Skyrim's Opening - How NOT to Start a Game - Extra Credits

Hey, missed you guys. Hope you all had a good break. Let's get back into it. Well, you don't need me to tell you that Skyrim's pretty great. We've lost more hours to it than we probably should have. Probably going to lose a few more later. And we have many a tale about slaying dragons and shouting back monsters, but still it's not without flaws. And hey, that's all right. Now it can be a great game and a good learning opportunity. So, let's look at Skyrim, specifically the first 5 or 10 minutes. We've talked about the importance of the first 5 minutes of an experience before, how those earliest minutes are both the hook that draws the player in and the context that sets the player in the correct emotional state to get the most out of the experience they're about to have. So, let's look at how we're introduced to Skyrim then. All right, so we've got an opening screen. It's minimalist, but we've got the Skyrim theme slowly building up. And then we hit a loading screen, but it's got some lore on it and a picture of a dragon, so that's cool. And then

then we're going for a cart ride, I guess. Now, if I were to ask you what the core engagement of Skyrim was, what would you say? What at its heart is the most appealing about this game? What human desire are they fundamentally tapping into? You might argue that it's about growing and becoming strong, but really even that's in service to something more basic, our desire to explore. You'll find that most games have at their root one or two very fundamental ways that they're trying to engage the player. And that in the best games all their design decisions help to reinforce this core engagement. Now, Skyrim does this very well throughout most of the experience. But let's return to the introduction, that moment that should really get us excited about the core engagement of the game. So, we're sitting in a cart, getting wheeled down a hill. Because this is an Elder Scrolls game, we're also a prisoner, which means that our hands are bound. So, as a player, mechanically all we're left with is the ability to manipulate the camera or look around. Finally awake. Now, this decision may seem to play directly against the core engagement of the game, exploration. And

I'm not sure it was the best route to go, but okay, there are certainly arguments for it. A lack of freedom can be used to cause us to desire freedom even more. Unfortunately, I don't know if that's really what they delivered here. I find it's always useful to look at games in relation to each other. So, here's a question for you. Can you think of another game where you're put into a vehicle to be taken to your execution, and all you can do is move the camera while voice actors give you an exposition dump to fill you in on the plot? Yep. The intro to Skyrim is straight lifted from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, both mechanically and thematically. Even more painful, Modern Warfare does it much, much better. In Modern Warfare, this intro works because it plays much more into the core engagement that they're trying to deliver. In both of these games, the designers are trying to introduce the player to the world they'll be engaged in. After all, this is the only function of constraining the player to looking around while you wheel them through the

world. But Skyrim and Modern Warfare deliver very different kinds of core engagement. Modern Warfare is attempting to set up a world on the brink, a setting where hard men need to do what needs to be done. It's all about heroic empowerment, making you feel like a badass hero while you run and gun. It's a gaming experience full of intense firefights and big set pieces, which this scripted introduction establishes perfectly. Skyrim, on the other hand, should be using this time to sell you on this incredible world full of mysteries and wonders for you to explore. Here, let's just side by side these two introductions and look how they sell the world they take place in. First, let's look at the most obvious. What's the player seeing around them while they're riding? In Modern Warfare, the player's riding through an unspecified Islamic city, rife with elements that are supposed to feel exotic and foreign to the player. But beyond that, the city itself is in chaos. The player passes tanks and cheering crowds, and the impromptu execution of resistance fighters. This is clearly a dangerous and unstable place. Historic things are happening here and

you are caught right in the middle of it. Now let's hop over to Skyrim. Let's see, we got some snow and some pine trees. There's some rocks. More snow. Uh more snow. Now, I happen to know that Skyrim's full of spectacular vistas and beautiful mountainous landscapes. Where are those? Where are the crumbling castles and standing stones? Come on, how did you manage to find the least impressive chunk of land in all of Skyrim? That's not how to make a first impression. Of course, part of the problem is the way Skyrim is set up the scene. They've made it unduly hard to provide the player with any such visuals. See, you'll notice that in Call of Duty, all the dialogue comes in the form of a voiceover, blanketing the player from the minaret speakers. Neither of the characters in the car ever actually talk to you, which allows

the player to freely look around without feeling like they're missing anything. You'll also notice how the driver and the passenger are seated closely together, so the player can easily see both of them at once and quickly take notice if one of them moves or does something. In Skyrim on the other hand, the other characters in the cart talk directly to the player, forcing the player to watch them if they want to make sense of the conversation. Not only that, but the speaking characters are spaced widely apart, making it difficult for the player to watch both at once. Shouts up back there. What's wrong with him? Watch your tongue. You're speaking to Ulfric Stormcloak. Meaning more of your time is spent trying to focus on the characters in the cart and not the world around you. Now, let's look at what the characters are saying. In both of these cases, it's a plot dump. They're trying to fill a naive player in on what's going on in this world and set up the overall quest. You'll notice that in Modern Warfare, this is done entirely with terminology we understand, by which I mean they never reference people by name or even call out specific places. Whereas in Skyrim, within 3 minutes of booting up the game, you will hear the terms Imperial, Stormcloak, Hammerfell, High

King, Seven Guard, Ulfric Stormcloak, Nord, Rorikstead, Dibella, Kynareth, Akatosh, Divines, General Tullius, Dalmore, Helgen, and Elod. All of this jargon is, I believe, an attempt to make the world feel massive, but anybody who's taken a screenwriting 101 class will tell you that people just filter jargon. It all just becomes meaningless words unless you've gotten them invested enough to try and suss out their meaning or make a concerted effort to explain it to them. And the more jargon you throw at a person at once, the more likely they are to tune it out. Now, you might argue that this was all meant for veteran players of The Elder Scrolls series to make them feel right at home, but both the marketing and the way Bethesda simplified some of Skyrim's systems, like stats and such, implies to me that they were going for more mass market appeal with Skyrim. So, it seems like an odd choice for the introduction. This exposition dump is made a little more ham-handed by the voice acting. Now is the time for first impressions, and some of these deliveries sure aren't helping. I don't know if you've ever seen someone really pray in a moment of fear, but I'm not buying that that thief is praying. I'm sure Mara, Dibella, Kynareth,

Akatosh, Divines, please help me. Or running for his life in a panic. You're not going TO KILL ME. ARCHERS! NO, it's not awful by any means. Games have definitely seen worse voice work, but it could be a lot better, especially for a game's first 10 minutes. This is the area where you want everything to shine, voice work included. Now, I can understand why this happened. You can't go throwing your entire voice acting budget at minor characters, and if your intro has a bunch of minor characters, you're very likely to get some lackluster performances in those first 10 minutes. But there are ways to get around that. You can always try to make your opening only include major characters, or you can do what Modern Warfare did and put everything in a language that'll be foreign to most of your consumer base. So, they can't tell if the voice acting was is stilted. Lastly, both of these games try to draw you in with the dramatic tension of an execution. There's nothing like death to get us invested. But in Skyrim, right before they send you to the chopping block, they pull up a character creation menu and have you customize your player character. Not only does this totally break the flow of the narrative, but now we know they aren't going to execute the main character. So, all the tension's gone. Although, well, I guess they could have

offed you right after that and then said, "Okay, create another character." Terrible design idea, but you got to admit that would have been kind of funny. As for Call of Duty, well, I think most of you remember how that riot ended. Anyway, after that, Skyrim throws the player into a constrained dungeon to learn the basics of play before finally letting the player see where the game shines. Walking out of the cave and seeing that wide-open world laid before you creates exactly the excitement the intro didn't. But by then, we're like 20 minutes into the game. That feeling should have kicked in a lot sooner. So, Skyrim, great game, but there's a lot we can learn from that opening. How could they have done it differently? Well, lots of ways. They could have gone with the MMO standard of starting the player in a secluded valley or on a small island to give them the sense of an open world while still creating a carefully constructed tutorial area. But since they decided to go with the sightseeing tour approach instead, we can look to it for clues on how this should be used in the future and what we should expect of games that do this.

Anyway, I think I'm uh I'm going to go play more Skyrim now, so see you next week. Yeah. Yeah.