Skyrim: Character in the Elder Scrolls Series
Mountain Forest Path, from www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim/media
The game world of Skryim, from which the game takes its title, is one of the most beautifully rendered places I’ve ever seen. Skyrim purportedly covers 16 square miles of in-game area, which is outrageous from a technical standpoint. Within its many acres are more than 150 points of interest, from dwarven ruins to troll-infested caves, and not one of them is quite the same as the next. Small villages and large towns also dot the landscape, and each has its own population of non-player characters with their own scripted lives. Following any one of them, you might observe someone working his job during the game, visiting the pub at night, before turning in to his bed at home at three in the morning, only to do it again the next day. There’s an incredible realism to Skryim, so much so that it becomes uncanny at times: at any moment, it can be so immersive that you forget you’re operating a video game and instead your mind hits a gear where you’re actually living in the moment as your in-game avatar.
One of the primary conceits of the Elder Scrolls series, in which Skyrim is the fifth major installment, is that you always start out as a nameless prisoner devoid of any background. It’s during this process that you pick your race and gender, as well as your name. There’s something exciting in this since you, the gamer, has such a hand in the identity of your character.
The downside of this is that your existence in the story’s narrative is tenuous at best. Since your character functionally begins existing the moment you start up the game with no backstory, there is nothing that grounds you into the world. This is done sometimes in literature as the “mysterious stranger” story, but often that stranger’s past is eventually revealed or, if not that, the stranger develops such strong relationships with the other characters that this becomes the point of the story. But due to the game world’s unbelievable openness, the protagonist (i.e. you) never gets a chance to develop any kind of complex relationship with any of the non-player characters. From a narrative perspective, your character’s identity is paper thin. One of the best methods of defining Character (capital C, as in the literary sense) is through the interplay between protagonist and supporting characters, and thus far in the Elder Scrolls series, this has proved impossible for the developers to create.
It’s no surprise then to hear the developers at Bathesda define Skryim as the main character in this eponymous game. It’s a complex, varied world filled with mystery, beauty, and danger. These are the hallmarks of a strong character, after all.
But it’s quite a different approach from another popular role-playing game series, developed by Bioware: Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II, both of which are set in medieval worlds like Skyrim.
In the first Dragon Age, which is enormous by most game standards (except for the Elder Scrolls series, with which it is a peer for its magnitude), the developers forewent a complicated and beautiful landscape for repetitious design and graphics that were five years backwards at the time. Instead, they gave the player the option of choosing among six backgrounds, each with a fully developed backstory for you to “live out” before entering the main portion of the game. (These backstories coverage at the same point about 30-minutes into the game.) You still have the ability to name your character and make him or her look as you please, but these are scripted events that throw you into the main quest. You recruit multiple non-player characters throughout the quest, and you may develop fairly complex relationships with them. Depending how they feel about you and the choices you make, you may get taken onto side quests that further develop your relationships.
In Dragon Age II, there is only one major background. The game is considerably more linear than the previous entry, but the character interaction and development is also much more pronounced due to the time the developers are able to invest in the narrower story. There are literally multiple acts to the story, as it takes place of the course of a decade, and many plot points are firmly scripted. The game world is considerably smaller as well, taking place in one large city and its surrounding countryside, unlike Dragon Age: Origins, which takes place across a nation. Despite the limits placed on the Dragon Age II, its structure leads to stronger characters and a more coherent plot, since all the game events happens in a prescribed order.
I prefer the latter, though I know many Dragon Age series fans enjoyed the enormity of the first game. (Indeed, the first game had several sub-quests you were required to complete in order to unite the nation to stand against the game’s chief antagonist. Each of these was complex and engaging on a story level.) I’ve always preferred quality to quantity, however, so I was content with Dragon Age II’s runtime of about 20-30 hours, compared to Dragon Age: Origin’s 60 hours.
Moving back to Skyrim, it lacks the aforementioned plotting you find in the Dragon Age series. That isn’t to say there aren’t an abundance of mini-quests and an overarching plot line that defines the entirety of the game. (Heck, there are even interesting side stories associated with various factions in the game, any of which you may join. I joined the Thieves Guild, which led me on its own twisted road for a while.) But you don’t recruit a stable of characters to share in these adventures with you. The best you can do is have a henchman follow you around to help you carry loot and fight off monsters. They offer the occasional quip but nothing substantive otherwise. In the Dragon Age games, your companions seem to experience your adventures with you — they often talked among themselves, too, which added a layer that made the game feel all the more tangible. Most impressive, those characters judge you by your decisions, and best of all, they don’t always agree amongst each other. One decision might make one very happy and the other angry. This leads to important plot twists as those games progress.
But the lack of true characters in Skyrim leaves your avatar as an almost vaporous presence, a floating camera in a stunningly beautiful and complex game world. After all, characters drive plot, for how can we care what’s happening if we don’t care about those to whom it happens?
That said, I think the technical prowess and sheer amount of Skryim still makes the game an almost unparalleled feat, and one which I’ve enjoyed immensely. But if the developers ever introduce strong Character in addition to their many other achievements, they will hit so strong an artistic point it will place their work among the great works ever created, across the many storytelling media.
