Let's Talk About Writing Satisfying Payoffs (And How Skyrim Sucks At It) · 8:39am May 24th, 2018
Hoo boy.
Okay, I have been away for a while now. Nothing bad's happened, I've just been really busy at work and looking for a new job and also my co-worker (and former supervisor) just bought me Skyrim. Which I have somehow never played. And has eaten like the last month and a half. I'm going to have a whole other thing about it at some point that's hopefully a bit more comprehensive and kinda summarizes my mixed-up if positive feelings about the time I've wasted slaughtering half of Tamriel.
For the record: Skyrim, even un-modded, is actually pretty good. I've been decently impressed by the writing and world concept, and most of my complaints have to do with the fact that Bethesda's creative team really seems to struggle with writing satisfying payoffs to go along with their really good buildups. And that's what I actually want to talk about today, for two reasons. One is that I don't want to have spent like a month and a half's worth of free time I could've spent doing something more productive with nothing to show for it. Two, I feel like it's an angle of writing very few people in the sphere of people-who-care-about-game-stories have really explored. Let's get to that, shall we?
My first impressions of Skyrim were colored by reviews of the game I heard from youtube video critics long before I got to play the thing myself. While none were outright negative, most of the capital-D "Discourse" surrounding the game focused on a few minor talking points: the absurdity of the narrative, the bad tonal control of the intro, and the lack of serious depth in the storyline. Probably the most common phrase I've seen bandied out about the game is "an ocean that's ankle-deep". That is, there's a lot of things to do, but none of them matter all that much.
While I understand where that consensus is coming from, it doesn't give the game enough credit. More than any other video game I've played in the last ten years, Skyrim really gave me that same feeling I used to get every time I booted up the gameboy Pokemon titles. The worldbuilding has just enough detailing to give you a solid idea of the "rules" of the setting, but is limited enough in what it actually shows that it kind of spurs your imagination and makes you really want to roleplay. About three days into the game my character had a full backstory. Five days in, I'd begun trading fanfic ideas with Cyne and Chuck for her adventures. Given that Skyrim is a heroic fantasy single-player game, I feel like that's a huge mark in its favor.
I've also seen Skyrim not having memorable characters bandied around as a common criticism, and that surprises me quite a bit. I remember a lot of characters very fondly. The Dark Brotherhood are probably the most obvious example since they're written to make you fall in love with them in spite of yourself (more on this later), but I actually really like a lot of the minor characters who show up in the various faction questlines. J'zargo of the College of Winterhold is an adorably competitive mage, the Circle of the Companions are pretty good bros - actually even Jarl Balgruuf of Whiterun is pretty solid, as are Legate Rikke and General Tullius of the Imperials questline.
The problem, I think, is that Bethesda's writing team for Skyrim is very good at setting up a stage, but bad at coming up with a way to give you a satisfying finale - if that makes any sense.
Consider the main questline. The first two-thirds of it are actually pretty exciting and even varied. You learn about the civil war and meet Jarl Balgruuf (who seems pretty divided, and for good reason). You see the return of the dragons, learn you're Dragonborn and all that encompasses, and slowly begin exploring Tamriel. You infiltrate a Thalmor party, you confront the World-Eater at the top of The Throat of the World and put him to flight, you travel to Legally-Distinct-From-Valhalla, join forces with four heroes of the past, and-
-get let down immediately because thanks to the setup for the final fight, the four heroes of the past will almost always do about eighty percent of the work of killing Alduin for you. What should feel like an epic confrontation and the ultimate test of your character's skills ends up being a really lame game of trying to swivel the camera so you can goddamn see where the fuck that stupid dragon is, god damn it this game was obviously built with mouse controls in mind because it's really fucking annoying on console- ahem.
Anyway, my point is that all that sense of majesty, destiny, and power that was built up on your way into Sovngarde, where you soloed your way past an army of dragons, draugr, and a floaty dragon priest dude with a sweet mask? Yeah all of that's gone now. You don't really get to appreciably feel like you changed Tamriel in any way. The almost half-hearted "Hail the Dragonborn! Hail her with Great Praise!" you're rewarded with feels like an appropriately anticlimactic note to go out on. Like, jesus, you don't even stop dragons from spawning in, so what was the point?
That's almost an unfair example for me to use, though. At least with the main quest what you're being let down by is the design of the final boss, which isn't necessarily the fault of the creative team. Where I can find fault is with the end of the Civil War questline.
So here, let me break down the promise vs. the delivery for you.
Skyrim's civil war is perhaps the most impressive, emotionally resonant storyline in the entire game. It's one of the few that really deliver on a sense of moral ambiguity and at least broaches some questions of what the player values. It's actually really elaborate, so I'm gonna try very hard to summarize it without rambling for anyone not in the know. Deep breaths, and-
Okay so the three major factions you need to know about for this to make any sense are the province of Skyrim, the Empire of Cyrodil, and the Altmeri Dominion. Skyrim is ruled by a high king but it's technically a province of the Empire, who are like fantasy-romans. The Empire gets into a war with the Thalmor, the ruling government of the Altmeri Dominion, who are a bunch of high elves and also just Actually the Worst. Nothing about the Thalmor is good and everyone hates them. Everyone. Remember that.
Anyway the war with the Thalmor isn't going great so the Empire eventually sues for peace, which they eventually get- but at a pretty high cost. See, the Thalmor have a bit of a religious issue with the empire. While both sides of the war worship the Aedra, the divine gods of Tamriel, the empire worships one more god than the Thalmor do - Talos, known in life as Tiber Septim, the only mortal ever to ascend to godhood. For various reasons relating to high-elf culture and beliefs I won't get into, the very idea of a mortal ascending in this way is super offensive to the Altmer as a people, and they demand that Talos-worship be banned. The Empire agrees.
The problem? Well, Talos may have been an emperor of Cyrodil, but he was born in Skyrim. The guy is the patron deity. People have shrines to him all over the place. Having his worship banned would be like if America had gone to war with Iran, and as part of the peace agreement we'd forced the leadership to sign a paper acknowledging Mohammed was bullshit. Not only would that be pretty terrifyingly awful as an idea, it'd rightly insult he national pride of the average Iranian and make everyone feel like their government had sold them out to foreign powers. And when you put it like that, it's actually pretty easy to understand why the Nords aren't super happy.
Enter ULfric Stormcloak, Jarl of Windhelm. He hates the empire's guts for selling out Talos, and very purposefully and publicly stages a bunch of military actions that result in his men getting a concession to practice Talos-worship. This backfires when the Thalmor insist they basically be allowed to station the Spanish Inquisition in Tamriel. Ulfric responds by killing the high king of Skyrim to prove that he has a bigger dick, and then rallying the populace behind a rebellion against the empire, intending to free his people.
The only problem is that Ulfric is kind of a massive isolationist. And some of his followers are, erm, well. Look there is footage of an actual white supremacist hilariously memeing his way through a playthrough of Skyrim comparing all the bandits he's murdering to international jewry while gleefully shouting "Skyrim is for the Nords!". Which is an actual stormcloak battle cry. Also in their capital city they literally have a dark elf ghetto.
What I'm saying is that the Stormcloaks are like, super racist. If you're playing a Nord you may not feel so bad about this, but I was playing a five-foot-tall cat woman so it got really old hearing racial slurs every five minutes.
I've gone into all this detail just to give you a sense of the care put into setting up the civil war. Every single character in the game has an opinion on it, it seems, and not all of them are fanatical. Some nords see the empire not as having sold them out but as selling a lie about banning Talos-worship that Ulfric forced them to make true when he poked the beehive. Some have little respect for Ulfric and his followers but ultimately think the Empire is too quick to capitulate to the Thalmor and Skyrim needs independence, regardless of the cost. Some are conflicted and really don't want to make a decision either way.
Hell, even in the individual factions you get interesting nuance. General Tullius of the Imperial Legion is a foreign commander sent to clear up Ulfric's rebellion. He's an old soldier and a bit condescending towards the people of Skyrim in general, seeing Ulfric as an upstart traitor who deserves a swift punishment - but he's forced to compromise largely because with most of the army guarding the border with the Altmeri Dominion, he doesn't have the trained reinforcements he needs and has to rely on recruiting and training the locals. His second in command, Legate Rikke, was born and raised in Skyrim and seems incredibly sympathetic to Ulfric, but her loyalty is ultimately to the general.
And then there's you. Your character in Skyrim is the Dragonborn, meaning you share - at least, to a small extent - the very bloodline that Talos came from. There's a very strong argument to be made that you are among the most legitimate candidates for the now-empty throne of High King of Skyrim. You even go on a mission early into the civil war questline that sees you retrieving the Jagged Crown, a long-lost artifact traditionally worn by the king and which was once possessed by Talos himself!
If that sounds like a recipe for some Game of Thrones-style political intrigue and excitement, I am sorry to inform you that no matter who you pick, doing the Civil War questline in Skyrim results in the same disappointing thing happening: you storm a bunch of forts, kill some guys, take a few holds, and then storm the enemy's capital city and kill their leader. It's actually pretty depressing- especially if you back the Legion. General Tullius's idea of a rousing we-did-it speech is to brag that Ulfric's head will be sent to the imperial city and displayed on a pike which... I mean, c'mon, dude. He was a beloved public figure and half your men didn't actually want to kill him. Be sensitive.
At no point do you have the opportunity to angle for the crown. At no point can you switch sides once the quest is in motion. At no point during the finale do you feel like you've earned the victory. And your reward for winning the civil war is... not much, honestly. While a lot of the holds change leadership, ultimately you really don't get much in the way of actual payoff for your actions. The questline just sort of feels flat. Nobody even seems to acknowledge that the war is over!
That's probably the biggest flaw in Skyrim's storytelling. It's a game that has a lot of big ideas about its world, but very few ideas for how the player character can permanently change it. Whether that's because of limitations on what the developers could program for a given quest or because the creative team didn't have anyone looking over their stuff to point out holes, the game ends up feeling remarkably unfinished in some ways.
That said, it's not like the team is bad. It's more that they seem to have a lot more freedom when instead of using the civil war or the return of Alduin as centerpoints they build their quest writing around smaller groups and factions. Take, for instance, the Dark Brotherhood. While I'm not overly fond of the fact that your character gets a bit pigeonholed into buying into the whole Sithis-cult thing, every character in the Brotherhood is fun, the quest has marked outcomes that permanently change the faction, and the story flows pretty naturally as an ambition/revenge storyline. The Thieves' Guild, the Companions, and the College of Winterhold questlines are all similarly stronger in both setup and payoff, though the reward for the College questline is a bit... erm, odd, depending on when you undertake it.1
Given all of that, I can understand what frustrates people with Skyrim as a story and a game. It presents a magical, interesting, fairly nuanced world to play in... and ultimately, your actions end up being fairly meaningless to it. As a story of heroic fantasy, that feels a little bit off.
Still, it has been quite fun exploring the Barrows. Draugr, away~
1"Good job hitting that asshole obvious badguy Thalmor gentleman with an axe, Scarlet. I can think of no one more deserving of the title of Archmage!" "...I'm an apprentice-level Conjurer." "No one more deserving!"
Even ingame, you're so smol.
If you want my honest opinion, you made me think about Fallout 4 and how its endings don't really change the Boston wasteland significantly. As far as I can tell, the Wasteland is as much of a shithole as ever regardless of whether you side with the Minutemen, the Railroad, the Brotherhood of Shit and the Institute. I'd talk about Fallout 3, but it has less similarities to a roleplaying game and more in common with a rail shooter.
And now I want a mod where dragons spawn from thunderstorms. And sometimes Sarkhan Vol falls out instead. (Skyrim is for the Temur?)
Very thought-provoking stuff for any narrative, interactive or otherwise. Thanks for the food for thought.
I liked Fallout 4 more than I liked Skyrim, and I didn't like Fallout 4.
I think the best example of how... bad, Skyrim's writing is, for me, would be the Mara questline, Book of Love, where Bethesda's writers try to string together compelling romances.
"Embers in Stone: Calcelmo and Faleen" was the worst offender. It's a long series of back-and-forth delivery quest. You talk to a shy nerd, Calcelmo, who has a big crush on Faleen, a guard captain. He hasn't really met her, or talked to her, or... know her, but, you know, huge crush. He'd speak to her, but he has no idea what to do or what to say. Totally cool, I can roll with that, let's coach this nerd up to talk to his crush and-
Actually you go to Yngvar the Singer, who's a total bardbarian playboy, kind of a legend. He'll just write a poem in Calcelmo's name, deliver it, bam, you're done.
... wait, what? No, dude, I just wanted your advice, since-
No, alright. Fine, I'm paying you to do this.
Alright so you give the letter to Faleen and she's so moved by how beautiful the poem is (that Yngvar originally wrote for a girl one village over, but you know, works here good enough, ladies, you know?) and says she never knew Calcelmo felt that way and had such a beautiful soul. Give him this letter, tell him we're totally dating now.
Ah. O-okay.
So you deliver it to Calcelmo, who's just finding out what's happened. He's overjoyed! Still has no fucking clue what to say because he never actually learned anything from it. He runs off to meet his new beau, where they declare their undying love for each other, go on a date, and it's a happy ending.
Wait, what?
Yeah, no, that's the only route through that quest, you can't actually coach Calcelmo if you have a really high speech skill. You have to buy a poem meant for another woman, give it to Faleen under false pretenses, then throw a confused Calcelmo at her and they get a happily ever after, despite knowing literally nothing about each other. Their declaration of love is the first conversation they have with each other and at no point does Skyrim subvert that, or meaningfully hint you've done anything wrong. That's the best possible ending, because it's the only possible ending.
It doesn't help that I found the gameplay tedious and unengaging as well. It wasn't... fun or interesting to roleplay, and I didn't feel like I was given meaningful options at any point. I side with wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.
I couldn't agree more. There's a few moments where I look at the ending to a questline and think 'That's it?' Don't get me wrong, I have fun with Skyrim, I just end up... disappointed with some of the storytelling aspects.
4868282
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fallout 4 is a good game (not great) but terrible Fallout game.
So it sounds like you played through the game without mods, which is a good way to experience games for the first time IMO; it gives you a good baseline that allows for replayability later. If you do ever go back and do another run with kids, though—and I do recommend that, especially since the current-gen console special edition has mod support—there’s exactly one mod that, especially considering what you talked about here, you truly don’t want to miss.
I forget the creator’s name off the top of my head, but there’s a follower mod that adds a companion character named Inigo. He’s a blue-furred Khajiit with an Iberian accent, and he’s genuinely one of the best story and character experiences I’ve had in a game—not just Skyrim, in any game EVER. He’s voiced might-as-well-be-professionally with thousands of lines that respond to just about everything in the game (including his own songs that he’ll sing for you if you want), is programmed better than actual in-game companions (there’s a system bindable to the Shout button where you can command him by whistling), and has a layered backstory that comes out organically as you spend time with him and develops into a truly compelling discussion with him (I mean that word choice totally) about morality and friendship.
By the time his personal quest activated (which was HOURS into hanging out with him, IIRC) he’d ascended to Garrus-tier “you are my permanent partner and I would name my adopted children after you if only the game let me” status. The quest itself is pretty fun and expands upon his backstory more, and AFAIK it’s not even finished yet. All in all, the mod’s so well-done that it not only feels like an organic part of the game, it makes the rest of the base game seem lesser without it, which I figure is about the highest praise I can give a fan mod.
TL;DR Inigo is BAE and I would die for him
4868292 See, the funny thing to me is I read the entire Mara questline as being a piss-take on the followers of Mara.
The people who worship at the temple in Riften include a guy who literally walks down to the local pub of an evening to chide everyone else for drinking and not worshiping Mara's hippie love shit. The weird requirement of "study these three random couples I had a vision of", it's... like it's bad, but it's bad in such a hilarious way I ended up enjoying it immensely and just writing a better story for it than actually exists? Which might be part of why I love Skyrim. An imperfect story I can imagine things into is better to me than a complete story that can't be added to in a lot of ways.
To be fair I don't think ankle-deep ocean is a bad analogy for Skyrim, I just think it undersells the experience by a lot. While it's a worse roleplaying vehicle than some I could name, it's also really fun. Then again, I didn't get to grow up with Morrowind or the old Fallout games, so my perspective might have a healthy boost of not knowing in a visceral sense what it is that I'm missing.
4868459
Wait wait wait: You can get mods for the console edition? Plz confirm this works with the Switch edition. Please. I will be so happy.
4868282
I will bite you.
4868290
Yeah, props to the voice actors in Skyrim because some of them are really good, but god damn it why fully voice the game if you can barely even get your characters to avoid talking over each other? Bethesdaaaaaaaaa.
Never did pay much attention to the whole civil war, if only because I just didn't like both sides, and the fact that I suffered no consequence for taking no sides. To the point that I often forget there was even a civil war.
4868752
See that's the thing. I love that I didn't like either side because, well, most of the people in Skyrim don't like it. I kinda love what Arngeir eventually claims about the civil war.
4868801
It just gave me a feeling of Darkness Induced Apathy. The Stormcloaks were self-righteous bigots, and the Empire felt like they were completely at the mercy of the Thalmor (whom to this day I WISH was a faction I could actually destroy), made me just not care much about the civil war. It also didn't help that I'm not a fan of GoTesqe stories.
Nice analysis! I wish there were more ways to influence the world after the civil war quest, because people still sing the stormcloak song and I got arrested for killing a stormcloak outside of windhelm.
My favorite thing to do in that game is to hear how the different shops got their names. The best backstory is the drunken huntsman, unless you bother to infer why the bee and the barb is, ah, called that.
Still a good game, though. Have you become a companion yet? Or a thief? Join the guild, it's fun, you can pay off your debt when you do dumb things!
Best character in the brotherhood is the vampire girl, and you can mod the game to be as kinky as you want so that's a win.
4868834
The Bee and-
oh god. How did I not.... wow. Wow. (I actually kinda love the Retching Netch)
and yeah, at this point I've done all the "join the guild!" questlines. I think the Dark Brotherhood was the best written as a concept, but the Companions and Thieves' Guild were a close second. The Winterhold stuff was pretty good too.
Like, honestly, if Skyrim had just taken some of the guild quests and blown them up in length and scope to match the main quest, it would've been a much better story.
"At no point can you switch sides once the quest is in motion."
You actually can. After you get the jagged crown, you can deliver it to either faction, allowing you to betray your side. But yeah, after that, it is fixed.
For a better experience, I'd recommend the Civil War Total Overhaul mod, which makes it much more immersive. For example, you can lose battles (or potentially the war) and when you are in an enemy controlled province, the guards will attack you, and killing them back helps the troop numbers slightly in later fights. There are enemy spies dressed up as your sides troops that try to stab you with poisoned knives, each side gets unique units for major battles, and sometimes dragons appear during a battle to roast both sides. I like that it makes your decisions and efforts matter more, and in more places.
The key part of this mod is that it uses already present game files though. The civil war was supposed to be much more expansive, but. as /v/ the musical tells us of Bethesda, "Every game you release is in beta."
I'm with 4868824. Literally every organized faction in Skyrim alienated me so much that I fucked off from anything resembling the Civil War questline and just toured Tamriel being a wandering hero slash mountain climber until my interest dwindled. If I'd gotten far enough to join the Dark Brotherhood, I probably would have done that, just because reducing the overall number of assholes in the country would have seemed like a major win.
At least the mountain climbing was fun!
4869593
I never did managed to join the Dark Brotherhood due to... well, let's just say I wasn't fond that they had tried to kill me before asking me to join.
4869639
It's honestly a pity! They're some of the better NPCs in the game. The Dark Brotherhood and THieves' Guild are probably the two faction quests that best give you a sense of what Skyrim is going for with its more restrictive roleplaying: you can't really change the outcome, but you have a lot of freedom in accomplishing most of your micro-objectives, and the tunneling is used to set up shoes it can drop later.
4869741
Ye, but again, they tried to kill me!
But I LOVED the Thieves Guild, even though I could barely remember everyone else in the game, those guys were what stood out.
4869593
That was me too! At some point I just stopped, and never finished
4873126
I wouldn't mind going back, but alas, before I started playing, I loaded up a bunch of mods, and a later update to Skyrim broke one of them. So I couldn't load it with my old config, and I couldn't load my saved games if I started modless. :( I'd have to do some serious forensics to figure out how to get back to where I was.
Honestly though, if I was looking to kill that much free time again, I'd go back to my unfinished Oblivion save. Entirely aside from how uniformly unlikable Skyrim's factions are, (saving the world from demonic invasion) >>>>>>>>>>>>> (murdering dragons to steal their powers). And its mountain climbing might not have been as awesome, but it still had the Acrobatics skill.
Not to mention, I still have a special place in my heart for Oblivion because I started playing it after getting hooked on Prequel Adventure, which is OMG SO AMAZING SERIOUSLY YOU HAVE TO READ IT, and Prequel inspired me to do a completely blind playthrough (starting the game without even learning the controls, and short of actual death, iron-manning it and accepting every misfortune that came my way). The very first thing that happened in that game was botching a pickpocket attempt in the Imperial City, getting chased literally across the map by a guard, finally losing him out in the outer mountains after I kited him into a bear, and then running from the bear into a den of vampires.
I learned it was a den of vampires when my disease-resistant Argonian character became a vampire three days later, because I didn't know enough about the interface to realize I had (against all odds!) contracted vampirism. It was the best thing ever to happen to the character. Suddenly, with all the stat boosts it provided, she became competent. I just modified my playstyle to adventure at night and drink blood occasionally from vagrants (giving them a ton of money the next morning in exchange), started kicking ass, and never looked back.
4873138
Okay that story sounds awesome. Also come visit Vegas this weekend if your can sneak away to HRPC for a day!