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[PATV] Extra Credits s.3 ep.23 - Skyrim's Opening
Bogey
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Should be some interesting reactions in here. The favorable comparison to Modern Warfare's intro in particular is sure to provoke rage, but it's true; for what it's trying to, Modern Warfare does it's thang extremely well.
I think the government's failure to regulate the amount of lead in paint explains it more plausibly.
what the f
As far as the intro goes, yeah I wasn't that impressed by it. Especially when compared to something like MW's intro which pretty much segued into me playing it for 8 hours straight to beat it. I think the points he hit were pretty accurate but could be considered biased towards Modern Warfare. I mean he completely skipped the dragon encounter. That's what I was most excited for. A fucking dragon.
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It has been discussed before, but if they would have done the same thing like the did with Fallout and have an "are you sure?" save right before you leave the cave to change anything you wanted to it would have been a lot better.
I still think that it's better than waking up in a dungeon, listening to that smart-ass dark elf, and then following the Emperor for a half hour.
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Pro tip: It made a save file for you at the moment of character creation. You'll still have to get out of the city, but that's pretty brief the second time through.
Which is great if you're a dedicated player, but as the video points out, they did a lot of this with a broader audience in mind and that's a pretty big up front investment of time.
Nowhere near as bad as say, the Final Fantasy game that gets good like 20 hours in, but still.
They skipped over the BEST thing about Skyrim's intro... the dragon attack.
To me, the Skyrim intro had this big feeling of suspense because I KNEW I wasn't going to die.... but I wanted to know how I was going to get out of this seemingly hopeless situation. When the dragon crashes down and starts wrecking the town's shit... I was super immersed and loved it. I also was paying attention to the characters talking, trying to decifer what exactly happened and was immediately picking up on the jargon. I assumed the Stormcloaks were a renegade group fighting the Empire, I knew what the divines were having played previous Elder Scrolls games.
I guess I'm not who they were talking about though since I'm a veteran Elder Scrolls player and I enjoyed the intro, the cold bleak colors, the helplessness, then the rush of freedom and urgency after the dragon attack and the subsequent escape through the tunnels.
tl;dr: Skyrim's opening was too deep for them.
Also, I haven't played a Call of Duty since the first one and really don't give a shit about modern day realistic FPSes. So I guess I'm biased.
Edit: Also... just because they simplified many of the elements for Skyrim (many of them were convoluted and unnecessary) doesn't necessarily mean they didn't want the game to appeal to veteran Elder Scrolls players as well.
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The ONE valid point in this is the timing of the character creation.
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I do believe they are digging too deep into the whole intro. 20 minutes is nothing for this game, if you find the intro too long, this may not be the game for you. I also have to agree that the dragon part that they all but skipped over was freaking awesome.
edit: @Henroid Damn, that is pretty much what I was trying to say, but you did it so much better.
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"There's a BEAR over there!"
What the Creditz Crew gets completely wrong is the attempt to compare a high fantasy RPG with a first-person shooter. This is like comparing the Lord of the Rings movies to a Michael Bay film. Say what you want about “well these two games begin the same way, with a main character being carried along and having exposition dumped on them”; I don’t believe that because two games start the same way, it makes them able to be compared. Every single sidescrolling platformer on the NES, Genesis, and SNES begins with “Press Start – Select Player 1 – Wall of Text explaining the problem, who you are, and what you do – Spit you out into the first level.” This doesn’t mean it’s cool to compare, say, Super Turrican and Super Mario World. They’re two separate styles, with two very separate demographics, two separate core game mechanics, and two separate flows.
Being into high fantasy I can tell you right now that they never begin simply, or excitingly. It’s the style. Put “Fellowship of the Ring” into your DVD player and watch the first 10 minutes. You’ll get Arwen giving you a voiceover that probably includes the words “wizard, hobbit, Mordor, Sauron, Ringwraiths, Frodo, Bilbo, the Shire.” The same is true with Game of Thrones; the first few chapters are setup, then the ball gets rolling and serious shit goes down. The last chapter of Game of Thrones itself might include some of the most exciting, beautiful, well-written prose I’ve ever read. Shit, put in or read any of the Harry Potter works, same thing. Now put in, I dunno, any James Bond flick. Or 2 Fast 2 Furious (which I’m sure you all own.) The first 10 minutes is going to be heart pounding excitement, and probably little else. Different styles, different demographics; neither is “wrong.” Except, you know, Vin Diesel.
What I’m getting at is that the comparison they drew is as fundamentally flawed as a comparison possibly could be: they’re comparing apples and oranges. Their point – that the beginning of Skyrim isn’t kick-you-in-the-balls exciting – is absolutely correct. But their way of trying to support and prove that point completely misses the mark. And they completely miss the point that it’s not supposed to be exciting. The Elder Scrolls games have always begun with a dude in prison who gets freed at the last second and then makes his mark on the world.
Yeah, once the cart ride is over, shit is good.
The problem is that assumes that is the only proper way to introduce / tell a story. If you look at something like The Big Lebowski, with it's fucking cowboy narrative intro, that has shit all to do with the pace / theme of the story. That's probably not the best example, but I mean... having a slower intro isn't necessarily a BAD thing.
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Skyrim is an awesome game, and that's why picking apart its lackluster opening sequence is so educational.
They could have done the opening so much better in so many ways. I think they really ought to have either kept the full on complex game system in place and decided that the game should be for veteran players, which would excuse the poor opening. (Because it would not be considered poor if it were aimed at vets, since they really need the info dump as to where the story is going.) However, that's not what they decided to do. They decided to dumb down the mechanics (or "simplify" if you are a fan boy that can't handle a little criticism of the fame) in order to appeal to new players but still left the heavy handed info dump of an opening. They should have picked one or the other.
I've played nearly all the Elder Scrolls games (including Daggerfall, but excluding Arena, Battlespire, and Redguard) and I will not be picking this one up until a mod is out to re-implement all the mechanics from Morrowind and Oblivion. What really killed it for me was the removal of creating your own spells and the movement altering magics. (i.e. Jump)
Yeah, it was pretty lame how they used that cliche, overused creature for that one scripted event and then it had nothing to do with the rest of the story. Oh wait...
Seriously though, it was pretty awful how they tricked people into buying Skyrim without giving them any clue the entire story of the game would revolved around those cliche, overused creatures. Oh wait...
For me, I got the game because it was an elder scrolls game. If I never hear the word dragon again, it will be too soon. As for the entire story of the game... a dragon is going to eat the world for no reason, so stop him or something. You mean that story?
I found the whole (mostly unrealized) subplot about the Aldmeri dominion, Ulfric, and the empire to be some of the most compelling stuff Bethesda has thought of. I wanted to find out about Ulfric's role in the great war. I wanted to know more about the current state of the dominion. Maybe the best thing about the intro is that it didn't explicitly explain what happened between oblivion and skyrim, and created a sort of mystery that it was fun to explore and unravel.
Nevertheless, I was super excited when I started the game for the first time.
The cart ride was very bleak, and although it was a bit annoying to turn around to follow the conversation, it established a bit of context for the player character.
Putting the character creation itself before the start of the game might have been a better idea, or maybe move it until you get into the cave, after it's clear that the character we're following is NOT going to be executed. We don't really know that until the character creator pops up, which does break the flow of the game at least a little bit.
I enjoyed the chaos when the dragon attacked and you had to escape, but it was only by chance that I followed the Stormcloak guy instead of the Imperial guy, even though I had planned to fight the Empire.
And the feeling when you come out of the cave and see the world spread out before you... fantastic.
I know this isn't the Skyrim thread but I have to disagree with you. I thought the main story line was quite well done, while the main factions of Skyrim came of as little more than petulant children.
The game has many flaws, but I don't think the intro was one of them.
They completely skipped over many other parts about the intro. The dragon attack that led to putting a stop to your exucution at the last minute, having to think in a matter of a couple of seconds to decide which guy you want to escape with, different enemies you encountered depending on who you chose, and of course...the bear XD. They tried to make it sound like the whole intro had no excitement at all in it when it had a ton.
I also didn't like how they explained about the fact that YOU KNOW your main character is not going to die...well of course. The game would end. But like someone else said, watching how the main character escapes at a completely hopeless situation can be just as if not more exciting. They also didn't realize that in the call of duty game, their is no main character of sorts. In fact, a couple of the protagonists died before you finally controlled somebody to the end of the story, and that happened in the mid point of the game. Comparing a game with the one and only dragon born of Skyrim to no clear protagonist soldiers IMO is a bit silly.
And of course, I find just overall comparing the transformers of video games (Call of Duty) to an popular fantasy open world RPG (Skyrim) a little ridicules. Not every game, movie, book, etc. Is going to start out with heart beating exciting action or whatnot, nor should it. The intro was not perfect by any means, there are definitely some ways it could have been improved upon but the reasons made in the video are way off.
I was also kind of disappointed with the topic of choice here. I was hoping they would talk about the SOPA bill that is coming up on the 20th of January I believe and now or next week hopefully would be a great time for it, and try to raise concern on how that bill affects the game industry or the Internet as we know it. Instead, we get a video that seems to be really nitpicky about the very beginning part of a great game, and not even done well at that.
But everybody makes mistakes, hopefully they talk about a topic a little more important for next week.
The way I saw this episode, they didn't talk about the awesome parts of the Skyrim intro because the subject was the other parts, the parts that could have been improved.
In Skyrim, you don't know for sure that the character you're controlling is important (and will probably survive) until the character creator pops up.
The impending execution still creates tension, but it's more like this:
How will the person you're controlling get out of this situation? Through an exciting sequence of running from a dragon and fighting your way through a cave, that's how.
In the Modern Warfare intro, you don't know anything about the person you're controlling - he might even be the main protagonist. You only find out that he isn't when he gets shot.
Here the person you are controlling is killed, and yet the game does NOT end. So in this case:
How will the person you're controlling get out of this situation? ...he doesn't. He's shot dead. But the game goes on.
I don't think they really compared the whole of the two games, just the intro - because it follows a similar structure in both games.
That was the good point of the video I thought. The forte of games like skyrim isn't the fast paced action "hook" of other games, so they should stick to what they're good at and make an intro which highlights the game's real strengths. Exploration, discovery, character growth...
This was the first time! The intro to the first MW game. And also;
Every other time a character gets killed later on, you definitely have more of a connection to them, and in the first 2 games it was far less predictable. It was always a shock, imo.