Weekly ‘What Games Are You Playing' thread #29

It's hard to really to properly roleplay in Skyrim, as the developers chose to make it almost a classless game, giving the player the ability to be equally talented as a warrior, a mage and a thief. As a result, you don't feel as if you really play as any of these roles. Still, I wanted to spice up my playthrough for the pilgrimage's sake, so I chose to create a support character. I never really played Skyrim with followers , much less relied on them , so my character was an alchemist with knowledge of restoration spells. I chose to recreate Dar-Ma, the argonian girl you have to rescue from the lovecraftian village in Oblivion. She is defenceless, relies on other to protect her and her mother is a trader with a large variety of alchemical ingredients in stock. Seemed like she would be a perfect fit for the kind of character I envisioned. Also, Dar-Ma technically has a “sharpshooter” class in Oblivion, so I can lore-wise justify her doing a little bit of stealth archer tomfoolery here and there. I don't know how long is the lifespan of argonians in elder scrolls, since it never comes up in the mainline games, so I assumed that just like real reptiles they can live for centuries , so a very young lizard girl during the Oblivion Crisis could theoretically live to see the events of Skyrim.

In the middle of the playthrough I had a bit of a somber moment when passing by the Valtheim Towers with two followers in tow (one of them was the pilgrim from the Kynareth quest). The Jeremy Soule music, the visuals of the towers straddling the river and the sense of adventure were overpowering enough to immerse me in the game world for a brief moment . It was brief because I immediately realized that all the elements feeding into my sense of immersion were handcrafted and them perfectly aligning at rare moments like this was by design . Starfield plans to use proc-gen planets and quite a lot of quests will be radiant with the emergent storytelling being similar to that of Daggerfall. There might be rare cases of the systems working together to create a compelling narrative, but it won't compare to the actual handcrafted content. The era of Bethesda I grew so fond of might truly be over Starfield will tell, but I am extremely doubtful.

I have mixed feelings towards Skyrim . On one hand, I lament the simplification of their rpg formula with the removal of attributes and other smaller mechanics like item durability. It's understandable that they wanted to create a game that would appeal to as many people as possible, with the predictable audience of casual g*mers with no experience in rpg games forming around it . On the other hand, it is the only game that my mother managed to get into and play on her own volition to this day. It is truly special to be able to talk about vidya with a parent on the same level you would with a film or a book. All my media connections with my parents were preciously one-sided, with them recommending me something that they hold in high regard before engaging in proper discussion after I finish whatever media they recommended to me . To be in the opposite position, to share something you like with a person you already love is really special. While I cherish the fact that my mother actually manages to enjoy Skyrim, which creates plenty of opportunities for us to bond and discuss something we both like, I also understand that she is only able to do so because of all the simplifications and streamlining that I detest so much . It is entirely a personal struggle, as I don't want every game in existence to be approachable by non-g*mers like my mother. Still, Skyrim has this special connection for me, a connection that makes it impossible for me to hate on it as much as the game may deserve from an objective standpoint

I most likely won't be posting next week, for obvious reasons . I have voluntarily chose to go on this pilgrimage and make Starfield a bigger thing in my worldview. In any case, I've never done a back-to-back playthrough of all mainline Bethesda games like this, although whatever observations and conclusions I gathered from this experiment are dubious at best and speak only to my personal sensibilities . It doesn't take a wise man to tell you that all Bethesda has been doing is slowly chipping away at the same formula they established two decades ago, trying to make each new iteration more streamlined and appealing to average people, ie potential customers . The fact that they can sustain themselves through this method speaks volumes about the quality of their original ideas and undoubtedly makes one sad that they haven't tried anything new for so long . Starfield comes along, where they promise to do just that - try something new. But now you are just anxious that they forgot how to properly do new things, since they haven't done that in two decades, so the result will probably be lukewarm at best . There is a reason it is marketed as 20 years in the making, but will it pay off? In five days we will see...

TL:DR

Bethesda Pilgrimage - Almost done

Sense of taste - Absolutely demolished

Altar to Todd - Erected

Starfield - Preloaded

Fun - Guaranteed