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thomasthewest · 29 days ago

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RPGs, Imsims and You(r player character)

Part 1

I dislike genre discussions for video games.

Mostly because half of it is dogma. If a game is branded by a community or developer as something, it’s that something forever. Genre isn’t a discussion about its gameplay content or design, it’s about how fans vibe with an idea of a genre.

Specifically, it’s a pet peeve of mine how the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is treated. It’s not my favourite game, or even my favourite Elder Scrolls game, but some people have taken to bashing it for not being an RPG.

It's an odd thing to bring up, since there’s plenty to criticise the game for. Yes, it does lack a lot of the technical fidelity of its predecessors. Yes, the writing is inferior. But why is Skyrim (and its immediate predecessor the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) treated like this? What’s great about the third title of Morrowind that everyone hails as a cornerstone cRPG? What is about Morrowind that makes it an RPG and everything after it a not-RPG?

The truth is, nothing.

Morrowind is my favourite Elder Scrolls game, and one of my favourite games full stop. Its archaic, rough around the edges, and has its fair share of warts. But it has stellar writing and has one of the most engaging settings I’ve ever played.

I’m half-blinded by nostalgia but it is genuinely a great game and a great example of adventure in games done right.

But the gameplay differences between it and its successors are superficial. Many Morrowind fans are probably chomping at the bit right now, seeing red over how one could suggest the masterpiece that is Morrowind could ever be compared to the Toddslop that is Skyrim or Oblivion. But the truth is, while some of Morrowind’s features were streamlined in later titles, the core gameplay remains the same in every TES title since Morrowind.

Morrowind has plenty of technical fidelity. There are lots of ways to kill things in the world and move through the world. It’s fun. It’s great. But having more ways to kill or move doesn’t make something an RPG (or at least I would hope so, otherwise the definition for an RPG would also include Skyrim).

Morrowind’s capacity for character roleplaying is pitiful. Choices And Consequences are some popular buzzwords cited for why Morrowind is better in RPG discourse. This is a meaningless argument in favour of Morrowind, even when compared to the Choices and Consequences available to players in Skyrim.

For the first encounter available to the player in Morrowind, you meet an elf who is missing his ring. The big catch: you picked this ring up in the tutorial!

Okay, good so far. You can do something selfish and tell him you don’t have it or do the right thing and return it. It looks like you already have a little bit of the first C in those Choices And Consequences we were talking about.

Now, in the local pub nearby, you can meet a guard. This guard is an absolute prick, he wants you to find out where the elf hides his gambling winnings and take them for himself. Okay, we’ve already made a choice before, there should be an obvious option to defend the elf and do something about this corrupt guard, if that’s what we want our player character to do, right?

The game certainly gives us a choice: finish the guard’s quest or don’t. The choice here is do the quest or do nothing. It doesn’t really sound like much of a choice at all, does it? Do something that doesn’t fit your character or just skip out on content. This is the rule for most of Morrowind’s quest design.

Some people might kick up a fuss, saying I want my character to be able to do everything on one character, like a stupid Skybaby, but I want the opposite! I want to be locked out of certain outcomes, I want to suffer consequences and weigh up opportunity cost. I want my precious Choices And Consequences.

But Morrowind doesn’t give them. The choice is to follow a thread to its conclusion or don’t. That’s not an actual choice! There’s no actual opportunity cost; it’s all or nothing, that’s a terrible opportunity economy.

On the surface, Morrowind has more choices to make, like how you can kill anyone you want, while Oblivion and Skyrim have a pesky system that doesn’t let you kill NPCs tied to quests.

You may think this makes Morrowind the clear winner for having more Choices and Consequences, but the actual outcome for killing people is usually nothing happening. Related quests can’t be completed, and you might get a bounty, but that’s it. The only consequence is that you now have less stuff to do. It’s a false choice, just like the quest above.

Now, there are some examples of quests and encounters where you still can make choices! However, from a design perspective, there was not a studio-level convention for quests to provide those choices. It simply wasn’t a priority for Bethesda Softworks in 2001 to provide that. Or in 2006. Or in 2011. And probably not in 2030 or whatever year the Elder Scrolls VI is releasing.

By design, Morrowind’s game engine was not designed for this. Having been a modder for the game for many years, I can say firsthand the game’s dialogue system was not built for handling complex decision trees that react to your actions. It’s possible, but when you try and implement it, you can see why Morrowind’s team prioritised single-choice encounters that start at point A and end at point B.

Morrowind’s design simply doesn’t value those Choices And Consequences, and that’s fine. That’s not what it’s trying to do.

So why does a game like this get the RPG badge and Oblivion and Skyrim don’t? A lot of fans might point to the different skills available to the player. Morrowind has 27 skills, while Skyrim only has 18! Surely that means Morrowind has better roleplaying?

A lot of those skills are just flavour. That isn’t a bad thing, but optimal martial builds in Morrowind are decided by what kind of high-level weapons there are available for a weapon skill, not for any strategic reasons. Whether opting to become a swordsman or an axeman is generally a matter of preference than one that would offer a significant strategic advantage or disadvantage.

Some weapons hit faster, and some do more damage, but hold on…that’s something embedded in Skyrim’s combat as well. Except that Skyrim removed a lot of its weapon skills in preference to a one-handed two-handed weapon skill dichotomy, which had more mechanical significance than the differences between long blade, short blade, blunt, axed or polearm weapon skills ever did.

It is fair to lament the comparative lack of technical variety with Skyrim’s magic system, but this is partially made up for with other toys players can use in combat. And Skryim still preserves some of the fun of magic, and if anything, gives players a lot more combat flexibility to mix and match weapons, shields, and spells in their hands.

My point isn’t to decry Morrowind as a bad game, but to highlight its lack of narrative and role-playing fidelity. Again, if all it takes for a cRPG to be a cRPG is to have a player with variable stats and different ways to kill or move, Skyrim should be an RPG.

Which brings me back to my main point of why I dislike this genre dogma in gaming. Morrowind is lauded as this shining example of what cRPGs should be. While I think Morrowind is a great adventure, it’s an adventure that reads from left to right and then it’s over.

Morrowind writer Douglas Goodall even remarked on Morrowind’s lack of roleplaying fidelity[1]. The game puts words in player characters’ mouths, it doesn’t let you create your own character outside of how it kills and travels. The world isn’t built to react to your actions in any meaningful way, as it simply wasn’t designed to do that.

You can see it spelled out in old RPGCodex discussions. At one point Morrowind was Skyrim to Daggerfall fans! What changed except for the community’s attitude?

To try and make a point out of all this bellyaching, how can we make better role-playing experiences if we can’t get a baseline down? How do we learn from this? Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but people criticise Bethesda Softworks for the degradation of their game design and writing, but Morrowind was the first TES game to have one ending![2] People were so happy with Morrowind and its lack of player agency in storytelling that Bethesda has been rolling with it since.

And now that it’s apparently too far gone, we’re all scratching our heads wondering how this happened. Why do people get in all of a huff when the history is there? You can very clearly see the lineage of TES gameplay when you look at the progression from Morrowind to Skyrim.

We seem to be sentimental about what an RPG is; sometimes it might just be games that make you feel clever, or games that you played as a child seem to be the ones you give those labels to. To be an RPG is a good thing, and it makes you a smart or good person for playing them. Games you personally don’t like aren’t RPGs, because if they were it would mean you wouldn’t be as smart/cool/clever for just having played other so-called RPGs.

I think this double standard between Morrowind and its successors bothered me less so about how similar all 21st century TES games are, but moreso about how much we lack a baseline for what an RPG is. Is it a boring and reductive method to try cramming RPGs to a definition? Or does ‘RPG’ just need to be a sort of axiom for other relevant video game discussions? I’m not sure but I am not satisfied.

[1]: It’s well worth the academic interest to look at the interview with Goodall. Apart from the interesting takes on Morrowind’s writing, it gives a very honest and personal account of working in the games industry.

[2]: Perhaps slightly unfair to bring up, Morrowind’s development timeline was short and the fact the main quest had one ending was more due to time constraints, than an active design decision. However point being, people accepted this and still think Morrowind is a shining example of RPG storytelling despite it (and almost every questline in-game) having only the one ending.

#morrowind #gamedev #elder scrolls #immersive sim #imsim #skyrim #oblivion #the elder scrolls #tes #tesblr

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