Skyrim - The Elder Scrolls V

[Crezth]

D&D's alignments are more judgments of behavior of ethics within the confines of ordinary modern-day normative behavior. Good and evil don't exist as objective things in reality, they're judgments. Skyrim acknowledges this. It's also why it's a sandbox game, not a deeply reflective RPG. You, Dovakhiin, are a prospective God, and the world is your toy, just as it was for Tiber Septim and his Dragonbreak. What do ethics and morality and cause and effect mean in the face of that when you can literally rewrite time by reloading games?

This is a really powerful theme that I think doesn't get nearly as much attention as it should. It is arguably the point of the Elder Scrolls games, at least insofar as they function as a both art and commentary on the art anyway.

It's really similar to BioShock in that BioShock is more about the commentary on the metanarrative rather than any specific arrangement of set-pieces. Bioshock Infinite is testament to that in that none of the arrangement of the pieces on the board matters, not particularly.

It's all about the perspective that you, the player, have for the universe. This is in contrast to the character you're said to assume insofar as you're playing or fulfilling a "role." The real power of your Thu'um, so to speak, is to say "aw screw it" when you get killed by a troll and reload save.

 

[cybrxkhan]

I actually really appreciate that meta-narrative aspect of TES, and it's one of the top reasons why I love the series, as opposed to [insert other generic fantasy RPGs, particularly highly regarded ones I don't seem to enjoy simply because I find 99.999% of any stories from any medium to suck terribly, which would probably almost make me a fantasy RPG hipster if it weren't for the fact I enjoy TES]. I find this relativist and existentialist perspective rather refreshing and the sort of stuff I like (forgive me if I'm using the wrong terms here, I'm no expert on philosophical terminology). The fact that it's combined seamlessly into the worldbuilding makes things even better.

The only problem is that it's too subtle at times, or really, really hidden from view. I had to read up stuff and then read up stuff online in order to really get all of it, and if you take TES at face value - or even at some level of depth - it'd still be hard to get to the bottom of things. I like that some of things in TES are really hidden - the politics, the history, and this whole metanarrative thing - but sometimes it's just way too hidden, and while that's not much a problem for me, it can be for players who don't realize this, particularly those who dismiss TES as glorified MMORPGs dumbed down for consoletards.

 

[schlaufuchs]

While I would agree in the sense that the game isn't about filling a role, I think it sort of falls apart when the quests come into play. If this was the true role of the game you could literally do anything you wanted at any time. You aren't constrained by the bounds of the quest. But this isn't the case. Most of the quests railroad you into a set role, at best giving you 1 alternative option in any given quest. Most of the time even the NPCs are unkillable, so you can't even go "aww screw it" and kill all the characters relevant to the quest. You are stuck in the game's story. In fact this caused a bit of ludonarrative dissonance for me as my first character played with the kind of narrative arc you described. The first time I went to Markarth I was quite literally ensnared by the main quest. I was essentially roleplaying it as an all-powerful chosen-one savior thane who didn't have time to sort out the petty squabblings of some backwater rubes and tried to muscle my way through the whole thing. Eventually though you find yourself in a position where you have no choice but to be arrested and thrown in the prison. There's really nothing you can do about it (short of not progressing in the quest). For a game that's about incontrovertible agency it was a very jarring moment.

Now what I think would have been a better metanarrative would be if the game made use of the Beowulf/Anglosaxon obsession with wyrd, as the idea of an endlessly flowing, undivertable path that the game puts you on with the choice of playing along as the hapless pawn of fate or being driven asunder seems far more poignant to me. Again they kind of play at this a couple times in the game, particularly with the idea of the "chosen one" and "slaying Alduin" prophecy, as well as the overarching theme of the Elder Scrolls. Also the Sheogorath questline plays at this a bit.

 

[Crezth]

That'd probably be why you're a prospective god, and not an out-and-out full-up god. But even on that note, the extent to which you're "bound" by the game is a contrivance of the imagination, just like when you rewrite your own personal narrative every time you reload save. Actually becoming a god isn't all that tricky: just use the modding tools.

 

[Symphony D.]

Crezth has it. What has to be understood is that Skyrim's gameplay and its story are fundamentally at odds with one another, to a greater extent than any other TES game. When I say that Skyrim is a sandbox and not an RPG, I want you to think of, oddly enough, Grand Theft Auto 4.

Grand Theft Auto 4's story, concerning Niko Bellic, has him endlessly agonizing over something bad he did during the Yugoslavian Wars and grappling with the nature of his morality and place in Liberty City in the present day. On the face of it, this is a compelling story. In actual practice, it's totally ludicrous. Niko's violent past means nothing when, after a cutscene ends, a player can take a car on a sidewalk and murder hundreds of random pedestrians. People complained about this, but not to any truly great extent, because everyone understood GTA4 was a sandbox game first and foremost.

Not so Skyrim, but Skyrim is also a sandbox game, it just wants to trick you into thinking it's an RPG (like GTA4 did with various RPG elements) only it's more insidious. TES has a deep backstory, but that backstory also contains things like CHIM and Dragonbreaks, which allow for the total violation of reality, causality, and locality. TES, in particular Skyrim, is an "RPG series" with a wink-and-nod. This becomes more apparent when you consider that your main form of interaction with the world is murdering people (and sometimes talking to them).

While it's true the worlds in TES are not very reactive (and never have been) and that this is primarily a technological limitation, it should be noted that the main form effects will take will be in the form of scripts and scripted events. It's technically feasible to build an elaborate, branching series of events, as demonstrated by Alpha Protocol, but this is fundamentally antithetical to the idea of Skyrim: Skyrim is a sandbox, not an RPG. It wants you to experience as much content as you want without locking you out of it if at all possible. Scripting does nothing but lock you out of content.

While one certainly can imagine a game wherein events have profound consequences, waiting too long to do certain things seals them off and the situation advances without the player, and so on, and such a game would be bound to be interesting, that game would fundamentally be the exact opposite of Skyrim in purpose and premise. This is also reflected in the attitude of the game developers themselves and the tools they allow you to use. TES has become less consequentialist over time, not more. This is not an accident.

Want to kill an essential character? Use the console. Not powerful enough? Open the Creation Kit and delete them. Advance your way through quests. Teleport. Summon items. It's right there at the press of a button, and you'll even still get achievements if you do it. You have the power, and that power is CHIM. This isn't new: Vivec nominally had access to Morrowind's Construction Set. TES, and Skyrim in particular, are about actions, not consequences—consequences impede or restrict actions. Consequences mostly come in the next game, not the current one, when they cease to be relevant because the player has assumed a new avatar.

While I can understand the desire for a more immersive "simulation," TES is actually anything but a simulation and you have attached yourselves to the petty surface features it adopts to mimic one. It's a game about being a God—how much you want to exercise or restrict your divine power is up to you, and that's part of the fun. If you want an extremely nuanced game to roleplay in, you've either picked the wrong one or you're not deploying your imagination enough.

 

[civvver]

I thought everyone kinda knew it was a sandbox game over an rpg though. It's all about exploring and experiencing the world. The quests are excuses for you to go other places, just in case you weren't planning on going to that far out city on your own, the quest is like a little breadcrumb leading you there. Sometimes I feel like the devs would've loved making skyrim like mount and blade. M&B is literally a big sandbox, it has no quests, it has no story line, the whole point is to play around in the world making your game experience whatever you want it to be. Skyrim is like mount and blade (ok that's reaching because obviously it has way better graphics, gameplay, world etc but you get my point), but with quests thrown in because the masses dislike games without direction, myself included. There is an underlying narrative of course in all the books lying around, there's a deep history and a storyline, but I think the whole point is to say this is what the world was, here's some backstory to get you started, now make it whatever you want.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

So now everyone is agreeing with me, brilliant. Please note that I never said Skyrim was a bad GAME, I said it was a bad RPG. My only real gripe here is that Bethesda insists on continuing to call their games RPG's when they pretty clearly aren't. That's all. Skyrim is a very good game at doing what it does, it's just not an RPG, and that's the only point I was trying to get across.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Well, i dont care about definitions, nor I know what exactly RPG games are. But TES games are mostly awesome, call them sandbox, RPG or whatever.

BTW, any suggestion about good real RPGs for PC?

 

[LDiCesare]

Good RPGs? The Witcher 1 and 2. Fallout 1 and 2. Arcanum. Most of these are quite old however.
I have some hope regarding Obsidian's Project Eternity when it comes out. Witcher 3 hopefully too, but that's probably more than 1 year from now.

 

[Crezth]

So now everyone is agreeing with me, brilliant. Please note that I never said Skyrim was a bad GAME, I said it was a bad RPG. My only real gripe here is that Bethesda insists on continuing to call their games RPG's when they pretty clearly aren't. That's all. Skyrim is a very good game at doing what it does, it's just not an RPG, and that's the only point I was trying to get across.

What is exactly an RPG? While I agree I think you may be using an odd metric. Like all things, the definition RPG is more appropriately termed in shades of gray.

 

[cybrxkhan]

RPG is a pretty vague term, come to think of it. It tends to get associated with the "Fantasy" genre (though sometimes sci-fi), but the funny thing is that "Fantasy" is also not a really well-defined genre to begin with. We like to think of Fantasy as stereotypically some Lord of the Rings and D&D mash-up of cliches, but that's just the typical fantasy, and not the only possibility for fantasy.


Anyhow, before I start to go off tangent, one thing I've always thought is that while I would still desire some more meaningful interaction with the world and questlines, I've always thought that some of this meaningless interaction served another purpose too - to show us how meaningless some of our interactions in our world are. I mean, you aren't going to talk with that random farmer over there, and learn his entire personal history and personality, and you are not going to do that with every single freaking person in the world. In real life it's much the same - you are only going to know the few people relevant to you (this would be like the people important to the main quest, like the Greybeards or the Blades), and even then they won't reveal every single thing about themselves due to plot convenience. What I like are the characters who have sparse dialogue, yet you can get much out of their personalities and background - Tullius, for instance, I actually like as a character. He's a hard military man, though pleasant in a way; he also has a very subtle change in character as he grows to respect (though not like) the Nords, and also seems to open up to you just a bit through the civil war questline.

But anyhow I'm rambling again, and I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

 

[Sonereal]

But anyhow I'm rambling again, and I'm not sure where I'm going with this.

Basically "show, don't tell".

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Well, i dont care about definitions, nor I know what exactly RPG games are. But TES games are mostly awesome, call them sandbox, RPG or whatever.

BTW, any suggestion about good real RPGs for PC?

In addition to the ones LDiCesare said, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale. For a more recent example, Fallout New Vegas, in my opinion by far the closest anyone has managed to come to making a true RPG using Bethesda's technology.

What is exactly an RPG? While I agree I think you may be using an odd metric. Like all things, the definition RPG is more appropriately termed in shades of gray.

It's as hard to define as any other genre, certainly. As a music nerd I know all about how hard it is to define genres. But for me the main requisite for a game to be considered an RPG is choice in how you do things. And I don't mean different skills or types of weapons that you can kill bad guys with, I mean choice in how to approach a problem in a broad sense. See IE Fallout, where if you discover the right information and play the game the right way you can actually convince the final boss of the game to cancel his plans and off himself instead of having to fight him, or you can kill him the old fashioned way, or you can sneak around his level and manually detonate a nuclear device to kill him. There are 3 broad approaches to handling this task, depending on the character you are trying to play. It's a murky line to be sure and everyone has to decide where to draw it on their own, but for me this is the main component.

 

[civvver]

But you do make choices in skyrim, you choose a side in the war, you can choose whether or not to become a werewolf etc. The choices are just too limited in your opinion, but by your own definition skyrim would be an rpg.

See I consider it an action/sandbox/rpg, or like an action game with rpg elements. Very few games are pure rpg. Most have rpg elements. Like mass effect. There's choices that effect the final outcome and there's a leveling system but the world is very closed. For me rpg implies two things.

1. Your character will progress in some way, either learn new skills, grow in power statistically etc. These are the rpg elements that are in most action games.

2. You can choose how to progress in the game and do things in non-linear fashion. I guess you could call this choice. But I see it as a little different, a choice on how to further the story, not just different choices on a straight line. Maybe you and I are saying the same thing. Mass effect has a small amount of this, going on side missions etc. Dragon age had a little more. Skyrim has tons. You can completely ignore the main questline if you want.

 

[coanda]

Choice by itself is a good start, but too broad I think. There wasn't that much choice about most aspects of Diablo - you slogged through 15 levels of undead, monsters, and demons, then killed the boss. But I think you're wandering very far from common usage if you don't consider Diablo to be a CRPG (or just RPG for short, when the C is implied); it is one of the archetypal members of that group as the term RPG is used.

I think the distinguishing feature of a CRPG is character progression. You play a character who has skills, stats, levels, perks, or something along those lines, and your actions develop those capabilities further, and/or unlock new ones. It's a very odd definition for something whose acronym literally translates to "role-playing game", as it does not require role-playing. Despite that, I think it most accurately captures what the term "RPG" actually denotes in the context of video games. And by that definition, TES games pretty clearly are RPGs; I don't think it's at all unreasonable for Bethesda to market them as such.

For an extreme satirical example of this, try Progress Quest (and it's "not getting the joke" knock-offs, the various flash Idle RPGs).

 

[Wolfbeckett]

I don't consider the Diablo games RPG's. And to be honest none of my friends that play RPG's consider them such either. The problem with the term RPG is that it gets thrown around more loosely than than the term "indie" in music. Your definition, for example, would make recent Call of Duty games RPG's, since they have persistent level based advancement.

 

[civvver]

People probably started calling them rpgs because the stats are based of D&D and the combat mechanics are based off D20, only usually done as a percentage instead of D20 stuff. Blizzard acknowledges heavy D&D influence in the way WoW combat is calculated with hits, crits etc. So I think the train of thought was, loosely based off D&D, D&D is a tabletop rpg, thus this game is a video game rpg.

Ultimately it doesn't matter that much, games can belong to more than one genre anyway.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Role Playing Game -> You play a certain character and assume a certain role.

Some flesh out the character part a bit more, some put their focus on the action around the character.
But video game genre are a weired thing anyway, since we define them by (old) mechanics. We got "First Person Shooters" - have you ever seen a "First Person (Action) Movie"?

An, regarding the topic: I consider Skyrim to be a RPG. It requires more effort (and some sacrifices) from the player part to work well, but there is definetly room for role playing.
I mean, I recently played BG2 again, one of the biggest RPGs of all time: Most of the dialoge will lead to the same result and the game is quite combat-oriented.

 

[illram]

I dont see any good/evil important implications in this game. My character has done all main quest, is master of a gazillion of guilds good and evil, he is a vampire, a werewolf, an assasin, ever the leader of some weird cannibal cult but it seems there is not any negative repercussion, everybody loves him.

BTW I dont even need to fight myself anymore. I have two companions (this pretty vampire girl and a guy from the fighters guild) also there is a dog which follows me everywhere and this weird black horse i got at the dark brotherhood. Also i can summon two dremora lords and the vampiress usually turns some corpse into a zombie. So everytime i enter in combat i dont have time to kill anything since my personal army does it quicker. It is damn funny but this way it is difficult to raise levels.

Yeah this is the boat I am in. I am the master of every guild including the Thieves and the Dark Brotherhood. I am a vampire, cannibal, was a werewolf, all that. Nice little army of followers. (Although I have Serana and the Riekling, how do you get two human followers?) Even when I don't feed and it says I am "hated and feared" everyone seems to be cool with me. Unlike Oblivion, where if you went too long people would just try and kill you on site.

I am now basically running around exploring every dungeon and finishing all the radiant quests and miscellaneous quests. Still fun but... the end is in sight for me.

You must really not like the questline, because both those are extremely easy to do with Smithing and Enchanting.

I have had smithing and enchanting maxed out for a while, it's just such a chore to continually cycle the alchemy/enchanting circuit for that extra 1% each time that I give up on it for long periods of time. Easy yes, fun not so much, at least until the payoff. And then when I finally thought I was done, the DLC gave us some additional buffs and armor that have got me experimenting again.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

Yeah this is the boat I am in. I am the master of every guild including the Thieves and the Dark Brotherhood. I am a vampire, cannibal, was a werewolf, all that. Nice little army of followers. (Although I have Serana and the Riekling, how do you get two human followers?)

I was surprissed too. I got Serana first from the main vampire quest and then i did the companion main quest and Farkas joined without asking for Serana leaving.

I did all the game being a pure mage reaching 100 in destruction and conjuration. Now trying to stretch out the game a bit more i gave up my destruction skills and used the resulting perks in heavy armour, blocking and one-handed trying to turn my character 180 degrees and becoming a fighter. I have tried to get rid of my companions to have the chance of fighting for myself in order to increase my fighting capabilities but after 40 levels focusing in magical abilities only i have become a sickly guy and it is too late to change. So anytime i find a somewhat hard opponent i cant barely make any damage with my weak sword blows and i end summoning a dremora lord or two to do the work for me.