Skyrim Is Genius, And Here’s Why
How Todd Howard overpowers puny critics and hipsters
Todd Howard is is an unprecedented genius in the gaming industry, simply because there is no other game designer that understands video games as well as he does. Legendary developers like Miyamoto and Newell understand that fun and engaging gameplay are at the core of the medium, they don’t see the full picture. The genius of Todd Howard is that he understands video games, and the people who play them, at a more fundamental level than anyone else.
The Skyrim Paradox
Skyrim is one of the most important pieces of pop art in the world, not only it was one of the most popular video games at the time of its release, it has managed to stand the test of time by virtue of being ported countless times, and each time it has been well-received.
However Skyrim has many detractors, but most of them cannot explain why the game manages to be so popular despite its flaws. The detractors do have a point since its combat mechanics aren’t very good, the graphics were never particularly great and the storytelling always felt lacking in many respects.
There are too many critics out there that are incapable of understanding what makes Bethesda games so popular, simply because most of them are frustrated writers and filmmakers, and so they don’t have the tools to actually understand video games. These people will always praise hackneyed cinematic experiences and interactive fiction over actual games, simply because they can only measure them by the standards of other mediums.
Nintendo had to imitate Skyrim in order to make a game as wonderful as Breath of the Wild, a game that always remains engaging, a game in which almost every design element contributes to the larger picture, a game in which every piece of the environment feels meaningful. Nintendo has always been great at creating fun gameplay and building amazing virtual worlds, what they lacked was Todd Howard’s wisdom and understanding of what makes open world games so engrossing.
What Games Are
What Todd Howard understands better than anyone else is that games are just systems, and what makes a game fun and engrossing is the way the player interacts with those systems. Every single part of a game is part of that system: every single button press, every single visual quirk, every single line of text, every single item you find is part of it. Even the player itself and their psychology is part of the system.
In the Elder Scrolls games every basic system is designed to contribute to the cycle that forms its core engagement. What many developers don’t realize is that fancy graphics and scripted combat systems don’t matter that much, what matters is that all the elements of the game contribute to the core experience of playing the game, and this can change radically depending on the type of game you are playing.
Look at the massive success of Minecraft: it’s a game with blocky graphics, clunky combat, very basic sound design and randomly generated worlds. However all those elements contribute to the sense of exploration and creativity that the game provides: The blocky terrain makes it easy to understand the shape of the world and build large structures, the unreliable combat makes monsters threatening and thus adds incentives to build defenses, the sound design creates an appropriate atmosphere depending on each situation, and the randomly generated worlds make it so that you never know what to expect, making exploration meaningful and wondrous.
So the question is what’s the core engagement of a game like Skyrim, and the answer should be obvious, but we have been living under the shadow of hack journalists for so long that many have lost sight of what games actually are.
The hidden truth is that Skyrim is nothing more than a hiking simulator, the Elder Scrolls games are just about walking around the world looking for interesting things to find and collect, and everything the game does is meant to contribute to this simple engagement. Breath of the Wild is one of the few mainstream games that also belong to this subgenre of sandbox games.
World Design
The world map in the Elder Scrolls games is designed with the explicit purpose that you never walk too long without finding something new to do. All the different assets, combat encounters and quest events are spread evenly across the environment so that the player never gets bored of doing the same thing over and over again. There is no secret to Skyrim world design, there is a map with a simple geography that funnels players into specific paths while also allowing them to get out of the pre-defined routes and explore the world on their own. Players will always find a dungeon, an enemy camp, a village, a city or a new quest.
You will never walk for too long without finding something of interest, so it’s possible to walk randomly across the map while keeping players engaged, even if the activities themselves aren’t that interesting. And players will also never feel like they are wasting time because the game is a RPG, and so everything you do in the game feels like progress because doing anything gives you experience points. This is also why the experience system in Skyrim is so great, because it works perfectly alongside its open-ended gameplay.
Character Customization
So in one hand the sandbox gameplay Elder Scrolls games provide a lot of freedom to roam around the world, and in the other the player is also given huge amounts of freedom to customize their own characters: you can play as any class, gender or race you want. You can also pick any items or weapons you find across the world, and you can dress however you want, and marry anyone you like. This means that the player itself is in full control of the experience, you are the one creating your own path forward across the world as the master of your own destiny.
Skyrim is about player expression: the way you look and the way you fight is a fundamental part of this role-playing experience. Many other sandbox games have made the huge mistake of forcing you to play in a certain way, and in the worst cases they force you to play as a pre-defined character. This will never be as satisfying as playing as an unique character that the player creates, not only because of the constrained freedom, but also because your particular playstyle might not fit with the pre-established character that the developers forced into the game.
Systemic Gameplay
The Elder Scrolls series also helped popularize systemic gameplay, which is another thing that Breath of the Wild greatly expanded upon. These types of games don’t rely on pre-determined paths and encounters that every player must experience, instead the world is populated with tons of different entities that the player can interact with.
The combination of entities, systemic rules, random variables and player inputs can lead to all sorts of different possibilities. For example one of my favorite moments in Skyrim was fighting two dragons by summoning a friendly dragon, the experience of watching three dragons fly across the night sky was simply fantastic, and the best part is that this is something that arose from the interaction of multiple mechanics instead of a scripted event.
Another example of systemic design are the Giant Camps that can be found across the map, in these camps you find extremely powerful creatures that keep to themselves and only attack if you invade their territory. And so it’s up to the player to decide what to do with them, they might choose to ignore and avoid the giants, they might try to fight them directly while using a diverse array of tactics to beat them, or they might even sneak into their camps and steal their valuables without being noticed.
Even pre-determined encounters like the dragon battles in the main quest can vary quite a bit it due to the amount of variables at play. And it’s in the dragon encounters that Skyrim really shines as a systemic game.
Dragons & Dragons
There is nothing more fun than killing a dragon, there is something deep within our subconscious that makes us thrill at the idea of a lone hunter facing against a whirling creature that inhabits our nightmares. And while a game like Metroid Prime has one of the greatest dragon battles ever created, it takes the game a dozen hours to get to that point, and the harsh reality is that a lot of people would get bored before getting to that point.
Skyrim in the other hand gets to it right away and it’s awesome.
Skyrim is not a subtle game, it’s a game that gives the players what they want right away without apologizing for it, without feeling ashamed of just being a fun and engrossing experience that allows players to make their own choices. That’s why fighting against a dragon is consistently engaging, even when the game bugs out and you have to fight an invisible dragon (which is awesome), you are always in control. When you play Skyrim you instantly become the master of both worlds, fighting against a creature of chaos that exists solely to provide you with new gameplay possibilities.
Brave New World
It took a long time for the Elder Scrolls series to conquer the gaming world, it didn’t became a one-day sensation like Minecraft or Zelda did. But with time the series found massive success among a player-base thirsty for freedom and autonomy, and naturally journalists were happy to give this series endless praise in order to pander to their audience. The problems only started when many pseudo-critics started getting pretentious and tried to understand games as art, even though they had absolutely no idea of what games are.
Video games are about exploring uncharted worlds, they are about players expressing their true selves by playing in a virtual environment, they are about giving the player massive amounts of freedom so we can explore boundless worlds full of imagination and endless possibilities, free from constraints of the real world. Yet many critics and journalists are so obsessed with predetermined meaning that they see games as mere products to be consumed, or artworks that need a number attached to it as measure of value.
For too long we have been living under the shadow of petty tyrants who refuse to see the world for what it is, simply because they refuse to open their eyes and unshackle themselves from the trappings of linear storytelling and pre-rendered bullshots. They are a nothing but a bunch of pretentious old men playing at running the world, but the world left them behind long ago.
