Screaming into the void

 

I sat down thinking about what it was I had to write today. What it was I wanted to write today. And what it was I was going to write today. And to be honest I ran aground with all three scenarios. Why? And do you know what I felt? I felt anger. And frustration. Why? And where were these inexplicable feelings directed? I'm glad you asked because the answer is pretty direct- I was LIVID at Bethesda game studios for scuppering my latest attempt to play through Skyrim by just being their unfathomably annoying selves. What do I mean by that? I mean that the company won't stop making it difficult to be a fan of their older games! I know, this is hardly the first time I'm kicked up this exact same fuss, but damn it if it won't be the last either! I'm going to explode if I don't talk about the damned updates- so sit back and grab a bag of chips as I unload my hated upon this rake-stepping machine of a developer.

So I understand how much of a privileged position we sit in as lovers of a game that has an evergreen footprint upon the gaming landscape. Skyrim was foretold to me as a game I could play for the next ten years, and I'm still trying my hand at the thing coming close to year 13; the hype did not lie. Not everyone could get abroad the train, and that is their loss because as far as I'm concerned there are only a couple of games with a modding community to match the sheer ferocity of Skyrim's, and those are the Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4 teams. Actually, for the rest of the month I'm going to call New Vegas the most extensively modded game currently doing the rounds... that hasn't already spun off into it's own standalone. (Let's not bring DOTA and DAYZ into this- muddying the waters and all that.) And that privilege can make us a bit protective.

At this point the amount of modded reconstructions that the game has renders literally every copy of the game as personalised, right out of the Mario meme. We decide the way that the game plays, where it starts, how combat works, the flow of the economy, the make-up of the enemies, the distance of the engine LODs, the visual hue, the extent of the God rays- and it's not uncommon to throw a few body mods and skimpy armour mods ontop of that for literally every other Skyrim player in the world because I remain the sole being in the universe that still only plays a male character when they boot up Skyrim. It's actually a bit worse than that- I always end up playing roughly the same male character, no matter how much I force myself to change their race, hair colour, anything- it always circles around to the same archetype. (Not someone who looks like mr, thank god! I only do that in Fallout 4...)

What I'm trying to say is that the game is functionally ours at this point, more so than 99% of other games in the market which developers feel likely totally within their rights to throw in a little change here and there to keep the product running smoothly. (But if it's Rockstar knocking up to try and rip licenced songs out of my GTA game- they can go dunk their head in a river! Starting the beginning of Vice City without 'Broken Wings' playing is tantamount to committing a war crime!) When it's one of Bethesda's old games, however, they're more like deadbeat parents kicking their way back into their abandoned children's lives to screw everything up, beg them for money and then leave them broken and non-functional. That is the state of Skyrim every few years after a Bethesda visit.

Here's the damage- Bethesda recently added a brand new storefront from which they instead to flog mods. But through some strange trick of fate- Bethesda decided to kick off this new initiative with a worse slate of mods than what Creation Club launched with. (I think you can tell that a lot more planning and build-up went into the Creation Club. All of this kind of feels chucked together.) This new attempt to centralise the modding scene by integrating official mods into the in-built Bethesda.net organiser is misguided, but well intentioned. It speaks to a decision making committee that doesn't quite get what the personalisation of the game means, but I know all they're trying to do is make modding easier. They have done the exact opposite though, so my understanding can only stretch so far.

First off, obviously, the change to the version number broke the SKSE which breaks every game that uses scripts. But of course it's a bit worse than that. Waiting for the still-active contributor team to fix the SKSE download is par for the course- but not every mod connects through SKSE. Some of the significant gameplay changers have to perform their own version checks, and those mods aren't typically maintained in a timely manner. Some aren't maintained at all. Every frivolous update for nonsense is a strike directly murdering large swathes of mods that would otherwise work fine, all to add another house mod from Eleanora. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate her work- but why couldn't this have been a creation club update?

But you want to know what grinds my gears? Oh this is the cherry on top of the cake, let me tell you! Part of providing access to a modding site through the game is having the functionality to run those mods- and that means having to build in basic features into the game such as a load-order manager. (Basically it tells all mods what order to load in- which prevents code running in the wrong order and mistakes from occurring.) But uhh... yeah, we've all already got our own one of those in our personalised mod building set-ups. Every modder in the world uses LOOT with inbuilt special-case exceptions, right?  A delicate placement of orders and rules to make sure the 500 mod mega pack runs precisely as it should... and the Bethesda tool overwrites it.

That's right, if you load Skyrim with enough mods to make Bethesda pause- then their new manager kicks in to disable all plugins and require you to switch, and order them, manually like an actual madman. I don't know what sets it off, I'm yet to see anyone manage to circumvent this, which means I'm functionally incapable of playing Skyrim again unless I manage to book an entire evening off to figure out how to hard-code my load order back into Skyrim and... I just don't have the heart to jump through more blasted hoops just to play this game. We shouldn't have to keep playing this endless pointless game of Cat and Mouse with the developers- when will they just give up and make Fallout 4 their cash cow which they never leave alone? When will us Skyrim fans finally be left alone to mod in peace? When will the beast of Bethesda be overcome?

An idiot talks about Soundtracks

 I guess it sounds good, I dunno...

NPCs, AI...

 And we

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the vapid mind of one of those NPCs you see strolling the streets of Los Santos, or holed up in the Inn during the worst storm nights over in Skyrim- or even what bounces around the heads of every character you aren't currently controlling in the Sims? Probably not, because the directions of AI NPCs has been a talking point in video game marketing for a good many years now whenever developers want to hype up all the effort that went into making their game as 'intelligent' as possible. The GTA NPCs are placed dynamically as you travel about, given appropriate AI packages depending on where they are in location on the map and what that specific NPC would be feasibly doing (i.e.  Mountain climbers will be Map Navigating, whilst beach folk will be relaxing on the sand.) Skyrim NPCs follow specific daily AI packages weaved to simulate a daily cycle of waking up, doing their important tasks for the day and then going back to sleep in their beds. And the Sims operate in the same way only with a basic AI that allows them to react to stimulae that the player feeds them.

It's all very heavily catered and orchestrated by the system designers, because games have yet to reach that state of development where they slide off the gangly rails and become free to slot in rampant learning AI that does whatever it wants. Most games would fall apart in a matter of a week under that sort of unfiltered access. Still, it's the job of NPC programmers to create the illusion of a breathing world in order to heighten player's immersion with the world, which in turn will help sell the story, or the action or pretty much whatever it is that needs to be fed to the player to make the game work. AI NPC work is a recipie of subtlety and balance. Nothing sticks out quite like a world with utterly braindead AI who refuse to function in way that we see as 'normal' or 'logical' for the human observer.

But personally, I can't fully shake from my mind the idea of a fully autonomous AI NPC controlled world as being that perfect endgame for the development of non player characters. Think about it- a world where the characters think and react and learn from what you do so that they can act on that information later. If you threaten an NPC with a gun one day, they'll spread that information and people avoid that part of the city for fear of what will happen to them. Or assault one shop keeper and they'll remember you the next time you come in. Currently such systems can be feigned through heavily scripted reaction scripts which you'll find in more extravagant open world titles. To push it that one step further all you need to do is map out a list of actions within an AI's range, throw a learning algorithm on the thing and call it a day! What a world that would be..

Of course, the toss-up would probably be system performance hits. Even with the basic puppets we have in most games today, the sheer power it takes to render those little guided AI silly-string people often grates most games down to a crawl. Drive around Night City in Cyberpunk and unless you're rocking those several thousand dollar systems you'll notice whenever you cross a congested part of the city. (What few there actually are, that is. Night City is surprisingly sparse outside of the centre city, I've noticed.) Perhaps we're not yet at the point of hardware where games can keep the AI minds of NPC's constantly evolving, taking on new information and forgetting irrelevant stuff, all around the core player's game. Unless... heck, that could have made for a revolutionary Stadia game if Google had anything resembling a back-bone in their bodies.

What if I told you, however, that there's an hidden hour between days called the "Dark Hour" wherein- wait, what were we talking about? Ahem- what I meant to say was: What if I told you that these suppositions about AI powered NPCs no longer exist purely within the imaginaries of our spongey minds! And we thank the overpaid and underworked researchers at Standford University for this, through their research paper entitled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviour" Always it's the Standford peeps that go on this bizarre little escapades pushing certain questions that no one really wanted to go ahead and answer, and everyone knows and then getting a good ear-worm into the news. Could still use some help naming the things, though.

Explained in laymen's terms from the perspective of another laymen (look up the paper yourself for a detailed analysis) what we have here is a simple world of sprites and characters imbued with life through an AI architecture, giving the algorithms necessary tools to learn new pieces of information. The set is actually very similar to how Bethesda handle their open worlds, with NPCs being given daily routines to wake up, do their necessaries, go back home and- if they get to that point- even throw parties. (So this is what Sims get up to when I'm not there turning them into abject monsters on society.) The researchers powered up their NPCs, or 'Agents, with personalities' and set them off to play about their lives.

And just like the spongey human race, these Agents pretty much immediately fell to gossiping and spreading rumours like wildfires and having very basic conversations back and forth as powered by an AI speech algorithm in a vein similar to ChatGPT. It's basic, but it's a very interesting look into the way that these separate agents interact with one another in a manner that appears vaguely life-like until you actually read the contents of these conversations and die of synthetic boredom. But you know that isn't going to stop an inherent idea thief like Ubisoft, who are absolutely in the process of building the next Watch_Dogs game entirely around that singular idea, with the rest of the actual gameplay loop being an absolute after thought they don't even consider until the final 6 months, resulting in another absolute disaster of a game. I swear, I'm like the Ubisoft whisperer; I'm in their heads!

Though the paper was more interested in the generative models of AI, displaying their ability to create something arguably similar to personally driven intent when given enough stimuli- obviously my interest starts and stops at the gaming application. I can't imagine big epic fantasy stories like Skyrim or Starfield benefitting much- but The Sims? Heck, half the problem with those games of late has been how robotic all the non players feel- give them the opportunity to act like other players and you'll add a whole new dimension to the world. Heck, you could turn The Sims into a competitive race for success with enough tweaking - just build The Sims 5 with an AI backbone like this and the sky is the limit! Finally, an AI story that doesn't sound like the end of the world embodied! (About time...)

Is Oblivion the king of Elder Scrolls?

 The eternal struggle!

I'm something of a traditional soul towards most things in life, ever erring towards the tried and true and typically glancing askew at anything even resembling some 'new world contraption here to rock my norms!'  I'm the old guy who shouts at windmills- you know how it is. And yet I find myself inexplicably on the other side of the fence when it comes down to the most important debate of our generation: Skyrim or Oblivion. Okay, so maybe I oversold that a little bit- but I really am surprised how heated this back and forth gets- particularly when there is only one objectively right answer- and it's Skyrim... right? But time and time again I'll hear people with opinions I typically respect drumming up their love and admiration for the mastery of Oblivion that Skyrim just couldn't match, and I have to scrub out my ears to believe it. Oblivion was my first Elder Scrolls game too, so I understand nostalgia- but I live in a world where facts are facts. Don't I?

Wait, now I'm actually questioning that. Because if I really break it down and look at myself, there were certain areas in which Oblivion performed more competently than Skyrim did, weren't they? Bethesda is a company that tries to overhaul their games from entry to entry, not just get incrementally better year by year; as such sometimes they push themselves too far in one direction that doesn't pan out, and the past efforts shine all the better for the misstep. Fallout 4's over-reliance on base-building over pre-existing complex world factions being a salient example. So how does Oblivion prevail over Skyrim in any similar fashion, and could they come together to create some form of reality where the old guard title truly is the superior to Skyrim in any remote fashion whatsoever? I'm really splitting hairs here, because otherwise I'm going to be horrifically bias.

Now I've said it before, and it's low hanging fruit for certain, but Oblivion's faction system is so much more robust than Skyrim's. Whilst they are both essentially the same, a string of quests in a self-contained line themed around the faction, Oblivion really remembered how to create an environment where you actually felt like a member of a guild. You would travel around to various guild halls, get to know your fellow members, perform quests for all the different guild leaders where advancement came based on how many of these favours you performed rather than how far along in the questline you were. Yes, Oblivion's faction system did still very much inherit Morrowind's tendency to present utter trash requests as 'quests'; although Oblivion's lowest standard of quest design was still tons better than Morrowind's worst. ("Please collect this ingredient."- please never fall that far again, Bethesda Narrative designers!)

Some have gone so far as to expand upon that point and claim that the world simulation of Oblivion was superior; referring to the way that Oblivion sold the illusion of a breathing world around the player. Indeed, Oblivion featured more believable Imperial patrols that scanned the important roads at night on horseback with their little torches and a modular ambient conversation system between NPCs that could react depending on where you had reached in various questlines. (even if it did become the basis of memes for how unnatural it sounds.) But the most ambitious iteration of Oblivion's world simulation is buried, half finished, in it's code. I'm talking about the semi-functional feature known as Goblin Wars, wherein various factions of Goblins would spread autonomously across the map to mount raiding parties and overtake territory depending on the status of special goblin totem poles and non-respawning raid-leader NPCs. It is a much debated about, but genuine (half working), system that really demonstrates what Bethesda was going for when constructing the world of Oblivion.

Then, and here's a controversial take, we have the combat. Oblivion's is better. But Skyrim's looks and feels better. Skyrim's combat is essential swipe and dodge, without a dedicated dodge button; and the existence of that blasted action-locking 'kill cam' is genuinely game-breaking at higher difficulties. Oblivion's combat has a little more depth to it with unlockable skill moves at certain level thresholds, which really rewards dedicating yourself to a single marital style of an extended period beyond the relatively boring damage increases that the younger brother title presents. Skyrim also had locational damage- oh wait, no it actually doesn't! That was just a rumour which has since been debunked by actual code skimmers! Oblivion knew the onus of complexity should be on melee combat and dedicated the bare basic amount of development to realising that, even partially. Of course, neither game has great combat by any stretch of the imagination, but Oblivion's at least remains partially interesting in the late game. Skyrim's flatly does not.

It has also been said that Oblivion has superior DLC, and this really comes down to a matter of taste and opinion. Mine being that 'Knights of the Nine' was okay but I don't really care enough about it to dedicate another playthrough through it... pretty much ever again after my first. 'Shivering Isles' is a literal classic and I seriously don't begrudge anyone who thinks it's unique world, unforgettably tormented characters and ironically twisted and intricate narrative and lore is a match for anything that 'Dawnguard' or 'Dragonborn' produced. The Shivering Isles reintroduced visual complex weirdness to the Elder Scrolls after that angle was notably toned down from the heights of Morrowind. It's one of those landmark pieces of content who's blueprint you can see on at least one of each proceeding Bethesda game's DLC offerings; because everyone always chases that high of old.

Finally, it has to be said that Oblivion really did a much better job providing a varied offering of objectives in it's main mission slate. Skyrim's are pretty straight forward- go here and kill this and survive that. Oblivion added something for everyone. There was a stealthy infiltration mission of a murder cult following a cloak-and-dagger subplot, there was a giant fiery siege of an Oblivion torn town against some truly tough monsters, there was an open-choice 'collect a Daedric Artefact' quest hook that pushed you out and forced you to not just explore but dig up one of the secrets of the game world. A main quest should explore the breadth of the wider game to some degree and introduce players to everything they might expect, Skyrim just kind of thrust people into the hands of The College of Winterhold, or The Companions, or The Thieves Guild and expected them to accidentally join up whilst otherwise attempting to save the world from a murder dragon. It got the job done, I guess, but it lacked the tailor-made nuance of Oblivion's approach.

So overall, yes there are a slew of things that Oblivion did better than Skyrim ever could of... however- the world of Cyrodill is still one of the most visually bland that Bethesda has ever produced, the vast majority of it's citizens still utterly lack in all but the most basic personality traits, the speech minigame is still a largely perfunctory trainwreck, the level-scaling system is still impressively broken and Skyrim's selection of mods are, and pretty much always have been, vastly superior. In my mind, Oblivion was a product of it's time that excelled for what it was but by merit of it's age was lacking some of those evergreen properties that make Skyrim and Morrowind games you can never grow completely tired with. Maybe next year I'll give another shot at an Oblivion playthrough to desperately try and love it. Maybe that time I'll get through my first visit to the Imperial City without quitting and uninstalling.

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.

Skyrim is better than Morrowind

The fire rises!

And now comes the point where we tip this all on it's head. Shoe on the otherfoot, claiming the new boy is bigger than the old man. Yes, it's quite the easy and popular stance to take that 'old game good/ new game bad' and with Bethesda games it's all but a given that this is the way the sentiment trends. I wonder if, for the sake of the argument, someone could neatly turn that on it's head and start from the otherside of the equation; decideing that the newest Bethesda game, with it's years of game design refinement, built up team experience and vastly ballooned resources, is actually overall the superior project and the better all-around game? Whether from the stance of observing the overall package, we can actually conclude that the Xbox original launch title is neatly put to rest by Bethesda's innovations and reiterations? Now you can see where I'm going with all this, right?

On an individual level, as in dealing with actual characters, the people who inhabit Skyrim are, as a whole, more interesting than the various Morrowind residents. That is likely because Morrowind is stuffed with far more people than the developers over at Bethesda could even hope create actual breathing characters and backstories for, whereas for Skyrim, and Oblivion, Bethesda really toned down on the quantity so they could focus on quality. Skyrim's residents are given personalities and unique topics of discussion and often times complex webs of acquaintes only hinted at with clever environmental storytelling techniques and hidden notes pointing this way and that. The majority of Morrowind's NPCs are just puppets for which general quest questions can be funnelled through. This is why the shrinking down of the landmass has been a boon for the immersion of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

Keeping on the topic of 'quality of quantity', I want to talk about quests for a brief while. Morrowind's larger questlines are long and drawn out big events, but the individual quests that make up those chains can, oftentimes, just be mind numbingly boring or uncreative. The mage's guild will have you picking flowers, the fighters guild will have you rat killing; these are all the sorts of quests no more deep and interesting than what an AI could generate. Which is probably why in Skyrim, an AI does generate these kind of miscellaneous 'no substance' quests. Whereas a lot of the less 'essential' parts of Morrowind are shoved with quests that just fill space, Skyrim's handwritten quests all attempt to be more interesting, multi-faceted and memorable. Not all of them manage this, some are collect-athons, but in general the majority of quests has more overall hits than Morrowind's quest success rate.

Of course, the lowest hanging fruit that I'm absolutely going to hit for is Morrowind's combat compared to Skyrim. Now Skyrim does not have the great and most in depth combat in the world and Bethesda absolutely need to overall the action elements of how their games played, and have needed to since Oblivion; but Morrowind was the result of an unholy union that frustrated everybody. Morrowind's combat is built by an idea that sounds conceptually in-depth and detailed on paper, utilising RPG stats and fatigue bars to calculate chance-to-hit like a full action DnD style of game. Whereas in practise it just turns out to be a frustrating and unfulfilling experience of swinging sticks that phase through enemies without doing damage. Level up your weapon enough to hit consistently, and then you'll quickly start to notice that enemies go down like it's nothing, because the sweet-spot between weapons connecting and doing decent, but not overwhelming, damage is so small that you'll have swept right past it by the time you're hitting consistently. Magic is slightly better and more interesting, and bows are always fun no matter the game; but Morrowind's combat never slips into the state of feeling good. It just moves from frustrating and uncooperative to acceptable but boring.

Perhaps it's a little unfair to put it up as a point, but facts cannot be denied, Skyrim has a better sense of set piece presentation. Shackled by antiquated soft- and hardware, even in it's largest narrative climaxes, Morrowind can't quite sell the grandeur of fighting a living god underneath a dormant volcano next to a giant Dwemer mech-suit so well. Skyrim, on the otherhand, smothers itself in the glitzy presentation of the swirling heavens of Sovengarde or the explosive scale of the battle for Whiterun. In it's biggest moments, Skyrim plays up the spectacle to the extent of it's engine's capabilities and matches the flash of an action game of it's time, albeit in the few rare moments that it can actually afford to do so. The set piece presentation isn't exactly stellar for any Elder Scrolls game, but by comparison there really is no competition between what Skyrim had done and Morrowind's very obvious limits. (Don't even get me started on Hircine's Hunt at the end of Bloodmoon; what a dog's dinner of a sequence")

Immersion is another sticking point for which I have to award Skyrim's efforts. Through the style of creating a world to the level of fidelity that The Elder Scrolls V has, it's actually quite easy to get lost up in the flow of living in the world of Skyrim. Cosying up on some warm barstool in a wayward inn on a chilly night, sipping on mead and embracing the heady boozy atmosphere, or listening to the wind howling from the valley drops underneath the Shrine of Azura; there's a sense of atmosphere that really places the player in Skyrim. Not that Morrowind is devoid of that same atmosphere, per se. In fact, I've always said the Bethesda are typically the kings of such immersion in their RPG games, but again this is a mastery of technology question; the amount of ways the player can interact with the world or have it interact with them, in sound and lighting, marks Skyrim as the superior.

And then there's Skyrim's DLC. Morrowind sort of betrays it's own design philosophy with the layout of 'Tribunal', carving out a restrictive section of map full of maze-like sewer tunnels and large empty courtyards instead of the wide open exploration which marked the strength of Vvardenfell. Dawngaurd builds it's narrative into the existing land of Skyrim and expands upon it with new locations and realms that connect with the main game, fitting more neatly into the package of Skyrim's landmass in a way that is totally seamless. Dragonborn is also a culmination of everything we've discussed so far, superior quest design, spectacular set pieces and improved technologies for creating immersion. (Just a shame about those 'waves'.) Making the DLC offerings of Skyrim, ignoring Hearthfire, a more coherent and enriching play experience than what Morrowind presented itself.

Which brings me around to the bitter end of my wanton character assassination of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind; For which in one instance, I quite literally pulled out a knife I'd already used on the back of Skyrim before turning it back on Morrowind. Presenting, I hope, just a few of the reasons for both sides of the potential coin when it comes to this endless debate that has been held for the past ten years regarding these games. Personally, I don't think that either game is better than the other because they are both just so very different. Despite occupying the same franchise and genre, Skyrim and Morrowind are so distinct in how they're constructed that I never find myself playing one whilst wistfully thinking of the other, as I would feel in other comparative titles. Thus for the sake of the argument I wouldn't land on either side too greatly, I think they're both just steller examples of RPG greatness. And then there's Oblivion. Hmm... what shall I do with little 'ol Oblivion?

Morrowind is better than Skyrim

Lighting fires.

Bold claim, isn't it? But one I've heard made time and time again by more niche members of the Elder Scrolls fandom as the franchise progressively fragments itself with each new game entry. Everybody buys and plays the new game, before inevitably peeling off and retreating to their old favourites with a nostalgic wink in their eye and a smile in their hearts. And that's the exact position I'm going to attempt to adopt today wherein I will, for the sake of the argument, detail the many ways in which Morrowind is a superior game to Skyrim and Bethesda should feel bad for not matching it's greatness. Okay, I don't mean that last part, that was a joke. But my seriousness remains; we're going to adopt the haughty high ground as we natter off today, I hope you can stay with me long enough to get to the end of the article. If to at least see what evidence I can pull out of worrying deep knowledge of this franchises' various entries.

First is the obvious cherry everyone who looks at this topic is going to reach for; the world of Morrowind is unmatched in the Elder Scrolls lore. Every Elder Scrolls game bases it's provinces off various real-world examples to varying degrees of intrigue, cultural inspiration and thematic fidelity. Although the snowy plains of Skyrim are pretty and vast, somewhat capturing the Nordic majesty of Viking homeland- those tundras and snowhills also increadibly terrestrial and safe. Bethesda didn't rock the boat with envisioning the world of Skyrim, just as they didn't stress themselves too much coming up with Oblivion's, fantasy standard looking Cyrodiil. Morrowind, on the otherhand, is one of the most original world spaces in RPG history. Giant mushroom wizard towers, towering insectile beasts, Ancient Egyptian influences trimmed down and warped to not feel in the slightest bit derivative. Just breathing in the culture of Morrowind is a fever dream of ingenuity and creative freshness that very few fantasy properties could ever hope to match. Morrowind's Vvardenfell is the best world space in the franchise, no competition.

Morrowind's handling of it's 'Factions' system is also much improved upon the very rigid way that Skyrim does the same job, with a single straightforward quest line that is often singular in scope. Morrowind is free form with an actual 'Faction rank' system built into the game wherein you travel around to various faction headquarters and accept side quests to build merits with your superiors. There's even a focus put into developing certain key skills to be actually suitable for higher positions, cleverly spreading out faction progression to coincide with the overall progression of the character throughout the course of the main game. In Morrowind, getting to the head of any faction requires tons of building connections through completing quests and improving yourself to be noticed, in a manner that is so much more engaging and rewarding than in Skyrim where you'll, quite literally, just fall into the role of guild master if you stick around long enough. 

Next up; Magic. Skyrim really scaled back on what the series was doing with it's magic, even more so than Oblivion already had done. For Skyrim every spell is really informed by how flashy it is, thus how much damage it does, but Morrowind contained entire lists of spells just for utility. Whether that was spells for breaking through locks, or spells for setting fast travel points; Morrowind built a robust and vast array of magical talents to make the idea of playing as a mage and enjoying yourself a genuinely valid proposition, as opposed to later Elder Scrolls games which all but demand a hybrid build between every potential specification. There was also a complete spell-creation system which allowed for fine-tuning of spells and, of course, the crème of the crop; Levitation. Levitation was a spell that revolutionised the design of Morrowind, not just for travel but for dungeon layout as well. How much more interesting is it to discover a hidden coven of ancient treasure not just by trudging along some linear path that any old thief could have stumbled upon over the last 1000 years, but by flying up to the highcrooks of some mossy cave and peering through cracks in the rockface to discover some tucked away antechamber far out the way of prying eyes? Morrowind understood the potential of expansive magic options better than any of it's successor's have so far.

Morrowind's narrative is a famously deep and rich thread of lore that drags the player, arguably forcibly, through dozens countless texts pertaining to the founding of the very nation of Morrowind and the origins of their subspecies. You delve into the deepest lores and bring those stories to life in an effort to become the embodiment of their messianic stories in a desperate struggle against an almost Lovecraftian-style threat that seeks to invade their very dreams, and yours, on it's journey to achieve an invincible godhood. There's oodles of interweaved complexity around traditions, factions and demi-gods that it feels like every sector of the world somehow links back to the grand struggle of the main quest. Whereas Skyrim, by comparison, is rather plodding and obvious with it's plot of 'defeat the dragons' which seems to progress itself and occur independently of mostly every faction in the game. Sure, you'll float by most factions through the course of the main story, but more just to introduce the player to their exsistence, there's no substantive interaction which makes the scope of the story seem to narrow to purely the efforts of the Player and the Blades. Not even the Aldmeri Dominion feel all that important to the grand scheme of things, making Skyrim's 'Save the world' plot feel like one of the softest I've ever gone through in fantasy.

Morrowind had itself two DLC, which brings it in line with Skyrim's 2 major DLCs. The first was an expansion into Mournhold, the capital of Morrowind's mainland, which interweaved with the major characters of the main story so well it felt like something of a natural expansion. Touching on the rest of the tribunal and how they interact with the claims of who you are, makes the events of 'Tribunal' feel worthy and formative to the proceeding few years of Morrowind's lore. If the main game is about dealing with the product of Morrowind's ancient past, 'Tribunal' is about laying the tracks of it's impending future. Whereas Skyrim's Dawngaurd is itself a separate and distinct narrative that fails to reflect back on anything really worthy to the actual state of the world, beyond how Skyrim's vampires choose to hold themselves. 'Bloodmoon' and 'Dragonborn', however, both take place on the island of Solstheiem and I'd argue the tables actually flip for it. Bloodmoon is it's own story whereas Dragonborn feels implicitly tied to the main narrative in way that makes it feel like the cap off to the entire game. Quiet curious.

Finally, there are the immersive elements with which Morrowind defines itself. Morrowind gives it's users no map markers or cheaty video game tools for quest hunting or quick travelling, players must travel the land as the people of the world would, through slit striders and very specific directions that one could very well end up getting wrong if they don't pay attention. Relationships and contacts can be built with anyone in the world thanks to the robust affinity building minigame, events occur in their own pace requiring the player to match it. Morrowind feels like a world that breathes on it's own, whereas Skyrim is a place that would stop in it's tracks if it's main reason for being, the player, stopped existing. Of course it's all an illusion in either game, but Morrowind arguably sells that illusion better with the way it places the character in a sprawling, unforgiving world that just doesn't seem to care about them until those players make it care about them.

Morrowind wowed the world as a launch title for the original Xbox and it has remained something of a love letter to fans of Role Playing Games ever since. One of the most creative and ingenious game worlds ever made, it's only fair that Morrowind has maintained it's adoration almost 20 years later. To this day people still flock to talk about the game, there's a whole new updated version of the game to run mods better on, there are active modding units making content for it, and Nvidia literally picked it as a game to show off their automatic ray-trace remaster tech on; proving it's relevance even in the modern age. Few games can boast living so prominently in the public consciousness for so very long, the staying power of Morrowind is nigh on unmatched. Who could truly argue, then, that it is not itself the greatest Elder Scrolls Game ever made? Who could argue indeed... 

The still growing future of Skyrim: Huge mods.

Future in the roots.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a game that is over 11 years old at this point, but for fans of the action RPG franchise, Skyrim is all we have to keep us going because the next main-line Elder Scrolls game probably isn't heading our way until the late 2020's. The Elder Scrolls Online makes for a half-decent stop gap; but there's so much potential in a brand new entry to innovate, improve, expand, and then be thoroughly disparaged by a bundle of folk who'll crawl out from under the furniture to serendipitously declare that Skyrim's systems were oh-so more complex and the new game is pathetically watered down by comparison. Because such is just the cycle of things. (I just can't understand Oblivion supremacists, I really can't.) As such, it becomes important for us fans to seek our comforts in the here and now, or 'coming and soon', to fuel our hobby until such a time that Bethesda gets bored of occasionally breaking entire load orders in order to add extra language options to their Creation Content mods, (I'm not joking, that was literally the reason for the last update) and gets to work making the new game.

To that end there's no shortage of mod creators dedicating their free time to crafting absolute wonders of creation of a high enough quality to actually be sold as full games. I know they're of that quality, because some of these mods end up getting key staff members head-hunted off the project by Bethesda themselves. (They don't even wait for the mod release most of the time. Imagine if they did that for the Fallout Frontiers devs! Yikes!)  Modding is, of course, a big part of Bethesda's identity, and there's decent evidence to suggest that Skyrim is going to, in the year of the Divines 2023, be the staging ground for yet another paid mods rollout attempt. As such, we should start to take the last few major unpaid mods seriously whilst they're still around to enjoy. In that vein; have you ever heard of Beyond Skyrim?

Beyond Skyrim is one of those projects that, when I first heard of it many years ago, I waxed lyrical about how cool it would be if anything ever actually came of it, and they shrugged my shoulders and assumed it would end up a dead-end pipe dream. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many ambitious mod projects do end up going nowhere because you're asking a plethora of random creatives to collaborate on a passion project that might not end up going anywhere for no greater guaranteed prize than the adoration of fans. And in the case of some collaboration mods (Fallout: Frontiers) not even that much. Beyond Skyrim just seemed ambitious beyond reason, pardon the half-pun. Expanding the borders of Skyrim to eventually cover every province on Tamriel and some further places besides? It seemed farcical to consider. But the projects have persisted.

In many ways it's nice just to see the incredible work that goes into bringing Vvardenfell to life in the creation engine, or remaster key locations of Oblivion's Cyrodill with that same architectural design but an improved overall fidelity. But then we start to see projects that envision lands that, when many of these projects first started, had no fixed reference material to draw from; Such as Eleswyr. Of course in the time since, Elder Scrolls Online has brought players to every individual province, but there's still a level of independent personality and driven creative passion sticking up the spine of these vast mew worlds mods being brought to the Skyrim world- most of which blossom into things that no Bethesda game has ever seen before. And with the scale of all of these expansions, all being worked on or at least planned on, simultaneously; it's all quite impressive to witness from the outside. I can only imagine the chaos from the inside.

Bringing the past games back to life has always been something of a dream for the Fallout modding community, and it's a dream that has really come to life in the ten year gap between the last main line entry and now. People tried to port Morrowind into Oblivion, and now the same is being done for Skyrim, as well as an 'Oblivion in Skyrim' project. Additionally, some truly pioneering individuals have gone that extra step to also port the storyline of Daggerfall into Skyrim, resulting in one of the most flat-looking, but still ambitious feeling port mods to ever grace the modding scene. For those who really want to replay those old Bethesda games but can't stand Morrowind's bad combat, Daggerfall's general antiquated presentation or Oblivion's... everything; these are promising, if largely ongoing and in development, propositions.

And then there are the wild total conversion mods that spark into attention every now and then. I talked about it a while ago, but the Westeros conversion for Skyrim based on Game of Thrones is still ongoing, probably revitalised in passion by a new show which wipes some of the distaste that Season 8 left in a lot of the fandom's mouths. Out of every mod project I've seen, and that covers a vast array of ground, I think the character models that the team have proposed to try and match the faces of the actors from the show are truly unparalleled. That and the architectural work going into to building tile-sets that match the buildings and interiors of the show with added inspiration from the book, all gives the impression that the passionate part-time developers of this mod have the spring-board for their own new style of game ontop of Skyrim's base to mind. The promise on top of that of branching quests are the only part where I draw some serious raised eyebrows. (We saw what happened the last time someone tried to play 'fan fiction' with this lore, afterall...)

All of what I've described so far have been mods that are in some way based on some sort of property, be it foreign to The Elder Scrolls or past games, drawing from that inspiration to form a baseline. But there has been one largely original 'new lands' mod that has swam into my viewfinders. Thras, promises to take players to the largely discussed by never visited coral home of the Sload slug people, a race that has only shown up in Elder Scrolls Online and Elder Scrolls Redgaurd at this point. Just the preview screens of some of the environments, and especially the animals, that the team has envisioned strikes with a creativity I haven't noticed in the modding world since I explored the incredible new lands Morrowind mods. The actual fauna in particular reminds me of the wild ingenuity behind the various species design in 'Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets'; a movie that was fun to look at if nothing else.

Bethesda's best ideas to support Skyrim in the many years between now and TES VI is to support modders, meaning that everything I'm describing is pretty much as good as the new 'DLC's of Skyrim's coming years. For some big mod teams out there, these multiyear projects is essentially their submission for gaming industry jobs, and Bethesda have expressed time and again how happy they are to accept such submissions with gusto. It's so amazing to get a chance to explore the best foot forward of creative fans across the whole of Bethesda's modable game library, and I've only touched on some of the dozens of really exciting projects being worked on simultaneously. Many internet communities claim theirs to be the best, but with the self-renewing and constantly developing nature of Bethesda's, I'd say this one has a strong foot forward in that regard.

I hate: Ice Wraiths

 And they hate me too.

Skyrim is one of most well travelled games of all time on account of being ported to every system under the sun. I know we joke about how many editions of the game exist but to be frank, it's a stellar game that thanks to the work of modders has a handle of genuine immortality without being necessarily built to facilitate that sort of game. There's no rougelite systems or decent cyclical play loops; but fans refuse to let the game die by modding in any and everything they can think of. Just recently Skyrim got itself a multiplayer mod and a Nemesis-style system straight from Shadow of Mordor. (Better watch out for a cease and desist on that one right there. Who knows how petty Warner Bros are willing to get.) What I'm trying to say is that this a game that has had everything in it torn apart and put back together so well that most players know it's landscape better than Bethesda's developers do. We should considering the amount of times we played through the darn thing. By all rights we as consumers should be surprised by nothing in this game, it should be incapable of rustling any jimmies. And yet...

I have a deep and enduring hatred for the enemy known as Ice Wraiths that I've had since the game first launched in 2011, and retain to this day. I despise their stupid wisp-like design of being bright shining blue, which clashes with their usual spawning environment; ice sheets. I hate the noise they make like a rattling cobra, loud enough to alert you to imminent death but nowhere near clear enough to indicate where the danger is swiping from. I hate their sweeping attack pattern which is nigh on impossible to dodge with how far it travels. And I hate the ice-wall effect they create on the floor with every swoop they make, essentially turning every encounter into a hardly visible minefield thanks to the fact that they spawn in snowy environments and again, the snow floor clashes with Ice Wall. In essence; I think they're most annoying enemy in the game and I hate them.

To be clear, Ice Wraiths are not the most deadly, nor the most one-shot capable in the game. Without turning off kill animations those dubious honours would probably go towards Dragons who, thanks to a badly programmed kill move parameter, can literally cutscene kill you at full health on the highest difficulties. Or maybe towards the Dragon Priests who are pretty much the only other creature in the game to make use of the borked 'wall' spells, that apply constant damage at such a ludicrous rate they can melt your health bar in about five consecutive seconds unless you immediately move, whereas the same amount of time spent in concentrated fire would do a fraction of that damage. (I think it's because of overlapping damage sources that hit you simultaneously, if I were to guess.) Those enemies are both bearable for the sole reason that slaying them is worthwhile. That life-or-death struggle is the demand of a serious boss encounter at the end of a dungeon or a epic ambush from a flying dragon. Are they poorly balanced? Sure. But getting that kill on the otherhand feels like all the more of an accomplishment because you faced that unfair wall. But what of Ice Wraiths?

They're trash. Pitiful forgettable worthless trash mobs so useless they're not even really afforded any substantive lore snippets explaining what the hell they even are! I guess they're just 'elementals' as nebulous of a title that is, but they aren't tied to any quest that really puts any amount of attention on them or their function because they aren't supposed to have a function. Yet somehow they're one-shotting demons. Off the top of my head I can think of only two quests in the entirety of vanilla Skyrim that will pit you up against Ice Wraiths, on any of the major critical paths. You have the route up to High Hrothgar, where they serve as obstacles that can feasibly just be run past. The game doesn't explicitly force you to fight them. And then there's the introduction quest to the Stormcloaks, which pits you against three of them to 'prove your worth'. A funny hazing ritual given that it is single handily the most dangerous task you'll embark on in the entire Civil War quest line. Does every Stormcloak have to kill three Ice Wraiths in order to join? If they did the army would consist of no-one but the Dragonborn.

The problem here is a clash of aesthetic and design, one that I can assume is driven worse by any of the numerous ENB mods that players choose to install given their tendency to up bloom to JJ Abrahams levels in the pursuit of 'beautification'. Bethesda designed an enemy with a jabbing stab range melee attack that does vicious levels of damage on it's own; a split second timing thing if you want to try and side-step it; but they made it damn near invisible thanks to their translucent icy body that slips right inside the already gleaming white of the ice caves and/or sheets they spawn near. They also tend to spawn in packs, meaning you can suffer an heavy infestation of invisible death snakes flying through the air at you for any given time without knowing it before your death.

And this is coming from a guy who actually loves the winter world of Skyrim. In fact, I like all depictions of winter as long as it come from the distance of a plasma screen. Yet for the Ice Wraiths that very theming is it's death. Not to mention how the things are damned sturdy too! Skyrim in general has a pretty piss-poor elements system where elemental weakness or strengths are pretty inconsequential in combat, and nowhere is that more frustrating then when facing literal ice monster that hardly feel it when being blasted with fire spells. They're also resistant to straight physical damage, which makes them a small tank and a canon; guess god really did the min-max stats when coming up with these guys on their character sheets; huh.

I welcome any number of ice-tainted Skyrim beasts over the bloody ice wraiths. Ice Trolls; annoying for their regeneration abilities but at least they're slow enough to make sense for the power behind every swing. Ice wolves; sturdy but easy to ultimately overwhelm. Frost Giants; so overpowered they literally break the physics engine but still good for the odd laugh. Everything else has some saving grace to them but the ice wraiths. I don't even think they're visually all that interesting; you know, in the brief moments you can even actually see them. Their design of spikes upon spikes just sort of brings to mind memories of the Prometheans from Halo 4; messy overdesigned garbage that melts into the scenery. It's just a good thing that Ice Wraiths are only a single rarely used enemy instead of an entire third of the running time. (God, Halo 4 made me weep.)

Many people flock to mods for Skyrim looking for some sort of mod to disable the spiders from their game because they've allowed their phobias to grow so bad they literally can't function if a badly animated one is on screen. (To be frank, I also have a phobia with spiders. If you think Skyrim's are bad, you would suffer a heart attack playing 2001's Resident Evil.) What I need is a mod that erases all Ice Wraiths for the game entirely so they be neither an eye nor brain sore ruining my good questing time any longer. A great exorcism of every Frost Snake from the border of Hammerfell to the Sea of Ghosts. Maybe a Saint Juib-style figure who drives all them from the land in some heroic act of self sacrifice. I don't care about the excuse behind it; it just needs to be done. No more Wraiths!

Wintersun Mod review

 Dorime

I typically am the type to gravitate to heavily story-focused topics when it comes to reviews, as writing and narrative construction are areas that I'm heavily invested in personally. It just happens to follow that I usually end up playing narrative mods for games over gameplay effecting mods, as I'm usually more trusting of modder's ability to be able to craft a fun new adventure then I am for them to totally rebalance a game in a manner that is totally fair from all angles. It takes some amount of research and debate to convince myself to try out a significant game-affecting mod, not least of which because I'm very careful with arranging my mods so that I play a sustained and stable game. I'm not a 'dip in to play this one mod' kind of guy, I like to embroil each mod I might possibly want to try into a total playthrough experience so that the new content flows in as naturally as it can. As such, it can take me a good many years and playthroughs to bring myself around to a mod as non-intensive as Wintersun.

In dozens upon dozens of serious modded Skyrim playthroughs over the years, I have never tried one with this mod installed despite it's fame and popularity, probably because I didn't think it would be the type of content I'd get value out of interacting with. Wintersun introduces gameplay mechanics into the faiths of The Elder Scrolls, so that players can choose a deity to worship and receive tangible gameplay benefits for their choices, similar to D&D. It's not all boons and bonuses though; because the favour of your chosen god must be earned through regular prayer or a specified task distinct to your chosen deity. Something to slide into your gameplay routine until it becomes part of your playstyle in an immersive and grounding fashion. It really is an elegant little concept that the mod author, 'Enai Siaion', conjured up here.

Religion is one of the most important aspects of the Elder Scrolls lore, with the convergence between various pantheons, conflicts, hierarchies and substitutes, taking up a vastly significant space in the critical questlines of all of the core games. Skyrim alone features several clarifications within it's literature about how the legend of the Dragon Alduin isn't just a Nordic variation on the Imperial Pantheon's Akatosh, the Dragon of Time. (Anyone who has played Skyrim through knows the importance of establishing that distinction) And that is just the tip of the iceberg. The cultural split between the Empire and Skyrim which spurs the civil war central to that game's political situation is due to a ideological debate about what legendary figures are viable gods for worship, specifically whether or not Talos belongs in the Nine Divines. Morrowind was all about the worship of the Tribunal, Daggerfall's multiple endings are only viable because of Akatosh's time-warping involvement and Oblivion literally turns into a clash of the Aedra versus Daedra near it's story apex. The gods and their worship are cornerstones of the lore, so why don't they have a role in the vanilla gameplay more?

Vanilla Skyrim gives us shines to the Nine Divines that players can spend a small sum of money at in order to get a brief temporary buff and a quick 'cure diseases' spell shoved on them. That's about the extent of interactions between the player and their gods in the entirety of the gameplay loop. No commitments to a certain pantheon or figure, none of the thematic offerings or rituals that you'll hear other in-game aspirants mention, and no meaningful interaction with the core gameplay loop of Elder Scrolls- dungeon diving and looting. (Beyond the buffs that vanish in a 20 minute period or so anyway.) Of course, these RPG games don't need to go into explicit detail for every aspect of the world for the title to still be 'immersive', but that's why we have mods, isn't it? To fill in the obvious feeling blanks that Bethesda left open to us.

In all honesty I haven't actually had the chance to try out every individual religion that the mod has on offer, especially given the amount of effort it takes to really become embroiled in a few of them. But I have played around 400 hours into my current playthrough with Wintersun installed and active the entire time, so I'd say that gives me enough experience to provide a general opinion on it all. With this mod comes the power to pray, that's not an affectation the ability is listed under the 'powers' tab, and this will be the main way you commune with your deity. Every day give-or-take you are expected to pray to your god and each day you remember it will build up your conviction and everyday you forget that conviction will drop. Once you reach 100% conviction, you will be crowned a 'devotee' which will give you a distinct power to make all the praying and adherence to your god's tenets worth the effort.

Where it really gets interesting is in the breadth of pantheons open to you. I started the game devoted to Shor, a Nord specific god who grants a hero spirit from Sovengarde whether a boss enemy aggroes on you, and the various races all have their own unique gods that cater to their region's lore. There's the Yokundan pantheon, The Elven Ancestors and even the Daedric Princes. That's right, you can worship a Daedric Prince. What makes that lot an especially interesting bunch is the fact that simply praying all day hardly does anything to increase your conviction points because, true to their nature, Daedric Princes prefer you prove yourself with action in order to become their blessed devotees. Through this the basic framework of religion can actually begin influencing your playstyle by dictating your daily routine and the goals you work towards.

A few hundred hours into my playthrough I accepted the Lovecraftian-themed Hermaeus Mora into my life, and his peculiarities proved quite interesting to the way I play. True to the maddening search for knowledge that so many Lovecraftian protagonist's fall for, Mora's religion demands the player seek out uniquely spawned pages of ancient apocrypha carrying dastardly secrets in order to further their convictions. These pages are spawned at random on the corpses of slain humanoids both in the vanilla drop list and on modded bad-guys. (I think it's limited to humanoid enemies though, I haven't checked for certain but that seems to track with my 200-odd hours of playtime with Mora thusfar.) Gather enough of these pages and you can craft them into special tomes that buff your magic and shouts, and grow enough to become one of Mora's Devotees and you can sacrifice 5% conviction in exchange for a free skill point! That's some pretty powerful reward system, and certainly worth checking the various corpses of enemies who you'd otherwise have long started ignoring by that point in the game.

In my mind the best mods are one's that function just like this. Sliding in seamlessly into the gameworld in order to provide a side of the gameplay experience you didn't necessarily know you needed, but which enriches your playtime regardless. There's nothing so overbearing about Wintersun that it impedes your ability to play the game how you want to, and if even the daily prayers prove too much of a nuisance you can just shirk the whole process and go agnostic. (Although at that point it would really be a wonder why you have the mod installed at all.) If you've interest in a little bit of immersion being imbued in a woefully underloved portion of Elder Scrolls lore, I'd have to recommend Wintersun as the solution that you're looking for. Simple, immersive, fun. The best of all worlds.

I hate: Skyrim's Killmoves

 Fatility.

I have been playing a simply obscene amount of Skyrim recently, and that renewed familiarity has sparked up some dormant issues that you only really think about when 200 hours into a playthrough. Such as the killmove system: which sucks. And to be clear, I remember this being one of the most exciting things proudly postured in the marketing leading up to that initial 11/11/11 release date. Oblivion's combat was rather famously one of it's weakest aspects, with a notoriously flimsy 'chopstick' waving of swords that was considerably lacking in impactful connection and even more in strategy. Somehow even Morrowind manages to give it's players more options in the heat of combat than Oblivion did, and the magic/ archery system wasn't much more advanced. So now that Skyrim was going to be directly addressing that, people were excited to try out this fighting system for themselves. Which was when Bethesda lifted that cudgel and squarely struck the heated Iron with the Killmove trailer.

This was a trailer that consisted purely of every single moment in the game where the animations took over and the player performed some choreographed show of martial prowess, far eclipsing anything we'd seen in an Elder Scrolls game to date. It was violent, it was exciting, and I even think it might have made the cut to be included in the Trump Administration's supercut of video game violence, for those who remember that little MLG compilation vid. And we, the many who were ready and eager for Skyrim to drop into our waiting hands for months already, went crazy for it. We ate that action up to the dregs and didn't even hang around the cafeteria lady in order to beg for more, because we'd feasted heartily. All of which is to say that I was pretty predisposed towards the whole Killmove ecosystem for months before the game came out, so I was just fine ignoring any budding complications with it's implementation once the title arrived.

And nor did I really have any reason to be upset. The gameplay was spiced up sufficiently with the special little flourish moment, typically performed on the last enemy in a wave of combat, and the ability to throw on a perk that allowed for decapitations was widely celebrated by the majority of players as 'super dope'. Even playing on Master difficulty it all seemed to work out just fine. And then Bethesda added Legendary difficulty. Now to understand how these two parts of this story work together, I'm going to need to explain both how the killmoves work and how legendary difficulty works, and then you'll see why this turned into a problem so bad that I, just recently, had to cave and get the mod 'Violens' just so that I could disable killmoves almost entirely. I do not exaggerate when I say that this combination of systems makes the combat nearly unplayable in Legendary difficulties lategame, and if you don't have Violens in your load order but are trying an Anniversary Mode Legendary run; be warned about what to expect from Level 30 up!

Killmoves are triggered on the enemy when two conditions are met, namely that slaying the enemy in front of you will take the player out of combat, and that the attack in question has the potential to kill the enemy in the next hit. As in, the expected calculated damage of the hit will drain all the remaining target's hit points. At the very moment that attack is initiated, before the animation to swing has even begun, the game takes control of the action and the player can watch as an animation plays off. Archery players will know that this becomes a problem when the camera takes control for a ranged shot, and then the enemy simply moves out the way and you get a cinematic presentation of your screw up, but otherwise the system works fairly well. However, it also works on the player. Killmoves on the player can activate even if the player isn't the last enemy in the area who needs to be slain, and will take over, once again, if the attack that is about to be executed has the potential to kill it's target. Keep that in mind.

Now Legendary difficulty in Skyrim expands the difficulty of the game merely by applying modifiers to combat which, when you realise them, absolutely suck. So let me give you a warning that once you realise what the game is doing, it might subconsciously ruin Legendary difficulty combat for you in the future forever. Are you fairly warned? Okay: it's just cutting the damage that NPCs take back 1/4 of the expected damage and multiplying player received damage by x 3. Not really the 'fair world' I was shooting for when I picked the highest difficulty. I wanted to be less of a god, not become the world's most paper-thin human. Oh and yes, the buff to damage received is only on the player, meaning that if you walk around with companions they'll serve to be great damage shields with their x 0.25 damage reduction. Basically; you have to get real good at dodging attacks if you're going to be playing Legendary solo.

But then there's a issue there, isn't there? Because as I described with the way that Killmoves work, the animation takes over the second an attack is queued that has the potential to kill the target. Now kill move animations overwrite the controls of the attacker, and the target; which means that if an enemy launches an attack against you that might have killed you, but you have healing potions or, you know, the ability to move out of the way, your chance to save yourself is overruled by the game taking over for a killmove animation. This becomes an even bigger issue in Legendary difficulty, because every enemy does 3x their damage, which essentially makes it so that any level 30 or above enemy with a two handed weapon can instantly kill you just by focusing their melee aggro on you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Dodging is useless when the killmove activates before the attack animation has begun, and solo legendary play becomes effectively impossible.

And even with a huge group of companions, like how I play, it's still an impossible situation to manage. I remember recently conducting the final mission in the Civil War, and it was essentially like trying to navigate a landmine of enemies who would instantly kill me just by looking in my direction. I had to try to sneak around the enemy lines so that I could quickly break the barriers between me and the final room and just hope that the game didn't spawn 6 guys ontop of whilst I'm doing it. The problem becomes even worse who you realise that, whilst human enemies pull off the most killmoves, most other humanoid enemies do too, which makes Nordic Ruins a slog. And then Dragons can do it on top of that, so melee-range dragon fights are a no-go. Basically, the further along in the game you get, the more impossible it becomes to play the way you want to; and that's a bit of a huge problem.

I can't recall the amount of times I nearly tore out my hair from having a five minute fight totally wasted because my handy shields, Sofia and Inigo, dropped aggro for a split second; I've even had times when I've been behind a wall of companion bodies and still had the animation glitch out, thus I've been melee killed from across the room. It's quite clear we're looking at the sort of game for which Bethesda have layered so many systems ontop of each other that they didn't really realise when two glaring mechanics didn't play nice together, and I suppose now it's just too late to change anything. At least from their end. From yours you can turn off killmoves in the Ini, or download a mod to give the player killmove immunity, which sucks to have to do; but the alternative is a practically unplayable melee combat system in a melee focused fantasy game.

And... I'm playing Skyrim again.

I'm starting to dream in Dragon.

We all have those onerous backlogs of games that we swear to ourselves we'll get around to one day. One mythical day where we just pull ourselves up and play more hours than are physically within the day in order to complete literally every single game we've ever had a passing interest in, and it's a lie. We know it's a lie. Most of us are lucky if we've even played all the games that we own, let alone finished them; but it's a falsity that harms no one. Yet even that becomes hard for me to tell myself when I'm going around wasting valuable off-time playing my fifty thousandth Skyrim playthrough on Anniversary edition! (Someone stop me, I can't do it myself!) So I think it's fair that if I'm going to talk about gaming as it currently exists for me right now, it only makes sense that I bring everyone into my ongoing love affair with Skyrim and overmodding to just-unhealthy degrees.

First of all, I've just played through Skyrim's main story on Skyrim Special Edition, which Steam is telling me is the first time I've done that... ever. Which goes to show the amount of times I've dived into a playthrough and just gotten lost on the innumerable side activities, and large questmods that characterise playing PC Skyrim. Currently I'm playing with exactly 312 active plugins in my Skyrim game, and I've touched upon maybe half of those mods in a lot of playing time. Most of which I started the game with and a few I picked up along the way are mostly patches or appearance mods to replace one's that broke or which I forgot; all of which is the sign of a modder who is a little too experienced. Knowing pretty much exactly what I wanted to have in my game, what I needed to have installed right away, what I probably wanted to leave until the future is all recommended knowledge, of course, because mid-playthrough modding is typically ill-advised.

So what sort of mods am I rocking? Well I'm actually rather conservative when it comes to modifications to the core gameplay experience simply because I really like the way that Skyrim plays. It's not particularly dripping with pitch perfect weight or complexity, but it has enough going on to sustain a playthrough and at least feels impactful on swings, which is all I ask for. That being said, I do have a couple of gameplay effecting mods in there from CACO (an alchemy and cooking overhaul which I'd never tried before and figured would be worth checking out) and Wintersun. (a really cool mod that brings religion into the game as a meaningful mechanic.) And there are the tons of companion mods I download, because I love making friends, which almost necessitates mods like OBIS (Organised Bandits In Skyrim) otherwise I would just roll through every combat encounter like a train. (Because I need to have Inigo, Sofia, Lucien, Aurlyn, Vilja, Lydia, my Armoured Mudcrab I call 'Harry', a modded version of Meeko that's a white Husky and some rando NPC from 3DNPC that I stumbled on and liked their backstory, all in my party at the same time.)

My visual overhaul mods aren't too numerous, although I've very happy with the few that I've chosen. Jk's Skyrim does an incredible job remixing all of the settlements across the region to create something feeling very much in the spirit of Skyrim but with more personality and sensible scale to them. One of my favourite additions being the way the mod adds a whole graveyard of ruined houses around the back of Winterhold, using the environment to tell the canonical story of the city literally fell apart, as in- off a cliff, under dubious circumstances. Plus there's Obsidian Weather, which adds some small seasonal rotation to the game, but also just improves the sky box so much that there are times I'm just left stunned looking up at the celestial wonder of the sky. Which is very important, because with the many mods of Anniversary Edition I spend a lot of time walking the roads.

'Skyrim: Survival Mode' is one of the most enduring inbuilt mods I've kept in my playthrough rotation and only now, that I've completed the main game, am I starting to get annoyed by it. (New Vegas still maintains the best integrated survival mode in a Bethesda published Role Playing game.) Why disable fast-travel, no seriously- why? Fallout 4's Survival Difficulty is a hardcore challenge, a Souls-esque weighing of risk and reward where the brutality of travelling to objectives is a large part of the fun. But Skyrim, even with Survival Mode, is just not that. Having to eat and sleep feels like natural addendums to this world and the rate they build on you against the amount of ready food there is within the world doesn't feel the least bit imposing to me. This isn't one of those games where the struggle to survive desperately outweighs your ability to have fun and do what you want, the meters just add value to the otherwise ancillary food items which litter the game world. So forcing walking everywhere feels totally out of left field and leaves we wondering if the makers of this little plugin even understand what the purpose of the mod that they made is. (I had to install a extra-carriages in Skyrim mod just to resist the temptation not to turn the mod off.)

But what brings me back to the act of modding Skyrim again and again are those quest mods. Good lord do I never get tired of taking my Dragonborn on some of the craziest and grandest new adventures cooked up by the endlessly talented creatives all over the community. Terminally unbalanced, all of them, but still incredibly exciting. And just as with Morrowind where I spent weeks walking the streets of the mainland, or that communities interpretation of Skyrim, and fell absolutely in love with places like Necrom and the Hammerfell-Skryim border; the promise of great 'New Lands' mods also excite me. I haven't had the opportunity to explore a great many of them quite yet, but I'm enthused everytime I bump into a character who's a hook for Moonpath, or a recruiter for Vigilant, or get jumped scared by the lead-in to 'Gray Cowl'. (It feels uproariously wrong spelling it that way.) 

Of course, juggling a load order like that there are some precautions to take, and if you don't mind I'm going to turn this into a little bit of an advice corner for a second. Firstly, research all of the mods you're about to install extensively, obviously, so that you know what each of them does and if any of them have any special install requirements. Use a current mod manager, manual installation is absolutely out of the question. Check the 'LOOT' sorter tool, it tells you about any well known patches you might be currently missing in order to make some mods work better together. (And LOOT comes included with Vortex Mod Manager, by the way) And most importantly of all, turn off all autosaving and never quick save. Even if you don't have particularly script-intensive mods, autosaving and Quicksaving are going to get things tangled up and sooner or later you're going to get a corrupted save. Oh, and read the heck out of requirements. (That really screwed me for one mod in particular and had me scratching my head for hours.)

I remember a very long time ago when I was just dipping my toes into the RPG world and I used to follow someone online who seemed much more into all of this than me and was hyping up every insignificant news drop leading upto Skyrim. A lot of the marketing material was really cool on it's own merits, but this guy could blow it up into a dance number and sing the news straight the way into Valhalla with his endless praise-fuelled rants. When talking about decapitations, as shown in the combat trailer, specially, I remember him stating something along the lines of 'this will be a game you'll play for ten years.' And at the time that really stuck with me, as I pondered on it and thought: "I mean maybe, but isn't that kinda optimistic?" We're past the ten year mark, and look at me. Because of Bethesda, because of re-releases, but most of all because of an unbelievable community, here I am falling for Skyrim in 2022. Some things never do change.

The Tutorials Tutorial: Skyrim

 Hey you, you're finally awake!

So after buying it on launch day and juggling it around three separate hardrives in order to make room for the dozens of other games I had scheduled to play, I've finally come around to playing Skyrim Anniversary Edition. Yes, that's because I was waiting for the Skyrim Script Extender 64 version to hit a stable state so that I could play with a full playthrough of mods and so start my- I dunno, hundredth Skyrim playthrough? It might literally be in the triple digital now, I've played this game a ton. Which is why it seems so very strange that I've hardly ever spoken about it on this blog, but that's because so many other titles have dominated my mind over these part two years and so I've largely gone Skyrim free for a bit. But it's time to break that sobriety for a few decent weeks as I jump in once more and, rediscover a lot of mods that have been vastly updated! But what I want to talk about today isn't at all related to mods, but the most vanilla part of a vanilla experience; the tutorial.

The intro for Skyrim is a hotly contested topic among the community in Skyrim, in that everybody else in the world thinks it's bad, and I disagree. Okay that's not fair, they say it's too long; but maybe I've just endured so many poorly thought-out mindnumbing, text-box heavy, tutorials in my life that this iteration feels perfectly acceptable and even good to me. But it just won't do to say that the game makes me feel this, what quantifiable value can be attributed to a feeling? So I've decided to go over the specific techniques and tools that Bethesda employed to construct, what I think to be, an intuitive and fun tutorial section that stretches just as long as it needs to, tells the player all they'll need to know, and then leads them out into the freeform adventure with nothing but a few loose story threads to pull on and a dream of wild adventure.

It's starts with that intro, and name me a more iconic conversation. It doesn't technically have anything to do with the tutorial, but I've memorised that intro sequence top to bottom so I need to at least mention it. Waking up to the sounds of Skyrim's wilderness as Jeremy Soule's suite kicks in, looking up and seeing that icon blazon across the screen is unforgettable, it honestly gives me unending chills everytime. For a fantasy game, to have the courage not start with narration (even narration by Patrick Stewart) can be a double-edged sword, it feels refreshing, but it could easily feel flat and dull for the lack of an exciting chunk of initial world building, usually instrumental to getting a fresh user pumped. But with the history of the series to lean on, Skyrim just rolls us in a prison wagon towards our adventure and so can experience the world firsthand, without having to endure being told about it. It's hard to put in to words how much I adore the carriage at the beginning, even on the times that the mod-load gets heavy and the wagon start doing full cartwheels and spinning off up the mountains.

From the moment you get control of your character directly before (Spoilers) a great big F-off Dragon named Alduin flies down to interrupt your execution, the game is in tutorial mode. You're told the key to run and, in a design philosophy understood by most every horror game developer today, you're immediately given the compunction to run; so that the big dragon doesn't come and eat you. This first set-piece section of the game is full of moments like this. Having the player jump to the burning Inn so they can progress in their escape, (teaching us jumping) crouching in order to avoid Alduin's attention when he lands on the wall above you (even though that moment is purely aesthetic, it makes for a teachable moment) and even an introduction to the concept of multiple quest paths with your two companions splitting off, Ralof heading one way and Hadvar going another. This intro section also serves as great playable cinematic, sweeping you away with  quickly paced action whilst cleverly throwing snippets of tutorial systems at you the very second that they'll apply to the situaiton. And to think that all of this is simply a stage to teach you basic movement; Skyrim really did go above and beyond for this one. (And it's tons better than Oblivion's 'walk around your cell with instructions' equivalent.)

Once inside Helgen Keep we're treated to a more traditional, explain system then let the player take their time to do it, style of tutorial but once again it never once shifts from the framing device of finding your way to escaping the crumbling dragon-besieged keep whilst learning how to do so. You're taught how to loot, and the game even offers you the option of using the handy new 'equip from inventory' option available to you. Then comes the infomation that flows naturally, combat, searching containers, the basics. Where the clever hand-of-guidance nudges it's way back into the scenario is through the torture chambers wherein we're directed to the lockpicking minigame and basic spell book learning and then usage. But some of the concepts introduced here border on advanced too, with the immediate next little brawl featuring two archers who are purposefully spawned atop a slick of flammable oil with you being recently given a flame spell. The game doesn't explicitly spell this one out for you, but it leaves the tools there for you to stumble across something cool if you're lucky.

The dungeon area that is laid out for this whole section, Helgen Keep, is actually treated like a proper crawl as well, without holding back in order to be more straightforward and completely basic, so that players can build a decent idea of what to expect from the rest of this game. Corners and crannies are stuffed with little coin pouches and general rewards for those who want to break off the beaten path and explore, showing us how the level design will treat exploration from then on. Last of all there's the stealthing tutorial, tucked within another real-world example, as you have a sleeping bear you can either sneak past or get an easy stealth hit off on before he can react. Now from here the game doesn't just stop teaching you, but it provides total freedom to either continue along the paved path and learn a bit more or strike out on your own if you feel like the total Dragon-slaying badass already.

All of these are the elements that come together to make, in my opinion, a beautifully integrated and intuitive tutorial that both introduces and familiarises the player to the game with an immersive presentation that stands the test of time in design. Now of course that doesn't mean this is the bar one must meet in order to make a decent tutorial, I just think this is a great example of one. Which, again, doesn't mean that it's perfect. There's no option to skip the tutorial and it does go on for about twenty minutes, but as an introduction to both the game and the world I find that first dungeon thematically serviceable and mechanically ideal. Seeing how other games handle their tutorial sections is really where we're going to be able to drawn and contrast, and I expect to be able to use Skyrim as a benchmark to call back to on some later dives. So I very much intend to start a little series of exploring introductions in games and their tutorials to see the pros, the cons, and maybe dissect a little bit about the creative process behind making the most perfect tutorial section of any game ever. (Ain't that the dream?)