Knights of the Cardboard Castle

My Steam counter says I’ve put in 260 hours in this game and now I’m officially declaring that I’m done with it. I’m pretty obsessive about being a completionist in RPGs but Skyrim is so huge that it has worn me down. There are just too many quests! That said, I did complete a lot of them. I finished the main quest of course, completed the Civil War questline on behalf of the Empire and reached the end of every faction questline, except for that of the Thieves Guild because that one needs you to do enough random thieving jobs in each hold to qualify for a special mission and completion of all special missions to accede to Guild Master. I also skipped many of the optional quests within the factions.

As for the DLCs, I completed the Dawnguard main quest but ended up not touching the Dragonborn DLC at all. I did briefly pop in to look at Solstheim and was intrigued to see that it’s in Morrowind but I was too tired of Skyrim by then to get into it. I also did many of the miscellaneous quests including the Daedric ones and the Bards College ones but also skipped a large number of them. This includes stuff like the dungeon quests and the hold-specific quests. Here are some of my thoughts about the quests:

• The main quest is surprisingly rather good. Due to its epic nature, it’s by far the best of the questlines. I really like how it forces you to go out into the world and interact with lots of NPCs of different factions. My complaint here is that being acknowledged as the Dragonborn should affect more of the other quests in the game, including the faction ones.

• Unsurprisingly, the Dark Brotherhood once again gives the best of the faction quests, both because you have more leeway in how to do the assassinations and because the quests create special situations, such as a wedding and the patrol route of the officer you need to kill. And of course, there’s the whole elaborate charade you set up to kill the emperor.
• I think the most lacklustre of the faction quests are the Companions. The premise of the leadership being werewolves looks promising at first but the storyline doesn’t go anywhere and you barely learn anything about the Order of the Silver Hand. It felt like a really short questline. Given that these are supposed to be the best warriors of Skyrim, it also felt really strange that they are not involved at all in the fight against the dragons or the Civil War.
• Thieves Guild and College of Winterhold questlines are okay. I liked how the Winterhold one starts with all of the college students but the final confrontation is unimpressive. The Thieves Guild is interesting for quests that don’t necessarily involve combat but due to how weakly stealth is implemented in this game, it ends up being easier just to fight through enemies anyway since there are no consequences.

• The Civil War quests are all fairly predictable. The Whiterun battle is cool and every encounter basically amounts to a chaotic massed battle with rather weak enemies. I like to entertain myself during these battles by summoning a dragon.
• The Dawnguard main quests impressed by the size and extent of the new areas. The new follower is also pretty amazing and feels much more alive than the standard ones. And of course Auriel’s Bow is a very special bow with a very nifty effect. Unfortunately the side quests seem unimpressive. I was all excited about building up the Dawnguard fortress but then nothing much happens with it. I also ended up skipping the werewolf and vampire transformation stuff entirely because I like to stay in human form with all of my custom-made and enhanced gear.

Overall the number of quests still astounds me. I don’t really understand why they need the Radiant system to generate infinite quests because the number of hand-scripted quests they already have seems perfectly adequate. If anything, I think there are too many quests. I’d prefer to have fewer but more sophisticated quests with complex scripts that causes unusual things to happen in the open-world. Things like needing to have a quest for each of the Daedric Lords just because it is traditional for an Elder Scrolls game feels like stretching it. Quests should be included because they are interesting, not to fill out a checklist.

Next, here are my ending comments on game systems and the game in general:

• Despite the many improvements to the animations and scripting system, Skyrim’s combat still lags far behind those of other games. It can’t even match the control and responsiveness of the Witcher games let alone genre-leaders like the Souls games. Its insistence on staying as primarily first-person game holds it back in my opinion. First-person immersion is great for exploration, but weak in melee combat. I’d like to see something like a third-person over-the-shoulder view and an enemy lock-on system in future iterations. The series really needs this for enjoyable combat.
• This series is all about breadth instead of depth of course, though in some places the game designers can still impress me. For example, some scripted events and conversations occur between NPCs in the privacy of their homes where the player has a very low chance of being present. But overall the lack of inconsistency in the game is really frustrating and becomes increasingly so the more time you put into the game. The game needs to be more aggressive about closing off quests to the player when it no longer makes sense for a single character to accomplish all these feats instead of enabling the player to complete a maximum of quests in a single playthrough.
• At the same time, this game seriously need better writing. There is probably not one single engaging character in the whole game. I guess this is another one of those breadth versus depth problems because there’s no attempt at character development for any NPC. This means quests have no emotional affect at all. You don’t really care why you’re doing something. You’re only doing it because it’s a challenge and the game told you to do so.

None of this of course detracts from the enormous achievement that the game’s scope represents. I still can’t wrap my head around how much work it must have taken to do all this. There’s no doubt that this is the greatest open-world, live-another-life type RPG in the world. My main worry is that Bethesda may not quite understand the nature of the appeal of its own games, given the existence of the Elder Scrolls Online. This series of RPGs very much does not need multi-player and it is perplexing why they would make an MMORPG when Skyrim appears to be their own main competitor. Hopefully they will come to their senses and make a proper sequel someday. I’d love to see one set in the Summerset Isles or Valenwood.

Anyway, here are the rest of the screenshots I’d set aside just for their eye candy value: