Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages Blog

I've been meaning to write something about Skyrim for a couple of weeks, but any time I had a few spare minutes I decided they were better spent actually playing the game than writing about it. Today, I finally feel sated. I don't mean I'm done playing it, because I'm not, but I no longer feel the compulsion to spend every spare hour in Skyrim, and even loaded something else instead (X3: Albion Preview in case you're wondering - I'll probably blog about that soon). Steam tells me that in five weeks I've spent 221 hours playing Skyrim and that I've already gone past Fallout: New Vegas (206) so It's definitely time to put down a few thoughts about the game.

The sheer scope of the game is incredible. I spent some time trying to come up with a one-word description and eventually settled on "mindblowing" - and don't tell me it's really two words and should be hyphenated; I know and I don't care. One problem with modern English usage is that so many words are overused and end up as mere synonyms for "pretty good", but I'm using "mindblowing" in the sense of "Bloody hell - there's more? How the hell am I supposed to keep track of everything?" Skyrim is almost too big. At one point I found myself trying to work out how to advance the Thieves Guild quest line and it took a trawl through my huge list of outstanding quests to jog my memory that one quest without any obvious thieving connection was the one I had to do. Yes, it's my own fault for leaving quests too long and also my fault for playing while under the influence of whatever type of alcohol has taken my fancy, but it's undoubtedly a big game.

Let's start by looking at my last post about the things I wanted to see in the new game.

The World

The land of Skyrim is certainly a massive improvement over Oblivion's Cyrodiil, so much so that my first several hours were spent simply exploring the province rather than doing quests. There's so much more to find than before, and there are areas of utterly stunning beauty.

Interiors look much better than in Oblivion, but while there's a little more variety than before there's still a certain sense of sameness. That's especially true of taverns, which are almost all identical inside. Most of the dungeons are rather linear too: you just have to keep moving forward, knowing that when you reach the end you'll face a boss. I know I'm being a bit unfair here, because there's only so many ways in which you can design a mine or a ruin, but given the way the "hand designed" nature of the locations was hyped I'd expected a little more.

The Characters

There have definitely been improvements here. For a start, the voice acting is better. Having so many different voices is a huge improvement in itself, but the quality of delivery is much better too. Some of it's better than other bits - Joan Allen is superb as Delphine but only the fact that Karliah is an essential character saves her from my wrath at Moira Quirk's performance with her voice.

By and large, NPCs don't do stupid stuff any more, although I don't imagine there's a single player who hasn't seen at least one weirdness. Letting other NPCs move around while you're talking to someone can occasionally lead to some oddities too - for instance I eventually had to watch my own marriage from several yards away from the altar and my beloved because somebody had pushed me out of their way and I couldn't move back.

There are still a few annoyances, such as the way NPCs almost always say the same things to you when you pass them, but that's almost impossible to fix unless someone comes up with a way of auto-generating realistic dialogue.

Lockpicking
Meh. This is probably as good as it can get. I find myself wishing I didn't have to give the skeleton key back though.

Persuading
Getting rid of disposition entirely is one way around the problem, I suppose. The persuade/intimidate/bribe mechanism works well: at early levels I usually had to bribe people but as I gained levels and got more Speech skill points, the other options became an option too. Having the bribe option as a catch-all is a good solution, because it means you never get locked out of options entirely. It's possibly a little over-simplified but on balance I think it's a good solution.

Music Switching
Much, much improved. It's not quite as good as it could be - I still get one or two places where I realise I'm under attack because of the music, but it's certainly better than in earlier games.

Alchemy
Almost perfect! I'd still like the ability to learn about effects from books or teachers, but the new system is really good.

Random Encounters
Possibly a few too many wolves but about 95% perfect.

And on
In other words, my list of gripes has been almost entirely addressed and has certainly made the game more enjoyable.

I like the new Smithing mechanic. No more messing about waiting for a bandit to wear a glass helmet; just get the perk, find or buy the material and make it yourself. Combined with the improved enchanting system, replete with its own set of powerful perks, there's no longer a need to keep waiting for some particular item to appear in random loot. This makes customising your character a lot easier.

Archery has been seriously improved. My first character is a stealthy archer and was delighted to find that arrows now do rather more damage than they did in Oblivion, where you may as well have flicked chewed-up wads of paper at enemies for all the good they did. It wasn't long before he was doing double damage, with a 3x bonus for sneak attacks, with a self-crafted Daedric Bow imbued with a Fire enchantment, and even powerful enemies began to drop in a single shot.

Magic, too, is actually worth using. I tried to like magic in Oblivion, I really did, but it was so ineffective it wasn't worth bothering. In Skyrim, most of the spells work well, and some of the new additions, like the Clairvoyance spell, are fantastic. The lack of spell-crafting is interesting. On the one hand, we won't get loads of people submitting dull combinations of spells for a Useful Spells page, but I do slightly miss the time spent messing around trying to come up with a genuinely useful spell.

It almost goes without saying, but the graphics are superb. The music is superb too, although the game does everything it can to downplay it. Under the default settings, the music is turned way down, and even putting the slider up to the max leaves it... in the background a bit. I know the music shouldn't be the main point of the game, but Jeremy Soule fans - and I count myself as such - should be able to make it more prominent. I can't wait to see if Santa brings me my signed copy of the soundtrack!

Dragons: as good as I had hoped, even if it can be bloody annoying when they circle around without attacking or crash-land in one place only to glitch into another.

It's not perfect though.

The first thing that hits me is that Skyrim has developed the Fallout 3-style invisible walls. I'll often find that I need to reach some objective on a hill. Upon reaching the general area it becomes clear that there's no easy path so I can either hike around the entire hill to find the path you're supposed to take or try to go rock-climbing. There's often a fairly smooth-looking path up the side of the hill so I set off, jumping up the hill (or riding up it on my horse). Suddenly, I can't go any further: some invisible wall is blocking my way and I now have to make a dangerous trip back down the slope. Why do this? Why make me take the One True Path? Really annoying.

The main quest is very good, and I thought the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild quest lines were really excellent, but the Companions and College don't stand up so well. Both lines are too short and the latter asks more questions than it answers. The daedric quests vary quite a bit too: I liked Boethiah's and Sheogorath's quests in particular, but Malacath's and Mephala's were a disappointment. Too many of the other quests are either "take this to X", "Fetch something from Y", or "Kill Z", and these can get a little boring after a while. In general, I suppose I have to give the quests a thumbs up, but I think some could definitely have been better.

Pace my earlier praise for the voice acting, some of the actors are a bit distinctive to re-use as non-prominent NPCs. Christopher Plummer is great as Arngeir, but hearing him crop up as other NPCs can be a bit odd. Ditto Claudia Christian - my Babylon 5 spider sense tingles every time I hear her voice.

And of course, there are the bugs.

Now I know that an open world game like Skyrim is going to be pretty much impossible to get right from day one, but sometimes I found myself wondering if the Quality Assurance team really did any work or just sat around on bean bags texting each other all day. Some of the bugs are bloody obvious too. For instance, I found myself wondering whether picking up two items from The Litany of Larceny quest would break it, and rapidly found the answer to be "yes". At one point during development, UESP offered to test Skyrim and we were rebuffed. If we'd been involved, I'm absolutely certain that many of these bugs would have been caught and fixed before release.

In Conclusion

This isn't everything I could mention, but it's the points that immediately come to mind. I imagine there'll be a "And another thing..." post at one point, but for now let me say that on balance: I absolutely love this game. It's worth every damn minute of the 5+ year wait. Those 221 hours are only the start of what I'm certain will be a couple of thousand. The only question is: where next? Obviously there's a lot to decide about the Thalmor, and it'll be very interesting to see how the next game handles the civil way: will Skyrim be independent or a part of the Empire? Will there even be an Empire?

When TES VI rolls around, of course, we'll be on a new generation of consoles, which will open up whole new worlds. That's all a long way away, which is just as well because it'll take until then to fully explore Skyrim.

Ten days to go now, and the anticipation makes me remember what it was like to be ten years old on the evening before Christmas, although the knowledge that the first eight hours or so after I get the game will be spent doing stuff for the wiki tempers things a bit. Anyway, it's nine years since Morrowind came out and five since Oblivion's release, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to look back at those games to see what worked, what didn't, and how the things we know about Skyrim might fit with that.

The World

I remarked in an earlier post that one of the big disappointments in Oblivion was that, after you got over how beautiful things were outside your prison cell, you began to realise how similar one place looked to another. You had the marshy bits, the snowy bits, the forest bits and the plain bits, but there was so little variation that should you be plonked down at random you'd have a great deal of difficulty saying exactly where you were without looking at the map. Inside the dungeons it's even worse: there are perhaps a dozen locations where you can say "Oh yes, I'm in X" instead of "Well... it's an Ayleid ruin of some kind". In Morrowind, Fallout 3 and Fallout:New Vegas, this isn't the case. It usually takes only a quick glance around before you can work out your location pretty accurately. One of the big bits of news is that Skyrim's terrain is all produced by designers rather than random number generators, so it looks like this won't be a problem. That's going to make a huge difference when it comes to replaying the game for the fifth time.

The Characters

I covered NPCs here and there's not much to add. It looks as if voice acting is much better, although the "A dragon! I saw a dragon!"/"What? What is it now mother?" from the first of the three walkthrough videos shows that weird NPC conversations still exist. Certainly the number of voice actors has increased, and I hope this will lead to far fewer situations when you overhear NPCs with identical voices talking to each other, which really put a metal bar through the spokes of immersion. Allowing NPCs to continue with whatever they're doing while you talk to them is a huge step forward and makes things a lot more natural. The level of detail in the NPCs has gone up massively, and with Howard saying there are "thousands" of items, it's possible that there will be a far greater variety of clothing on offer too. One thing I haven't been able to judge from the videos so far is whether basic common sense has been added. We've all seen NPCs walking into walls, saying "Goodbye" to someone only to start another conversation with them immediately, and generally being idiots. I'm really hoping Skyrim does these basic things right so the clever things stand out even more.

Lockpicking

Morrowind was awful at this. If you stood no chance at all of opening a door with your current security skill and quality of lockpick you got a message about the lock being too complex, and otherwise you just had to keep clicking on the door until it either opened or your pick broke. Oblivion was a bit better, but the experience of trying to pick Very Hard locks at low levels used to have my blood pressure heading towards extremely dangerous levels. Skyrim seems to use essentially the same system as Fallout 3 and F:NV, which means the minigame isn't difficult but you need to have a certain level of skill before you can attempt different levels of lock. That works well in most cases and I dare say it'll make Fortify Skill a more useful spell. UPDATE In a Tweet, Pete Hines said "Yes, you can attempt adept locks when you're a novice." Good and bad, I guess. Certainly one less use for Fortify Skill!

Persuading

Oh dear. So far, no TES game has done this well, and Fallout 3 and NV don't really improve things either. In Morrowind, you had three conversation options to increase an NPC's disposition: Admire, Intimidate and Bribe. The first only becomes an option when your Speechcraft skill gets to about 50, the second when you reach at least level 25, and the third when you have loads of cash. This means that to all intents and purposes, a low level character can't increase an NPC's disposition. Even with high levels of Speechcraft you have to keep clicking the Admire option because there's a hefty element of randomness in there that means getting the disposition to 100 can sometimes be a really frustrating task.
In Oblivion, the randomness was mainly gone, but you had the ludicrous minigame where you had to threaten someone, tell them a joke, boast and try coercion one after another, several times. Imagine that in real life: I'm going to reach down your throat and pull out your heart. Did you hear the one about the Argonian fishmonger? Well I'm the best swordsman in Cyrodiil! Now give me all your money or there'll be trouble. Right.
In Fallout 3, you had a Speech skill, and there was a percentage chance of getting NPCs to tell you things that was affected by it. So, say, if your Speech skill was 25, there might be a 30% chance that an NPC would tell you what you needed to know, but if your Speech increased to 50, that chance might reach 60%. The problem here is that these topics were all one-shot chances. Fail and your chance was gone for good. This could be really annoying, because (obviously) even a 90% chance of success means you fail one time in ten. I must confess that the quick save/load feature was used quite a lot in my case...
Fallout: New Vegas did something similar, except here you had to get a Speech skill of X to unlock certain topics. No randomness, no messing, you had to have the required skill.
I *hate* the one-shot bits of F3 and NV. I often found myself delaying a quest until I'd increased my Speech skill so I'd be able to pass a check I knew was coming up, and that's just silly. I also hate the silly mechanisms from earlier games, so how would I work it? Well think about real life for a minute. You're only likely to tell someone a secret if you've known them for a while and get on well with them, so how about doing something like that? I wouldn't want to try to create The Sims in Tamriel, but some simple mechanism for keeping track of how long you've known an NPC shouldn't be hard to implement.

Music Switching

You know the scene. You're running along the Gold Road on your way to Anvil when suddenly the music changes to a "battle" theme. You therefore know someone or something is about to attack you even if you hadn't seen your attacker. While it would be great to have a small orchestra following you around in real life, playing music to suit your activities and location, in an RPG it's a real immersion-breaker. More than once I've found myself thinking "I know I'm being attacked, but I can't *see* anything!" Morrowind and Oblivion are equally bad at this, but in Fallout there's usually a bit of a delay before the music switches, which means by the time you realise you're being attacked, three deathclaws are already feasting on your intestines. Much more realistic, even if it can be really annoying when you find your last save was an hour ago. The videos we've seen *seem* to indicate that Skyrim does something similar - the music changes when the player realises they're under attack, which is the most sensible way to do it. I really hope this is done right, even if it means I have to remember to look behind me every so often.

Alchemy

It looks like this is essentially the same as Morrowind and Oblivion, which is a bit of a disappointment. I suggested before that it wasn't very sensible having new knowledge about plants suddenly appear in a player's head as soon as you hit another level of alchemical skill. It would be much better if you had to learn from a fellow alchemist, read the information in a book or research it yourself somehow. On p41 of The Infernal City, there's a bit where Annaïg does some tests to reveal "virtues" about a substance - learning that "the primary virtue was restorative and the secondary was... one of alteration. The tertiary and quaternary virtues didn't reveal themselves even so vaguely." Too bad Annaïg wasn't an Oblivion Player Character, or she'd have known what the ingredient was and what it did.

Random Encounters

Oblivion didn't too much wrong here. Skyrim appears to be very similar and I'm only mentioning it to bitch about the idiotic number of Cliff Racers you find in Morrowind.

The Rest

One really encouraging thing is that not one of the preview articles has had anything negative to say. Unfortunately, most game previews and reviews seem to be this way these days so it's not an absolute guarantee, but at least it sets a kind of baseline. Even the fansites seem pretty favourable. Sure, there are a few comments about the game being dumbed down but you always get those and any game that requires an official strategy guide of 656 pages can't be that dumb anyway. The one real criticism I've seen was that the bone structure of all the NPC photos was identical, and from the leaked footage that I absolutely haven't watched, it's clear that this can change too - the photos must have been the presets.

Some people are sure to say that I'm a fanboy and will like the game no matter what. In fact, I think the opposite is true, and I think my comments on Fallout 3: New Vegas and Dead Money prove that. Still. Ten days and I'll find out.

Yep, another rant about "Well, back in my day..." except without that actual phrase; I can't say back in my day -- I'm 13! But what I can say is that from what I understand from my older siblings and their friends, there have been some very drastic changes in the heart of the video game community, and two of them I will cover in brief.

* The Fans: Probably the most noticeable change is that of the attracted and targeted fanbase of video games. When video games began to be very popular back in 90's, it was considered somewhat "nerdy" to actually own a video game, let alone many. Of course, this was not the case with arcade games -- they were treated often as the activity the "cool kids" took part in after school. Now, not only are arcade gamers still treated this way, but now players of popular games like Call of Duty, God of War, and Assassin's Creed are considered totally normal and even somewhat cool.

* The Games: A somewhat obscure title for a not-so-obscure topic. In my lifetime I have been able to note the change in which games are produced. Now, the attention is often given to the blood and gore aspects, as well as graphics in general. I find that the more I play Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2, I get a strong feeling of monotony and deja vu. There really doesn't seem to be any fresh ideas in the First Person Shooter genre. The same goes for RPGs like Assassin's Creed. As much as I loved the first and second games, Brotherhood made me feel like I was playing AC2 with slightly better game mechanics and a lazy extended plot structure. Though I plan to give Revelations a try when it comes out, I get the feeling that prowling the streets of Constantinople will have little to no difference from running around in the city of Rome (aside from the scenery, of course).

Now, despite my disfavour of these changes, I am in no way trolling modern video games. I tend to enjoy Oblivion, AC, and Fable just as much as I do Dungeons and Dragons, Daggerfall, and Ultima. However, I don't wish for these games to go as far with this modern trend as CoD has (I'm just using CoD as an example; I love those games). At that point, games become more of an occassional simple pleasure rather than a game I genuinely enjoy.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts about what I foresee happening on UESP when Skyrim is released -- beyond the obvious points, such as that UESP is going to get alot more traffic. These thoughts are in part based on what I witnessed when Shivering Isles was released -- which was the last major game release for UESP. However, SI hardly compares to Skyrim, because SI was only an expansion and therefore didn't introduce any new game mechanics.

As an aside, for those who may have wondered, the release of Oblivion doesn't provide us with much as far as an example for what to expect with Skyrim. Not that I was active on UESP when Oblivion came out; I first discovered UESP a couple months after Oblivion's release. But I do know that UESP had only recently converted to a wiki when Oblivion came out. Even by the time I started editing, the site was pretty minimal, at least compared to where it is now. Templates, screenshots, redirects, help pages, style guidelines, site policies -- none of these were in place yet. Anonymous editing was first enabled months after I started editing -- and, for the record, no, that didn't mean that there was a dramatic increase in vandalism, badly-written content, or unwanted content.

So, back to the future.

1. UESP is facing alot of competition. When it comes to Skyrim, UESP is starting from square one, just like every other wiki being set up to cover Skyrim. People are going to choose which website to read based primarily on google -- and at this moment UESP is doing pretty poorly on google searches related to Skyrim. Fewer readers means fewer editors. Which means less new content, and therefore even fewer readers, etc. I'd like to see UESP do well -- and not just for the sake of UESP, but for the sake of the Elder Scrolls community as a whole. Having as many editors as possible work on the same wiki means that the community has one good, comprehensive website -- instead of a half-dozen incomplete websites with overlapping (but inconsistent) content. If UESP wants to be the primary Skyrim wiki, we're going to have work aggressively towards that goal.

2. New content will be added very quickly. I'm guessing that by November 12th people are likely to have posted (minimal) walkthroughs for the majority of the game's quests, and basic desccriptions of nearly every place -- if not on UESP, then on some other Skyrim wiki. My guess is based upon how quickly content was added for SI: one day after the game's release, the quests page already contained a walkthrough of the entire main quest.

3. Most of UESP's regular editors will disappear. We all want to play Skyrim, plus we'd all like to avoid learning any spoilers about the game. And for most of us, playing the game doesn't mean rushing through the main quest in 30 hours; it means spending hundreds of hours exploring all the random corners of the world. So those editors who buy Skyrim are going to be too busy to visit UESP for several weeks. Those who don't have the game are going to actively avoid the Skyrim namespace. I'm not trying to blame anyone or make anyone feel guilty -- it's just human nature, and it needs to be taken into account when anticipating how Skyrim's release will affect UESP. I'd also love to be proven wrong!

4. New editors / anonymous editors will be responsible for most of the new content. It's just a natural consequence of points #2 and #3. Although UESP's regular editors are unlikely to be rushing to add to the wiki, there are other people who enjoy being the first ones to post information online about a new game. Those editors will be the ones who are most active on UESP starting November 11th. Even though the new editors are likely to have little wiki experience, it doesn't mean that the new content will all be a horrid mess. For example, look at the history of an SI quest such as The Cold Flame of Agnon. In three days, it was transformed from an unformatted dump to a proper quest page -- incomplete, but properly laid out and properly written. Nearly all the work was done by anonymous IPs and brand new editors, such as Jrtaylor91 (whose first UESP edit was on that quest page).

5. Fact checking of Skyrim content won't be possible -- at least not at anywhere near the level we're used to for other games -- for many months. The most obvious problem is that initially none of us will know the quests or any other game details. But beyond that there are a couple of other issues that might not be so obvious.

• We don't know when the Creation Kit (aka Construction Set) will be available. Without it, we can't do any of the quick fact checks we're used to -- for weapon damage, gold values, dialogue,etc. We won't even know how to take in-game values, such as weapon damage, and convert them to base values -- will weapon damage be affected by skill level in Skyrim and, if so, what's the equation?
• We won't understand of the new game mechanics. For example, if editors disagree over the reward for a quest, we won't be able to resolve the question. Is it a levelled quest reward -- but how does levelling work in Skyrim? Is it a random reward -- again, how do random lists work? Is the reward dependent upon other factors that are a new feature of Skyrim, such as Radiant quests? As far as we know right now, two players could have different experiences for nearly any detail of a quest. So how do we figure out whether edit X is adding incorrect information to an article? Eventually -- 2012? -- we'll hopefully start to get a handle on the range of possibilities (although it took a couple of years to understand various nuances of Oblivion's levelled lists). But we'll have to write most of the site's web pages before then.

There's no way to know until a couple months from now what really is going to happen. But these are some of the issues going though my mind when I think about how UESP can start to prepare for Skyrim's release.

Leveling in TESV: Skyrim is something that's received a fair amount of attention in the gaming press. What's the big deal? The problem of how a game's challenge should be adjusted as the player gets more powerful is much trickier than you might think. The problem is that you need to give the player a sense of power while not making the game a total walk-over, and getting the balance right can be tricky.

In Morrowind, leveling was at a minimum. NPCs and creatures all had a fixed level, although a lot of creatures were picked from leveled lists that produced a more-powerful variant at higher levels. Something similar happened with treasure as you can see on our Morrowind leveled lists page. The advantage of this system was that there were fixed "easy" and "hard" areas. Some caves were essentially off-limits to new players because the creatures or NPCs inside were simply too powerful. This meant you had to be careful when you were exploring in case you found one of the hard ones. The disadvantage was that when you hit about level 30, you were invincible. The two highest-level NPCs were Wulf (level 50) and Divayth Fyr (level 65), but you never had to fight either of them. The most powerful NPCs you had to fight were level 30, and they didn't have access to all the powerful weaponry and armor you did. The expansions offer a tougher challenge, and Hircine's Quest in Bloodmoon is one that you really don't want to attempt until level 40, but it's a one-off. By the time you reach level 50 there's no challenge anywhere.

Oblivion picked a slightly different system. Many of the NPCs leveled with the player, so for instance Glarthir kept the same level as the player (at least at levels 4-12) while Audens Avidius was eight levels higher than the player. Some creatures leveled too: Liches gained 15 health for each level of the player and Ogres got 26. A lot of NPC equipment came from leveled lists too, so it's quite possible for some people to be using powerful enchantments that make them even tougher fights. The upshot of this is that at the start of the game, there's almost nowhere you can't go. The problem is that at high levels, even though you're pretty much unbeatable, killing even a single ogre can be a time-consuming exercise because of all the hit points it has. In other words, even though you're all-powerful you don't feel it. There's not even much of a challenge.

Fallout and New Vegas went pretty much back to the Morrowind model. Levels are largely fixed, although creatures often come from leveled lists. The challenge is much greater in places, though: creatures like cazadores and deathclaws just cannot be beaten at lower levels. Yes, you might get lucky with one, but they come in groups and you'll be toast unless you're a powerful character with good weapons. With the level cap, you end up in a position where you can always beat these things as long as you're not stupid. That's not a bad endpoint - a feeling of power but not all-consuming, ridiculous power.

If reports are to be believed, Skyrim goes a little further. Things level in a similar way to Fallout, but after you've visited an area it becomes fixed at that level forever. This might be a good idea as long as there are difficult places early on and you can't freeze everything at level one.

Of course this is just my preference. I know some people like the über power thing, judging from the number of "I killed everyone and now they're dead" posts we get on talk pages.

Speaking purely from a UESP perspective, fixed levels are great: with no horrendous formulae to construct, summary infoboxes become much easier to construct.

Not too until we find out for ourselves anyway!