Grumpy Old Nerds

Since Final Fantasy first hit the NES a bug has bitten the US market. The ability to live out a heavily story driven game that allows you to still do really cool things. The best of this crop to change the landscape has been such greats as Final Fantasy 7, Fable, and Bioware games (barring DA2) that have really given us the chance to live in another life. MMOs take hundreds of hours to accomplish this, and hand out small chunks of story laced with such timeless classics as "go get pig intestines" only to find a dozen such pigs without said organ. However despite that we, as a community, love RPGs.

Today's review (13 hours of game play in) in Skyrim, the much anticipated next chapter in the Elder Scrolls franchise. Now before we get started let's just take a moment to review the previous Elder Scrolls. First person RPG type action set into a sandbox environment pretty much was their thing. However I remember playing at least one of them and getting so sick of it inside 20 minutes I wanted to throw it out my window. In fact I traded it in long long ago, and who knows where and for what, but I wasn't a fan of it. But Skyrim toted how it made everything so much better. Better enough to intrigue me.

However right out of the ball part the story seems like I've seen this before. And I have, honestly. It's the same sort of bad camera direction I've seen in first person games, but the voice acting almost makes up for it. So I forged on through the expositional dialog that took WAY longer than it should have IMO, and got excited to play this game and see if it was really anything close to Fable in it's open-range class system. Something I enjoyed about the series so much I've tried some extreme things to get that same feel elsewhere.

So do Skyrim stack up to the hype? Well, to be fair, not really. The opening sequence of trying to escape a dragon attack in a prison camp should have been absolutely awesome. Instead I spent the whole run wanting to give Bethesda a punch in the nose for bad controls. Perhaps the PC version has a better key mapping ability, but for the 360 it is a shooter's controls on a hack and slasher's game. I call foul right there. Now this would be an optimal way to play if you were an archer or even a mage. It would feel right at home, but using it to swing swords, axes and other objects of death? It's clunky. It feels like you're a keyboard turner in a MMO E-Sport tournament. Of course that last statement is hyperbole, cause there is no MMO E-Sport. Silly Blizzard. E-Sports are for shooters...

But to be on topic I was to throw some praise out. This game looks beautiful. The details, the character creation, the clothes, armor, even the buildings are really well done. It's a shame that everything looks so good in a way. Because you never get the time to just stare at how wonderful it looks. You can't spend the appropriate amount of time admiring everything from the beaten road path to the way the landscape can change when you do little things like harvest crops. All in all this is a great looking game, and nothing could change that. Yet how is the story? The quests? The interactions? Well to be fair with you.? Meh.

I wish I had something better to say about it, but for the most part the answer is just sort of a giant shrug. The plot isn't on rails, it's just not there. What should be a great plot from how contrived the opening dialog and action was sort of gets lost by the time you reach the second or third step on the journey hunting people and things that are only vaguely associated with the core plot. In fact I spent so much time talking to people that at one point I needed the interface to remind me what the plot was. This game may do a good job at sandboxing, but it tries too hard to accomplish it when the plot gets lost behind errands for shop vendors and blacksmiths.

What else is good about the game since I've just punched it in the face like Rocky? Well to be honest I like the crafting system for the most part. Gathering materials sort of requires you steal from everyone you meet, but the crafting is interesting and you can make some pretty cool looking gear. This also ties into my last statement as I actually enjoyed making items at the forge so much I forgot to bother with the plot until I was completely out of materials. So be grudgingly I forged out to attack more things in search of their goodies, but noticed some over-realism that bothered me.

Night time is so dark you actually can barely see. This is cool to set tone, and a well thought of idea in theory for a game, but when the day slides by so fast, and you can only roam the world for 45 minutes at a time before seeking an inn to wait out the dark, it really stars to wear thin after a while. In fact I'd sometimes just go to the bathroom and leave my man standing in the middle of the road. Why? It doesn't matter. You'll be ok in most areas, and you wont really miss anything.

So what's the overall verdict? If you're not a heavy fan of Elder Scrolls and haven't been drooling over this game? Probably not for you. I admit if I was anticipating this game like I know some people were I might actually be thrilled with some of this stiff. As stands I was on the fence but just couldn't enjoy the game enough to recommend it to a person with a more casual interest in it. That's not to say it's a bad game, it's not, but it's just not the sort of game you play on a whim. This game has a crowd, and I'm pretty sure that crowd already got their copy. So if you're just sort of waiting for a review before you invest, you're already not the crowd this was aimed at.

The game tries really hard to deliver a sense of scale and openness that really hasn't been done before. And for the most part it delivers, but the things that it took for granted to get there are major concerns like game play sensibility and plot direction. Things that any game has to have solidly for anything else to work? This game forgot that part. Still if you're a huge fan you may not even notice, but new players to the series will scratch their head and make funny faces all the way through the strange dialog options, control scheme for melee, and even the slowly unfolding plot.

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gets a mediocre score, and it's a shame. It could have been great, but instead it forgot the fundamentals while trying to rewrite the game.


The Breakdown:

The Good:

* This game looks sexy. There is no way to say otherwise. Every piece of clothing, armor, weapons, all of it looks amazing.
* The crafting system that allows you to make your own armor and weapons is actually really well done. Getting items for it takes a while, so if you're a fan of that you'll be spending a lot of time stealing and killing across the landscape to get back to a tanning rack or forge for more goodies.
* The voice acting is mostly well done. Even the people you don't give a damn about have some well crafted lines. Your dialog responses may be horrible, but listening to them is a pleasure in and of it's self.
* The leveling system has promise to be great, but after the time I've put in on it I can't say for sure. But it's some pretty interesting stuff none the less. With time this could be one very interesting system.


The Bad:

* This game lacks direction. The plot floats around like a helium balloon some kid let go. And while there's always another quest somewhere, the driving goal isn't strong enough to keep you going for the sake of the storytelling.
* Playability, at least for me, is nil. Once I'm done with this game there's little to no chance I'll play it again for another species or class. Without a plot to lead me, or a moral compass to compare yourself to this game lacks the long-term playability it could have had.
* The world is artfully created, but I don't care about it. I don't care about my character or any character out there. I know a lot of effort went into breathing life into this game, but they forgot that you can't stop at a living breathing body. It needs a soul as well.
* The controls are really well done for a shooter. And I enjoy it when I fire a bow (though for some reason I can't hit a damn thing even at point blank) and casting spells that way must be great, but in melee they're slow, clunky and so far below optimal it's a long learning curve that's painful to reach the end of.

Papa Mimic's Score: 5/10