There's plenty of aspects to The Elder Scrolls series that is oft criticized and rightly so. For a series that is constantly biting off more than it can chew and seemingly never bothering with the chewing part (in this analogy 'chewing' equates to game testing/QA), it's certainly not above being called out for falling into the obvious pitfalls it seems so willing to lung itself into seemingly propelled entirely on hubris (in this analogy, 'pitfalls' are the various bugs/underwhelming mechanics). Still there's something to be said for that hubris isn't there? And so despite itself, the series is venerated I suspect largely because of that hubris. But I think this obvious narrative critics of the games have created overshadows a greater underlying issue that plagues the series and by proxy, all the Bethesda games on which this template is based and that is a lack of cohesive design.
I've only ever seen one review of the game that discusses the issue, pointing out the undercooked nature of the underlying mechanics of the game's combat and social interaction. Fighting doesn't amount to much beyond clicking the enemy until they die, and them doing the same for you. There's no AI to speak of beyond the occasional 'yield' from humanoids that you can't actually accept said yield from, leaving said enemy to regenerate enough health to go at you again ad infinitum, until you kill them as they lie their on their knees begging for mercy. The critique exposes the fact that even if the game hadn't been technically unpolished, it still would have problems from the standpoint of basic game design and having played the game, I heartily agree.
There appears to be this tug-of-war in how The Elder Scrolls are still tethered to the out-dated concepts of the D&D number-crunching tabletop games that informed their inception and the real-time simulated 3d world the games now take place in, leading to this Frankenstein's mess that is franchise's mechanics. Let me give you an example:
In Skyrim (as it appears to be the case for every ES game) your real-time actions stats are split into three basic bars: magic/health/stamina. The magic bar depletes as you perform magic, the health bar depletes as you get damaged and the stamina depletes are you perform certain physical actions (sprinting/jumping/attacking/etc). In Skyrim, there are various potions that can effect these bars in various ways, but the game also includes food that you can ingest that does the exact same thing...only less so. Food only restores health, however it doesn't restore as much as potions. Prepared food (cooked/stews/etc.) can restore and even regenerate both health and stamina at the same time, but since the game pauses when you do eat food/drink potions, this benefit is rendered completely superfluous. Food is cheaper, but it often weighs more because you have to carry more to equal the healing power of one potion and potions are so plentiful out in the world/dungeons anyway, there's no reason to ever buy either in the first place. In Skyrim, there's no reason to eat food...ever.
I think that can be fixed.
Remember when I talked about how The Elder Scroll series was being tied down by D'nD number-crunching? The fact that it has food in the games as a health restoration mechanic is a good example of this. In real life, food does not work that way. Now, the obvious retort is that 'it's a videogame...dude', but it doesn't really hold up in light of the fidelity of the game's world, the freedom of expression it allows and most importantly, the mechanics it establishes. What I'm trying to say is, the purpose of food in real life - to restore energy - has a mechanic analog already established in the game: the stamina bar. When I realized this, I started thinking about how the mechanics could be rearranged in the entire series and yet still remain true to the immersive experience the games strive for. I shall es'plain:
I would restructure the functions of these three bars. I would have the stamina bar not only represent extreme physical exertion, but all of it, as such the stamina bar would slowly deplete over time, just as our energy does in real life. As in real life, the level of exertion would determine the rate of depletion. Walking would increase the rate of depletion over standing, running would increase the depletion over walking, sprinting would increase over running, etc. etc. Once the stamina bar was completely drained, the character would pass out from exhaustion. In game, this would be like a forced sleep and he'd ragdoll where s/he stood. When s/he'd awoke, s/he'd have a small amount of stamina restored and their health would be depleted a certain amount. This could also be restructured so that completely depleted stamina would begin to deplete your health until you died, as it is in Minecraft, but I'd personally go for the first option.
Stamina however would have a much closer relationship with the health bar. Stamina would determine every aspect of health adjustments. The rate of health regeneration and damage received would be directly tied to the amount of stamina and conversely the damage you receive and how much health you have can increase the rate of stamina loss.
Eating food would no longer be a redundant mechanic, but the only way to reduce the rate of this stamina loss. Sleeping would no longer be simply a method of fast-traveling through time, but the only way to actually restore amounts stamina. There would now be an incentive to utilizing these mechanics for their intended purpose.
Now that covers the physical, but I also realized that even though I never really dabbled into the magical side of the game, it could also benefit from this kind of alteration:
In The Elder Scrolls games, it's pretty clear that magic is treated as a mental activity rather than an explicitly 'spiritual' one. Mages are the geeks of the Elder Scrolls world. The mages guild in Skyrim is called the College of Winterhold afterall. Point being is that while health and stamina cover the physical aspects of your character, it should stand to reason there should be similar structure set up for magic.
In this way, I'd add a 'mental stamina' bar. This would visually restructure the entire setup of the three bars so that health and stamina would be bound together as the physical aspect of your character and magic and mental stamina would be bound as the intellect. Magic and mental stamina would have a similar relationship with health/stamina. Mental stamina would not only control how powerful your spells were or how fast mana regenerated, it'd be a determining factor with the success of any intellectual activity in the game, such as speech, alchemy, enchanting, smithing, pickpocketing, etc. Sleep would restore mental stamina just like physical stamina and the reading of books that reduced the rate of loss. Food for the brain and all that.
Now there's plenty of ways this could go awry. For one, it would alter a fundamental aspect of the games resource management. Up to this point, restorative elements in Skyrim - potions and food - were an issue of simple math. You have 100pts of health, received 50pts of damage, took a potion that healed 25pts. You now have 75pts of health. Easy. But now the system is an issue of rates and percentages. You had 100pts of health, but the battle decreased your health by 25pt and increased your rate of stamina drain by 50%, which reduced your health regeneration by 10%. Now you have food that will reduce your rate of stamina drain by 25%. That's a much harder math problem to figure out. You no longer will be able to determine by a quick glance just how much the item you carry will aid you now. Yes, it's more in line with how the real world functions, but are people willing to give up on the easier number crunching...? There's also the issue of books, which in-game are a fun distraction, but not required in any mechanical way except to increase certain skills and even then, you have just have to open the book and can then drop it before turning one page and while reading the books in Skyrim are a fun distraction if your into the lore, making them a requirement without allowing the option for a short-hand "I read this book" click of the button would...well, let's just say I think it'd be poorly received. Rightfully so.
Another issue is the problem of item management. TES already has a simple binary mechanic where if all the items you're carrying reach a certain threshold, you instantly become over-burdened and are unable to move but very slowly until you relieve yourself enough to reach back below said threshold. It's very perfunctory and allows for abuse so blatant, it's not really considered abuse. Integrating item weight into these stamina management mechanics would severely reduce the total weight from items you're allowed to carry and would therefore significantly reduces the ability to carry all the valuable treasure waiting to be looted in them thar dungeons and while I personally wouldn't mind this sensible restriction in the name of a more immersive play experience, I can certainly see jimmies being rustled if people can no longer run around with twenty some-odd greatswords in their backpacks should they choose.
But the biggest hurdle is the fundamental alteration of level design. Skyrim - the actual land itself - functions in many respects like a massive hub world for the dungeons/caves/etc that inhabit it. The nature of it means the difficulty has to remain pretty evenly spaced throughout the world, but for those aforementioned dungeons and caves - especially the more intricate ones - there's an innate escalation that occurs the further you delve into these places that is controlled by the developers through the level design and enemy placement. When combined with the system described above, there's going to be this inevitable feeling of resentment towards the game as you begin a dungeon at your strongest, and the dungeon is 'weakest' - thus wasting your strength - and then end it when you've used up your strength and the dungeon's just hit it's boss-battle stride. This is compounded if you don't actually know the length of the dungeon and how much time you'll be investing and therefore how weak you'll be at the end of it. Increasing difficulty over time is a fundamental aspect of game design and this system compounds that concept to a level that's unfair to the player.
This can be mitigated by allowing 'save points' in the game. Needless to say the entire system would require the ability to set up a camp or at the very least a sleeping bag, and having sections of a dungeon or cave be 'cleared' of enemies to allow the ability to set up camp for resting and such would go a long way towards mitigating the issues I mentioned. Skyrim's dungeons (and caves especially) also incorporate certain aspects of this concept already in their level design and layout, such as large areas divided by tight corridors and occasional situations where beds from bandits/previous explorers are already available. Still, this is a wide reaching alteration that would require a lot of work to finesse for every dungeon and crawlspace the games have to offer.
But I still think there's a whole lot of merit into altering the fundamental structure of this aspect of the game (among others) as it would incentivize the use of what is now currently superfluous mechanics. In the end, I believe this change away from what The Elder Scrolls was will lead it closer to what it was meant to be...but that's just me.
*Now I've only played Skyrim and if you want to use that truth to dismiss the previous statements and what comes to follow, I can't blame you. My extensive statements regarding the entire franchise is based on audio/visual cues such as images and videos, so take that as you want. But I have irrefutably played Skyrim - to the completion of the main quest and a good majority of the others - and I can speak with authority on my experience with that game and I feel my previous and following statements most certainly do apply with that game at the very least.
No comments:
Post a Comment