Dragons, Dungeons, and Skyrim

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 26, 2011

With a Christmas bonus from the Day Job, I went ahead and picked up Skyrim on Friday. Thanks, Day Job, for the game.

Of course, the following day it appeared on sale at Steam for a third off. Ah, well. My internet connection sucks right now and would have taken me days to download the dang thing (that’s supposed to be fixed hopefully today).

Anyway, one joke goes that Skyrim is “like Fallout 3, but with swords.” Considering how much I’ve enjoyed all of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games, in all honesty it’s not a terrible thing. The Elder Scrolls series began, by my understanding, as an attempt to expand on what Ultima Underworld achieved. Thus in many ways Skyrim and the latest two Fallout games are spiritual descendents of one of my all-time favorite classic RPGs.

I know I’m late to the party, and many of you who are reading this have already “beat” the game twice before I ever installed it. But I often get games many months or years after they’ve been released, so this feels positively current for me. 🙂  The game is jaw-droppingly beautiful and graphically excellent even running at medium-quality, as I am. Twenty years ago, if you’d asked me to describe the ultimate RPG, from my limited vantage point then I probably would have described something kinda like this game.

Today, of course, I can pick nits… between the crashed to desktop and the what-the-hell-were-they-thinking console port of the UI to PC (anybody who complains about Frayed Knights‘ UI but gives this game a pass is on drugs, IMO – though it does highlight the fact that making a good, usable UI for a game that doesn’t just imitate another games’ gameplay is NOT EASY). And of course there’s my old complaint about how they aren’t making the kind of RPGs I really want to see. But I don’t want to begrudge Bethesda their success, and frankly they were making these games before those old kinds of games went extinct among mainstream publishers, so that’s really a silly complaint. Yes, I’m not entirely sure if I’m playing an action-RPG with FPS elements or an FPS with RPG elements, but let’s talk about what it is and what it tries to be, not about what it’s not and not trying to be.

But there’s something else that kinda clicked in my head while playing this game. Back when I was still in school in the early-mid 1990s, I attended a science fiction & fantasy symposium and went to a discussion on the use of computer graphics in current and future entertainment. At the time, as I recall, the movie Jurassic Park was the hot news with CGI dinosaurs that still look pretty dang cool today. Anyway, they culminated the talk with a video clip from an interactive “game” (more like a walkthrough) done by local simulator company Evans & Sutherland. It was a dungeon, with really cool lighting effects from torches and swinging pendulums you had to time your way through, and a big ol’ dragon at the end that was so large you could only see his head and neck coming. This was supposedly in real-time, and I went nuts. I immediately thought of Ultima Underworld – which was also a pretty recent release at the time.  THIS is what I wanted to play. It’s what I wanted to make! It also made me apply for a job at Evans & Sutherland as I approached graduation. Yes, it was not anywhere close to fair — the E&S dungeon was running on top-of-the-line hardware costing hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more). But it was so dang cool!

Ironically, while E&S never got back to me (and were apparently having problems and downsizing at or about that time), I got a job at fledgeling start-up Singletrac, founded by a bunch of ex-E&S people, including the principle guys responsible for that little dungeon project that got me so excited. They clued me in on how much they’d faked things to get that demo to work… it wouldn’t have held up to the scrutiny of a true interactive game, but the project had been done largely “off the books” and after hours without official sanction (or budget) anyway.

Anyway, as I’ve played a bit of Skyrim, going through dungeon corridors with timed pendulum-blade puzzles and of course fighting BIG OL’ DRAGONS, I felt that thrill again, and didn’t immediately recognize it. But the game has everything that old high-end simulator hardware dungeon had, only far, far prettier.

So, yeah. Skyrim. Is it the perfect RPG? No, there’s no such thing. Is it even an RPG? Yes, I’d argue so, though of course I fret that it’s popularity is helping to redefine RPGs as little more than a subgenre of action games. But it’s a very very cool game, and so far seems deserving of its record-breaking sales. What the series continues to do right is to place such a large emphasis on exploration. That’s a principle aspect of the western RPG experience for me, and so in spite of lacking some other elements that ‘scratch the itch’ for me, the exploration is still plenty of fun and plenty rewarding. While it’s still early in the game for me, it does feel like they corrected most of the parts of Oblivion that sucked and left a game that might not be quite as vast in scope and ambition as its predecessors, but what it does do it does very, very well.

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