though carried out by swiping your mouse across the screen while holding down RMB. It feels about as weird as it sounds. Luckily your input bears only a slight suggestion to your character's on-screen swishing or your chance to connect a blow, so there's not much in the way of a learning curve. By the by, that thing I'm fighting is a lizardman, which is completely different from an Argonian, which are also in the game, including scales yet seemingly sans their stylish tails. The provinces of Tamriel are pretty much all there, despite Cyrodiil being The Imperial Province and my High Elf hailing from a place inconsistently rendered as Summurset Isle.

And yes of course the various dialogues and texts slingshot randomly between anachronistically modern colloquialisms and cheesy Merrie Olde Englishe. Dude, dost thou not understandest yon game was madeth in the nineties-eth? Don't get me started on the cringe-worthy amateur narration -

- sending me to kill the imperial battle-mage of Tam Real. Aside from that, the plot could be retold on a bar napkin. Add some inexplicably bizarre design decisions: "You cannot save in a tavern, store or temple." WTF? These are precisely the places where I should save! If there were no other save points in the entire game, you should still be able to save at a damn tavern, store or temple!

This is a classic example of a game made on the assumption that games don't need to be good to sell; you were supposed to be enthralled by simply being given the ability to watch pixels roll past and swipe your mouse across the screen. Its main draw seems to have been the infinite redundancy of its absolutely gigantic (but randomly generated) world. Even towns look like endless expanses of the same squarish buildings, with fifteen different inns in my starting location of Cloudrest alone... all showcasing the same fat innkeeper and the same bards and the same randomly generated half-dozen barflies. Copy/paste the same redundancy for temples and stores to supply locations for the simple fetch quests filling your time between hacking and slashing. Beyond being a repetitive chore, Arena simply has nothing to recommend it. No wonder Bethesda keeps taking it and Daggerfall off the market.

Oh, well. I made it to level 4 in a level 2 game... good enough for me.

Dragon 1 : Werwolfe 0

"I get lifted and spin 'til I'm half-twisted
Feet planted and stand with a grin full'a chapped lipstick
[...]
Did I just hear somebody say they wanna challenge me here?
While I'm holding a pistol with this many calibers here?"

Eminem - Amityville



Once upon a fourth era, in a Skyrim far away, a lone moon-beast stalked mountain forts and caves and steep ravines, gorging himself upon the corpses of his enemies. As night turned to day, sated at last, he found his steps had led him to a narrow upthrust of rock overhanging a glorious view of the surrounding landscape. He advanced to stand upon its pinnacle, bathed both in gore and glory, and roared a defiant challenge to the morning world so far beneath him.
...
A moment passed.
A deeper roar answered his challenge from below. He had time to blink before the dragon was upon him.

I wish I could say this screenshot represents the actual event, but it's a mere re-enactment. Possessed as I am of a slight flair for the dramatic, I really did venture out onto that rocky overhang to repeatedly bellow my werewolf howl over the lands below. When the dragon (which apparently sleeps at the bottom of this mountain) swept upwards along the cliff face, its motion knocked my character physically off his mountaintop perch to a rather ignominious falling death. Far from snapping a screenshot in the heat of the moment, I merely stared slack-jawed at my screen, trying to make sense of the past couple of seconds.
As I splattered onto the rocks beneath, the game interface informed me I was entering an area known as Dragontooth Crater.
Dragontooth. No shit. Would've been nice to know that five minutes ago you assholes!

I roared a challenge to the world and my bluff was called. This was not meant to happen. I didn't know there was a dragon sleeping at the bottom of that cliff. The dragon, in its 64-bit brain, certainly didn't know I was coming. No narrator cued suspenseful foreshadowing music. Had I not decided to get loud and proud at that moment, I could have kept walking along the cliffside utterly ignorant of the fire hazard lurking below.

I've been talking a lot about heavily scripted RPGs lately but as good as something like Torment:Tides of Numenera can be, it doesn't quite fill the "adventuring" quota of the emblematic RPG hero's journey. Adventure is not scripted. It's an emergent property. Given adequate substrate, it writes itself. Don't program the dragon to seek me out. Just give it the ability to hear noise and let my hubris do the rest.

Guess what I'm saying is: Mount&Blade 2 just cannot come out soon enough. Good writing's always good, but much too lawful for my chaotic tastes. The Pandemonium of a good sandbox, the thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters yield one campaign after another, pitfalls and pinnacles of storytelling, by simply stepping over the next rise. Good scripted RPGs are a sure thing, a low risk venture: you know what you're getting. Sandboxes are a gamble, but if you keep pounding away at them the stories you write yourself easily surpass the thrill of having lines placed in your character's mouth.
Roguelikes, sandboxes, virtual worlds. Not a nice tidy headshrinker's office where you're quietly guided in exploring your superego and archetypes, but an insane asylum with crumbling walls, shit smeared on the ceilings and dead flies piled on the windowsills. Dirty and freaky and half-baked and howling through the arteries of the world, that's adventure, adventurers.

And yes, sometimes a dragon just jumps up and knocks you off your pedestal.

"You can get capped after just having a cavity filled."

A Werwolfe Curled up on the Fireplace Rug

I can't hate Skyrim. It did some things amazingly well like the landscape, beautifully modeled with both secretive nooks and glorious vistas. However, after seeing Oblivion's alarming decrease in nerdiness, I did give Skyrim a pass in favor of artsier fare until just last year, when my fears and suspicions were more or less confirmed. It's a game marketed to idiots, oversimplified and handing the player undeserved pats on the back at every turn, lacking any sense of scale or proportion but riddled with idiotic Hollywood envy like the bullet-time kill camera. It whipped you onwards with giant map markers so as not to overtax your presumed low gamer IQ with demands of planning or foresight. More so than Oblivion it crammed the repetitive MMO grind down your throat with every area respawning mobs almost as soon as you leave it. It pretty much removed any meaningful resource management, with so many freebies lying around that your only worry is being able to carry everything you find. Every single NPC and faction in Skyrim will gladly let you rob them blind as soon as you declare yourself their friend.

Still, I can't entirely hate Skyrim. Despite its deliberate simplicity and redundancy, that insane pile of money thrown into its development yielded a great many serene, captivating hours wandering the snowy slopes of here and there, picking berries and catching fireflies. Paradoxically, a much better designed game recently drove me to fire up my old Argonian character in Skyrim. For all I enjoyed Pillars of Eternity, it did suffer from some glaring half-implemented features cut short during development and though the spell / ability system's shortcomings had a more negative impact on actual gameplay, I can't help but shed a tear for Caed Nua, PoE's woefully lackluster attempt at a home base. You build one-click simplistic upgrades which serve no purpose and offer little to no eye-candy either: dining rooms in which you never dine, libraries which hold no books, defensive walls awaiting raids which never arrive. Caed Nua never feels like home.

(The Endless Paths of Od Nua on the other hand were freaking brilliant but that's a topic for another day.)

So PoE inadvertently made me fire up Skyrim again, not for the game itself but for its Hearthfire expansion. Welcome home.

After a hard day's looting, a lycanthropic lizardman accompanied by his vampiric witch sidekick and trusty divine hound climb into the southwestern foothills of The Pale to a stately mansion still bearing the signs of ongoing construction. Welcome to Heljarchen Hall. Come in, come in (wipe your feet) and lemme introduce ya to tha missus.

If she minds me adventuring all over the map with a smokin' hot vamp in tow she's never complained. Good sport, old Brelyna, and hey, it's not like I ask what she gets up to with my stout gravely-voiced male servants while I'm gone. Why, yes, of course we have kids - two orphans adopted and spoiled rotten with sweets and dollies and expensive clothes and their own allowance and, errr... and blood-soaked ceremonial sacrifice daggers, which apparently count as children's presents for some strange reason.

Then again daddy's a snarling moon-beast so y'know what, go nuts kid, go sacrifice your pet bunny to a demon prince or something. But hey, the aesthetics alone wouldn't have made me love this place so much. It's rather bland for my tastes. I would've rather dug a rotting dank lair into the ground and filled it with zombies and wild beasts if I'd had the choice, but the most you can get out of Skyrim's options seems to be generic Sims-ish homeyness. Well, okay, my tendencies nonetheless assert themselves - I refuse to put in any lighting in my basement aside from the pale red glow from my forge, though unfortunately I've yet to find a way to fill it with cadavers.

The best part is that you actually build the damn place. You buy a plot of land and buy lumber and have it shipped there and dig for clay and collect all sorts of resources like glass and straw to build each upgrade. Simpleminded and linear it may be, like the rest of Skyrim, but the Hearthfire expansion makes you work for it and that's very important to build a player's sense of attachment to one's base of operations. Even more important, it's functional.

That's my greenhouse. I mostly grow poison and wheat (I'd combine the two but ergotism never made it into the alchemical system) and as the stuff grows it attracts butterflies and bees as well. Whoever masterminded the Hearthfire expansion had an excellent mind for detail and went just one step further with every facet of the place. If you build a kitchen it comes with a functional oven for cooking. You decorate the walls with trophies from the battlefield. Your family sits down for breakfast at the big table in the central room. Your servants defend your home from attacks by wild creatures. Last but not least, these homes are... let's say "situated" - no mere "third house on the left" they occupy distinctive locations, carefully landscaped in keeping with the Elder Scrolls series' brilliant mapmaking in general.

You can spot the hill with your house from half a map away. Your eyes turn homewards from distant mountain peaks. It's "on your way" to here and there, and always so tempting to stop off for a homecooked meal and a little bricolage, maybe pursue your alchemical research in the peace and comfort of your own abode built with your own two hands. Skyrim bores me. I hate all the myriad quest markers ordering me mindlessly in some direction or another. The Hearthfire expansion, however, has beckoned me back several times. Banal and mostly linear, still a functional, self-built home lends a center and a sense of purpose and progression to your wanderings which the idiotic level-grind utterly lacks. I'm always going to dungeons from my house and returning to my house with presents and dreams of renovation and expansion.

Don't underestimate the importance of making the player work for and be rewarded by a base of operations. Hearthfire by itself has more than doubled my Skyrim play-time.

The spine-tingling misadventures of the coccygeal comrades

Pillars of Eternity's got its share of bugs. The biggest one I've found so far (aside from a couple of good old CTDs) is a failure to clear combat states at the end of combat. Sometimes it can be very aggravating, such as characters never getting up after receiving a wound or the rogue ability "shadow step" getting locked in the "on" mode permanently. Other times? Bugs can be pretty funny.

After one fight, two of Kana's three summoned skeletons remained on screen, immobile and untargetable. Quaint in itself, but not worth a second glance. Then I moved to the next area, and the next, and kept wondering if I'd inadvertently triggered some new quest about a skeleton invasion of the Dyrwood. Took me a while to realize these weren't watcher visions but that I'd merely acquired two permanent, immobile, invincible and utterly useless skeleton pets.

I'm'a call'em Ilium and Ischium. Ilium's the upper one of course.

Here's Ilium and Ischium braving the halls of power:

- and the darkest dungeons (Ilium's fallen prey to a desk mimic! oh noes!)

And naturally who could forget that delightfully naughty bonehead brothel romp:
Ilium and Ischium Do Defiance Bay.

Of course, even the mightiest must fall. Our calcified heroes met their match and were eaten in one fell gulp by that bugged out invincible perma-aggro flying dragon skeleton from Skyrim.

The end.
(Who the hell am I kidding, there's no end to bugs.)


________________________________________________
P.S.:
I think more people would've gotten pissed about that Skyrim bug if the sight of a dragon shearing its own flesh off, disintegrating in mid flight at supersonic speeds and whooshing among the clouds as a skeleton weren't so totally friggin' metal!

Surprise!

"As you all know, the key to victory is the element of surprise. Surprise!"
 - Rear Brigadier 25-star General Major Webelo Zap Brannigan

It's been over a decade and that's still one of the funniest one-liners I've ever heard. Must be why so many game designers try to emulate old Zap. Anyway:




That's a vampire about to ice me in Skyrim. Context: the Elder Scrolls games are great worlds for exploring, but combat has always been rather dull. To spice things up and force the game to force me to actually drink some of the thousands of potions I've been alchemizing, I've been steadily ramping up the difficulty. At the start of the game I'd actually had to lower it since I kept running into mobs with two-handers which would lop me noggin off with a single blow. Then gradually as I got stronger it got boring so now at "Master" difficulty it's... still boring, and also frustrating. Half the things in the game are so weak I one-shot them. The other half are so strong they one-shot me. How do you tell them apart? You can't! Random mob #417 turns out to be the biggest badass in Tamriel, and you won't know it until you see your health bar disappear.

I complained about this when talking about Icewind Dale some time ago. You'd walk past a random empty area and have monsters teleport on top of you and insta-gib your casters.
More recently, I've been having the same experience in Warhammer 40k: Armageddon. There is no way to scout. The game's mechanics are solid as a whole but mission structure proves a sad grind of re-loading your last save because you have no way of knowing where to direct your forces.
This was one crucial difference between Half-Life and the likes of Doom, HL's careful introduction of various enemies by showing you those enemies butchering hapless NPCs. It wasn't just window dressing, but offering the player a chance to see how those enemies move and shoot and plan accordingly. Doom 3 simply dropped monsters on top of you. Even that became painfully trite, as it was so overused that you absolutely knew that after picking up an ammo pack you had to immediately turn around to shoot the monster which inevitably teleported in behind you.
Examples of such idiocy abound.

Quicksave/quickload. Replay value. That's called replay value, right?

Look, it's hard to keep single-player games exciting. AI opponents' behavior almost always resolves down toward the pathetically repetitive. Surprises are useful but truly good games foreshadow new elements or changes in pacing or difficulty to allow the player to anticipate and prepare for, y'know, the good stuff coming up ahead. It's good that every once in a while some opponent's power rating is over 9000, but there's no excitement in just randomly getting hit by a 9000-power nuke. Preparation, planning and foresight are not dirty words. You don't have to design games only for fast-fingered, slow-brained mouthbreathers with backwards baseball caps. Scout units, sound cues, cutscenes, aura perception, divination spells, satellite imaging, visual cues as to your opponent's weapons and armor, maps, mission briefings or maybe just a scouter, call it what you will but players need to be allowed to invest resources and effort into at least gathering some hint of their enemies' position, strengths and weaknesses.

Otherwise, you may as well just be dropping anvils on them.

The Shifting Demographic: Because It's There on Your Silver Platter

"And when we have the kids we'll tell them to remind we
Of where we were and how so we never get lazy"

Emeli Sande - Mountains

This is a great view. Given a bit of context, it's also emblematic of the game industry's decline in quality over the past two decades. It's from Skyrim, as any player who's played Skyrim will easily tell you, and I do mean any and every player who's played Skyrim. There's the rub.

The previous two Elder Scrolls games also provided the player with sweeping fantasy-world vistas, Oblivion especially earning a great deal of praise for the views from the mountains above the town of Bruma, encompassing all of Cyrodiil. We are after all talking about video games and visuals have always been the main boundary for developers to push, whether through new technology or artistic panache or (very rarely) both. Even the first game I played, Dune, was lauded for its lavishly pixelated 2D desert sunsets.

By the late '90s Morrowind was 3D and became famous for exploiting three-dimensionality to its fullest, not only through the (for the time) lush visuals in the player's immediate vicinity but for allowing the player to choose his vicinity. The sights you saw were a function of the sites you decided to see to. Explore dwarven or demonic ruins, big cities or untamed wildernesses, uphill or downhill, caves or peaks, rooftops or sewers, it was adventure a la carte. Exploration. Remember that word?

The Elder Scrolls series made its name via its relatively freeform nature. Anyplace might be worth visiting. You followed verbal directions (reading! what a chore, amirite, Generation Facebook?) to some minor location or another which was rumored to house something interesting... and it just might. That little door in the side of a hill might lead you to a ghost story, a magic sword or the last living dwarf, or the hill itself might give you the best view of Tel Aruhn. Up to you to find out.

Several years later Oblivion played up its technological advantage pushing the world fog out past the horizon, allowing the player to view nearly the entire game map from a few choice locations, by actually sending you up into the mountains through the main quest... but that location was not the only one with a good view. Peaks rose above it, with a minor pilgrim's path connected by bridges leading to a minor Daedric quest, and arguably the best vantage point in the game was to the east, the stuff of mere rumors bandied about town, a precipice marked only by a tent and a depressing journal.

The view of Skyrim which started this post is the view of Skyrim. There's a mountain in the middle of the game and the 3D map makes it rather obvious that this is the highest vantage point available providing a 360 view of the world. Had they left it at that it may have been a laudable optional objective, an obvious challenge for any explorer, an Everest to climb simply because it's there. The pioneering spirit, however, is nowhere to be found in modern big-budget video games, either on the developer or the customer side. The mindless rabble demand their stupidity be rewarded and endorphin-pushers are only too happy to provide undeserved validation. As with the overdone introduction and slaying a dragon before you're even out of diapers, this is just one more gimmie.

You're sent up the mountain by the third quest in the main plotline, just like that. Just like that, there's even a conveniently terraced highway leading right to the top, complete with tourist markers. It's Goblin Mountain all over again. What's worse, the top of the mountain, the top of the top of the highest point in the game, is also barred by your progression through the main quest, following the operant conditioning nightmare so entrenched by WoW-clone and Steam achievement mechanics: every reward is tied into obediently following linear instructions and new rewards are constantly dangled before you, contingent on following a longer but no less linear path.

Players are now too stupid to find their own objectives, too insecure to find they've missed something, too shortsighted to make plans, too narrowminded for a sense of perspective. Choice and challenge are dirty words.

Morrowind was not actually the most freeform game out there but it did sufficiently embody the concept to serve as a point of reference for the distinction between theme park and sandbox for much of the RPG / MMO fanbase. So even though I already knew The Elder Scrolls Online was a shameless WoW-clone, it's still sad to see that even its immediate predecessor had already given up the ghost, given in to the current dogma of market control. Skyrim is bearable, but given the series' constant decline I will not be buying The Elder Scrolls 6. So where to now?

"You say we're going to move somewhere with neighbours less crazy
You know I'm going to be there 'cause I trust my baby"

Mount & Blade 2 cannot arrive quickly enough, and I hope it has mountains.

Polloi-er than Hoi Rest, 1

Amazing how many minute, subliminal degradations we suffer without even looking back, like the now proverbial frog in its slowly heating water bath.

When did the word "encumbered" become too high-brow for use in computer games? Did the knuckledragging communications major who first instituted the change pause even for a second to think that replacing the term with an entire sentence made the message so much more... cumbersome?