It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with the series this site is dedicated to when I say that Elder Scrolls games have a lot of items. How many? Well, enough that we don’t even give a second thought to the majority of them. When you have several hundred of any type of item to consider, the distinct traits of specific items become unimportant. Even in a small set of items, the redundancies begin building up rapidly. For example, the Lunar Weapons set (I am using Skyrim examples for the purposes of this blog entry, simply because it is the latest game at time of writing). While there is some nice lore around the items as a group, there isn’t much interesting about individual versions. Or there is an issue with individual items being unique is one or several ways, but the item itself being completely uninteresting besides that. An example of this are the Gloves of the Pugilist. The linked item has a unique enchantment, but there just isn’t much else to say about it. So it might seem obvious that we shouldn’t have pages for these items, they should just be on some kind of giant table with the rest of the boring objects in the game, right?
Throughout our site’s history, the answer to the above question was quite obvious. Items weren’t really worth that much of a fuss over. You were either an artifact, or you just weren’t important. And this neglect of the huge number of garbage items worked, at least for the editors. It simplified a lot of our work, as we wouldn’t have to write an article for generic helmet number 146, when we could be working on a lot more interesting pages and projects. Yet, our readers saw things differently. One of the most frequent requests I have ever seen us get is for us to give more item in-depth coverage. With these frequent suggestions in mind, I began a lengthy look at the pages we have for items. My examination of them revealed that we had two different kinds of item pages, the “generic” item page style (example, note that I have never worked on the linked to page, and have not really looked at in my time here ever), and the “artifact” item page style (example, note that I am responsible for the current set-up of that article, and am quite proud of it). The prior example is just a table of the relevant items, getting the necessary stats out and nothing else. The latter example, on the other hand, is more of a hub page, it just lists some key facts about the item, while linking to a more complete page on the subject.
Obviously our readers seem to prefer the style of the second one, it provides some actual content while also allowing for some simple organization. The clearer organization of the second style is better for our editors, however. Not only does it save editor time, as bots can easily produce those tables in many cases, it is also just less redundant. The vast majority of the items on those generic pages are just that, generic. We could create pages for all of the items listed on those pages, but not only would people probably not see them, they would be nothing but cut-and-paste copies of each other with a few words changed each time. I know this would be true, considering that this cut-and-paste method is what I use when writing new item pages. It’s just the easiest way to go about it, since not that much information changes each time. While I think the “artifact” style is visually impressive and the preferred choice by our readers, it just isn’t practical for all cases.
So if we want to please our fans by providing more item articles, while also not just producing pure drivel, a new balance between these two styles need to be found. While a lot of generic items will never have pages of their own that are anything more than a redirect, we do seem to need some more item pages. So more of the item groups, like unique items or quest items, need to be given the “artifact” makeover. And that’s what I’m currently working on. While we need to consider what we will do about items on a bigger scale in the future, I am currently sorting through it and working on what I think is appropriate.
Just a quick update on what I’m up to. Oh, and also have a happy New Year.
