Skyrim & Me: The good, the mad and the (b)ugly

The Elder Scrolls series has always held a very dear place in my heart; from the moment I first ventured in to the empire of Tamriel and in to the province of Morrowind some 10 years ago (I know what you’re thinking: ‘holy crap!’), I was well and truly hooked.  From the immersive gameplay and stunning environment, to the endearing bugs and glitches, Morrowind was, in my opinion, an utterly fantastic game and Oblivion followed suit in all its more polished and epic greatness.

These are games I have dedicated a borderline-insane number of hours to, given up social events for, risked vitamin D deficiency for…so you can imagine my excitement at the announcement that Bethesda were once again returning to Tamriel to add a 5^th instalment to what is undoubtedly my favourite gaming series of all time.

Since its release only 2 and a half months ago, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has gone on to sell over 10 million copies around the world, has earned universal praise and spawned countless internet memes.  It is without doubt my favourite in the series and, in my opinion, Bethesda’s greatest work.

Now, I’m not going to go over the story or anything like that as I’m sure the majority of people reading this will know the deal; I am simply going to talk about my experiences with the game, share some funny anecdotes and stories and sum up my overall feelings now that I have largely gotten as much as I think I want to from the game, so here goes nothing….

Firstly, the character customisation options in Skyrim really are mind-bogglingly vast – you really could spend hours honing facial features and skin tone and build to get just the right character or likeness (see below image).  I didn’t spend so long on this part and made pretty much the same character I’ve used for all of the games so far – a female Dark Elf – with only a change of name and a few extra facial features (like some bad-ass red war paint), Lellith (thanks to boyfriend Leeman for the 40k inspired name) and I were ready to venture in to the world of Skyrim for the first time!

"If it bleeds, we can slay it"

Now, I would like to commend Bethesda on the simply beautiful world they have created – the imposing mountains, flowing rivers and vast, snowy plains are absolutely stunning and accompanied by composer Jeremy Soule’s score is just, to me, gaming perfection and unlike most other open-world games, actually makes me *want* to walk between my destinations rather than “fast travelling” from place to place.

Just one of Skyrim's many breathtaking vistas

Another big reason for walking around and exploring is, obviously, the numerous dungeons, mines, caves, lairs, ruins, puzzles and crypts that seemingly litter the environment – this is what I spent the first 5 or 6 hours of my game doing – walking around, venturing in to every nook and cranny I came across and, for the most part, getting my ass handed to me on a plate!

I learnt very quickly that approaching one of these guys as a level 1 will end in being launched in to orbit and plummeting to my death!

Jackpot!!!!

I levelled up pretty quickly through doing lots of side-quests and training and after reaching level 19 I decided to tackle the game’s main quest. That really is one of the beauties of these games – you don’t have to play things in a prescribed order and you are not in any way forced to do so by any quest limitations etc, you really can make it your experience.  For example, I started a lot of quests that I simply wasn’t good enough to finish (god damn you, Falmer scum!), therefore I abandoned them halfway through and went off to do other tasks I was good enough to complete and returned to the abandoned quest once I’d levelled up a bit (or stolen a kick-ass weapon from the Jarl in Whiterun ).

Alduin in Sovngarde

Now, as for the main quest, I thoroughly enjoyed it and at no point did it begin to feel laborious, however I must say, I was expecting the final battle with Alduin to be far more challenging than it was (I have played on Adept difficulty for the entirety of my journey thus far) as it was over in the blink of an eye, but perhaps that is just down to the fact that I’d concentrated on levelling up quite a lot beforehand and had, ahem, ‘aqcuired’ some pretty sweet weaponry and armor.  In any case, I found the entirety of the main quest extremely enjoyable and it is probably my favourite of the three Elder Scrolls games I’ve played.

Skyrim’s side-quests are, for me, what really makes this game and I have had so much fun doing them so far.  Stand outs for me have to be the Mage’s Guild (or College of Winterhold as it’s known) and the Thieve’s Guild (which takes insanely long but every hour of the 12 it took me was a genuine joy).  This is a game with 100 hours of potential gameplay time, which is truly staggering in itself, but to make almost each and every hour of this as brilliantly immersive and thrilling as they are is a remarkable achievement and one that I think is completely unmatched.

As for the bugs that have now come to be synonymous with Bethesda’s work, Skyrim has plenty of them, however nowadays they are nothing compared to the days of Morrowind. Before Autosave became a feature of these games, if you had been particularly engrossed in a quest and hadn’t slept or manually saved the game for a while, literal hours of progress could be lost forever by becoming trapped in a shrub (yes, this actually happened to me).  I also recall sinking through a mountain path and finding myself stuck in a nightmarish white void from which there was no escape!

Skyrim’s bugs have, for me, been far less frustratingly punishing and far more entertaining and I for one find them really quite endearing. There’s nothing like talking to an NPC who is spazzing out on the spot, watching a dragon fly backwards across the sky, watching a chicken walking in thin air or see people falling from the sky for no apparent reason.  I also had an arrow stuck clean through my head for several days of gameplay time before it finally disappeared!  The bugs and glitches of today, for the most part, provide us all with unique, hilarious anecdotes and go some way towards making what already feels like a bespoke experience even more ‘yours’.

I’m not normally one for forcing my game opinions on people as everyone is different, however Skryim is a game I would urge everyone to pick up and give a go, it really has something for every kind of gamer out there – whether you like to run & gun (just replace the guns with destruction magic) or play it stealthy, whether you want to loot & steal or play it industriously, whether you want to be a hero for the masses or a master criminal – Skyrim will provide an experience for you!

As you can probably tell, I could literally talk for hours and hours about this game, I could dissect it, provide an almost walkthrough-like analysis of it….but for the purposes of this casual gaming blog, this is where I will end my first article.

Skyrim is, in a word, remarkable, and was undoubtedly my GOTY2011 (sorry, Portal 2).

And of course, I cannot possibly write a blog post about Skyrim without an inclusion of the following in some way, shape or form….

Power is nothing without control

(Thanks for the killer headline, Pirelli!)

This weekend, Kim was gracious enough to let me have a go on her copy of Batman: Arkham City. It’s an astonishing game, although I did have some issues with the fight mechanics. I found myself a little frustrated with the way it played. A quick little vent on Facebook on Sunday morning led to a comment thread which went something like this:

Me: “Arkham City’s fight mechanics: frustrating.”
Others: “While you *are* the lord and master of all mankind Lee, we do feel that we must respectfully question your above comment.”

So, with this in mind I figured I’d put fingers to keyboard and explain myself.

However, before I continue with this opinion piece, I want to stress that Arkham City isn’t the only example of this behaviour in a game, so please don’t take this post as me having a go at what is probably one of the best games of 2011 (despite not being quite my cup of tea) – I’m not singling it out as the only culprit of this feeling of frustration – I’ve played plenty of games over the years which have frustrated me equally as much. With this in mind, please read on.

Videogames (and forgive me for paraphrasing The Matrix here) are a system of controls within an environment. Control of the charater is granted to the player via their (aptly named) controller – the player tells the character what to do. This is how it’s always been, right? So when I press a button, I want the character I’m controlling to carry out whatever action that corresponds with that button the instant I press it. By not allowing this to happen, the game is effectively removing control of that character from the player – in a cutscene this is fine, but in the middle of gameplay? That’s a big no-no. Forcing a player to effectively relinquish their control over their character mid-game goes completely against the grain of what a videogame is.

The jist of it is: If I tell the character to do something (with a button press), he/she should damn well do what I tell them to! I always figured that in a fight (judging by my extensive knowledge of fighting, with a grand total of zero fights under my belt…), that it was all to do with whoever was quicker off the mark – get in fast, and hit faster and harder than the other guy, so you’d think that hitting the punch button (known to some as ‘button-mashing’, which loosely translated means ‘The Way of the blazing punch button hyper turbo 3000′) faster than the other guy was the best way to win the fight (maybe throw in a kick, a jump and a couple of hadokens and you’re golden).

Now, you could argue that it’s more a limitation of the technology/coding of a game to now allow interruptions in animations/moves, and the arguement of videogames and realism is a weak one – yes, in the real world you can stop doing an action half way through if you want, but your world wasn’t created by a game studio with finite resources, but some games have allowed for cancellations/interruptions in animations/moves. I don’t want to get into the whole games/realism debate here, suffice it to say that putting realism into some games would just be wrong – imagine if Mario couldn’t jump as high as he could, for example – games are meant to be a form of escapism from reality, so there’s got to be a few unrealistic things happening, but getting ‘caught’ in an animation shouldn’t be one of those things, in my opinion). Perhaps all this is just a limitation of current technology that I’m not comfortable with, but I don’t like my games becoming glorified Quick Time Events (Henceforth, QTEs). As I said before, if I wanted rhythm and timing, I’d play Rock Band.

Speaking of QTEs, when did it become the trend to make all boss battles end with a QTE? Bulletstorm, Space Marine, Vanquish, The Force Unleashed and Bayonetta – I’m looking at you as some of the guilty parties. I don’t think I’ve ever heard any one of my friends tell me they enjoy QTEs (and I’d love to hear the reasons from anyone who does).

When a cutscene starts, I’ve always seen it as a reward for completing my previous task in the game – when one of these kicks in, I’ve put down my controller and I’m probably sipping on my cup of coffee. The last thing I want to do at this point is hammer the ‘A’ button – I’m trying to watch the cutscene unfold. At this point, not only am I covered in recently spilled coffee, I’m also not concentrating on the bloody cutscene because I’m having to keep a sharp eye out for another bloody button prompt, so all that effort making something cool on the screen is wasted because I’m hunting for that elusive little flashing ‘X’ button or whatever. The Force Unleashed and Bayonetta get a slight reprieve here because their QTEs didn’t punish you too much if you failed. I can’t say the same for the others as I’d not managed to fail any QTEs in the (because I’m awesome). Even so, FU, Quick Time Events.

The Summer drought is over

I’m currently writing this in somewhat of a zombified stupor, given the small amount of sleep I got last night after getting back so late, so I apologise if this post becomes a bit of a ramble.

After a fairly uneventful summer for videogames, it’s a big relief to see the release schedule pick up the pace – the recent release of Space Marine kept some of the crew happy (except maybe for our own Adapt-”It’s-a-2-for-£30-game”-UK0). Last night saw a few of us head to our local branch of Game for the launch of Gears of War 3, which meant I got to grin like an idiot while carrying this:

Not pictured: The slightly more irate version of me 5 minutes before when I thought people were pushing into the queue "to buy my bloody Epic Edition which I've already bloody paid for"

I know I was going a bit stir-crazy over the summer months, especially as the weather this year has been less than stellar, and so the usual antics of pub-gardens, beaches and other such niceties didn’t really happen, which meant the usual quiet summer for videogames was felt more keenly than in past years (at least from my perspective). It does annoy me a little, having a few months with very few games being released. I know it’s all to do with the whole Christmas rush and companies want to maximise their profits, it’s just a real shame that in ‘sunny old England’ (and I use the term ‘sunny’ in it’s loosest possible terms) we have very little to look forward to in the summer months in terms of games.

At least now, for the next few months leading up to Christmas, we’ve got quite a lot of big releases to look forward to, in no particular order:

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Batman: Arkham City
Ace Combat: Assault Horizon
Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary
Battlefield 3
Modern Warfare 3
Forza 4
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

And that’s just on the Xbox – I’ve not mentioned much about other systems (mainly because they get relatively little of my gaming time, which I do find to be a shame sometimes, but the releases there rarely fail to grab me as much as the Xbox release schedule). I do however want Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land (although I do need to get a 3DS first…)

The best thing about the above releases? We’ll get to try out nearly all of them at the Eurogamer Expo this weekend! I’ll see if we can’t write some sort of collaborative report after the weekend for those of you not attending.

Videogames and Cheeseburgers

Like a lot of people, I enjoy a good cheeseburger. I know what I want in my burger, how it should be cooked and what I’ll be eating when it’s been unwrapped. So why should the games industry be any different? After all our cheeseburgers aren’t cheap either!

The current trend with most triple A titles is to release a game with a multitude of playable modes and options, which increases the amount of time a player can spend within the franchise. Some franchises (Bioshock, Dead Space, Uncharted to name but a few..) have all decided that after a fantastic first installation in the franchise, what the game needs is a competitive multiplayer option. Now when I buy a game it’s usually because I’m intrigued by one of the game modes. I buy single player games for their story (Alan Wake, Red Dead Redemption, Dead Space) and multiplayer titles for the well implemented online experience (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Gears of War).

Based on that list of titles you’re probably thinking “well those multiplayer games have great stories too” and you’d be right. I believe the principle behind why those games have developed into well oiled multi-mode franchises is simple; they were multiplayer orientated titles first. We all know the tried and tested FPS mechanics work and are easy to adapt to, let’s just apply them to a story. They are the all you can eat option of the gaming world, you can devour to your hearts content because there are plenty of options.

Going back to my original point, I like a good cheeseburger. I liked Dead Space, it had all the right juicy morsels I needed in a 3^rd person survival horror game to sink my teeth into. So when I heard that a second game had been pushed into the pipeline I was genuinely exited. I didn’t like Dead Space 2. It wasn’t because of the story, or the graphics, it was because they had strapped a silly half-assed attempt at competitive multiplayer on the side which felt like the unwanted baby of Left4Dead meets Waterworld. Why waste time and resources on a pointless feature, a feature I would have happily bought the game without. I could have said “if you don’t like it, don’t play it” but then it feels like I’ve just chucked money away. After all I buy cheeseburgers without pickles in, because I don’t like them.

 

Spoilers (Warning: No spoilers)

There was an article posted on /Film last night detailing a study on spoilers and how they’re good for an audience. I won’t go into a blow-by-blow analysis of the study (I’ll just let you read it for yourself).

Now, I know that some people go to painstaking lengths to avoid spoilers for upcoming movies and games. I have to say that for the most part, I’m not one of them.

Mrs LeemanRuss (aka: Kim) once said to me: “Lee, you over-hype yourself on games by reading too much about them before they’re released.” (I’m probably paraphrasing somewhat here – she most likely also commented on my stunning physique and supreme intellect too). This was during one of my usual internet-scouring sessions watching videos of the upcoming Battlefield 3 and Space Marine games.

Not quite the spoiler I was thinking of

She did make a very good point though – I’d been hyping up Brink to myself and Team Gash ever since I’d first read about it just before the Eurogamer Expo in 2009.

Eighteen months later, after watching video after video and poring over many pre-release articles and hands-on tests, it was released, to much disappointment for us all. Now, it’s not strictly a ‘spoiler’ in terms of storyline, but I’d definitely over-hyped it to myself.
That and the fact that (and I’ve said this many times before to people) Splash Damage concentrated too much on ‘dress-up’ for the characters which nobody really pays any attention to anyway (other than to determine if they’re friend or foe), the awful AI of your team-mates and god-like accuracy of the enemy bots, plus the rage-inducing lack of a FUCKING LOBBY SYSTEM (Yes, I’m never letting this one go…).

I do find that I don’t really mind hearing major plot twists beforehand – I’m not a huge fan of surprises – and while I won’t necessarily read spoilers to the point of knowing exactly when Character A gets killed and by whom, I do tend to like to know a little of the over-arching storyline beforehand, ie: Will they save the world/defeat the evil genius/find their car? (MASSIVE HINT: Yes, in 99% of cases). A good example, if slightly off our chosen topic of videogames, will be when Kim and I started watching Dexter and before we were even halfway through the second season, I hit Wikipedia and read ahead all the way to the end of Season 5 (but with a memory like mine I’d forgotten most of what I’d read by the time it came around!)

In terms of gaming, any Halo fan worth their salt will have known the outcome of Halo Reach long before the game came out, and yet somehow this didn’t deter $200million being spent on day 1 of it’s release. I certainly enjoyed the single player campaign, and seeing exactly how it tied in with the original Halo (and yes, smartypants, I know a lot more people bought it for the multiplayer than the campaign).

However, (and that’s a big ‘however’, er, however); there are certain films/games where I don’t want to be spoiled. Film-wise, it was Inception – I deliberately kept my nose out of any spoilers for that one. Game-wise, Portal 2 was a game that I made sure I didn’t hear anything of the plot beforehand. I can’t quite put my finger on why, out of all the games I play (spanning genres from First-person Shooters all the way to Third-person Shooters) that I didn’t want to know what happens in this one. Of course, now I’m going to completely contradict myself and that study by naming Portal 2 as my Game of the Year (so far). I thoroughly enjoyed the experience from start to finish, and I had zero clue about the storyline, other than the premise of it being set after the original Portal (and that Stephen Merchant was providing the voice of Wheatley). That still hasn’t deterred me from reading any and all details I can find about Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, Gears 3 and Space Marine, however.

I think, for me, as long as I know the outcome of the story, I can concentrate on enjoying the actual journey of the characters (or in a games case, my journey) from the start to the end.

And if I’d known you’d have to play as that long-haired emo fop Raiden for over half of MGS2, I’d have saved myself £30…