Why Skyrim is Boring

Need proof that there are problems in the world? How about me playing Skyrim for 120 hours and being bored for 119 of them?

........tear :(

But the game press said it was the Game Of The Year! In the same year as Portal 2! So I figured that it would be worth it!

[And I knew I wasn't having a good time during pretty much the whole playthrough, but I kept playing, anyway...]

And after finishing Skyrim, I ended up thinking about it for another 120 hours

:(

Realizing that I had been pwned by the games industry made me want to understand it. A want bolstered by my being pretty sure that what happened to me happened to most everyone else who played it.

And here be my scientific conclusions:

Most of us play a game like Skyrim to get lost. We play it to utterly break from our quotidian lives via living in a fantasy world -- in this case, the kind of world with cloud-covered snowy mountains, massive tundras, mystery-hiding caves and ruins, and car-sized spiders. A world with orcs and romans and goths, with manifold things to do.

And I want to focus on the "manifold things to do" part for just a moment. Just read this list of but a few of the things I did in Skyrim:

1) Became a werewolf

2) Rose zombies

3) Saved a priest from being eaten by cannibals

4) chopped wood

5) killed, like, twenty bears with magic (I had the magic)

6) fought dragons

7) used a lot of dragon shout jedi powers

8) failed to save people from being executed

9) collected 20 red ninroots and brought them to someone because my quest log said I should

10) hired mercenaries and watched them do all my fighting for me (three out of four of my mercenaries died)

11) got in half-hour long fights with all the guards in town.

12) chopped some more wood

13) mined iron

29) and many other exciting things that most of us don't do in "real" life.

It is a massive fantasy product! And I'm sure my desire to find every interesting thing in it is why I was willing to be bored for 119 hours.

Most of the time, you the player won't be experiencing the interesting moments unless you follow a strict guide for how to play Skyrim; but how many of us wants to do that? And even if you follow guides, you'll still have to grind through boring stuff. There's just so much boring in between the good stuff.

I probably spent a third of my Skyrim time exploring, in the hope that what I'd soon discover wouldn't be another dungeon/cave/ruin, or another elven dagger, or another group of the enemies I just fought. There are so many dungeons/caves/ruins/elven daggers/etc. sprinkled all over the place that it makes the fantasy world seem less real and more stupid. There are so many enemies in Skyrim, it felt as if there was a line of code in the world making it so I had to fight something every few minutes of travel, as if the world thought I'd get bored from lack of enemy contact.

It doesn't help that many of the enemies are boring to fight, as Skyrim's combat is very much composed of pausing the game to drink health potions, not made more fun by the fights largely being one-sided affairs -- the difficulty level of the game scales so that either you can beat almost every enemy with just one or two strategies, which take little skill to implement, or the game's so hard that you're pausing every twenty seconds to drink a health potion. I.e. if the battles are challenging at all, they're really just become a pausy drinking game, in which you do some attacks, take a lot of damage, pause, search for a health potion in your inventory, unpause, and repeat until the enemies die. (Maybe on PC there's a way to avoid this, but I was determined to play with an XBOX 360 controller).

The level design doesn't really help, probably because there isn't much of it. I don't know how many dungeons, caves, and ruins there are. But the amount perhaps is too much, as most of them are pretty much the same.

Most of Skyrim's dungeonscavesruins/levels go like this: A simple maze, with a boring puzzle somewhere (the puzzles are usually matching games in which you must match animal symbols with animal symbols somewhere else to get a door to open). There will probably be booby traps, and yeah there are enough different types of traps that they're kind of interesting (especially when they kill you). At or near the end of the dungeon there'll be a boss battle; the boss is almost always a more powerful form of the things you were just fighting; the boss might have minions. Behind or on the boss is a reward -- which is usually loot, a new dragon shout Jedi power, or a quest development.

It seems like half of the game is spent in boring fights and exploring, and that another fourth is spent listening to the boring people of Skyrim say boring things, like: "Boring. Boring. Boring." No seriously, I find it amazing that Bethesda managed to record so much boring dialogue and not feel weird about it (or maybe they did). I think what happened in the development offices was something like this: Bethesda put in so many characters and were so determined -- more determined than anything else -- to make believable their Middle Earth cliche fantasyland that they said to each other, "You know, I don't really wanna spend time making all these virtual people I don't care about interesting. Let's just make the NPCs say things that would make sense -- given the history of Tamriel and their role in it -- and let's make sure they talk a lot, A LOT, about their personal histories and the history of Tamriel, for world-building reasons, and let's ship this thing and make money." Yep, something like that happened.

So maybe a fourth of this game is, at the least, interesting.

I feel like the best thing about Skyrim (and it is a good thing) is its visual art, especially that of the land Skyrim itself. Seeing giants and their mammoths migrate across the vast, unforgiving-looking tundra, backdropped by tall, snowy, cloud-covered mountains (almost all of which you can walk to) is really immersive, especially with those wind-blowing sounds and that subtle (epic) music. And I could go on about this; the visual art is good, also steeped in cliches, but good.

But despite that I can't even recommend the game based on the immersion-value. I can't recommend it even for that, because it just isn't immersive enough. It's not merely the bugs that prevent it from reaching the desired level of immersion, nor the awkward gesticulations and tone shifts in conversations. It's the lack of computing power and the ambitious fantasy they're trying to achieve with it. It's when a dragon lands, ready for battle, and you think you're going to experience something great, but then the dragon crawls around like a geriatric, and awkwardly decides to fly around again. Or the other dragon that barely survives a battle against three measly town guards. Or the epic, civil war battle for a major town, involving thirty troops!

You know what, even if this game were immersive enough, I wouldn't recommend it. Too much of it is boring.

Review score: 3 chickens / 1 Dragon