Great Games That Actually Suck: The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim

As a child of the 80s, I was a pretty Nintendo-obsessed kid. The NES was the greatest gift anyone could ever bestow upon the world, and every game made for that console was beyond reproach. Nintendo could do no wrong in my eyes, and I considered every NES game released to be a masterpiece, regardless of whether or not it was actually developed by Nintendo.

That is, until my parents brought me a game they had purchased at a garage sale - Where's Waldo?

Where's Waldo? has a reputation for being one of the worst NES games of all time. Even as a Nintendo-obsessed kid, I recognised that this game was really, really awful; in fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the first video game I ever hated. A few months ago, I decided to load this game up in an NES emulator, just to see if it really were as bad as people claimed, only to see a rather familiar name on the loading screen: Bethesda Softworks.

Yes, they've been around for a while, yet in all this time they've never gotten around to producing anything memorable except The Elder Scrolls series. Try asking an Elder Scrolls fan what the developers have produced besides those games and Fallout 3 (which wasn't originally created by Bethesda) and you'll likely get blank stares. And when you get right down to it, were The Elder Scrolls games really that great in the first place? You can tell how important a title is by measuring its influence on other games - Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Ultima all had a tremendous influence on the RPG genre. But The Elder Scrolls? How many elements of those games have undergone osmosis to other developers' projects? Given how no one seems interested in emulating that series' formula, I'd argue that it's almost totally irrelevant.

The Elder Scrolls is proof that today's gaming market is so stagnant, so utterly bereft of creativity, that one can release the same game over and over, only with fewer features, better graphics, and more bugs, and still have people praise it to high heavens. I'm not exaggerating when I say that The Elder Scrolls is the only game Bethesda knows how to make. Even when they got their hands on the Fallout franchise, they shoved it into the Elder Scrolls mould, and one of their designers stated that he was mystified that games like Starcraft and Diablo weren't being made with a first-person perspective!

Skyrim is the latest installment in The Elder Scrolls, and like its predecessor Oblivion it's been hyped to hell by the sycophantic gaming press who claim it "fixes all the problems of Oblivion" (which reviewers conveniently failed to mention back when the game was actually released). But Skyrim is little more than Oblivion with fewer features and prettier graphics, and like Oblivion, the game displays a staggering level of incompetence at every level. Then again, what can you expect from a developer like Bethesda, who has so little regard for quality that their fanbase's rallying cry is "The Modders will fix it!"?

Skyrim, like every other Elder Scrolls game, purports to offer you a great, expansive world, where the player can "go anywhere and do anything!" And on the surface, the world of Skyrim does appear to offer a world that is vast and completely open-ended, allowing an unprecedented level of freedom. You can see a snow-peaked mountain in the distance, and know that you can actually climb that mountain. You can stand at the edge of a vast forest, and know that it's entirely open to you. For the first few hours of play, Skyrim appears to offer the player a massive amount of content to experience. But it doesn't take long to see through the thin veneer of the "open world" realise that, while it has all the breadth of an ocean, it has all the depth of a puddle.

Skyrim looks pretty, and appears to offer a world of possibilities, but there's very little worth doing in that world.

The game begins with the player character having been taken prisoner by the Imperials and on his/her way to his/her execution. It turns out that she/he/it was caught trying to cross the border into the land of Skyrim, and had the misfortune of doing so in the company of the Stormcloaks, who are fighting to free their homeland from Imperial domination. You see, since the events of Oblivion, the High Elves (AKA the Altmer) have launched a war against the Empire, which ended with a rather one-sided treaty demanding (among other things) that worship of Talos (a human who ascended to godhood) be outlawed, and since Talos was a hero of Skyrim, that doesn't sit well with the population of that province. Skyrim is now split between those loyal to the Empire and those wanting to secede, and it looks as if a civil war is brewing.

Of course, before the player character's execution can be carried out, a dragon swoops in and starts torching the place. The player can choose to escape with either an Imperial soldier or a member of the Stormcloaks, supposedly foreshadowing whichever side the player might choose to support later in the game. But if you're thinking this is a game entirely about political intrigue, then you'd be wrong; the return of the dragons is the entire focus of the game, with the civil war plot merely a distraction. Which is rather disappointing, because the whole bit about the dragons is utterly dull and forgettable, but then again no one ever accused Bethesda of being great writers. The real meat of the story centres around the player character, who happens to be the mythical "Dragonborn," capable of slaying dragons and devouring their souls, and who also possesses the ability to speak the dragons' language, thus allowing him/her/it to use "Dragon Shouts" (essentially an alternate magic system). Predictably, the Dragonborn is the only one capable of saving the world for the dragon invasion which, like the Daedric invasion of Oblivion, will never actually get underway so long as the player avoids starting the main quest.

Almost right from the start Skyrim bares its utter ineptitude for all to see. As soon as the player enters the menu, he'll be confronted with one of the worst user interfaces I've ever encountered in an RPG (or any other genre, for that matter). Here's a screenshot:

Notice how just over half the screen real estate is taken up by the section showing the item and its related statistics, which take up only a fraction of that section's total area, leaving huge amounts of wasted space. You can click and drag on the item's picture to look at it from various angles, something that is useful for solving exactly one type of puzzle.

Now look at the leftmost column, showing the top level inventory categories. This list will always be the same size and never expand, yet it is stupidly located so that the top of the list starts in the middle of the screen, forcing the user to scroll downward every time he wants to select one of the categories near the bottom. The actual items in the player's inventory are presented in one long alphabetical list, with no option to sort by weight, value, weapon damage, armour rating, or anything of the sort. It also starts with the top of the list at mid-screen, forcing the player to scroll downward, something not helped by the huge spacing between items and the narrow width of the column. It doesn't even have the basic common courtesy to place currently equipped items near the top of the column, forcing the player to scroll through a potentially-lengthy list of items just to find what his character is using.

And note the large black bar along the bottom, which displays only a handful of relevant stats. Bizarrely, the armour rating is presented as a number that is not a percentage, nor it is a damage-reduction value. Instead, it's a number between 0 and 567, where 567 equates to 80% damage resistance. Why didn't they choose to display the damage resistance percentage as in Oblivion, which would have been far clearer? Who knows? It's Bethesda, who can't get even the basics of UI design right.

The "Favourites" system is even worse. If you want to assign a weapon or spell to one of the number keys, you first have to select it in the inventory screen and hit the "F" key. Then during gameplay, you hit "Q" to bring up the Favourites menu, highlight the item you want to assign to a number key, then press that particular number key. The problem is, the Favourites menu isn't sorted in any way, nor is it split into categories, so once again the player is forced to scroll through a tiny menu (that shows maybe five or six items or spells at once) to find what he wants.

The Perk menu is so bad it deserves special mention:

As you might have guessed, you cannot simply select the skill tree you desire. Instead, you must laboriously scroll through the entire thing until you find the one you want. Then, you zoom in on that tree, and selecting each individual perk involves navigating the tree using the WASD keys. The problem is, sometimes hitting the A or D keys will move you over to the next skill tree entirely, rather than moving you over to an adjoining perk like you wanted. So you have to scroll back to the desired skill tree, then try to find out what key you need to press in order to advance to the perk you want. You could try just clicking on the desired perk, but since only a fraction of the skill tree is visible at any one time, that's usually not an option.

Other UI issues abound. At one point, I tried swapping the functions of the right and left mouse buttons, so that my character's left hand would be bound the left mouse button, while his right would be bound to the right button. Unfortunately, even this simple button reassignment was impossible, as the mouse buttons would suddenly cease to function. When it came time to choose dialogue options, the menu system would display an odd sort of mouse lag, where the mouse pointer would be hovering over one dialogue option, yet the highlighted dialogue option would be something else entirely. This often led to picking one dialogue choice, only for an entirely different choice to be selected.

Next up in the litany of bad design decisions is the skill system. It's clear that Bethesda has no clue as to what purpose RPG mechanics serve or why they were originally implemented. For those of you who are unaware, the basic premise of a role-playing game is that you are not playing as a mere avatar of yourself, but as a completely separate entity - the player character - whose interactions with the game world are governed by HIS skills, HIS qualities, HIS abilities, not the player's. Thus, any RPG system will possess mechanics separate your character's abilities from yours, such as the STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA of Dungeons & Dragons, or Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system. The player will progress in some manner, whether it is the typical XP and Level system, or a negative progression such as declining Sanity in Call of Cthulu. The game world will possess mechanics that recognise and respond to your character's intrinsic qualities, such as an ability or inability to use certain items, or dialogue options based around your character's intelligence (as demonstrated in Fallout)

In Skyrim, you have a number of skill trees, and each skill is increased by performing that skill's related action. For example, fighting enemies with a two-handed weapon will improve your Two-Handed skill level, while smithing new arms and armour will improve your Smithing skill. When you raise your skills enough, your character earns a Level Up, at which point you can choose a Perk from one of the skill trees. Sounds simple, right?

Of course, there's one thing missing - attributes like Strength, Intelligence, Luck, and whatnot, which the developers have removed from the game. Bethesda's justification for this was that attributes such as Intelligence only increase mana and are therefore redundant...which only goes to show that Bethesda has no understanding of what purpose attributes ought to serve. "Intelligence" ought to affect things ranging from the rate at which skills increase to the sort of dialogue options the player character is offered; Bethesda must be familiar with this sort of thing, because it was implemented in Fallout 3 (albeit clumsily). Thus I can conclude that the removal of attributes is either due to laziness or incompetence on the developers' part.

The rest of the skills are a mixed bag. Some are downright worthless, while others are easily trumped by the player's level of skill (never a good thing in an RPG). Lockpicking, for instance, is useless - you can pick even the hardest lock in the game so long as you're skilled enough at the asinine lockpicking minigame. The Speech skill is useless, because there are few speech checks in the game (and none of them are all that important), and the only other purpose of the Speech skill is to get better prices in stores, which is also useless because you can make all the best equipment yourself, rather than buying it in stores. The Alchemy skill is useless, because it takes so long to increase, and potions are so plentiful regardless, so there's little point to creating your own. The Archery doesn't make your character more likely to hit opponents, because that is based entirely based on the player's aiming skill (here's a note to RPG developers - player skill should NEVER trump character skill!)

Other skills are completely broken, such as Smithing and Enchanting, which lets your create weapons and armour and apply enchantments respectively. You are required to grind both of these skills, because if you only smith or enchant equipment that you actually use, you'll never increase those skills beyond a slight amount. So you head out into the wilderness with a bag full of soul gems and start hunting animals like bears, wolves, sabrecats, and so on. You collect their souls in soul gems and skin them for their their hides, then you turn those hides into armour (thus increasing your Smithing skill), then enchant that armour with soul gems (thus increasing your Enchanting) skill. Then you sell all the armour and weapons you've created, use the profit to buy more soul gems, then repeat this entire process over again. Once your Smithing and Enchanting skills get high enough, you'll be able to make weapons and armour that are vastly superior to anything you might find exploring, thus eliminating the motivation to go exploring in the first place! You might argue that I just shouldn't grind those skills in that manner, but the game practically encourages it, and if I have to purposely gimp my character just to get some challenge out of the game, then there's something seriously wrong with the skill system.

Even the game's much touted potential for exploration is rendered worthless. There is almost nothing that's intersting to find in the vast wilderness of Skyrim. All the dungeons in the game are either Nord ruins, Dwemer ruins, fortress ruins, or mines, each one clearly constructed from the same building blocks as any other, differing only in their layout. Every dungeon is totally linear in its design, featuring utterly asinine puzzles that involve activities such as rotating columns to match pictures on the floor, and each one leads to a lame boss encounter, where the "boss" is just a stronger, hardier version of the same sort of creatures you've already faced in the dungeon. Worse, nearly every enemy in the game scales with your level, just as it did in Oblivion. To be fair, it's not nearly as bad as in that game; you won't see highwaymen wearing Daedric armour worth thousands of gold, and there are a handful of creatures that don't scale with your level, but you can still traipse through dungeons knowing that likely won't face anything too tough for you at your current level. As if that weren't bad enough, all the loot you'll find is also scaled to your level, and will likely be worse than anything you can make yourself. In other words, the only conceivable reason to go dungeon-delving is to find items in order to learn their enchantments.

The level scaling even extends to items given as reward for completing quests, such as the Nightingale Armour, effectively punishing the player for completing certain quests at lower levels. This system also results in certain skills becoming worthless after a while, particularly magic spells, because these don't scale with your level. If you're playing as a mage, you'll find that a large number of spells become worthless after a while, since they will no longer do enough damage to be worth your while, or they simply won't work on higher-level foes. I have to ask Bethesda, what is so wrong with having some enemies that are too tough for a low-level character to face? There are a few such enemies, such as Giants or Chauruses, but these are the exception, not the rule. Is it so hard to believe that there might be parts of Skyim's wilderness that are simply too dangerous for inexperienced adventurer? It rather sucks all the thrill out of adventuring when realise that nearly everything, from dungeons to items to enemies, is all scaled to your level.

And when you're not crawling through dungeons? Skyrim itself is a landscape that's pretty, but empty. You'll quickly discover that the "open world" serves little purpose beyond wasting your time as you travel from Point A to Point B. Occasionally you'll encounter a few NPCs in your travel, such as a travelling minstrel or groups of Thalmor leading prisoners off to who-knows-where, but most of them serve no real purpose and nothing ever comes from interacting with them. In fact "nothing ever comes of it" could be Skyrim's watchword. This game is utterly hollow and superficial.

So now that we've talked about the skill system, I'm going to move on to the combat system. And there's very little to say about it, because it's almost exactly the same as combat in Oblivion. If you're a melee fighter, just rush up to any enemy, spam power attackers until you run out of stamina, quaff a bunch of potion to regain stamina (enemies will be conveniently allow you to drink several potions in an instant, thanks to the way that the inventory screen pauses the game), and then repeat the process until your opponent is dead. Archers have little to do except make sneak attacks against enemies for massive damage, which is stupidly easy because the enemies in Skyrim are as thick as a brick, taking less than half a minute to go from "Someone just shot my friend in the face with an arrow!" to "Hmm, must have been nothing." Mages will simply spam one or two spells over and over while running backwards in order to stay out of opponents' melee attacks. There's little strategy involved beyond "Use electricity-based attacks against spellcasters!" or "Use ice-based attacks against fire-based creatures!"

Worse, the level scaling system can't even do its job properly, because once you reach Level 20 or so, the game becomes childishly easy, with even the final boss (who is fought like every other dragon in the game) being a veritable pushover. The result is that I invariably became bored of my character after a certain length of time, and had to force myself to finish the game.

The only thing in Skyrim capable of challenging the player is the dreaded Bearzilla.

But the most glaring flaw in the world of Skyrim is something it shares with Oblivion, namely, the utter lack of reactivity of the game world towards the player's actions. The "open world" of Skyrim is largely static and unresponsive to your actions, often to the point of absurdity. For instance, stealing from a shop might result in the shopkeeper sending hired thugs out to attack you, but if you talk with the shopkeeper after dealing with the thugs, he'll act as if nothing happened. In Riverwood, the first town the player visits, a shopkeeper will ask you to retrieve his "Golden Claw" from a group of bandits. Of course, I retrieved the Golden Claw and returned it to its owner, who placed on the counter of his shop. As soon as the shopkeeper's back was turned, I swiped his precious Golden Claw, but during every subsequent conversation with him, he repeatedly thanked me for getting back his Golden Claw, completely failing to realise that it had been stolen once again.

Quite simply, Skyrim doesn't care one whit about what sort of character you've created. Your level is "whatever," your skill at something is "meh," and your choices and decisions amount to little more than "who cares?"

And when you're not exploring the empty world or increasing your meaningless skill level, what else is there to do? Well, there's the quests, of course, but that's a road to nowhere, because Skyrim's quests are all terrible. Every last one. I cannot recall a single quest in the game that didn't boil down to "Go to Location X and fetch me Y" or "Go to Location Z, kill everyone, and report back to me." There are no choices to be made, no alternate paths to open up, no differing ways of completing quests depending upon your skills. Just talk to NPC A, who tells you to fetch something for NPC B, who directs you to NPC C, and so on. For example, during one particular quest the player is tasked with getting a curmudgeonly wizard to hook up with a woman he's infatuated with. Turns out that the woman has a soft spot for poetry, so completing the quest involves talking with the wizard, (who gives you one dialogue option), and then you talk with a minstrel (who gives you one dialogue option) who can write up a bit of poetry and which you will claim is from the wizard, and then you take the poem to the woman in question (who gives you one dialogue option), after which you return to the wizard for your reward (which involves, you guessed it, one dialogue option). And this is more or less par for the course for Skyrim, where quests demand that the player character act as little more than an errand boy for NPCs that are too lazy to deal with people less than a quarter mile away.

New to Skyrim are the "Radiant Quests," which is a fancy word for procedurally-generated quests that fill up your "Miscellaneous Quests" menu like so much detritus. All of these said quests amount to nothing than "Go to Location X and bring me Y" or "Go to Location Z, kill everyone, then report back to me." This isn't "content," this is just a litany of tedious chores to pad out the already-thin gameplay.

Then there are the guild quests. Oblivion may have been a disappointment when it came to quests, but the guild quests were a bright spot, such as the Dark Brotherhood quest that was ripped straight out of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, or the Thieves' Guild quest that culminated in the heist of an Elder Scroll from the Imperial library. Sadly, guild quests in Skyrim and a painfully shallow, one-dimensional affair, and worse, completely fail to recognise what sort of character you're playing as. An Orc berserker can become the archmage of the Mage's College, so long as you can cast the one spell the gatekeeper asks you to cast. Likewise, the same Orc berserker can join the Thieves' Guild, despite knowing absolutely nothing about stealth or subterfuge. All of the guild quests are completely linear and constantly railroad the player. If you want to advance through the Companions guild, you must become a werewolf. Want to advance through the Thieves' Guild? You have no choice but to pledge your soul to Nocturnal. There's no divergence, no alternate paths, no opportunity for role-playing. Just do as your told and follow the plotted line. And every guild seems to follow the exact same story arc: either the guild leader dies or turns traitor, and suddenly you, ensign newbie, get catapulted to a position of guild leader, despite having proven to be skilled at nothing other than dungeon-delving and killing endless scores of level-scaled enemies.

In fact, "Follow the plotted line" is an apt description for Skyrim, because it implements the damnable quest marker. I have to ask the developers, what was the purpose of including a vast, open world if every quest involves little more than following the omniscient quest arrow? You'd think that quests for the Dark Brotherhood (which involve assassination) would have you learn the target's whereabouts and observing his daily routine before moving in for the skill, but the quest marker eliminates any need for that, reducing the assassination missions to that of yet another kill quest.

And yet while the world of Skyrim fails to respond to any action the player character takes, it also displays a stunning inability to operate without the player's input. The so-called invasion of the dragons? Won't ever happen so long as the player avoids any quests related to the central story. The civil war between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks? It will never get off the ground so long as you avoid taking sides, even when both sides have camps within short walking distance of one another. Nothing happens in Skyrim without your input, but when all is said and done, no one cares a whit about what you did. I once completed every single guild quest save for the Companions, did every single Daedric quest, and even finished the entire storyline, becoming the saviour of Skyrim and all of Tamriel...and yet how was I greeted when I tried to join the Companions? "Who is this person? I've never even heard of him!" Give me a break!

As for the new features introduced by the game, they're likewise shallow and poorly implemented. For example, the player can have henchman follow him or her, but their AI is so braindead that they're often a liability, rather than an asset. You can get married to various NPCs, but "wooing" said NPC involves some utterly inane task like bringing him/her back an item like a mammoth tusk. Compare this to the followers of Fallout: New Vegas, which had distinctive personalities and their own personal quests, and who would react the decisions the player character made. Oddly enough, given that the player can mine ore, cook food, buy a house, and get married, it seems that all Skyrim needs is a crop-growing minigame in order to become a darker, edgier version of Harvest Moon.

And I'd be remiss in my duty as a reviewer if I didn't point out the vast amount of bugs to be found in Skyrim. Many quests would be rendered uncompleteable if the player deviated ever so slightly from the predicted path, such as "Blood on Ice" or "The Forsworn Conspiracy." The game would often crash to desktop inexplicably, for no rhyme or reason. Bethesda apparently forgot to check the box marked "Compiler Optimisation" for the release build, resulting in the game running about 50% as fast as it ought to have, and the modding community had to release its own fix before Bethesda got around to dealing with it.

Which brings me to my final point - the rallying cry of the Bethesda fan: "The modders will fix it!" To be fair, many mods do indeed fix issues with the game, such as the atrocious user interface. But I will not give Bethesda credit for things they themselves did not add to the game. And to be brutally honest, the modding scene for Skyrim is downright terrible, being more concerned with tarting up female characters and creating ever more ridiculous "skimpy" armours than improving the game.

A typical Skyrim mod.

So in conclusion to this lengthy, ranting review of Skyrim, I'd say that this a shallow, hollow game that believes in style over substance and quantity over quality. Given the sheer amount of praise this game has received, it's clear that the "professional" gaming press, along with a good portion of the game-playing public, has absolutely no idea what constitutes a good RPG, or even a barely-functional one. This is modern gaming at its worst - a hollow, empty experience that serves no purpose but to showcase the ego of its developers. If anyone is looking for a great RPG, then steer clear of Skyrim, or anything else the makers of Where's Waldo? produce.