For a former niche activity that was itself relentless sneered at, gaming sure has a lot of bigots. If you read the comments under any review, the chances are that someone, somewhere, is going to tell someone else (who is in all likelihood also a 'troll' or a 'moron'), to go back to playing Call of Duty.
"You cannot possibly appreciate the beauty of this game!" they scream! "This is because you play Call of Duty! Probably. I describe myself as an atheist and ridicule religions, but the burden of proof is not a concept I agree with!"
And before Call of Duty became one of the most successful shooter series ever seen, the railing was against casual gaming:
"Of course you don't like this game! You probably like Farmville! Go back to Farmville and farm like the bitch you are!"
And before that, when World of Warcraft was the new hot stuff, there were gamers using it as an excuse to slam other gamers. To stigmatise them as inferior, because they did not like what the abuser liked.
"You do not believe in God. Why. I bet you believe in Allah, who is completely different and obviously inferior to God, because who in their right mind would like Allah?"
Homophobia, racism, and everything else, all follows much the same logic.
It's an annoying and silly trend, and I don't think anyone believes that it helps anything. Systematic abuse of any group, has only ever resulted in that group become stronger, more resilient and unified, even until extinction. You perpetuate the thing you hate by the very act of hating on it.
Of course, there are those who would say that casual gaming, Call of Duty, or World of Warcraft have brought down 'proper' gaming. It causes dumbing down, as developers attempt to appeal to mass markets tapped by the latest big thing. And true, success spawns imitators - the modern shooter has until recently been almost entirely dominated by imitations of CoD. Fair enough, Modern Warfare was almost ridiculous in its excellence, whether you like the clones or not.
The thing is, no matter how much some dislike them, these hits bring in masses of players, many of them new. They help to expand and legitimise the industry as part of mainstream culture. More money enters the system, until the games industry is worth more than former titans of culture like film and music. And that money attracts people into the industry - quality programmers and artists.
What's more, the technology needed to develop games is enhanced further and further, as developers seek to improve graphics, streamline distribution methods, anything to strenghten their claim to a section of the market.
And all that technology and expertise eventually filters down to the hardcore, niche games, which simply do not have the fanbase to support sustained technological development on the scale which CoD, or WoW permit. We ought to encourage people, especially non-gamers, to go out and buy these titles. It'll make for better games for us in the long run.
Besides, while most won't admit it, or simply can't see it through their rose tinted specs, even proper gamers played shit when they first started out. Anyone remember Cool Spot Goes To Hollywood? Or early FIFAs? Don't expect the toddler to get onto Tolstoy without going through Meyers. They're learning, and they'll learn, and in the meantime, they're paying to improve our games. We don't have to.
And God it makes us smug :)
Thursday 6 December 2012
Monday 26 November 2012
UN uses Minecraft
Original article here.
Amusing news from the BBC. Apparently UN development projects are to be mapped out in Minecraft. That way, those who are affected (and indeed anyone who is interested) can simply go on the game and walk around the proposed development, and get an idea of what completed projects will be like.
This may have the effect of making the simulation look butt ugly, as competent designers in real life don't necessarily make for competent ones using the limited materials of Minecraft. Still, if they ever want to hire, I and many others have bloated portfolios of our previous design work.
You want something that can resist lava, or a zombie invasion? You know who to call.
Amusing news from the BBC. Apparently UN development projects are to be mapped out in Minecraft. That way, those who are affected (and indeed anyone who is interested) can simply go on the game and walk around the proposed development, and get an idea of what completed projects will be like.
This may have the effect of making the simulation look butt ugly, as competent designers in real life don't necessarily make for competent ones using the limited materials of Minecraft. Still, if they ever want to hire, I and many others have bloated portfolios of our previous design work.
You want something that can resist lava, or a zombie invasion? You know who to call.
Thursday 22 November 2012
Limbo
There's a spider scuttling among the ceiling. A completely normal spider, with eight legs and a face no mother could love. Except that it's ten times your size, and peckish.
Welcome to Limbo, where the world really isn't fair.
Having mentioned the return of games where deep thinking is key, it makes sense to go a little bit more into how this came about. And one of the ways that it seems to have happened is through the platformer genre attempting to reinvent itself.
Endless Mario repetitions get dull after a while, but for a time it seemed that the only platforming games to come out of the big developers were rehashes of old and established franchises; The Prince of Persia, or Tomb Raider. It seems almost odd that they would be so risk averse, and in retrospect they should have seen the way forward easily.
As is often the case, indie developers led the way. And services like Steam meant that if an indie game took off, everyone noticed it.
It started with Braid, which mixed traditional platforming with a variety of time-travelling puzzles practically guaranteed to twist your mind like wringing a wet cloth. Sooner or later you'd think of the solution, and feel like all those days of thinking you were smart may not have been completely untrue. There was immense payoff.
Other games followed: There was And Yet It Moves, where you can turn the game world upside down, only to die a lot. And then there was Limbo, which managed to make puzzles feel natural, brutal, and cruel.
Limbo succeeds because it is such an unrepentant work of art. The atmosphere is grey, steady, and often frightening. The gigantic head-munching spiders are iconic, but there are a host of other enemies ready to murder and brutalise the small child you play. And it's a helpless child too - it can survive only on wits and agility. There are no weapons to lessen the tension, as in Tomb Raider. You really are on your own.
In the days of the Steam Autumn sale then (whoop!), pick up Limbo for a dark night. It's not true horror, and it's not too challenging. But it was a step in the right direction for games, integrating satisfying mental challenges without killing the fun of making progress. And, indirectly at least, it helped turn the industry back towards puzzles that weren't just when to take cover.
(Aragog?)
Welcome to Limbo, where the world really isn't fair.
(Just chilling on the swing)
Having mentioned the return of games where deep thinking is key, it makes sense to go a little bit more into how this came about. And one of the ways that it seems to have happened is through the platformer genre attempting to reinvent itself.
Endless Mario repetitions get dull after a while, but for a time it seemed that the only platforming games to come out of the big developers were rehashes of old and established franchises; The Prince of Persia, or Tomb Raider. It seems almost odd that they would be so risk averse, and in retrospect they should have seen the way forward easily.
As is often the case, indie developers led the way. And services like Steam meant that if an indie game took off, everyone noticed it.
It started with Braid, which mixed traditional platforming with a variety of time-travelling puzzles practically guaranteed to twist your mind like wringing a wet cloth. Sooner or later you'd think of the solution, and feel like all those days of thinking you were smart may not have been completely untrue. There was immense payoff.
Other games followed: There was And Yet It Moves, where you can turn the game world upside down, only to die a lot. And then there was Limbo, which managed to make puzzles feel natural, brutal, and cruel.
Limbo succeeds because it is such an unrepentant work of art. The atmosphere is grey, steady, and often frightening. The gigantic head-munching spiders are iconic, but there are a host of other enemies ready to murder and brutalise the small child you play. And it's a helpless child too - it can survive only on wits and agility. There are no weapons to lessen the tension, as in Tomb Raider. You really are on your own.
(Well, there's him. The dead guy. Teddy?)
Wednesday 21 November 2012
Dreamfall Chapters
Late in October I did a series of posts on Funcom. In them, I talked about a possible sequel to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, the brainchilds of Ragnar Tornquist. And, in my post on Dreamfall, I suggested that one way to fund such a sequel would be through using crowdfunding sites - in the same way that DoubleFine have found money for their own games.
So I'm feeling happy and psychic today, because a few days later that's precisely what was announced. And, should the Kickstarter fund take off, it'll be yet another victory for crowdfunding, particularly when it comes to adventure games.
I for one am all for the return of the genre - rather than shooters, which challenge your skill with a mouse, and quick thinking abilities, or RPGs which challenge your persistence and forward planning, adventure games (of the puzzle variety) encourage deep thought and experimentation. There aren't many other genres which accomodate that.
And, encouragingly, the developers have dropped the idea of 'episodes', along with the combat elements which damaged Dreamfall, but which were put in back in the day to broaden marketing appeal. It's a good sign then that developers feel that the niche for pure adventure games is sizable enough now - that's in no small part to services like Steam, which give indie games immediate and cheap marketing.
In short, it's a bright new future, because Funcom's hand is strongest when it deals in story, and that's precisely what the gaming world needs.
So I'm feeling happy and psychic today, because a few days later that's precisely what was announced. And, should the Kickstarter fund take off, it'll be yet another victory for crowdfunding, particularly when it comes to adventure games.
I for one am all for the return of the genre - rather than shooters, which challenge your skill with a mouse, and quick thinking abilities, or RPGs which challenge your persistence and forward planning, adventure games (of the puzzle variety) encourage deep thought and experimentation. There aren't many other genres which accomodate that.
And, encouragingly, the developers have dropped the idea of 'episodes', along with the combat elements which damaged Dreamfall, but which were put in back in the day to broaden marketing appeal. It's a good sign then that developers feel that the niche for pure adventure games is sizable enough now - that's in no small part to services like Steam, which give indie games immediate and cheap marketing.
In short, it's a bright new future, because Funcom's hand is strongest when it deals in story, and that's precisely what the gaming world needs.
Monday 19 November 2012
DLC
Apologies for the radio silence of late - NaNoWriMo is being a pain in the backside, and while my attempt at a novel is indeed flowing towards a conclusion, the 'flow' is consistent to the sort of stuff you'd find oozing out of a sewer pipe, or a horse's arse for that matter.
Still, there's time for a small and poorly researched rant about the merits of DLC. That's right - the merits.
A lot of people don't like the extra downloadable content that game developers occasionally market alongside their games. There are a number of reasons why, so let's break them down:
Now, I don't think that's true - more likely it's a way of keeping in-house developers occupied' during the periods that they aren't needed. Such periods (while rare), tend to be during the early stage of development of a new game. Most Oblivion DLC was produced while Fallout 3 was in the early stages, and programmers weren't hitting crunch time to finish the game off. It's simply a way for company's to keep on expertise during the slower days and not make a loss from doing so.
And once the game's out, the funding from publishers for that game is pretty much gone. So it's hard to justify getting programmers to work on completely free features and updates (Minecraft, being self-made, is an exception) because they should have been there - people cost a lot of money after all. So at least by charging for it, developers can get the content out there without making losses.
Still, there's time for a small and poorly researched rant about the merits of DLC. That's right - the merits.
A lot of people don't like the extra downloadable content that game developers occasionally market alongside their games. There are a number of reasons why, so let's break them down:
- It costs too much.
- It distracts from proper development.
Now, I don't think that's true - more likely it's a way of keeping in-house developers occupied' during the periods that they aren't needed. Such periods (while rare), tend to be during the early stage of development of a new game. Most Oblivion DLC was produced while Fallout 3 was in the early stages, and programmers weren't hitting crunch time to finish the game off. It's simply a way for company's to keep on expertise during the slower days and not make a loss from doing so.
- It's stuff that should have been in the original game.
And once the game's out, the funding from publishers for that game is pretty much gone. So it's hard to justify getting programmers to work on completely free features and updates (Minecraft, being self-made, is an exception) because they should have been there - people cost a lot of money after all. So at least by charging for it, developers can get the content out there without making losses.
Thursday 15 November 2012
Les Misérables
By no means a game, but certainly a very good musical, a film of Victor Hugo's massive work is due to hit cinemas this Christmas. And yes, it's in musical format, because anything about poor urchins from the past has to be musical. I mean, look at Annie, or Oliver!.
Check out the trailer here.
It's not all urchins of course. There's something of a love story, and plenty of tragic stories. Tales of redemption sought and lost, comic grotesques and a revolution. But the angle that this particular trailer has gone for has been the crushing of dreams, followed by the statement 'The Dream Lives'.
So the cynic in me has instantly made comparisons with the American Dream, and the slight fear over in the US that the best times are all gone, and that the new generation are to be the first to end up worse off than their parents. The American Dream is damaged, much like Fantine's. Yet, as at the end of the trailer, there's still some hope for a resurrection, that future prosperity (or at least, redemption) is still possible, if only through your children.
Is that accurate? I don't know, but the film is certain to do very well at the box office. Definitely one I'd recommend seeing, for even if the potency of the songs may be lost a little, the acting will be even better than that of the West End.
Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Amanda Seyfried, Hugh Jackman and that amazing story...Mmm...
Check out the trailer here.
It's not all urchins of course. There's something of a love story, and plenty of tragic stories. Tales of redemption sought and lost, comic grotesques and a revolution. But the angle that this particular trailer has gone for has been the crushing of dreams, followed by the statement 'The Dream Lives'.
So the cynic in me has instantly made comparisons with the American Dream, and the slight fear over in the US that the best times are all gone, and that the new generation are to be the first to end up worse off than their parents. The American Dream is damaged, much like Fantine's. Yet, as at the end of the trailer, there's still some hope for a resurrection, that future prosperity (or at least, redemption) is still possible, if only through your children.
Is that accurate? I don't know, but the film is certain to do very well at the box office. Definitely one I'd recommend seeing, for even if the potency of the songs may be lost a little, the acting will be even better than that of the West End.
Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Amanda Seyfried, Hugh Jackman and that amazing story...Mmm...
Tuesday 13 November 2012
From Daggerfall to Skyrim - How Bethesda Grew Up
First, a confession. I love The Elder Scrolls series. I love the RPG genre, and the open world format. Bethesda, for all its reputation for bugs, has a solid backer in me.
Still, when I saw in the PC Gamer magazine that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had gained first place in a list of the best PC games of all time, I had to object. Because for all it's a great game, and it really is, it has some serious flaws.
Now, I'll admit that this sort of ratings table isn't entirely to be trusted. To some extent, the top game on the list always had to be a recent and popular one, because of PCGamer's readership. More people have played Skyrim than Deus Ex or any other of the usual contenders, so why upset them? To some extent, magazines pander to the readership - they have to.
Besides, Bethesda are almost certainly working on something new right now, something exciting. It may only be a subconscious thought for PCGamer's editor, but it's there. So naming a developer's game the best ever can only enhance prospects of getting that exclusive preview.
Still, it's as good an excuse as any to look at The Elder Scrolls series as a whole, to see how it started, how it developed, and what it learned on the way. Skyrim is a mess of influences - and developers took as much from the second installment (Daggerfall), as they did from Oblivion, the fourth. For obvious reasons, I'm only going to deal with the games I played, from Daggerfall onwards. Ready?
The Origin of the Western RPG:
I'm dangling from a steel wire, wrapped around my ankle. Below me is a very long drop, while above me the hulk of a vast airship is in flames. Welcome to the skies of Victorian London. This is an RPG, as they used to be: five friends around a table, pretending to be someone they're not.
My 'someone I'm not' is a very stupid character. After the first dice rolls to decide my base stats, I pumped additional numbers into strength and endurance, completely ignoring the fact that if my character sat GCSEs, he'd not only fail, but probably eat the paper. He's good in a fist fight, God awful at negotiations. He's a balanced character.
It's in pursuit of balanced characters that RPGs have a class system. Traditionally in videogames, that's been the trio of the thinker, the fighter, and the rogue. Each has strengths, and each has weaknesses, and in early RPGs like Daggerfall, we even have dice rolls, as if this was a roleplaying game acted out around the table. Class systems also open up different playstyles - you can pick locks or negotiate your way through a game. You can batter all goblins with an axe, or set them alight with magic.
Traditional RPGs established complex worlds and systems to deal with many different playstyles - if you could think of a solution to a problem, the Game Master would try to accommodate it. It all went towards deep worlds and rules that accommodate a number of different playstyles - and this translated into the videogame equivalent.
The world of The Elder Scrolls, with Argonians, Daedra, Orcs and all the rest of it, was all constructed over the course of several tabletop games between those who would go on to become videogame developers. And the entire genre owes much to Dungeons and Dragons, or Fighting Fantasy. It's all obvious stuff, but it's worth stressing, because it explains a lot, particularly about the second game in the series.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
If you've only played Skyrim, and have the time, download Daggerfall for free from Bethesda. You can play it using DosBox. I guarantee that after half an hour of play, you'll hate it. You'll absolutely hate it. Perhaps, after a longer stint, you'll grow to adore the game, but it's likely that the sheer difference between Skyrim and Daggerfall will be enough to put you off.
Provided you look past the graphics, it seems quite cool and retro at first. You answer questions about your background - these all go to affect your stats and class, and your starting relationship with the game's many factions. You're free to add or subtract a few points to each stat if you wish (note the dice by the side as you do so?). It all adds to the feel of a more complicated character, a character with a history, one that you can truly roleplay.
That's fine. These are all features commonly found in a tabletop RPG. Take my guy, hanging from the airship. He's a pirate. A dumb pirate, sent on an undercover mission by a captain who doesn't expect or want him to return. And, roleplaying the dumb pirate, I decide to stop the enemy airship by setting fire to the balloon, while I'm on it. It's great fun.
Of course, the Game Master didn't really expect me to roleplay quite so well. So he swears at me a little, and has to invent a whole new scenario from scratch - where we crashland, who lives there, and so on. He could just kill us all, but we're buying rounds, and he's bought one more than the rest of us. So he sets about making a whole new neighbourhood, off the hoof. And he does it through the use of a randomiser, which creates entire areas from the roll of a dice.
You see, the world of the traditional tabletop RPG is infinite, and very flexible. And this was a feature that the developers of Daggerfall attempted to put into their game. Daggerfall is big, very big. It's roughly the size of Great Britain. The cities are large, and can take half an hour to walk across.
But they're also dull. Because by very nature of a randomiser, you can't put in particularly specific touches. Each dungeon is huge, randomly generated, and just a little dull. If you leave it, it resets, as if you never entered. Unlike more modern RPGs, you don't feel that you're making much of a mark on the world.
That's not to say that Daggerfall didn't get anything right. It still has a cult following, and if you can get past the issue of a large, random world, you might be able to see why - there's a certain depth to the gameplay, if not the world. But it's too much like a tabletop RPG to me, without the personal, humorous touches often added by the Game Master getting pissed off by your actions. So, after feedback from players, you can see why, with Morrowind, Bethesda went completely the other way.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Of the ten playable races of Tamriel, only four are human. So it's odd that after five entries in the series, only one game has been set in a non-human province of the ruling Empire. But then, Morrowind is odd in many ways. It's almost as if the developers set out to be different - as if the best way to add a personal flavour is to create mushroom cities, and beetles the size of houses.
It was much smaller than Daggerfall of course. However, as with Skyrim, the developers found that the more mountainous you make a world, the larger it seems. It was a principle abandoned in Oblivion, where, set in a gigantic basin, you could always see how close you really were to the Imperial City.
What about the gameplay elements of Daggerfall? Well, Morrowind still has questions about your background, but these are optional. And factional relationships seem to have been done away entirely - these are something you develop through play, and joining various guilds.
Combat is still based on dice - you can fire an arrow at point blank range, and it will miss because the dice rolled behind the scenes exceeded your skill level. While Oblivion did do away with this system, it did so in a way that made arrows feel less lethal. Only Skyrim seems to have got it completely right.
Other similarities between Daggerfall and Morrowind are in how quests are treated. In Daggerfall, quests had time limits, and could be failed if the wrong choices were made. In Morrowind however, there is no time limit. It's also hard to fail a quest (bar dying). However, it is possible to kill characters needed to complete the quest. The game notifies you when this happens, warning you that you've effectively broken it, but you're free to continue if you wish.
In Oblivion of course, it's impossible to kill essential characters. With the leveling system creating some pretty lethal bad guys, that's probably fair enough, particularly in quests like the saving of Kvatch. Still, what Oblivion did wrong here was to come up with a message every time a character was low on health. Reading 'Martin is Unconscious' a dozen times kind of breaks immersion.
Back to Morrowind, and what the game does right. The answer is, quite a lot really. The world feels large enough, and different enough, to not be dull. There are more factions than you'll see in the more recent games - you can join different vampirics tribes, religions, the traditional Guilds, and the Great Houses of Morrowind. What's more, once you've chosen a Great House, you're stuck with it. In Oblivion however, you could play through every questline, regardless of how little sense it made to have a Arch Listening Gray Fox wandering around. Morrowind takes your choices seriously. It's good, in a way.
Other than that, Morrowind does lore exceptionally well. You get a really good feel for the game. This is partly due to the conversation system. There was no voice acting. In the case of Morrowind, this was a good thing. Sound files add to a game's space requirements dramatically, so if you have voice acting, you are necessarily going to have to cut down on the amount and variety of dialogue.
Morrowind didn't have that problem. So it's able to maintain what's effectively a fantasy Wikipedia. Conversation with characters can reveal a lot of genuinely interesting information, with a variety of topics, and a variety of opinions. And, unlike with Oblivion, you're unlikely to be jolted out of your geeky reverie by awkward or just plain bad voice acting.
And the lore of the world is interesting too, made better by the world. You don't discover caves or ruins by following a marker. You discover them by accident - they feel like your secrets. Nothing you find is ever marked on map, and fast travel is impossible. It makes for a more mysterious world, and you genuinely are interested in issues like what happened to the Dwemer, the secretive dwarven race that has apparently disappeared.
Finally, as the one who has been 'chosen', with dungeons that don't reset, you feel like you really can have an impact on the game. You can free all the slaves in the market, and they will stay free. Morrowind did a lot of things right. But then came Oblivion...
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Oblivion was a good game in its own right. Graphically, it appears more dated than Morrowind, but that's largely due to the faces of the characters - they are unappealing. In terms of size, the map is larger, and so are the dungeons. That was actually a problem though - the dungeons weren't different enough to justify the size. It grew too easy to get bored. Skyrim changed this a little, thankfully. Caves in Skyrim are often small, with little personal touches. You can dip in and out of them in twenty minutes.
I've mentioned the voice acting already, and this was one reason why the world didn't feel quite as deep - the lore couldn't be expanded upon properly by characters. It was left to the books, the majority of them having been copied over from Morrowind in any case. And when speaking to people, you zoomed in on them in a way that smashed immersion to pieces.
Regarding justice, guards knew that you had accidentally stolen a jug from a shop at the other end of the map, and weren't going to give you leeway. Levitation, present in previous games, had been axed, as cities were moved to cells separated from the main world. In fairness, that was necessary. Had the cities been open to the world, the frame rates would have been terrible. Still, the loss of levitation was a serious blow to player freedom. Meanwhile, dungeons didn't feel like your secret any more. Wander within a mile of them, and you'd see a marker on your map.
As a final damning blow, creatures leveled with you. This was likely an attempt to prevent new players from getting screwed over by something stronger earlier on, but it made matters worse. Not only did it make levelling feel pointless, but it also reduced the fear factor of meeting something that you know can two-hit you. I count among my fondest memories of gaming the time when I had to flee my first daedra in Morrowind, after a less-than-appropriately-cautious raid on a temple.
Still, Oblivion does have standout features that are worth commenting on. It was one of the few games that let you move each individual item around, making fireballs feel fun. The Radiant AI was a decent attempt at giving characters lives, routines and secrets. The Guilds, while fewer, still had long, engaging questlines. The main questline was still a bit crap, but that's practically a traditional feature of Elder Scrolls games. It doesn't matter - the main questline is not what you came for.
Oblivion wasn't bad, in the same way Deus Ex 2 wasn't bad. It just wasn't its predecessor. And neither, as it turns out, was it worthy of its successor.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Now, I've met people who prefer Oblivion, for various reasons. One prefers the main storyline of Oblivion, which is fine, because the main storyline in Skyrim (particularly in the case of Alduin) is uninspiring, made great by the characters (dragons!), rather than the plot.
Still, for the most part, Skyrim is excellent. It's not 'best game ever' excellent, but it has learned well from those that came before it.
From Daggerfall it takes a crime system that splits the realm up into different jurisdictions. A murderer in one hold will not be arrested in another.
From Morrowind it takes a mountainous terrain, making the world seem bigger. It takes small dungeons, ones you can pop in and out of, and not grow bored of.
From Oblivion it takes a combat system where you hit no matter what your level, making the dice seem less obvious. It takes voice acting and improves it. It adds more variety to the map. It adds creatures that don't all want to kill you, and adapts the levelling system so that you do occasionally encounter the weaker creatures that used to terrify you.
Other than that, it adds flying creatures (dragons most notably), and moves further away from the tabletop RPG tradition by removing class systems and backgrounds altogether, streamlining the combat. The result is a more fluid game experience, where immersion is rarely broken, and you can spend hours forgetting that it's a game at all.
It's not all perfect though. It's the first Elder Scrolls game where you can tell the User Interface was designed with console players as the priority. It feels much easier to use keys than a mouse to select what you want - and it doesn't gel so well on a PC. Certain questlines, in particular that of Winterhold College, are cut so short as to feel cheap. Compulsory fistfights (as in Markarth) are slow and dull. Cities are also still slightly too small (Riften and Winterhold in particular). But the move to a darker tone is very much to be welcomed, and overall Skyrim comes out very much in credit. It's come a long way from its RPG routes, but with the single player open world formula, it's unlikely the series will die anytime soon yet.
***
Further notes:
If you're a Morrowind fan, wander over to Tamriel Rebuilt. Whereas Morrowind is based only on the island of Vvardenfell, TR aim to build the rest of the province. They produce high quality work, and have made three fantastic releases so far.
You might also want to check out the trailer for the latest Skyrim expansion - it looks very much like Solstheim from Bloodmoon.
Oblivion fans should take a look at the modding community. Favourites of mine are The Lost Spires, which adds an Archaeology Guild, and Castle Ravenpride. But there are so many other gems out there.
***
FUTURE EDIT: Sorry for the wall of text. I will add screenshots. Morrowind required me to edit the game files. Oblivion and Skyrim seem to plainly disallow it. When it's not two in the morning, I'll have another go. I'll put the links in then too.
Still, when I saw in the PC Gamer magazine that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim had gained first place in a list of the best PC games of all time, I had to object. Because for all it's a great game, and it really is, it has some serious flaws.
Now, I'll admit that this sort of ratings table isn't entirely to be trusted. To some extent, the top game on the list always had to be a recent and popular one, because of PCGamer's readership. More people have played Skyrim than Deus Ex or any other of the usual contenders, so why upset them? To some extent, magazines pander to the readership - they have to.
Besides, Bethesda are almost certainly working on something new right now, something exciting. It may only be a subconscious thought for PCGamer's editor, but it's there. So naming a developer's game the best ever can only enhance prospects of getting that exclusive preview.
Still, it's as good an excuse as any to look at The Elder Scrolls series as a whole, to see how it started, how it developed, and what it learned on the way. Skyrim is a mess of influences - and developers took as much from the second installment (Daggerfall), as they did from Oblivion, the fourth. For obvious reasons, I'm only going to deal with the games I played, from Daggerfall onwards. Ready?
The Origin of the Western RPG:
I'm dangling from a steel wire, wrapped around my ankle. Below me is a very long drop, while above me the hulk of a vast airship is in flames. Welcome to the skies of Victorian London. This is an RPG, as they used to be: five friends around a table, pretending to be someone they're not.
My 'someone I'm not' is a very stupid character. After the first dice rolls to decide my base stats, I pumped additional numbers into strength and endurance, completely ignoring the fact that if my character sat GCSEs, he'd not only fail, but probably eat the paper. He's good in a fist fight, God awful at negotiations. He's a balanced character.
It's in pursuit of balanced characters that RPGs have a class system. Traditionally in videogames, that's been the trio of the thinker, the fighter, and the rogue. Each has strengths, and each has weaknesses, and in early RPGs like Daggerfall, we even have dice rolls, as if this was a roleplaying game acted out around the table. Class systems also open up different playstyles - you can pick locks or negotiate your way through a game. You can batter all goblins with an axe, or set them alight with magic.
Traditional RPGs established complex worlds and systems to deal with many different playstyles - if you could think of a solution to a problem, the Game Master would try to accommodate it. It all went towards deep worlds and rules that accommodate a number of different playstyles - and this translated into the videogame equivalent.
The world of The Elder Scrolls, with Argonians, Daedra, Orcs and all the rest of it, was all constructed over the course of several tabletop games between those who would go on to become videogame developers. And the entire genre owes much to Dungeons and Dragons, or Fighting Fantasy. It's all obvious stuff, but it's worth stressing, because it explains a lot, particularly about the second game in the series.
The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall
If you've only played Skyrim, and have the time, download Daggerfall for free from Bethesda. You can play it using DosBox. I guarantee that after half an hour of play, you'll hate it. You'll absolutely hate it. Perhaps, after a longer stint, you'll grow to adore the game, but it's likely that the sheer difference between Skyrim and Daggerfall will be enough to put you off.
Provided you look past the graphics, it seems quite cool and retro at first. You answer questions about your background - these all go to affect your stats and class, and your starting relationship with the game's many factions. You're free to add or subtract a few points to each stat if you wish (note the dice by the side as you do so?). It all adds to the feel of a more complicated character, a character with a history, one that you can truly roleplay.
That's fine. These are all features commonly found in a tabletop RPG. Take my guy, hanging from the airship. He's a pirate. A dumb pirate, sent on an undercover mission by a captain who doesn't expect or want him to return. And, roleplaying the dumb pirate, I decide to stop the enemy airship by setting fire to the balloon, while I'm on it. It's great fun.
Of course, the Game Master didn't really expect me to roleplay quite so well. So he swears at me a little, and has to invent a whole new scenario from scratch - where we crashland, who lives there, and so on. He could just kill us all, but we're buying rounds, and he's bought one more than the rest of us. So he sets about making a whole new neighbourhood, off the hoof. And he does it through the use of a randomiser, which creates entire areas from the roll of a dice.
You see, the world of the traditional tabletop RPG is infinite, and very flexible. And this was a feature that the developers of Daggerfall attempted to put into their game. Daggerfall is big, very big. It's roughly the size of Great Britain. The cities are large, and can take half an hour to walk across.
But they're also dull. Because by very nature of a randomiser, you can't put in particularly specific touches. Each dungeon is huge, randomly generated, and just a little dull. If you leave it, it resets, as if you never entered. Unlike more modern RPGs, you don't feel that you're making much of a mark on the world.
That's not to say that Daggerfall didn't get anything right. It still has a cult following, and if you can get past the issue of a large, random world, you might be able to see why - there's a certain depth to the gameplay, if not the world. But it's too much like a tabletop RPG to me, without the personal, humorous touches often added by the Game Master getting pissed off by your actions. So, after feedback from players, you can see why, with Morrowind, Bethesda went completely the other way.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
Of the ten playable races of Tamriel, only four are human. So it's odd that after five entries in the series, only one game has been set in a non-human province of the ruling Empire. But then, Morrowind is odd in many ways. It's almost as if the developers set out to be different - as if the best way to add a personal flavour is to create mushroom cities, and beetles the size of houses.
It was much smaller than Daggerfall of course. However, as with Skyrim, the developers found that the more mountainous you make a world, the larger it seems. It was a principle abandoned in Oblivion, where, set in a gigantic basin, you could always see how close you really were to the Imperial City.
What about the gameplay elements of Daggerfall? Well, Morrowind still has questions about your background, but these are optional. And factional relationships seem to have been done away entirely - these are something you develop through play, and joining various guilds.
Combat is still based on dice - you can fire an arrow at point blank range, and it will miss because the dice rolled behind the scenes exceeded your skill level. While Oblivion did do away with this system, it did so in a way that made arrows feel less lethal. Only Skyrim seems to have got it completely right.
Other similarities between Daggerfall and Morrowind are in how quests are treated. In Daggerfall, quests had time limits, and could be failed if the wrong choices were made. In Morrowind however, there is no time limit. It's also hard to fail a quest (bar dying). However, it is possible to kill characters needed to complete the quest. The game notifies you when this happens, warning you that you've effectively broken it, but you're free to continue if you wish.
In Oblivion of course, it's impossible to kill essential characters. With the leveling system creating some pretty lethal bad guys, that's probably fair enough, particularly in quests like the saving of Kvatch. Still, what Oblivion did wrong here was to come up with a message every time a character was low on health. Reading 'Martin is Unconscious' a dozen times kind of breaks immersion.
Back to Morrowind, and what the game does right. The answer is, quite a lot really. The world feels large enough, and different enough, to not be dull. There are more factions than you'll see in the more recent games - you can join different vampirics tribes, religions, the traditional Guilds, and the Great Houses of Morrowind. What's more, once you've chosen a Great House, you're stuck with it. In Oblivion however, you could play through every questline, regardless of how little sense it made to have a Arch Listening Gray Fox wandering around. Morrowind takes your choices seriously. It's good, in a way.
Other than that, Morrowind does lore exceptionally well. You get a really good feel for the game. This is partly due to the conversation system. There was no voice acting. In the case of Morrowind, this was a good thing. Sound files add to a game's space requirements dramatically, so if you have voice acting, you are necessarily going to have to cut down on the amount and variety of dialogue.
Morrowind didn't have that problem. So it's able to maintain what's effectively a fantasy Wikipedia. Conversation with characters can reveal a lot of genuinely interesting information, with a variety of topics, and a variety of opinions. And, unlike with Oblivion, you're unlikely to be jolted out of your geeky reverie by awkward or just plain bad voice acting.
And the lore of the world is interesting too, made better by the world. You don't discover caves or ruins by following a marker. You discover them by accident - they feel like your secrets. Nothing you find is ever marked on map, and fast travel is impossible. It makes for a more mysterious world, and you genuinely are interested in issues like what happened to the Dwemer, the secretive dwarven race that has apparently disappeared.
Finally, as the one who has been 'chosen', with dungeons that don't reset, you feel like you really can have an impact on the game. You can free all the slaves in the market, and they will stay free. Morrowind did a lot of things right. But then came Oblivion...
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Oblivion was a good game in its own right. Graphically, it appears more dated than Morrowind, but that's largely due to the faces of the characters - they are unappealing. In terms of size, the map is larger, and so are the dungeons. That was actually a problem though - the dungeons weren't different enough to justify the size. It grew too easy to get bored. Skyrim changed this a little, thankfully. Caves in Skyrim are often small, with little personal touches. You can dip in and out of them in twenty minutes.
I've mentioned the voice acting already, and this was one reason why the world didn't feel quite as deep - the lore couldn't be expanded upon properly by characters. It was left to the books, the majority of them having been copied over from Morrowind in any case. And when speaking to people, you zoomed in on them in a way that smashed immersion to pieces.
Regarding justice, guards knew that you had accidentally stolen a jug from a shop at the other end of the map, and weren't going to give you leeway. Levitation, present in previous games, had been axed, as cities were moved to cells separated from the main world. In fairness, that was necessary. Had the cities been open to the world, the frame rates would have been terrible. Still, the loss of levitation was a serious blow to player freedom. Meanwhile, dungeons didn't feel like your secret any more. Wander within a mile of them, and you'd see a marker on your map.
As a final damning blow, creatures leveled with you. This was likely an attempt to prevent new players from getting screwed over by something stronger earlier on, but it made matters worse. Not only did it make levelling feel pointless, but it also reduced the fear factor of meeting something that you know can two-hit you. I count among my fondest memories of gaming the time when I had to flee my first daedra in Morrowind, after a less-than-appropriately-cautious raid on a temple.
Still, Oblivion does have standout features that are worth commenting on. It was one of the few games that let you move each individual item around, making fireballs feel fun. The Radiant AI was a decent attempt at giving characters lives, routines and secrets. The Guilds, while fewer, still had long, engaging questlines. The main questline was still a bit crap, but that's practically a traditional feature of Elder Scrolls games. It doesn't matter - the main questline is not what you came for.
Oblivion wasn't bad, in the same way Deus Ex 2 wasn't bad. It just wasn't its predecessor. And neither, as it turns out, was it worthy of its successor.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Now, I've met people who prefer Oblivion, for various reasons. One prefers the main storyline of Oblivion, which is fine, because the main storyline in Skyrim (particularly in the case of Alduin) is uninspiring, made great by the characters (dragons!), rather than the plot.
Still, for the most part, Skyrim is excellent. It's not 'best game ever' excellent, but it has learned well from those that came before it.
From Daggerfall it takes a crime system that splits the realm up into different jurisdictions. A murderer in one hold will not be arrested in another.
From Morrowind it takes a mountainous terrain, making the world seem bigger. It takes small dungeons, ones you can pop in and out of, and not grow bored of.
From Oblivion it takes a combat system where you hit no matter what your level, making the dice seem less obvious. It takes voice acting and improves it. It adds more variety to the map. It adds creatures that don't all want to kill you, and adapts the levelling system so that you do occasionally encounter the weaker creatures that used to terrify you.
Other than that, it adds flying creatures (dragons most notably), and moves further away from the tabletop RPG tradition by removing class systems and backgrounds altogether, streamlining the combat. The result is a more fluid game experience, where immersion is rarely broken, and you can spend hours forgetting that it's a game at all.
It's not all perfect though. It's the first Elder Scrolls game where you can tell the User Interface was designed with console players as the priority. It feels much easier to use keys than a mouse to select what you want - and it doesn't gel so well on a PC. Certain questlines, in particular that of Winterhold College, are cut so short as to feel cheap. Compulsory fistfights (as in Markarth) are slow and dull. Cities are also still slightly too small (Riften and Winterhold in particular). But the move to a darker tone is very much to be welcomed, and overall Skyrim comes out very much in credit. It's come a long way from its RPG routes, but with the single player open world formula, it's unlikely the series will die anytime soon yet.
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Further notes:
If you're a Morrowind fan, wander over to Tamriel Rebuilt. Whereas Morrowind is based only on the island of Vvardenfell, TR aim to build the rest of the province. They produce high quality work, and have made three fantastic releases so far.
You might also want to check out the trailer for the latest Skyrim expansion - it looks very much like Solstheim from Bloodmoon.
Oblivion fans should take a look at the modding community. Favourites of mine are The Lost Spires, which adds an Archaeology Guild, and Castle Ravenpride. But there are so many other gems out there.
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FUTURE EDIT: Sorry for the wall of text. I will add screenshots. Morrowind required me to edit the game files. Oblivion and Skyrim seem to plainly disallow it. When it's not two in the morning, I'll have another go. I'll put the links in then too.
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