It’s been nearly two weeks since I last played Skyrim, but while I was playing I was completely absorbed in the game, as I’d known I would be. 146 hours I put into that game, and I feel fairly certain that I’ll be going back to it in maybe a year or so, once some of the better mods have come out.

I did enjoy Skyrim a lot, but I can’t help but feel that it wasn’t as good as Oblivion in a number of ways. Sure, the graphics were an improvement. That’s a function of the improved hardware between 2007 and 2011. They also got rid of Oblivion’s lame conversation wheel mini-game. But I can’t help but feel that alchemy was much more useful and more fun in Oblivion – I’m not sure why they changed it at all. Skyrim’s perk tree was a vast improvement over the 25/50/75/100 perk schema in Oblivion, and Bethesda was smart to get rid of the weird major and minor skill system that caused such a leveling paradox in Oblivion. I also really liked the new lockpicking system. It was almost too easy at times, but that’s much better than being too difficult.

My primary gripe with Skyrim, and the reason that I preferred Oblivion, was due to the nature of the game’s main plot. In Oblivion, the world was being invaded by the demonic Daedra through horrific gaping red magical gates, and it was the player’s job to save the world by venturing into a realm that might as well have been Hell. It was epic. In Skyrim, the plot involves killing dragons because they’re kind of mean. Sure – there’s one big powerful dragon who’s extra mean and must be stopped, but the threat seems nebulous and so relatively minor. The dragons in Skyrim were never as much of a threat as the Daedra were in Oblivion. Plus, even though the main dragon will have been defeated at the conclusion of Skyrim’s main plot, there are still many powerful dragons in evidence, attacking just as much as they ever were. How much has actually been resolved?

My last gripe with Skyrim is mainly geared towards the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild plots. Although there are ostensibly unlimited quests in Skyrim, the game’s foremost quest lines are the main story, the civil war, the Wizard’s College, the Thieves Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, and the Companions. That’s six questlines, and two of them are really only available if you choose to be at least partially evil. And while I’m not at all opposed to games that allow you to be evil, I find it odd that large sections of content are entirely closed off unless your character is a cold-blooded murderer or thief. Two out of six questlines is a third of the game’s non-random content, although it’s actually less since the main quest likely has far more content than other quest lines. Personally, playing as a sneak sniper is my favorite way to play Skyrim, so it’s ironic that the Dark Brotherhood is the only quest line I never touched.

I’m going to start a new character, since my current character is level 51, and the game is no longer much of a challenge. This time I plan to focus on the skills I neglected with my first character: pickpocketing, heavy armor, and blacksmithing. I’d like to try out 2-handed weapons as well, but there’s a perk that enables slow motion when you block with a shield, and I’d really like to try that one.

So tonight, in my hour or so of free time, I get to hunt for some new mods to install in prep for my new character. Looking forward to it.

I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot, and I’m loving the game. My character is level 39 at present, and my sneak skill is already at 99 – I hope to max it out the next time I play and then work harder at maxxing out my archery, enchantment, and alchemy.

But my favorite part of any Elder Scrolls game has always been the emergent gameplay moments – those moments that weren’t specifically scripted by the programmers that somehow end up being the best thing about the game. In this article, I’d like to share a few of my favorite moments.

Taking out an entire keep of bandits Garret style

I really enjoy stealth games, so I was really excited to find that the stealth mechanics in Skyrim were way better than in Oblivion. I now sneak up on enemies regularly and slit their throats before they know I’m there. When I cleared one particular keep full of bandits recently, I did so without letting any of its inhabitants know I was ever there. They were dead before they knew they were in a fight. Skyrim’s cutscene-like final blow animations make it even more fun.

Backstabbing a snowy sabrecat

That four-word description really doesn’t do my story justice. Here’s the long version: I was coming over a snowy mountain rise and looked down to see a keep. Far away, near the keep, were two snowy sabrecats fighting an ice wraith. I watched for a while, and the sabrecats killed the ice wraith. I thought it’d be nice to get the ice wraith’s teeth since at the time they were fairly valuable to me. I hid and started firing arrows at the sabrecats, but they were so far away that I missed 80% of my shots. After 5-10 minutes of firing arrows, I’d hit a few times and they were wandering closer. One eventually charged up the mountain, and by the time he’d reached me I had him down to about 50% health. Still, I barely survived the encounter. I’d gone through all my healing potions.

I snuck down the mountain, thinking that if I could get up onto the keep’s walls, I could shoot down at the second sabrecat from safety. When it saw me, I started sprinting for a wall where it looked like I could jump up. My luck, I found that I couldn’t jump that high. So I ran. I ended up trapped in a V between one of the keep’s walls and a sheer cliff – if I fell, I knew I’d be dead. So I hid. And somehow, the sabrecat lost me. It came down towards the V and decided that I wasn’t there, then turned away and sat down. Its back was to me, and I’d just gotten the x15 backstab perk. So I snuck up very slowly and BAM. One-hit kill. It was so nice.

Arrows shouldn’t hurt skeletons – should they?

Archery is another skill I’m loving. The game’s bows take some getting used to – they have a lot less drop than you’d expect. But when you get a decent bow and your archery skill is good enough, a bow can be devastating. I entered one crypt and a number of skeletons began rising from their sacrophagi. As they rushed me, I took them out all one by one, one-shotting most of them. None of them were even able to enter melee. There were probably twelve or fifteen in all, and my bow pwned them, so to speak.

Mountain goat, Meet Waterfall

A small thing, really, but I stood and watched while a goat forded across a river and was swept downstream. When he reached the end, near a waterfall, he began struggling mightily. He fought it quite a lot, but in the end the goat went over and fell to his death.

You done with that?

This is the only thing on the list that actually is scripted, but I was shocked that it happened. During multiple runs back and forth from a store to an enchantment table, I found at one point that I was overburdened, so I dropped a shield and some boots on the ground. A passing woman stopped me and asked if she could have the things I’d dropped. Wow.

Picking Flowers during an Invasion

At the risk of spoilers, I was at one point involved in an armed conflict: the Invasion of Whiterun. While soldiers were locked in heated bloody battle, I kept sidetracking to pick flowers. I found the whole situation so utterly ludicrous that I felt obliged to mention it here.

Since Steam makes screenshots so easy, I’ve started trying to screenshot as many of these moments as I can, but they can be fleeting – you don’t realize a moment until it’s passed. You can see the screenshots I’ve collected so far here.

Well, I’m finished with Bastion and I’m playing Skyrim – my Bosmer elf Leroy is already 11th level. But enough about Skyrim – I want to talk a bit about Bastion. I’ll say right out that I loved the game. Its music is one of the best parts of the game, but I also enjoyed the story and the unexpected twist. It’s no Heavy Rain twist, but I love when the story takes a turn that you never saw coming.

The gameplay and combat are very old-school, although they’re thankfully a great deal more forgiving than many other old school games. You may have heard about the game’s dynamic narration – the narrator will comment on actions that you take in the game as you take them, and his narration is keyed to certain progress points, so as you progress through a level, he’ll continue his progress in segments as you hit certain points. It works very well, and the guy is a great gravely-voiced voice actor who sounds like he’s stepped right out of a western.

It’s no Skyrim – you won’t be spending 50 hours in the game, but it is very good. You should buy the Steam version if you don’t own an XBox 360.

I’m a huge fan of games that have tactical combat. I’ve been playing these types of games since Ultima III, Ogre, and Pool of Radiance. But other than Dragon Age: Origins, I haven’t seen a game with good strategic combat in years.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tactics was released four years ago, in 2007. But having only recently picked up a PSP, I’m just coming around to it. The reviews weren’t great – the game has a metacritic score of 58% – but having now played the game for a bit, I’ve found that I enjoy it. The game is similar in many ways to the PC game Temple of Elemental Evil. Both are based on the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 ruleset, and both allow you to control a group of characters in turn-based combat.

When creating my first party, I immediately went to my favorite two synergies. Firstly, a dual-classed sorcerer/monk. This would allow me to create a sorcerer who could cast shield and mage armor, and then dual class him into a monk, which would allow for a monk with an insanely high armor class. But as it turns out, there is no multiclassing in D&D Tactics. So I went for my other favorite: a fighter with a spiked chain and the whirlwind attack feat. The spiked chain is the only reach weapon in the game that can attack adjacent enemies. If you’re totally surrounded and make a whirlwind attack, you can theoretically attack 24 enemies in one turn. That has probably never happened in the history of the game – more realistic is attacking 4-5 enemies – but it’s a cool advantage to have. But as it turns out, neither the spiked chain nor the whirlwind attack feat exist in this game either. The ruleset in this PSP game is far more divergent from actual D&D 3.5 rules than was Temple of Elemental Evil. Nevertheless, I’m having fun with it.

After starting with a paladin-led party and getting stuck in the game’s fourth scenario, I restarted the game with a new party, taking care to have more toe-to-toe warriors and more characters with the heal skill. My new party consists of a high-dexterity dual-wielding fighter, a polearm-wielding orc barbarian, a monk, a cleric, a gnome sorcerer, and a dwarven psionic warrior with an insanely high armor class.

Creating these custom characters and micromanaging their inventories might be annoying for some people, but I enjoy it. It hearkens back to the old infinity engine games: Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. Good stuff.

Moving the party around environments between fights is sometimes annoying – I can completely understand the UI complaints of the game reviewers who bashed the game’s interface. Yes, it could have been better. But all-in-all, this is the kind of game I enjoy playing, and I foresee myself playing it to completion.

CRPGs go back decades, and I certainly don’t plan on talking about every Elder Scrolls or JRPG title out there. I’ve chosen five, and I’m going to hit them in alphabetical order because I want to avoid any qualitative assessments.

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura

I can’t say why, but I still get the warm fuzzies when I think of Troika.  Arcanum came out in 2001. I never progressed very far in the game’s plot, and the battles in the game never felt fun, but the actual rules system surrounding character creation drew me in far more than the gameplay did.

You could choose a race, gender, and then a background. The various backgrounds function much like traits in Fallout’s SPECIAL system, granting both a benefit and a detriment to your character.

Characters in Arcanum have four physical stats (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Beauty) and four mental stats (Intelligence, Perception, Willpower, Charisma) The game’s skills are organized into four categories. Combat skills include bow, dodge, melee, and throwing. Thieving skills include concealment, pickpocket, silent move, and spot trap. Social skills include gambling, haggling, persuasion, and healing. Yeah – I’m not sure why healing got grouped in there either. Lastly are technological skills, which include firearms, pick lock, repair, and arm/disarm traps. Lastly, fate points are sometimes awarded which allow players to guarantee a critical hit, heal all damage, or succeed in a skill check.

In the steampunk world of Arcanum, magick and technology exist as opposing forces. If you’re a technologist magic doesn’t work as well on you, and your aptitude for anything magical is poor, and the reverse holds true. A technologist can study the disciplines of herbology, chemistry, electricity, explosives, mechanical, therapeutics, weapon/armor smithing, and gun smithing. A mage can study any of the colleges of magic: conveyance, divination, force, mental, meta, morph, nature, summoning, temporal, black or white necromantic, and any of the four elemental colleges. Each of the technological disciplines and each of the magical colleges have numerous schematics and spells.

Maybe its my background as a tabletop RPG player, but I’m inordinately interested in systems such as these. Typically, they either work really well, or else crash and burn. The obvious complexity in Arcana’s rules system fascinates me, and I’m sorry that I didn’t go further with the game.

Baldur’s Gate 2 / Temple of Elemental Evil

I’m grouping Baldur’s Gate and Temple of Elemental Evil in this case because they both use the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. Baldur’s Gate 2 used Dungeons and Dragons second edition rules, and gave you some fantastic options for customizing your character. I’ve created more multi-classed and dual-classed characters in Baldur’s Gate than I can shake a stick at. The character kits and proficiencies you could choose allowed you to have a wizard who used a bow, a kensai/invoker, or a cleric who could backstab. I’ve tried a number of weird and powerful combinations, and they’re a lot of fun.

Temple of Elemental Evil was plagued with bugs, but it had such a wonderfully-realized interpretation of the Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 ruleset that it was hard not to love it. It was a true turn-based game, unlike the pause-based gameplay of Baldur’s Gate, but it allowed for so many tactical decisions. You could use a ready action to have your archer shoot any enemy wizards who began casting a spell so as to interrupt them. You could use a charge action to get the additional movement before an attack, and accept both the attack bonus and defense penalties that came along with the charge. You could even make the always-useful five-foot adjust. Those of us already familiar with Dungeons and Dragon’s tabletop rules took to the gameplay like a fish to water. Too bad so many parts of the game were buggy.

It’s hard for me to talk about D&D games without mentioning Neverwinter Nights, so… Neverwinter Nights. Yes, I spent a solid year in the creation toolkit almost nightly building my own adventure, but the actual gameplay was nothing compared to ToEE and BG 2.

Dragon Age: Origins

Although much of the goodwill I once had for Dragon Age was worn away by the Awakening expansion, the game did a lot of things right, and the new ruleset created for the game works very well. Having such a well-made RPG with only three character classes is unheard of, but works very well. I love the way that the thief’s backstab works; strategic combat games so often ignore the direction a character is facing. The system of spells, talents, and skills is terrific: trap-making, herbalism, and poison-making are all well-implemented, and I’m a fan of the way area effect spells work. I’m glad to use the cones and burst-area spells, but I wish the game had some line-effect spells like lightning bolt and Aganazzer’s Scorcher from Baldur’s Gate.

SPECIAL

The SPECIAL system is used in the Fallout games, and is based largely on GURPS. The various Fallout games have used many minor variations on the SPECIAL system, but the core seven attributes, percentage-based skills, and perks aquired as you level up have remained a constant. The system’s name is an acronym which draws its name from the seven core attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck.

Ultima V

This system is 25 years old. It’s old school, and it works. One of the main things that had always stuck out to me is the fact that occasionally, one of my faster characters would end up attacking twice before an enemy would get a turn. There’s a speed mechanic in place that takes your character’s dexterity and the weapon he’s using into account when calculating whose turn it is.

Doing a bit more research online, I uncovered this document (pdf) which explains a lot about how the system works. Very well designed in my opinion.

I’d like to give an honorable mention to Dungeon Siege, Elder Scrolls, and any other systems that employ an improve-skills-as-you-use-them methodology. I’ve always liked that approach.

My wife and I have always played video games together. Back when we were first dating, she bought a gaming PC and left it over my house so that she could come over and play Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate with me. Later, we played Dungeon Siege, Champions of Norrath and Gauntlet Legends together. These top-down or isometric action RPGs are amongst our favorite games to play together. Recently, we’d been looking for a game of that ilk to dive into on the Playstation 3. While Sacred 2 is by no means the most recent PS3 game, it was well-spoken of, so we figured we’d give it a shot. On a whim one weekend afternoon this past spring, we popped by a GameStop and grabbed a copy. I’m not a big fan of teh Gamestop, but it’s good for impulse purchases.

Sacred 2 is awkward and difficult to understand. Each character has three skill categories, and four skills in each for a total of fifteen powers/spells/techniques. Most of them are difficult to use well, don’t do much damage, and don’t seem very cool. You can combine two into a single power and slot that power on a given button, but I have yet to find a good use for that, as the powers are mostly useless anyway. The game’s weapon system is similarly opaque. You can see the damage and level of weapons, but is a level 8 weapon that does 10-28 damage somehow better than a level 5 weapon that does 12-36 damage?

So far, it’s nearly impossible to die in Sacred 2. And while this is infinitely preferable to an error on the opposite side of the scale, it means that strategy is absent. In Diablo 2, you’d dodge incoming enemy fire. In Champions of Norrath, you’d use area attacks to take out enemies before they could close. In Sacred 2, this is not an option, nor is it necessary.

There is so much more I could complain about in Sacred 2. And yet we continue to play. The game mechanics suck, but the running around and killing things is somehow enjoyable.

1998: Baldur’s Gate
The IP that put Bioware on the map is arguably still the best series they’ve ever produced. While in my opinion Dragon Age’s setting, storyline and characters surpassed those of Baldur’s Gate, there are still many things about Baldur’s Gate that remain superior: exploration, class and spell selection, and available PCs to name a few factors. There’s a reason that Baldur’s Gate remains a legendary name and a gold standard in RPGs.

2002: Neverwinter Nights
Without a doubt, the strongest feature of Neverwinter Nights was the Aurora engine’s make-your-own-adventure toolset. Many things about the Neverwinter Nights game engine bothered me, and despite completing the included single-player adventure, I never loved it.
I hated the fact that you couldn’t control an entire party of adventurers. Although I spent countless hours with the Aurora toolset, it never changed the fact that Neverwinter  couldn’t hold a candle to Candlekeep. I never played Neverwinter Nights 2.

2003: Knights of the Old Republic
Hailed by many as a better Star Wars story than George Lucas’s prequel trilogy, KotOR was met with much acclaim. But the lackluster combat was so very similar to the combat that had annoyed me so much in Neverwinter Nights. Although I appreciated the story, and very much enjoyed The Big Twist, the black and white good versus evil choices that determined your alignment on a very one-dimensional scale never struck much of a chord with me. I never played KotOR 2.

2005: Jade Empire
I enjoyed the gameplay of Jade Empire more than I had Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic. It had a single-companion mechanic very much similar to Neverwinter Nights’s and a good guy/bad guy gauge similar to that in KotOR, but the combat was twitch-based. Sure, there were RPG aspects, but I got to manually jump, punch, kick, and dodge. I’ll grant you that by this point, the conversation system in Bioware games was getting very much same-old-same-old, but with much of the remainder of the game working so well, it was easy to overlook the staleness of the conversation mechanics. And Jade Empire had a storyline better than any of the previous Bioware games. Jade Empire 2 would be very nice.

2007: Mass Effect
TO hear some speak of it, Mass Effect was the second coming. The premise of a race of super-machines threatening humanity sounded absolutely fantastic. What we got in reality was a shooter that didn’t feel much like a shooter. It had a somewhat innovative conversation system, but the same black and white good vs evil mechanic that had bored me in KotOR was replaced by a black and white paragon vs renegade system. And the closest to unstoppable robots we ever got was the geth, a robotic race of utterly unremarkable peons for the PC to shoot at. Oh, and for some reason they could put people on giant spikes in order to change them into zombies. For some reason. I’m not in a hurry to play Mass Effect 2.

2009: Dragon Age Origins
Where to begin? Bioware took the one game they’d made which had been absolutely fantastic (Baldur’s Gate) and they did what they could to make it even better. And I’m not just talking about better graphics.

Firstly, the system of game mechanics. In the past, they’d used Dungeons and Dragons rules. Baldur’s Gate used 2nd Edition rules. Neverwinter Nights used 3.0. The current D&D ruleset is 4th Edition, and it’s dog crap. Bioware made the decision to create their own rule system, and I couldn’t be happier with it. It’s very different, but it’s probably my favorite RPG rule system other than Fallout’s SPECIAL system.

Secondly, they took that tired old black vs white good vs evil character alignment system and trashed it. In its place, they set up a system whereby each of your NPCs will have a different opinion of you based on their own values and their opinions of the various decisions you make throughout the game. It may sound like a small change, but in practice, it’s hugely different, and aside from making the game deeper, it leads you to care about the characters with whom you travel.

2011: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Oh, good. Another MMO. Based on a game that everyone other than myself loved. I’m not particularly interested.

Although I’m smack in the middle of a big ole writing drought on this site due to real life issues, I thought I’d share my Dragon Age online profile. EA does a lot of stuff that gets on my nerves, and the integration of Dragon Age’s DLC has rubbed me the wrong way a bit, but their online profile system is kind of cool. As you play, your character is continually updated on their site. My main character is a human rogue named Johann, after an old D&D character of the same name I played more than a decade ago. The site shows all your achievements, your main character’s stats and skills, and even what equipment he’s currently using.

You can check out the details on my character here.