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Iād heard some rumblings of this about Hunicke before but this is pretty stark. Hope it pressures some positive change.
Itās interesting that Skyrim is still the touchstone people reference like that, and not anything else from the past 10 years. Thinking back on it, compared to todayās āopen world gamesā, Skyrim probably still has more freedom and agency than the Ubisoft checklist style thatās so popular now (granted I never played Skyrim, and my impression was that it was already more linear and controlled than than even Oblivion).
Were people still using the term āopen world sandbox gameā by the time Skyrim came out?
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Skyrim has still been a surprisingly perennial bestseller, so thereās that - something like 3 to 6 times the sales of the biggest other single player games.
After Skyrim, in terms of open world design, Witcher 3 was really a turning point, the first open-world game to really nail crafting its quests and setpieces without compromise from a more restricted alternate. It really changed the direction of Ubisoftās template, seen clearly in Assassinās Creed from Origins onward (and in their fashion, they managed to turn even the act of ābespoke narrative contentā into a rote checklist). Horizon clearly takes after Witcher 3 more than Skryim, for instance.
Iād say Skyrim, like Oblivion, is structured as a dense network of dungeons without strong directed order (using level scaling systems to allow this), with quest and quest characters built using the same tools, assets, and fidelity targets as their more basic quests. The intended player experience is a series of interesting discoveries in the world, through dungeons, and quests, not strongly connected nor laid onto the player character, who exists entirely through stats, functions, and in the playerās conception. Where the Witcher 3 model adds interest by investing more work into each piece of content, the Bethesda model gradually bumps the fidelity of everything but prioritizes scope and oddness over quality.
I still donāt really understand why Skyrim hit so big. Sure, itās slightly better than Oblivion and Fallout 3 but, well, it was years later, too.
My old boss would tell me the answer was simple (read: depressing): Vikings were a big underserved fantasy
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Skyrim will never die, because people want to play house, the thing people copying skyrim never take from skyrim because itās probably a nightmare to program. The people are starved for ultima
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I think even Bethesda was surprised by how big Fallout 4ās town building mode turned out to be. Really caught on the cusp of survival games getting huge on PC. Iām curious how that will inform what they do for their space game.
So many survival/building game modes that attach to an existing game donāt really incorporate it into the main loop ā rather than being essential to get to resource stability, unlock new player functions, itās just a sink for extra resources.
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skyrim somehow seems to have found a bunch of people who never played any video game besides like mario and sonic. so much of the praise I hear about it is stuff like āwow you fight dragons and find swords in underground caves itās so cool!ā and yeah I mean that describes about 40% of video games made since 1985 I donāt know what to say
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It has systems streamlined enough to appeal to JRPG fans who would not put up with WRPG bullshit in basically all other Western RPGs and it has environments pretty enough to overlook a lot of the jank
(basically for exactly the reasons WRPG fans hate it)
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if you spend like an hour drinking potions and making armour/weapons, you can one hit kill every monster in the game
it takes place in one of the least interesting fantasy worlds iāve ever seen, and i just couldnāt get interested in the plot at all. i completed the game and honestly couldnāt name a single character in it
does your old boss come from an alternate universe?
he had the greatest ability to guess metacritic scores and sales of any human Iāve ever met
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honestly skyrim would probably be my favorite game of all time if it had more varied enemy types. but because youāre just shooting basically the same guy over and over again it is extremely mid. even the dragon encounters are bad. ok and the story and writing in general are embarrassing.
thereās just a lot of potential there. i still think in terms of the way it captures the feeling of moving through a big, immersive world it is pretty unmatched. itās just a shame you keep seeing the same shit wherever you go. i also think the design of the towns and stuff is cool. i bet there are some mods out there that would actually make it into the game i imagined it could be when i first started playing it, but who has time for that.
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mod to make skyrim elden
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the greater graphical detail and cinematic presentation that Skyrim offered while its melee combat never stopped looking and feeling likeā¦
thatās a videogame thing i think about a lot
I blame Witcher 3 for a lot of the worst trends in the recent past, more than Skyrim. Bethesda have been making consistently worse games as they go along, but their dedication to the staples glue and rubberbands world simulation is something I have deep respect for.
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I like Skyrim because of how jank it is, itās just so much fun screwing around in the game world and experimenting with different magical items to see what you can get away with, something that was missing from the Fallout games and as a result I never got into them as much (also the writing was even worse than the Elder Scroll games).
I mean, Morrowind has the best world out of all the games by far IMO, but as a game I find Skyrim way more fun to screw around with. Also why Ubisoft style open world games donāt grab me, because theyāre so polished and refined to the point that they donāt let me have any fun with their game in case I break it. The only game of that style that got me was Horizon, but even that didnāt hold my interest as much as an Elder Scrolls game can.
BACKWARDS FLYING DRAGONS, BABY
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wait is the player the one who shoots an arrow into the guyās knee
I completely forgot about Witcher 3. I wonder if Elden Ring will cause any ripples since itās so much closer to the AAA space than BotW, or if itās so anathema to accepted AAA game design that it will stay as Fromās exclusive house style (except for like maybe The Surge 3: Surge Harder).
Though now that I think about it, there are several open world games that were industry tentpoles but you donāt really see people going for the same things. Like, is there any game that tried to be Red Dead 2? Witcher x Ubisoft style seems to be the enduring current of the AAA open world space.
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I encountered this line before I knew it was a meme, and I was playing as an archer so I briefly considered this possibility. Sadly the game is not that funny
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I think red dead 2ās thing is mostly infinite money related, so it was kind of out of reach by default
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yeah but it is pretty interesting if we get to the point where 3/5 extant AAA developers has their own extremely expensive and hard to duplicate house style. feels like the big studio era and then some
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Yeah the most immersed Iāve felt playing Skyrim was when a series of weird glitches made it seem like the head of the thieves guild had put out a hit on a stablehand who had mastered the art of self-cloning. It was like the glitches had got out of hand and the characters had decided to deal with it themselves
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Itās gonna break my heart if the new Saints Row is mid. All this Skyrim talk has me thinking about how Saints 3/4 reckoned with how weird a GTA-like is: absurd escalation of conflict thatās funhouse mirror American police militarization. The Stillwater PD really need VTOL jets. Or the text adventure in the vaguely Darkplace bossās Tron world ā this was the lowest middle brow game possible one year after Nier doing metatextual twine gags.
Iām not keen to revisit them even though I donāt recall specific icky shit, but I could really go for a postmodern open world these days.
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