Morrowind was my first exposure to what is now the trademark Bethesda formula. I remember picking it up for the PC when it was first released in 2002. I was 16 years old and a huge fan of the incredible RPGs developed by Black Isle Studios. Those games felt like huge, sprawling adventures despite their limited 2D isometric art style. I recall being sceptical of 3D RPGs at the time, because I didn’t think you could get the same level of complexity and DnD-style depth with a first-person 3D engine. In my head 3D was too primitive, and too much work; clearly they spent their budget on art, not writing.

Despite all this something about Morrowind piqued my interest.¹ To say that the game blew my young mind would be an understatement. This was a world unlike anything I’d ever seen before, with complex systems and rich lore. Of course it famously had its share of issues: cliff racers, broken custom spells and a draw distance of about 3 metres. And the bugs… oh lord, the bugs! But it didn’t matter to me. I was totally immersed in this vast and wonderful world. I’ve been hooked on Bethesda’s unique method of game design ever since.

After Morrowind, Oblivion came along. The engine improvements were considerable, and the game looked incredible. However it too had its fair share of issues, being criticised for its generic NPCs with repetitive voice lines and unimaginative setting (at least when compared to Morrowind). Despite this I loved Oblivion more than I did Morrowind, losing myself in its well-realised world.

Which brings us to Skyrim. In typical Bethesda fashion, it was a bit of an ugly duckling at launch, filled with bugs and issues. Even now, long after the release of an ‘enhanced’ edition, it still requires a number of mods to fix the bugs they missed and provide an interface that can reasonably be used with a keyboard and mouse (I’ve provided my mod list at the bottom of this article). But despite its issues, Bethesda have again made a game that I can’t help but love.

One of my favourite things in Skyrim is just how well Bethesda nailed the feeling of the setting, and a big part of that is the quality of the NPCs.⁵ It’s clear that Bethesda took the criticism of the Oblivion NPCs to heart, and as a result the NPCs in Skyrim feel like a huge leap ahead of the previous game. There are more diverse voices and appearances, more dialog lines and more natural behaviours. Part of this is down to the radiant AI, which gave NPCs jobs and had them go looking for food when they were hungry and so on. It all comes together to make a world that feels populated with distinct characters, which is something incredibly difficult to do in a game this large.

In other ways however, they have somewhat homogenised their characters. This is most notable in the beast races, the Khajit and Argonians. In Morrowind both had tails and elongated feet that prevented them wearing any shoes. They were also limited in what headgear they could wear. This is no longer the case in Skyrim; the Khajit are the furry humans and the Argonians the scaly ones.

This is one aspect of the most common criticism made against Skyrim; that it dumbed down the game. I think this is true, but I don’t quite mean that in the same way that other Morrowind purists do; they harp on about the days where you didn’t have quest markers and your journal was a literal journal that quest updates were added to, in the order you advanced them, without any sort of grouping. No fast travel, no horses.⁴ You had to level up to run and jump, and only got better at these things by sprinting everywhere and jumping through the wilderness.

It’s a nice romantic idea but in my opinion the game would not be improved by that sort of thing. Although I will concede they might provide the right player with a more immersive RPG experience, I don’t think these things added any real complexity or depth. As such I don’t think replacing them with systems that streamline the game for more casual players is really dumbing down anything.

I do think with Skyrim, Bethesda dumbed down the game in a number of other ways. Let’s start with the quests in the game. The vast majority of the side-quests in this game are incredibly generic and bland. Almost all involve some sort of dungeon dive, a beast that must be slain, a piece of loot that must be obtained and finally a return to the quest-giver to turn it in for XP. Then you go to the shops, sell a bunch of crap, and repeat. There are some exceptions to this, but even the main plotline falls back on this formula in places. By far the worst offenders are the Bard’s Collage quests, so offensively generic that they actually become notable. It should have been an exciting set of quests exploring the incredible lore cultivated through years of skilled world-building. Instead, we fetched some instruments and an old book from a sequence of caves for the most uninspired characters imaginable.

In my opinion, this really is the capital offence of Skyrim; failing to fully utilise its own lore. The Elder Scrolls universe is incredibly rich with interesting things. A unique and genuinely interesting pantheon of gods, demi-gods and god-like creatures. There are multiple races in the game all of whom have a long history, which you can actually read about in books in the game. There are extreme racial tensions between these races which is manifest in the setting (e.g. The Grey Quarter in Windhelm) and the main plotline.

Yet this deep vein of lore is barely mined. It feels almost as if someone at Bethesda sat down one day with sticky notes and created one for each notable thing in the setting. One for Sheogorath, God of Madness. One for Potema, the Wolf Queen. Here’s one for Azura, the Daedric Prince of Dusk and Dawn. Ah, and this one about the how the Bosmer are supposed to cannibalise their enemies within 3 days²… actually on second thought let’s bin that one. These little sticky notes were perhaps given to game designers, who in turn could make the quest for that “notable” thing.

The logical conclusion of such a process would be a quest about Sheogorath, a quest about Potema (which is actually one of the best in the game), a quest about Azura, and so on. Those quests become distinct little parcels of the world without any overlap; the Sheogorath quest is only about Sheogorath. As these parcels never interact, they don’t have the opportunity to coalesce into a pervasive and convincing setting. Given that it’s possible for one PC to meet damn near every god in the setting, and also acquire damn-near all of the most powerful artefacts in the setting, the world should be overflowing with the influence of these things. But it just isn’t there, and as a result the setting itself feels more shallow than it ever has.³

The common thread here is that Skyrim is the most generic game that Bethesda have ever produced. It feels like a massive missed opportunity not only in terms of this game, but also in terms of enriching the franchise. If only the world could have been more cohesive, the quests more relevant, Skyrim could have become something really incredible.

Perhaps I am being unfair, because Skyrim really is an exceptional game. Its greatest strength is level design, in particular telling minor ‘ambient’ stories with clever placement of items in the world. It’s quite common to come across, for example, the remains of some bandits near a bear’s den. Deep in the caves you might find the skeleton of some poor sap caught by a collapsing roof, his pick-axe just out of reach. I think this is something that Bethesda have all but mastered. It’s quite clear that the world is made up of modular components, but these little decorations make each area unique enough that you never feel like you’re in the same cave twice. This makes the world interesting to explore on its own, despite the shortcomings of the game’s quests.

I’d say this is how their games are meant to be played. There’s so much to find off the path, and if you’re willing to set your own goals and invest yourself in the setting, there’s an incredible amount of fun to be had in Skyrim.

There’s a special type of magic in Bethesda’s games that just keeps sucking me back in. While I think Bethesda could improve their games with some tweaks to their formula (not to mention engine improvements), that formula just keeps sucking me back in and leaving me wanting more.

Hey, look at that. I wrote a whole article about Skyrim and didn’t mention the dragons.