elder scrolls – Gamer Peak

When do you Fast Travel?

The ability to skip sections of a video game has been around for a long time. Think about this mechanical feature for a moment. The creators of a game have poured their sweat and tears (I hope there’s very little blood involved) and spent a considerable amount of time writing and coding, only to give the player an exit. Take cut-scenes for example. Lots of love went into a visual spectacle that drives story and inspires excitement for the gameplay to come. And then the creators add a “press _ to skip” feature.

In one respect, fast travel feels a lot like this. An entire gaming world has been forged for your entertainment, but with built-in a feature that lets you teleport. “We made this to entertain you.” The developers say, “But we put in a button that lets you skip it in case you don’t find it entertaining”. If it can be passed by, why is it in the game?

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Should open world games rethink how they tell stories?

We’ve all observed stories that use the ‘x days later’ device. A linear narrative can avoid weeks, months and years of bunkum by jumping to the next interesting bit. It’s a trick which allows the storyteller to stick to the good bits, providing it is used effectively. It’s a trick we can all accept and appreciate.

Now imagine you were reading a book or watching a film where the inverse happened. Instead of moving time forward ‘x weeks’ into the future, the story instead took a detour which lasted for days or weeks, only to return to the main story as if no time had passed. In most cases, we would find that very odd and a little jarring (unless it’s a dream-sequence or a peculiar plot twist). Yet open world games let this happen all the time.

Videogames can be rigidly linear in gameplay and story, or completely non-linear in either area. In many games story can be absent entirely, but sometimes I feel that the combination of linear story-telling and non-linear gameplay feels unwieldy. We as gamers are meant to follow a pattern of close-knit events whilst simultaneously spending hours on exploration and random side missions.

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How Historically Accurate is Skyrim? Part 4

There’s lots of things I enjoy about over-analysing Skyrim, and the responses I get are a big part of that. There are a pleasingly small number of people that misread the title and my intentions (“Oh sure, the game with dragons is veeery accurate…”), and a fantastic number of readers willing to add their own knowledge and join the discussion. Sometimes, one of you lovely people will step in and flesh out something I have mentioned or correct a minor mistake, which is awesome to see. Learning should be a two-way exercise after all. And there’s still a lot of untapped History within The Elder Scrolls.

If you’re joining this gaming/history blog at Part 4, hello and welcome. I started playing Skyrim for the first time last November, and I’ve been climbing every tower and turning every rock for signs of History. Sometimes real life Historic details are the clear inspiration for a detail in the game, and sometimes the game appears to stumble into a historic comparison. And in one particular situation, History actually helps to explain one of the most famous lines in the game…

How Historically Accurate is Skyrim? Part 2

You know, the more I play Skyrim, the more I begin to realise that historical accuracy isn’t the main point of the game… and I’d be very disappointed if I wasn’t too busy Fus-Ro-Dahing the local wildlife across the landscape.

A few weeks ago I began to play Elder Scrolls V, and almost immediately began to spot the many ways that History has influenced the game. The Vikings are the main inspiration, whilst other ideas are taken from various points in the middle ages. Three weeks ago I shared these observations. Some parts of the game show accurate references to historic details, whilst other features were based on misunderstandings of the past. The majority of readers seemed to enjoy the makeshift history lesson, so here we are at Part 2.