Skyrim: Part 3

The first part of this review established that Skyrim's leveling system funnels people into dominant playstyles. The second part showed how the inconsistencies of all the different skills limit the roleplaying potential of various builds. This third (and final) part will show how all of this contributes to the larger issue of people being unwilling to suspend their disbelief when engaging with the game's stories. The first part of 2024 saw a culmination of a weird online phenomenon. Bethesda lead writer Emille Pagliarulo was lambasted by Elder Scrolls and Fallout fans alike for taking the game's writing in directions that nobody likes.

Bethesda never employed on-staff writers dealing with in-game stories, and they have a credit policy that makes it difficult to pinpoint who was responsible for what, which contributes to this image of Bethesda being "bad" at writing stories. The reality is that the novel-like quality of a great story cannot be delivered with 30 minutes of voice-acted dialogue when the main product being sold is a game that lives or dies based on the quality of its gameplay and art direction.

I think Skyrim tries to deliver something with the majority of its stories, but it fumbles the ball because it's difficult to marry the aforementioned leveling and character-building problems with the community's demand for "good stories". You shouldn't play the Companions because you want to experience the great Companions storyline, but because you want to roleplay as a Companion- and gameplay and exploration tie into this just as much as the "story". Nitpicking all the small, insignificant inconsistencies in the "warrior content" of the game is content farming an algorithm.

To some extent, all Skyrim stories are about the same thing- a betrayal of either older, traditional values or of some group representing an ideal. The Companions are about the betrayal of the Companions brand, devolving from a"virtuous", Elven-hating, Viking trailblazers to a focus group of furries. The Dark Brotherhood is explicitly about the betrayal of the old tenets, leading to the destruction of the last Brotherhood bastion, framed within the leader's betrayal. The Thieves Guild is about the current leader's betrayal of the previous leader, culminating in a botched heist and a mandatory "I will pledge my soul to a goth girl" moment that everyone hates. The College of Winterhold is about the Archmages' betrayal of his friends to contain a dragon priest whose artifact is supposed to stop an impending catastrophe. Finally, the game's main quest is posed as a question to the player: whose allegiances do you betray to deal with the end of the world, which came as a result of a betrayal: the dragon Paarthurnarx betrayed his kin to help humankind overthrow the dictatorship of dragons.

The Civil War of Skyrim- a continuous battle between two mechanically identical factions- poses as the game’s greatest narrative achievement due to the incumbents’ philosophical differences towards the concept of betrayal. The Stormcloaks look at the Empire’s unwillingness to deal with the Aldmeri Dominion’s sinister power games in Skyrim as a betrayal of the sacrifices made by the warriors of Skyrim during the Great War. The Civil War is rooted in the so-called Markarth Incident which oversaw the betrayal of Ulfric Stormcloak.

Hell, this bleeds into the DLC stories. In the Dragonborn DLC, the antagonist Miraak is betrayed by the Daedric prince he served for centuries, posing the question of whether or not the Last Dragonborn will suffer the same fate. And the Dawnguard DLC has the player fawning over a vampire princess who betrays her father because he was a negligent asshole, or double-crossing the Dawnguard faction to side with the vampires. The vampire storyline ends with the player betraying the goth princess’ father becuase of his poor long-term business practices.

Alas- some of these stories deliver a quality narrative resolution, and some don't. Dawnguard is lauded as the best content associated with the base game because it stands in direct opposition to the main quest. While the game's main quest is a lonely descent into power-mongering that rewards forming cold alliances with people you hate, Dawnguard has the player character form an actual relationship with an NPC that gets more than 10 minutes’ worth of dialogue lines. The game's main quest punishes player agency in ways the Dawnguard DLC doesn't, because the main quest's purpose is to direct the player all over the map to complete side content that has more immediate roleplaying potential.

Here is where I have to criticize Skyrim's content distribution because some of my favorite holds in the game (Hjaalmarch and the Pale) get so little content when compared to Whiterun or the Rift, that it becomes frustrating long-term. There were some locations on the map I simply forgot existed because content takes you there too rarely.

And the way people engage with content is what matters with these types of games. There was an older YouTube Skyrim review made by a channel titled Private Sessions, in which he spent 3 hours detailing his experience roleplaying as a Khajit thief, but he concludes the reason he managed to roleplay effectively was due to a couple of mods. What I got out of his review was that he changed the way he approached and engaged with the game's content. He stopped using fast travel, made exploration a more active part of questing, took detours, imagined a background for a non-stealth archer character. He pursued something different than increasing and decreasing stat numbers. He utilized the roleplaying prompts the game offers to his advantage, pursuing a less optimal build. And he chose to engage with the game's stories on the game's level; as a video game, and not as a TV show.

And that's the pitch. You have to be willing to engage with the game's less-than-stellar mechanics to appreciate the full depth of what it has to offer- which is true for all Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Skyrim is closer to an "immersion engine" than to a "traditional" RPG or a sophisticated action-adventure game, and the market for DIY roleplaying experiences was dormant and waiting to burst with creative energy, resulting in one of the largest and most prolific modding communities gaming has ever seen. It's possible the executives at Bethesda foresaw this and were able to pinpoint what their preferred market was craving. Skyrim was not meant to be "The Elder Scrolls V", it was meant to be Nexus Mods.