Improving Skyrim: Aftershock

 Fixing the squeaky wheel

Skyrim is a great game, it should be: getting updated all the way to today, with another huge game changing update later this year. (When I say 'game changing' I mean in the way that it's attempting to reintroduce paid mods back into the ecosystem against everyone's insistence.) But Skyrim is not without it's faults and set backs. If you ask the Elder Scrolls community, they'll tell you that the problem with Skyrim is exactly each and every way it does not match up exactly to what previous Elder Scrolls games were doing. If you ask me, much of what Skyrim falls flat on, every Elder Scrolls game falls flat on. Like worthwhile and meaningful side quests; don't even get me started on Bethesda and their damn side quests. Actually no, do get me started: because that is what today's blog is going to be about afterall. (Might as well talk about the topic, no?)

When I say 'Side Quests' I should probably elaborate. Every Elder Scrolls game, and open world title in general, is stuffed with side storylines and missions that are non-important to the main progression of the narrative and exist primarily to fill out the emptier corners of the world. Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind have their share of side quests of all different shapes and sizes, so if I'm going to start critiquing I need to be more specific. My problem is the 'tick box' side quests, the extra missions so empty and interest-free that later Bethesda titles would literally leave it to an AI system to create and present them for a player to delve through. Although that shouldn't be entirely crazy to hear, given that Bethesda were experimenting with AI all the way back in Oblivion for it's world generation. Crazy to think that AI assisted development was going on all the way back in 2006...

Bring us to Skyrim and I'll tell you exactly the type of quests I'm drawing issue with. I'm raising arms against the quests that have the Companions send you off to random houses in different holds to slay home invader creatures for the reward of an actual pittance of gold, the Dark Brotherhood quests that have you track down and slay some random NPC who seemed to spawn up out of the ground without anything in the way of challenge or skill being required, or even just the random hold 'bounty' quests that simply spawn a dungeon to clear despite that being an action most people do naturally whilst just living the Elder Scrolls life. The key problems with even calling these activities 'side content' is their gameplay process and their rewards. They're either too boring and uncreative to be fun to play through, or too unrewarding to bother with to any serious degree.

Which brings us to the topic of today's blog. You see, I was just playing Skyrim myself the other day. There I was, traipsing over rocky crags at the tip of the mountainous regions around the Reach, and I came across a surprise ball of magical aura identified rather suddenly as an 'magical anomaly'. Assuming myself having bumped into the activation of one of my 300 odd mods, I jumped to the task whilst trying to figure out which insane adventure I had stumbled upon. (Which proved difficult once I remembered that spawned creatures carry a temporary Ref ID in the Console that can't be traced back to the source mod in the loadlist.) Only after I finished the insanely basic and boring encounter, got a sudden quest notifciation and looked it up on the Internet did I realise; this was vanilla content, and I had accidentally just finished it. The quest was called 'Aftershock', and it's one of the endless generated 'radiant' quests awarded to players for finishing the 'College of Winterhold' guild questline.

Now before I break down the mechanics and offer a solution, I want to talk about the lore and how it's somewhat wanting. The plotline of the 'College of Winterhold' concerns a magical orb known as the 'Eye of Magnus' which is kept mysterious throughout the entire plotline as to it's true origins. We're told it predates the Atmoran settlers of Skyrim and probably even the Snow Elves kingdom before it. It lacks any signs of known construction except perhaps Aedric, but the Aedra aren't known to manifest any part of themselves physically like the Daedra do, so that alone would make it insanely unique. However, as one of the worst questlines in the game, The College of Winterhold quests only use the 'Eye of Magnus' as a magic McGuffin that forces conflict between faction over some vague and nebulous ideal of 'arcane power'. The Aftershock quest appears to be tied to an event in the climax of the quest line wherein rouge Thalmor dignitary, Arcano, manages to shoot enough magic at the orb to open it up causing magical fissures to bloom across Winterhold shooting out tiny wisps called 'Magical anomalies'. 'Aftershock' blooms more anomalous tears across the world that the player, now entitled Arch-Mage, should close as part of an endless clean-up task for Arcano's bumbling.

Now from a lore standpoint this is excessively boring, a vague 'magic entity' that opens up 'fissures' that leak 'anomalies'; there's no substantive narrative or lore value in anything here that might elucidate or reward the observant player and the gameplay value of this side content is even worse. Every iteration of this side quest plays out thusly; you get the order to visit a location, kill a few wisps, go back home. There's no variation, the gold is crap and it is repeated forever. In order to conceive fixing this side quest into something more interesting I want to highlight both the gameplay and the narrative to serve both core demographics of an Elder Scrolls audience. Also, I think that if you can serve those two sides whenever you approach any quest, you'll go a long way to buffing the value of the content proposition. 

My idea is actually rather simple, what you could do with a quest like this is to borrow from the set-up of the Thief Guild side quests in Skyrim, which are all tallied up to a coherent meta-quest line. For 'Aftershock' they could perhaps lean into the fact that magical fissures which leak out magic are frighteningly similar to the lore of Elder Scrolls stars, which are said to be holes in the sky that the gods made when they fled Nirn, all of which bleed magical energy back into Nirn from the realms of Aetherius. We could turn each fissure into their own distinct portal from which one of the elemental planes of Aetherius is leaking, which means even if you don't want to put in the effort to design distinct creatures for each individual plane, you could colour code each magical wisp to be themed to a certain school of magic. There could be destruction wisps that fire spells, conjuration wisps that summon adds and hide behind them, illusion wisps that cast reflect shields and make themselves invisible- that's the sort of basic theming that doesn't even require a lot of thought or effort. Then, as a reward, you have the individual school of fissures tally up so that once the player has closed a certain number of a specific type (5 illusion fissures, etc.) they can open a portal to that realm and have a short generated dungeon with specifically themed rewards. Perhaps random loot affix with a unique enchant property you can only get in this area. I'm just spitballing things you could do to really revolutionise a single quest chain without going crazy with resources and making new models or something. This alone would bump up the worth of doing these side quests ten fold for players.

Of course this isn't perfect, and it won't make these quests the best in the game; but relatively small scale touch-up work like that should form the foundations of what can make great side content in an action adventure RPG. I think that as long as you can convince the player that they are making progress towards something, a reward with any sort of value to it, even if that is value purely by merit of being unique, then you are on the way to developing worthwhile side content; at least to someone's standards; instead of to noone's. That is the only way currently that ESO trounces single player games from a design standpoint, being born in the world of MMO development taught those devs how to handle an expectant online audience. Some of the those lessons could do wonders being translated down here too, if only Bethesda had the ears to listen to them.