An Elder Scrolls Analysis - Episode Three: The tragedy of Skyrim the wise

Something I've detected throughout this analysis is the sense that the author loved Morrowind so much that the ways the series evolved was inevitably going to be criticized for their differences from the thing he loved. He also did this with the Dragon Age series, being heavily critical of any ways the sequels deviated from the original (although I also hated Dragon Age 2). For Skyrim, specifically, he also adopts an overbearing tone of condescension and sarcasm that doesn't serve the analysis.

By contrast, if you watch his (epic) Final Fantasy retrospective, he defends a game like Final Fantasy XVI (which is almost nothing like the classic games in the series in any conceivable way) by effectively saying, 'Well, it's fun, so none of those differences really matter', and (I feel correctly) noting that an overarching theme of the Final Fantasy series was evolving and changing to stay relevant.

No, Skyrim is not Morrowind, but that's okay. Did it have its flaws? Certainly. Was it an amazing game? Yes, I think most people who played it would say it was. I personally have more issues with the things Bethesda hasn't tried to significantly improve from game to game (faces, hair, their outdated engine, etc...).

I'd say that the Stormcloaks versus Imperials choice is still lacking significantly. Yes, it is one of the few actual decisions that seemingly has some kind of an effect on the world, and so it does feel like a big decision, however, the implications behind this political storyline just feels cynical, and I don't enjoy engaging in the quests because of that.

The choice is between the Stormcloaks and the Imperials, but what does that mean. The former support independence and the latter support empire, and as a Scot I naturally incline towards the former, but we don't see any real consequence from that, at no point does the storyworld feel like it is under the regime of the Stormcloaks or the Imperials. There is very little difference between either of them, except of course, their one policy.

The Stormcloaks hate elves, and the Imperials hate the worship of Talos. That is the political division between the two sides. One wants religious tolerance and the other wants racial tolerance; or to put it another way, one wants racial discrimination and persecution while the other wants religious discrimination and persecution. Great. So, either side we join, we're supporting an openly bigoted regime. There is no third option, there is no future for Skyrim (in this game) that has both religious freedom and civil liberties for all races. When you engage in this storyline, you have to make a choice about whether you would rather to be religiously racist or ethnically racist, you are asked which form of bigotry you are most okay with.
Call me overly sensitive, but I'd rather not roleplay as a racist, thank you very much.
And this isn't just a problem with Skyrim, a few games that try to inject some political discourse into their stories with choices between two political outcomes have fallen into this same problem, the problem of just making both sides bad. I think it was Far Cry 4 that had your character choosing between supporting one ideology (where you allow child brides to exist) or another ideology (where you allow a drug empire to exist), great, love it. Some developers seem to think that politics are just choices between two bad options, and that's nuance, there is no world in which you can have no child brides and no drug empires, no world in which you can have religious tolerance and racial tolerance, no world in which you don't gain a good thing without allowing a bad thing. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, it feels overly cynical.

They could have given us a new set of quests after the civil war that helped restore order after the conflict, rebuilding towns, defeating or placating remaining enemies, and creating a peace treaty with the last of our enemies. And in this endgame set of quests we could also work to try and convince our new regime to undo their bigoted practices. If, in the peace talks as an Imperial, you could compromise with the remaining Stormcloaks by granting religious tolerance, or if, as a Stormcloak, you could calm the remaining Imperial loyalists by ensuring racial tolerance, then you could actually have your character exist in an endstate world where bigotry is not inevitable. We would also feel like a greater agent of change, as instead of just supporting one movement or another and being that final push for them to win, we also went against said movement on the issues that we as the player obviously disagree with them on, and by doing so we ended up bettering the world on our terms. It would be far better than having our character just be okay with a certain kind of bigotry.

I just don't like games that try to do something political (in-universe) when the developers don't actually care about politics. It always ends up being lazy at best and problematic at worst. I honestly would have preferred if they just left it as a civil war with the basic policy conflict of "independence and autonomy" against "unity and alliance", just empire versus kingdom, with no policies beyond that.

Ironically, I was just seriously considering downloading a mod to add MORE required radiant quests to the Companions questline to pad the story out.

OMG. Did you just went from soyboy simp love letter confession to a absolute smooth criminal suggesting a booty call...in less than a minute. Damn. i did not expect this kind of ending. Nicely done.

Skyrim is a game about D&D but in the same time is not D&D game at all.

I've mixed feelings about Skyrim. When I played through it, I had a pretty good time. But that was with all the patches, DLC and tons of mods. But now, especially with the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious just how shallow and repetitive it really was. It feels like the game was actually 50% content, 50% filler, but it didn't bother me that much back then.

Now, it would be really hard to go back and play it again, and I have no problem playing and enjoying games much older and much more dated than Skyrim. It's just that Skyrim, at it's core, is as wide as an ocean, but as shallow as a puddle, unlike many of it's RPG peers from around that same time, or even from way before.

One of the least self aware video game criticisms I've ever heard

Really wonder how you would feel about Enderal. Did you ever talk about it in a video?

Watched all 3 til end. “Good enough for ppl to want it to be better” is succinct. Well done dude.

Edit: WOW dude I appreciate your love lost come full circle. A love letter to an old flame. Brilliant. And brave if you to do. Braaaaaa vooooohhhh sir

i only played skyrim so i skipped the other two...until "you have to yet earn to start at episode 3" ok, see you tomorrow then
edit. afther 2 whole days here i am, finally starting this video and i don't even think i can finish this today XD
edit2: finally finished, one thing is sure my friend, you made me +5h older XD

Skyrim is designed around being easy to explain to a board of investors who never played a videogame in their lives. Character progression system? Can you explain it in golf terms please.

This really pulled together a lot of my major feelings from each game. Very well made!

I did all the dungeons I encountered in skyrim

I'd like if they made houses accessible via multiple means and quests used the city environments more to justify the crime systems/guards. You could have a castle you need to get into, but sadly they got rid of climbing etc

One of my Earliest Skyrim memories kinda describes Skyrim quite well:
Quite new to the game,I wanted to play a Magic user. Full of hopes i went to winterhold: Oh cool i need to use magic to get in. Nice.
Yeah my first quest as an appretice i cannot wait what the college holds in store for me.
Oh stuff is hitting the fan already. Ok Lets solve that Problem.
Wait what? Im Archmage now? Ive just joined the college. I didnt even get to learn any spells except basic ones. And now its over already?

Had to stop watching when this guy tried to say Skyrim lacks replay value

This quickly turned into another “hey remember that game literally everybody loved including me? Well it was actually bad” video. Now watch as I state general concepts that apply to every game ever made

I disagree with the section about lockpicking perks being useless. Maybe other skill trees have useless perks and maybe a couple individual perks within the lockpicking tree are bad, but to declare them all bad is ridiculous. Maybe the rest of us are not the god gamer this guy apparently is, but I always found the higher level locks difficult. Or at least I would burn many lockpicks on them so I would not pick them if my lockpicks were low. Lockpicks aren't super common. If you spend time buying them at stores then you will get a lot of them, but who does that? It is most certainly a quality of life perk to have unbreakable lockpicks.

I enjoy listening to you talk and it makes the time go by and I recognize these are opinion pieces and aren’t intended to influence somebody away from the game, but thus far after three or four game analysis videos I don’t think I’ve seen you say more good than bad about a single game. Can’t wait to click on the video that has a game you just really love.

One of my favorite side quests in Skyrim is one you can get in Markarth(also my favorite city, design wise and artistically) to catch a cannibal in the local crypt, the Hall of the Dead. Though it is a long quest, the gist is that you find the culprit there whom asks you to help her clear a cave of Draugr, and when you do, you find a shrine to a daedra, you're then tasked with luring in the initial quest giver, a priest, in order for the cannibal and her seemingly whole cult of cannibals to eat him.
You're then presented with only one choice, lure him in, where the whole cult is then congregated, all locals of Markarth, they then put a spell on him and you have to sacrifice him to the daedra, eat his flesh and then receive the corpse eater skill/ative effect, but I took the hidden second option. At that moment my character realized all the local cannibals were united, in a hall that was hard to escape from, needless to say, none of them did. The priest woke up mid slaughter and helped my character get rid of the cult, then Markarth was plagued no more by them, I earned nothing but a sincere thank you from the priest and I walked out of that bloody hall, leaving the daedra lord to hunger and seethe in darkness, along with her cultists' corpses.
Now if that is not roleplaying, I dunno what is, I felt like Rorschach cleaning up the city.

you forgot the best hidden dungeon in a dwelmer ruins that is an unmarked quest giving you one of the best bows in game and also like the windshear on the boat. skyrim really has some awesome stuff but i do understand the critisisms

I wish this one had the same format as the last two. This always felt like half an analysis and it's a dissapointing end to a great series you did.

Fun fact, Egyptian tombs had a separate tunnel so the builders could more quickly oeave themselves.

That small university rant has me thinking that you, too, studied economics? Lol

I couldn’t get past the horrendous graphics in the opening. Characters looked dirty and bizarre. UGLY. Oblivion had a weird beautiful style. Overdone bloom and potato heads not withstanding. It was charming where Skyrim was just dingy and depressing looking.

YT should give me an achievement for watching the whole series

Blackreach was so disappointing to me after the initial burst of excitement. This fantastic, strange, new ecosystem illuminated by a a magical orb and faintly glowing fungi… but populated with the same dull monsters we already knew. How amazing would it have been to have Blackreach as a whole new world with its own collection of terrifying darkness-hunting, bioluminescent creatures worthy of the nightmares of benthic fish? As it was, it fizzled. I was so excited to find this “secret” world within a world that I was a little crushed when I realized it was just more of the same.

Gothic 2 was more fun at any day than TES. Even after 20+ years I still remember well who was who in Gothic. Gorn, Milten, Lester and the rest of buddies.
Do you wish to know what I remember from TES? The names of some towns/cities. I do not remember any of the character in the game. I remember climbing the mountain, something time travel with mind and a temple built from bones at the end of the game. Good visuals, otherwise the TES always was shallow. I discarded TES III Mw after 10 hours of game, compared to Gothic 2 it was utterly boring. I neve tried TES IV after I heard its monster levelling / scaling.

Looking back it is insane how such a dumb game could be the best selling RPG. With dumb dungeons, 0 real char, bad skill tree. The only merit of the game is visual. Music? Forget it, since ~ 2000 every RPG had enough good music for its job.

There's debatably another type of mini-puzzle in dungeons. Some dungeons have levers, and chains you can pull, but you need to do so in a certain order to unlock doors. The dungeon in ivarstead for example has one such puzzle.

I don't believe removing the player from the map is intelligent. Maybe make map usage include realistic usage where you in game calculate where you are to add the player is here marker. No marker at all is less realistic than real world map usage.

You say you cant buy daedric swords even at high levels.... over footage of you browsing a vendors inventory who has several daedric artifacts. Also you act like all the quests just come to you wich is just not true. Only a small amount of quests are given to you by a courier. Most are acquired by exploring and talking to people. Most of the other criticisms are valid.

I absolutely love your sarcastic description of the gameplay loop, something that has always bothered me but now at least I know the term for it. I'll take minmaxing Morrowind or fighting Gothic's controls every day over Skyrim.

I like the idea of "go anywhere, do anything, be anyone". Skyrim is definitely "go everywhere, do everything, be everyone".

Skyrim is to the open-world RPG genre what Coke is to Champagne

Bro really said Skyrim world isn't well designed most dungeon have a story and there is lot of interesting locations

I'm pretty sure there are a few empty dungeons baren of enemies.

I love the implementation of lockpicking in this game. Along with quite a lot of designs in this game, It feels intuitive.

It's so funny you talk about Nightgale Inn. It's one of the places that really resonates with me, it's one of those locations in a game that feels like a place I have been, and very few games leave me with that sense that it's hard to pull apart fiction and reality.

"it's in these dungeons where the magic happens."
so you have thomas the tank in your dungeons! i see!
amazing choice! 😁

Still kinda want that perk nit-picking video.

The main problem with Skyrim, so far as i can identify, is that in favor of complete freedom they have abandoned consequence. But in a twist of irony, i think limiting freedom with consequence makes the freedom all that more interesting. If you have to choose certain things, and that locks you out of other things, you have used your freedom to choose and you end up actually roleplaying. If you are never limited, the freedom becomes meaningless and makes the content feel hollow and flat, as no decisions you make ever matter. Locking content behind player driven decision making isn't causing the players to miss half the game, it gives them a reason to play it several times, while still having new experiences.

This could perhaps be mitigated a bit with better writing and less Radiant stuff, but ultimately the core of any good RPG experience is choice and consequence. By eliminating one, you miss out on the other.

I can envision a version of Skyrim without Radiant AI, and with the map slashed in half and how great it could be if every quest and dungeon just got double the effort put in to it. Or a version where you actually need to have relevant aptitude to join and advance in the guilds, instead of essentially being the leader of every organization in the entire country at the same time. And what if the quests and guilds your build was able to complete affected the ending of the game? That game would have me glued to the screen for hundreds of hours, and probably happily shell out for DLC.

The main appeal of Skyrim is the Sweet Rolls

Tha lighthouse quest was for me one of the most memorable gaming moments ever, compunded by the fact that shortly after it i stumbled into blackreach. these two moment plus a dog suddenly talking to me are what made skyrim memorable for me.

Skyrim x Chopin Waltz

Truly, a man of culture

Two years.


It's been two years and I'm still waiting for the in-depth video about all that is wrong with Skyrim's Perk System from you.

It actually made perfect sense when you said it and I was like... Omg... He's right...