Skyrim — The Death of Lydia

I played a little more Skyrim last night. The world still hasn’t opened up for me in the way I expect from a Bethesda game, but I’m still in it.

One of the main quest missions sends you into an area alone, with access to just whatever gear you have an NPC smuggle in for you. Lydia, the warrior assigned to me by the Jarl of Whiterun, had to stay behind.

I didn’t bother taking much stuff with me, anticipating that I would go for a stealthy, speech-based approach. It started out well, solving an initial hurdle through dialog. Then I got into the back area, and found myself stuck in an area I couldn’t sneak through successfully, and couldn’t fight my way through either. I turned the difficultly down, and the combat is now a breeze. Considering it hasn’t been the highlight of the game so far, it’s probably for the best.

So, I made it through, completed the objectives, and escaped through a trap door. Behind the trap door, I discovered that Lydia, my faithful servant, had apparently been waiting for me there. With a frost troll. So I guess that’s where Lydia’s story ends. She didn’t really have a lot to say even before the frost troll, so I don’t really know what I’ll be missing out on there.

I made my way back to meet up with the quest-giver to get my gear back, and then resumed what has turned into my favourite activity in Skyrim: smithing. The roleplaying centre in my mind fills in that my character must believe that perhaps if Lydia had been better armored, she might have lived, and vanquished that troll. And so she spends hours honing her craft, creating and refining better and better suits of armor. Banded-iron, steel — soon she will try her hand at Dwarven pieces. Her swords, war-hammers and axes are flooding the markets of Skyrim.

I’m starting to find the character now. Elissa, the warrior-smith who ventures out into the wilderness always searching for new materials to craft with, haunted by the knowledge that the armor will never been good enough.

Whatever Could be Inside?

The First of Many?

Skyrim — First Thoughts

The experience of Skyrim has been quite different from most Bethesda games I’ve played before. I’m only a few hours in at this point, but looking through my quest log, almost everything on there is connected to the main quest. I just haven’t been compelled to explore the world very broadly.

That main quest has been great so far (which, considering it mostly involves hunting dragons shouldn’t be all that surprising). So, I’m puzzled. What is about this experience that’s different? In most respects Skyrim feels like a simple refinement on the model set by Oblivion. So where did that desire to see what I’ll find if I walk down this path over here go? Why am I not stopping to talk to every inhabitant of every town I come across?

One possible answer is that the world of Skyrim seems more dangerous than that of Oblivion or Morrowind. In the small bit of exploring I have done, I’ve mostly come across giants, trolls and a seemingly endless supply of wolves. Also, bandits and the odd necromancer. Everything in the world seems intent on killing me, which doesn’t do a great job of incentivizing a hike through the woods.

Then there is the considerably improved scripting of the main story encounters. One effect of this is that the quest feels more like a conventional game. I have the distinct impression that I could follow from one sub-quest to the next, and treat Skyrim as a fairly tightly scripted fantasy adventure game. The older Elder Scrolls games, and the Bethesda Fallout games were less firmly connected. Their main quests frequently paused (or less charitably, ground to a halt), giving the player an obvious space to run off and do other things.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this enormous game, and from everything I’ve heard, there are tons of interesting side-quests and discoveries to be made. I just wonder how long it will take for me to find them.

Uncharted 3 — Review

Uncharted 3 is a great game by almost any measure you could throw at it. It looks fantastic, it features more of the signature Uncharted set-piece moments. For pretty much the first time in the series, the puzzles are ‘just right’ — not so hard that you’ll be stuck standing in one place for hours, but challenging enough to make you think. Yet something bothered me about the game. Something was off.

There was a moment early in Uncharted 3 that sums up the problem: Drake, Sully and the new addition to the crew, Cutter, are making their way through an underground tunnel. Cutter makes a reference to Macbeth. Not even a tough one. “Lay on, MacDuff.” Pretty famous line. And Nathan Drake, typically a font of obscure knowledge and wit up to this point in the series, doesn’t get it. Uncharted 3 suddenly muddles the question of how smart Drake is. He can translate Latin on the fly better than any Oxford don, has to be one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of human exploration and archeology — but he flubs on a very common reference from one of the most famous works in the English language. Who is this man?

This is actually an intriguing question, which the game ostensibly seeks to explore. For the first half of the game, it seems like the answer is that Drake is just going through the motions, a highly damaged person. Characters ask Drake repeatedly in the game “Why are you doing this?” And tellingly, he never actually answers them. He just has to keep going. In this way he appears to be written as something of a metaphor for the series itself. Why does Uncharted 3 exist? Because it has to. It coasts through without a whole lot to say, because, well, there has to be an Uncharted 3, just as there will probably be an Uncharted 4. Drake pursues the game’s band of villains, because … that’s what he does.

Where Uncharted 3 is most interesting is in the second half of the game when we meet up with Elena again. Here is a character who isn’t as willing as Drake’s usual band of enablers to just go along with his mindless forward charge. She is sucked into his problems, but only because he makes it unavoidable. And she isn’t happy about it. Uncharted 3’s story is almost singlehandedly redeemed by a few moments between these two characters. In a few lines, the game transforms itself from a mere string of independently impressive moments, into a probably doomed love story, with Drake as a very damaged person who draws people in with his charm, but it seems will always push them away again in an obsessive quest to fill a void in his soul. This could be a description foisted onto quite a few games, of course. If we were to look at the behaviours we create with most of our video game protagonists from the outside, they would not look all that healthy. Where Uncharted 3 becomes something more, however, is in that at a certain point it becomes aware of this.

Is Uncharted 3 the equal of its predecessor? No. While it does get there eventually, the story takes too long to realize what it is about. The game has internalized the expectations set by the other games, and you can often feel it trying to be clever. In Uncharted 2, Drake’s wit seemed to rise organically from genuine surprise at situations he found himself in, or the actions of characters around him. (“I’m sorry, do you have a plan to go with that grenade?”) In Uncharted 3, you can almost feel the writers pacing in the background, “How about that? That was funny, right? Right?”

I can only hope that the next time Uncharted comes around, Naughty Dog has a sense of what they want to say that lives up to the flair with which they can say it.