5 Rules to Make The Elder Scrolls Games More Realistic

One of the things I like to do with Elder Scrolls games is impose my own set of rules. There are some aspects that I feel are just too “gamey” and pull me out of the game. Over the years playing Elder Scrolls games since Morrowind, I created a list of five rules that improve the game experience to me. I do not have Skyrim yet but will definitely be following these rules when I get it.

1. Play the Game Blind

Do not read strategies on how to complete quests or get the best reward. You can only use in-game information to make decisions. If you have already completed a quest before, you can use your experience of course to finish the quest. Just no “cheating” if you have forgotten what to do in a quest. The goal here is to just not spoil your experience. It makes the game feel a lot more mysterious and at the same time interesting when you do not know what is coming next. Even if you finished the quest in an earlier playthrough you might not remember every detail. It is more fun to surprise yourself.

2. Limit Your Saving & Loading

Saving is allowed at any time in case crashes or major bugs occur. We all know how buggy Elder Scrolls games are. Even fully patched and unofficially patched, the game can crash, even more so if you use mods. Loading is only acceptable at the beginning of a game session or when major bugs/crashes occur. Major bugs are ones which would prevent you from playing the game as it is meant to be played. Example: If an essential main quest character got stuck in the environment closing off the entire main quest, reloading would be allowed. (this has actually happened to me.)

3. Always Accept the Consequences of Your Actions

This goes hand in hand with the last two rules. Maybe you played badly and lost a character you really liked. You have to accept that you did not do enough and let them die. Or maybe you thought helping X faction, would have Y effect, but it turns out X faction is secretly evil or nefarious. You could then quit working for that faction, abandoning them in disgust, or continue knowing your character has permanently changed. These “mistakes” become part of your character’s history and make the game more memorable.

4. No Fast Travel

This was added for Oblivion as Morrowind never had this feature. Fast travel is nice for getting you through quests faster. If you just want to see the big picture, fast travel is great. However, you miss out on seeing so many interesting places in the world when using it. I think the point to playing Elder Scrolls games is exploring the world, and fast travel hurts that. You can be more lenient with this if you do not want to complete stop using it. You could only allow it to travel to major cities or only from NPCs that offer it at a cost (Morrowind and I hear Skyrim too). Fast travel in Oblivion can be completed turned off in Oblivion with a mod or in Skyrim with ini edit, or you can just not use it when playing the game.

5. No Quest Markers

This is also only for Oblivion and Skyrim. The reasons here are similar to the no fast travel reasons. You want to see more of the world, not just make a beeline to the end of the quest. Most people do not like to follow this rule. It greatly increases the time to complete quests. I do not know about Skyrim, but most Oblivion quests had little or no direction in the dialogue or quest log. You were expected to use the quest markers. You could spend hours trying to find the place you are supposed to go, all because the quest does not actually describe where to go. I personally play through the first time with quest markers on. Then, on subsequent characters I try to do without quest markers relying on my memory and some wandering. A mod is required turn them off in Oblivion or an ini tweak in Skyrim.

6. (Optional) Hardcore Mode

This is when your character is not allowed to die. You create a save file at the beginning of the game. If your character dies at all, through your own fault or otherwise, you start over from beginning with that save file. The idea here is complete realism. If Skyrim was real, your character could not reload when they died. They would be dead forever. I call this playing the game hardcore, in line with Diablo 2 which coined the term. You can make some role-play exceptions if you want. For instance, if you died near a church or temple, you could say your character was revived by the nearby priests and allow a reload.

I created the first three rules when playing Morrowind to avoid spoilers. I found I started to look up more and more online rather than trying to figure things out myself. Morrowind was a difficult game if you did not look anything up, but I wanted it to be that way. I did not want to just rush through all quests or go straight for the best items. I wanted to learn, explore, and discover new things as I played. With Oblivion I added two more rules due to the new fast travel and quest markers features. I played through once without those rules but felt like I never saw much of the world. When I get Skyrim I will be following these rules myself.

These rules make the game feel more realistic, more immersive, and get me to see the world more. All this translates into more fun. What we all want more of from our games.

Do you have any more rules to make Elder Scrolls games feel more realistic? More immersive? More fun? Please comment below.

RPG Quests Are Just as Repetitive

Scrusi wrote about his first impressions of Star Wars: The Old Republic during the weekend beta. As I was reading I came across this passage:

I’m not quite sure yet how things will pan out once I start playing alts, but for now quests actually feel like quests as opposed to random markers on the map that lead to (usually insignificant) rewards. The quests themselves aren’t all that different from the standard MMO fare, but the voice acting and “cutscenes” make me feel actually involved.

You see the main difference between World of Warcraft quests and The Old Republic quests are the cutscenes with voice acting. Other than those cutscenes, the possible quest types (the actual gameplay) are the same. Yet TOR feels a lot more fun than WoW.

MMORPG.com wrote an article about the limited quest types in traditional MMORPGs. It is interesting that every traditional MMORPG (such as WoW and TOR) has these same limited quest types. This got me thinking about single player RPG quests, and I realized they are pretty much the same as WoW quests.

Let’s just compare with Dragon Age: Origins. DA:O quests:

• are made up of the same basic tasks
• are generally longer with more parts
• have cutscenes with voice acting
• have various puzzles to solve (riddles, combining items, mini-games, etc.)

That is all I could think of right now, but you do the same tasks in DA:O as you do in WoW. The only difference is DA:O has much better presentation. The quests are longer so they feel way more epic. The voice acting and cutscenes bring the characters to life. The puzzles make the tasks seem a little more believable instead of simply right-clicking to grab the quest items or unlock the door.

Single player RPGs have you doing the same tasks, the same tried and true tasks as MMORPGs. This is why I do not understand when people criticize MMORPG quests for being repetitive. All RPG quests are repetitive. The only thing RPGs do better is that presentation. They excel at getting you to feel like you are doing more than you really are. This is what games in general are about really.

MMORPGs need to move in this direction, and I think TOR is the first step. In addition to the cutscenes and voice acting, MMORPG designers need to make each quest epic and add puzzles (alternative gameplay) to those quests. This will make MMORPGs feel just as fun and engaging as single player RPGs.

RPG fans should not have to choose between subpar gameplay with good community or great gameplay with no community. The choice should be purely whether the player wants to play with others or not (single player vs multiplayer). That will be when MMORPGs truly shine.

Why Skyrim Sold Better Than Oblivion

Recent reports peg Skyrim with 7 million copies shipped (3.5 million sold) in the first two days. That’s not nearly as good as Modern Warfare 3’s 12.3 million shipped (6.5 million sold) in one week or even Battlefield 3’s 10 million shipped in five days (5 million sold), but Skyrim’s numbers are way better than you would think.

Let’s compare Skyrim’s sales to Starcraft 2’s sales. Starcraft 2 sold 1.5 million copies in the first two days. By the end of the month (30 days) it had sold 3 million. So from two days to one month, Starcraft 2 sales roughly doubled to 3 million. If we assume Skyrim, another immensely popular title, also doubles it’s sales by the end of the month, Skyrim will sell 7 million copies by the end of the first month.

Now we can compare it with Oblivion more easily. Looking at this old Gamespot report shows that Oblivion sold 1.7 million copies in 21 days. We can make another assumption here that within 30 days it sold another 300,000 copies to put Oblivion at 2 million copies in one month. Doing the math here, we can see Skyrim is likely to sell 3.5 times as many copies as Oblivion did, but what about the growth in the game industry? Could there just be 3.5 times as many gamers now and the popularity is roughly the same?

The video game sales reports have the answer. I found the Entertainment Software Association to have a lot of good information on this. According to their Video Games in the 21st Century (PDF) report, 2006 annual video game retail sales, the same year Oblivion was released, were $7.4 billion. They don’t have any data for 2011 annual sales yet. The year is not even over yet, but they do have 2010 sales. Their Sales and Genre webpage puts the numbers at $15.9 billion retail sales for 2010. So the game industry has grown by 2.06 times from 2006 to 2010.

If you’ve been paying attention to the game sales reports this year, the sales have been down overall compared to 2010. In fact the NPD Group, the game sales tracking firm, expects 2011 game sales to be from 1% to -2% growth for the year. That means the 2011 figures should end up very close to the 2010 figures, and we can use the 2006 to 2010 growth as a good estimate for 2006 to 2011.

So in reality, Skyrim sales have actually increased quite a bit relative to the growth of the industry. Skyrim is more popular than Oblivion, and the reason for that is a combination of good luck and good timing. Think about it. The highly anticipated RPGs this year (not counting MMOs) were Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 2, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, and to a lesser extent Torchlight 2.

Mass Effect 3, Diablo 3, and Torchlight 2 were all delayed to 2012. All three of those were originally planned for Fall release, the same time as Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks got very lucky with that. Then, there was only Dragon Age 2 and The Witcher 2 as competition for 2011. Dragon Age 2 was a generally considered a disappointment. The Witcher 2 was well received by both reviewers and fans. but released back in May, outside of any real competition with Skyrim. Up to Skyrim’s release, hungry RPG gamers only really had The Witcher 2. There was a lot of pent up demand for a new RPG to dig into. Skyrim released at the perfect time.

Skyrim sold much more than Oblivion, even taking into consideration the growth of the game industry (the increase in gamers). The year started with six high profile RPGs expected to release in 2011. Three of them were delayed into 2012. That left only Dragon Age 2, a disappointment that gamers avoided, and The Witcher 2, released a full six months before Skyrim. Through good luck and good timing, Skyrim did much better than Oblivion. Bethesda Softworks will be have to work mighty hard to top Skyrim when they eventually make The Elder Scrolls 6.

“This is the Best Game Ever”

It seems like every big game on the Hype Train ends up having at least some disappointments. The game is announced; the hype starts. Little tidbits of information are given out to tease fans, slowly increasing the hype. Then, the marketing starts building up even more hype. As the game’s release date comes, the hype becomes overpowering. Finally, the game is released, and everyone dives into it. So busy playing, the internet forums are quiet for a few days.

It’s at this point, a few days after release, that the disappointment begins to set in. Now some games are really, really good that there is very little disappointment. There is always some disappointment, though. Maybe the game has some annoying bugs, or maybe there are flaws in the game design. It could be neither of those, and your own subjective reasons, or personal preferences, cause you not to like something about the game. Starcraft 2 was an amazing game, but some people hated the online-only multiplayer. At the same time, other people didn’t have a problem at all. This is neither a bug nor a design flaw. The developers fully intended it to be that way. It is just that some people had a personal preference of playing over LAN.

Rogue Leader, what went wrong?

I never really noticed the Hype Train until I got the Gamecube with Rogue Leader on launch day. I had been following the Gamecube for years, ever since they showed the Mario-128 and Ganon vs Link tech demos. The same for Rogue Leader. From its first announcement, I kept up on all the previews. I sat there hours waiting for my slow 56k modem to download E3 videos of the game. I was just completely hyped up about it and the future with Gamecube. Release day came, I picked up Rogue Squadron, and had an absolute blast. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, and I really felt “this is the best game ever”.

Category Changes

I sat down today to write a Daily but just did not see anything interesting to write about. I thought it was a good idea at the time, but I think some days there just will not be much to write about. Actually, I did come up with some ideas, but I want them to be longer than a short daily post. I can not call them dailies if they aren’t posted daily. Instead, those regular normal length posts will be in the General category. These will be more opinion heavy. I state some news of the day and write my opinions on them.

Then, there will be the Features category that will be for longer posts. These posts I have thought a lot more about and maybe do some research on. Like my other blog, I do not really want to have a schedule. It makes me think of the blog as work. And it is not, because I do not make any money out of this at all. I am more than willing to write about video games on a schedule for paid work, but I am far from that right now.

Gaming Revolutions

People tend to organize the game consoles into generations based on periods when a large number of consoles were released in a short time span. If we abstract things even more, we can reduce that down into a few key technologies that ushered in each new age of games. These major advances in technology created the gaming revolutions of the past and will continue to do so in the future.  During and after a revolution, developers use these revolutionary technologies to make the cutting edge games. Based on current video game history, I feel there are five revolutions: 2D Graphics, 3D Graphics, Touchscreen Control, Motion Control, and 3D Visuals.

2D Graphics

2D graphics were introduced with the first consoles, starting in 1972 with the Magnavox Oddysey. Popular consoles in this period were the Magnavox Odyssey, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Sega Genesis, and Super NES. There were some games made that used vector graphics to create a psuedo-3D effect, but the vast majority of games were 2D.

With two dimensions game developers only had height and width in the image. There was no depth, so you pretty much saw everything from just one viewpoint. For example, if you saw a building, you couldn’t really walk around to see the other side unless the programmers specifically programmed another 2D viewpoint for that side. 2D graphics were usually hand drawn on paper, and then a pixel artist would convert it to a low resolution image that could be displayed on the TV. All TVs were just standard definition in those days, so the max resolution in most cases was only 640×480. Many times it was less than that due to limitations in the console hardware.

For quite a few years, 2D graphics went dormant as 3D graphics surged in popularity. They have started coming back, however. Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and Steam release many games with 2D graphics on the dedicated console platforms. 2D graphics are also dominate among handheld gaming including the Nintendo DS as well as mobiles, smart phones, and tablets.

3D Graphics

The next major advance in gaming was full 3D graphics in 1994 with the Sega Saturn. Popular consoles in this era were the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64. Some previous game consoles were capable of some basic 3D environments with 2D sprites, but starting in this period game consoles were capable of producing full 3D graphics for everything in the game. There also started to appear some industry standards for how to do 3D graphics. This meant developers for one console could make games for other consoles without having to relearn everything for the new console. This made it easier to port games to other game systems or switch development to another console platform.

With 3D graphics developers were no longer restricted to just a few viewpoints. Most games would let you move the viewpoint around with buttons or through the movement of your character. The camera wasn’t just stuck in one direction. All of the graphics were now made up of polygons with textures rather than the traditional 2D hand drawn sprites. Over the years 3D graphics have gotten better with higher polygons and texture quality.

Touchscreen Control

There was not really anything better after 3D graphics, so developers had to come up with something else for the new game consoles. They turned their attention to implementing new control interfaces. The first was introducing the touchscreen to gaming with the Nintendo DS in 2004. While touchscreen control causes fatigue in long periods, it suits a handheld gaming device well. The Nintendo DS touchscreen only detects one touch at a time, but newer touchscreens have multi-touch capability.

While touchscreen control will never become a primary interface for games you can expect to see it more often as new game systems come out. With home consoles touchscreen could possibly be employed on future controller designs. Also, the iPhone and iPad have become extremely popular devices for touchscreen games lately even though they are not primarily gaming systems. It remains to be seen how far touchscreen control will go, but it is sure to stick around in some form or another just as 2D graphics has.

Motion Control

We are getting to the more recent years now, so you can probably predict what the major advances are from this point forward. Motion control started with the Nintendo Wii in 2006. The Wii had this technology exclusively until September 2010 when Sony released the Playstation Move. Microsoft also released their own motion control system with the Kinect on November 4, 2010.

Instead of using buttons the player uses body motion to control the game. This can be achieved with a special motion sensing controller (Wii, PS3) or with the body alone (Kinect). The first Wii controller was more of a sophisticated pointing device than true motion control mainly sensing height and width of the controller. Over the years Nintendo has released new controllers to improve its depth-sensing capability. The Move controller is much the same as the Wii controller but adds much more precision to sensing capability in all dimensions. The Kinect also senses these things, but does not require a controller.

I don’t know if motion control will ever be the way to play hardcore games; however, it should be around in some form in every future console. I could easily see it being one form of control in hardcore games. At certain points of a game they could call on you to use motion controls when it better fits the action. Motion controls would work very well for mini-games within a game, such as a lockpicking mini-game to unlock doors.

3D Visuals

In addition to new motion control devices, 2010 also brought 3D visuals to consumers. This is kind of confusing when it comes to games, because we already have 3D in the form of graphics. This new 3D technology I call 3D visuals, because it has to do with how we view the graphics, not how the console simulates a 3D space. Another common name for it is Stereoscopic 3D, two separate images are projected to the viewer with one image for each eye.

The Playstation 3 is at the leading edge right now with full 3D Blu-ray support and 3D game support. I believe the Xbox 360 and Wii can support 3D, but may not have the performance to do it well. Current 3D games render two images per frame, one for each eye. That means it pretty much requires twice the processing power to do 3D graphics. Only the PS3 has the power to do this and draw high end graphics at the same time. Coming in 2011 is the new Nintendo 3DS, a DS with the ability to display 3D visuals. It will be the first gaming system to have 3D visuals without requiring the player to wear 3D glasses.

Now a lot of gamers say 3D visuals is just a fad like every time before. On the other hand, I think it will be staying around. TVs are getting to close to the maximum clarity our eyes can actually see, but TV manufacturers have to get people to keep buying new TVs. The only way is by adding new features to the TV. We already have so-called “smart TVs”, which are computer-TV hybrids that add the Internet features. 3D visuals is one such feature.

In the original post I made a prediction that 3D visuals were going to be the future. That 3D visuals would be added to all future TV sets, everyone would eventually have a TV capable of 3D visuals, and game developers would take advantage of that. Over the year though, it seems like 3D visuals lost a lot of steam. First, 3D movie ticket sales went way down to the point that many theatres stopped showing them. Second, consumers were not really interested in 3DTV and stuck to their current HDTVs. Third is the Nintendo 3DS, which sold much lower than Nintendo expected. The sales were so slow they had to reduce the price by $80. Fourth, I have heard a lot of complaints about headaches when playing 3D games.

All these combined, I don’t see 3D visuals coming to hardcore games. I think they will work for games designed for short play sessions, like mobile games. I think the 3DS could definitely recover over the years. I still consider 3D visuals to be a revolution though. It will change quite a few of the games we play once the costs go down. Gaming with 3D visuals today is too expensive for most gamers, but some day the costs will be pretty low.

Conclusions

There are a few interesting things to note here. Gaming revolutions do not require a complete end to the use of older technologies. For example, most modern games use 3D Graphics of some sort, but there are still quite a few that still use 2D Graphics or a mixture of the two. In many cases the new technology discovered during a revolution is simply added on to existing technologies, not wholly replacing the older technology.

Another thing to note is that these technologies are usually discovered much earlier than the actual revolution. It’s only when they get onto store shelves and into consumer hands that the revolution can be considered to begin. Touchscreens were invented back in the 1960s but only came to gaming (and widespread use) in 2005.

What do you think? Are 3D visuals and motion control here to stay? If not, what is your prediction for the next great technology in the future? Sound off in the comments below.

WoW players quit for Skyrim?

I am introducing Dailies on this blog. No, I am not talking about daily quests in World of Warcraft. I am talking about daily posts about my personal feelings on whatever is going on in the game industry. Once a week I will have a longer “Discussion” post where I go into more detail and do a little research, but the other days will be Dailies. I am planning that Fridays will be the Discussion day and the rest of the week will be Dailies. I probably will be taking a break on weekends, but there is always the possibility if I am interested on the weekend.

The big deal today is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim just released. There was a lot of hype for this game the whole year ever since it was announced. While there had been plenty of rumors about Elder Scrolls V development at Bethesda Softworks, they had not publicly said anything one way or another. All of a sudden they announced the game was in development and on track for release by the end of the year. That caught everyone by surprise. Bethesda was quite open about their development of Morrowind and Oblivion. They did regular interviews, showings at E3, and even previews. With Skyrim they seemed to go more the Valve Software route of not revealing anything until the last minute.

The major gaming outlets seem to be pretty happy about the game. Just a quick check of my personal favorite game sites shows a minimum of 8.5 and a maximum of 10.0. So the reviewers love it, but what about the regular players like us? Well, they actually seem to be in agreement with the reviewers for once. Most of discussion in the forums I frequent has been positive with everyone saying they are enjoying the game. I personally have not picked up the game. It is just a habit of mine with Bethesda games to wait until they come out with the Game of the Year edition. I am a sucker for deals. If I know a deal is coming up eventually, I just cannot buy it new. Ever since Morrowind, all of Bethesda’s games have eventually come out in a Game of the Year edition. It just makes sense to me to wait for that.

These days there is also the Steam sale. Usually, within six months you can expect any game to be on sale for a nice, low price. The longer you wait, the better the sale is. This just could not be done before digital distribution. By the time a game would get down to half price or lower it usually wasn’t on store shelves. If you could find a copy, it was used with no manual. Now, there is no more hunting to find your very own new copy. It is always sitting there on Steam’s website ready to buy. You can even predict when sales will occur allowing you to “plan” for sales. Sure, you can plan for Black Friday and Day After Christmas sales, but that is usually the leftovers, not the quality products you wanted. They are just convincing you to buy things you didn’t really want.

The big news on Tuesday actually was that World of Warcraft lost another 1.1 million subscribers since March 2011. Since I didn’t post anything then, I will write about it today. The blogosphere woke up quite a bit with this news as well as the major game websites and game forums. Everyone seems to have their own opinion on why WoW is losing subscribers. I think the game is just getting old myself. Cataclysm didn’t do anything more or less than other expansions. It was par for the course. Many players were on the edge of quitting from boredom. Cataclysm just spurred them into action.

I do find it interesting that this coincides with Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls games have always felt like single player MMOs. You have this really big expansive world, tons of character creation possibilities, RPG mechanics, crafting, and many more MMO mechanics. Could a lot of the WoW players that quit been waiting for Skyrim? I could definitely see some players replacing WoW with Skyrim. I know this is probably not the reason for the losses. If anything, The Old Republic is what WoW players are moving to. Mike Morhaime said it was China that is losing most of the subscribers. If that is true, I wonder what is going on over there for so many obsessed WoW players to quit. Either there is some amazing WoW clone over there or the Chinese government is meddling with things.