What Bethesda needs to do for TES VI

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Hey guys, I just thought I'd share my opinion on Skyrim - what it does right, what it does wrong, and how everything should be enhanced and changed for the inevitable Elder Scrolls 6 game.

 

First off, I've never played Morrowind, so I can't really compare my experience in Skyrim to MW, but I've clocked well over 2000 hours in Oblivion and I've realised that Bethesda have messed up a lot of things in Skyrim. I'd rather focus on TES VI though, so let's just get Skyrim's positive and negative aspects out of the way:

 

Skyrim's groovy stuff:

 

• Combat has more variety than Oblivion thanks to enhanced tactics and interesting perks (dual-wielding, dual casting, slow motion, shouts, finishing moves, freezing)
• There's a bit more interaction with the world thanks to cooking, woodcutting and mining, as well as being able to take salmon out of rivers
• At last, not everything outside of a city that moves wants to kill you, which means there's a lot more opportunities to just enjoy the game world and even hunt for foxes, deer, etc.
• Dragons!
• Improved lighting and shaders
• NPCs have more personality
• Less repetitive environments
• Dynamic wind, water, snow and rain
• Greater variety of enemies and environments
• Better stories told by using the environment - e.g. burnt bodies next to a fire bolt scroll in a burnt down house

 

And now the not so groovy aspects of Skyrim...

• Combat is still repetitive
• Far too easy
• Dragons spawn way too often
• NPCs are still as stupid as before
• Awful optimisation
• Tons of bugs, lots of them quest/game-breaking
• No sound effects (echo, noise dampening, muffled sound, etc.)
• Lack of impact on the world. The rest of this bullet point contains major spoilers: Saving the world has no visible, tangible impact, siding with the Imperials/Stormcloks and helping either faction conquer a city just switches out some NPCs and adds a bit of rubble, the Thieves Guild's headquarters remain as empty and dirty as before despite having re-built the guild, and a very long etc.
• (Spoilers over) Enchanting is ridiculously overpowered
• Alchemy is simplified far too much
• Cooking is rather pointless for anything other than RPing
• Vendors have far too little money, even with the appropriate perks, e.g. Solitude's royal smith only has a few hundreds of pieces of gold despite making armour and weapons for the Imperial army
• Unable to join the Thalmor even if you're a high elf - really?
• Awful textures
• No collision detection for rain or snow
• Quite possibly the worst real-time shadows I've seen since The Force Unleashed

 

Now, I'd like to focus on one main issue: the player's impact on the world.

 

Of course, there's a major problem that Bethesda faces with every game that they make: progression and impact. How can players effectively feel that their characters develop and cause an impact on the world whilst retaining a sandbox style of gameplay? The issue is a lot more complex than it may seem - just look at the list above. Skyrim is, at worse, a great sandbox game and an acceptable RPG, but it faces a lot of criticism because of the things that I've pointed out. And despite having questlines that involve huge events, there's barely any visible impacts on the world. Surely if I set a tree on fire, the tree should at least lose its leaves? Surely if I attack a travelling NPC, the people at their destination should ask why the farmers or guards haven't arrived despite being a week late? Surely if I kill a very important dragon, certain people should attack me? It's that huge problem, which is really a combination of tiny issues, that irks me the most.

 

There is no reason to play Skyrim other than to collect the bets loot and level up to, say, level 50, which can be done in under 60 hours anyway. My actions have no real impact on the game world. I am a Thane in every possible town, yet nobody has tried to murder me, I have not been able to go to any feasts or weddings, barely anybody acknowledges my status... Why? I'm playing Knights of the Old Republic and simply wearing Sith armour makes Taris' citizens be terrified by my presence. I understand that linear games offer a much bigger chance for developers to base the game around the story and the characters, and therefore allow the player to have a much more important impact on the world than sandbox games. But linearity does not necessarily mean that the player will affect the world, and sandbox does not mean that the player will never have any sort of impact. Call of Duty is extremely linear, yet the player is offered pretty much no freedom and they have no sort of impact on the events of the game. Dragon Age is relatively open-ended, yet the player's actions can cause a lot of different outcomes. Let's face it: Skyrim has nordic fortresses, ancient dwemer ruins, haunted swamps, snowy mountains, and all sorts of interesting locations, but there is no real reason to explore them. The art style may vary between all the different 'biomes', there may be interesting notes or mini-stories to be found (like I said before, burnt bodies next to a fire bolt scroll inside a burned down house), but they serve no real purpose other than to disguise repetitiveness. The world is not really affected by your accomplishments or your actions and in the end you realise that there isn't that much variety or that many hidden stories after all, so the game is rendered pointless. Sandbox games are all about discovery and doing what you want - but in Skyrim, the activities that you can perform become boring very quickly (alchemy, cooking, mining, woodcutting) or are far too easy (stealing, hunting, dragon slaying, etc.), and what you discover ends up becoming repetitive very quickly. If I were to ask you the names of the last 10 fortresses you cleared out and to match up an image with the name of each one, would you be able to answer? However, returning to my previous example of KotOR, you can immediately identify any of the cantinas from the game, despite there being dozens upon dozens of them.

 

However, I feel that, in a way, Bethesda did take a step in the right direction. If you do a shout in the middle of a town, guards will tell you to stop, or you might receive a letter from a 'friend' complimenting your skills and indicating where to find treasure. If you have a disease, some people may tell you that you should take some rest and ask for help. If your character is strong, NPCs will acknowledge it. However, that's the problem - NPCs will mention those little tihngs and that's it. If a dragon attacks town, people will walk over to the skeleton and forget all about it the next day. If there is a murder, as far as I have seen nobody will actually react - again, they'll simply walk over to the body and say something, but no members of the family will take over their jobs, children won't cry, there will be no mention about it in the local tavern, etc. I feel that Skyrim does fall short of providing the player with a reason to play, simply because there is no important narrative element that drives the game forward. If the world underwent big changes throughout the many quest lines - for example, rebuilding the thieves guild could make thieves spawn a lot more often in towns - then the world would be believable, and because my actions would have consequences, I would actually care about them. But because the world is so ironically static, there is little reason for me to play after obtaining enchanted daedric armour and weapons in my 6th day of playing.

 

Hopefully, Bethesda will balance these issues out in TES VI. It would be interesting if it were set in Elsweyr, as there are many tropical jungles and forests amongst the desert, and having only a few cities and villages would mean that they could focus on including many important quests in the 'wild', so that players were rewarded for exploring by receiving story-driven quests, which could affect the Khajiit's society. Imagine if you were to murder an important Khajiit politician, and the large majority of guards would move to the major towns to protect the other high-ranking politicians and scholars, which would allow a large group of bandits to assault an unprotected village and kill everyone and set it on fire. When you are sent to investigate the left-overs of the attack, you discover that the bandits are actually being led by a corrupt official who wanted to get one of his political adversaries out of the way and kill off the villagers who demanded government money and protection. You could then expose the corrupt politician and become the leader of a town and decide where to invest your money, and depending on your choice, there would be more edifications being built, tourists from other towns, and maybe even a local feast. It would not be difficult to do, and it would give the player a reason to play and become involved in the world.

 

Of course, there are many other things that Bethesda not should, but *must* deal with for their future games. NPCs need to be more intelligent and react to and with their surroundings. The game needs to be deeper and offer more room for the player to do whatever they want - including joining the equivalent of the Thalmor, which are basically a mafia. They also need to seriously fix the graphics and sound. It may not seem too important now, but I don't think that in 2016 it will be acceptable for a game to have pixellated shadows, no ambient occlusion, awful textures, no proper combat physics (swords that don't hit bodies yet still cause damage, I'm looking at you), particles that go right through geometry, no echo, no sound dampening, etc. Bethesda need to focus on brushing up their tech, and that hopefully involves making a real new engine, and not just making small modifications to Gamebryo and slapping a new sticker on.

 

All in all, Skyrim is a good game. It's fun for a while, it's surprisingly bug-free compared to every other Beth game, and it's rather intense, but Bethesda need to really step up their game for TES VI. I want more variety in combat, better graphics, intelligent NPCs, but most importantly, what I wish for is a truly interactive game, where I can really have an impact, where I can really progress, and where I have a reason to continue playing apart from collecting more loot. I don't want a sandbox - I want a proper region, a proper 'world', which will evolve with me and my character.