Game Difficulty

“Challenge” is not a inherent part of video games. Games can be toy-like, relaxing, simple, casual. Target demographic matters: It’s weird to complain that a game for children is child’s play. The hardware matters: It’s unfair to demand mouse-like precision when playing a console game. The design goals matter: Developers often rather have the players see end of a game. Challenge also cannot be separated from rest of the game design.: Some games are open-ended, focus on giving the player a lot of options. These games fundamentally rely on player agency, and have a hard time creating controlled environments for challenges, they are often more suited for self-imposed challenges. Nevertheless, a well-considered, tasteful level of difficulty can embolden core strengths of the gameplay, push the player out of their shell, and make them approach the game with a more sensitive eye that appreciates little nuances. It’s still good to have options however, because there is never a one-size-fits-all level of difficulty for everyone. There are also certain methods of difficulty that cause frustration more than not, and should best be left optional.

Medieval 2: Total War(2006) is dreadful to play on higher difficulties. All of your neighbors attack me on first opportunity, usually ignoring any other neighbors. When I try to play defensively and expand slowly, they will send armies over and over, there are times I have fought more than a dozen battles. It’s a most unwise way to play. The game isn’t unbeatable however, one just needs to play aggressively. The more aggressive, the better. The faster I conquer provinces, the more enemy becomes deprived from resources. I gain loot by capturing them and I get more taxes from new cities every turn, thus having even more armies to crush anything on my path. AI is completely helpless against this snowball effect. However, this isn’t too much fun either. This makes me too strong too early, and there is no time or need to use any sophisticated units. No guns, no heavy infantry, no elite archers. Just mercenaries, basic town units and general’s bodyguard can conquer the world. No need to any fun diversions like assassins, I can steamroll anyone before I can train one useful enough to kill a general. No need to care about religious mechanics or happiness in cities, I can just exterminate the population. No need to merchants, general traits, or most other mechanics. Even if I play recklessly and lose couple of cities, I can easily conquer more faster. The first time I did this, it was mildly enjoyable but the fact that I had to play like this every time made me soured any interest to play more in the future. Then, one day, I asked myself: “Why don’t I lower the difficulty?”. And I did. This made me finally remember why I liked the game so much once. I could play slow; develop large, bursting, happy cities and. build armies of elite soldiers. AI wasn’t obnoxiously aggressive and didn’t back-stab me in every chance. The game was pleasant, not stressful. I could play the way I wanted. I did not started any wars, merely retaliated, I released any prisoner I captured, never resorted the cruelty in conquered provinces. nurtured honorable and heroic generals. Diplomacy is bare bones in the game, but I still tried to keep my reputation as high as possible, because I could. I had so much fun when the game didn’t force me to optimize my behavior.

A common complaint about Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim(2011) is that the game is too easy, but such remarks hides the true grievances. There is a difficulty slider in the game, but the only thing it does is to punish the player for playing a magic-oriented build and make even the simplest encounter last 5 minutes. The game has difficult bosses, but the only real difference from easier ones is the amount of time they take to be defeated. As I have stated before, Skyrim is truly beautiful as a stroll in the forest. Whenever it tries to challenge however, it can only become a facsimile of better games. People don’t really complain that Skyrim is easy, they complain that it is a game that detests being hard. The fact that players and modders need to alter the gameplay so drastically to make the game even slightly challenging in the way most expect from similar games is a testament to the game’s inherent allergy towards difficulty.

In Trails of Cold Steel (began in 2013) series, the hardest difficulty "Nightmare" gives enemies more health and makes their attacks considerably more powerful. Protective abilities are costly and slow. Many bosses can heal themselves to full or make devastating attacks that pierce through any protective spell. If the characters are not fast enough, the enemies will get more turns and attack more. The only way to defeat the bosses is to be fast and strike hard as much as possible. Thankfully, the player can achieve really big combo attacks with correct builds. And, it works so well! The exhilarating rush of overwhelming the enemies with a well-planned chained of moves is superb, the game is able to create feeling of a flashy, bombastic arcade game within a turn-based combat system. Sure, it restricts the player options; as in one can’t approach the battles in the manner of classic RPG boss fights where the player slowly dwindles the enemy while trying to survive. This is perfectly fine, because the play style the game is pushing me is much more interesting. There are countless RPGs with “war of attrition” bosses. By punishing slow play, the game is able to guide the player into its unique and interesting features. And the beauty of difficulty options is such that, a player can always play on lower difficulties if it is too much for them. When it comes to linear gameplay, merely tweaking some numbers might be enough to make a game that’s just right for everyone.

A couple of difficulty modes can really enhance the game. I am bad at action games and when I saw Bioshock Infinite(2013)’s fast-paced, frantic gameplay, I knew I had to play the game on easy. And thankfully I did, it made the game quite tolerable overall, otherwise I cannot ever imagine tackling those sloppy gun-fights seriously. I like Starcraft(1998) quite a bit but, it’s Brood War expansion was way too brutal. There are no easy options, I am simply not good enough. And this is a inherent weakness of the games with unforgiving difficulty. A game won’t lose anything with having some cheats or a story mode. It will only win people who would otherwise give up on the game. Moreover, there is no reason to have the game resent the player for playing on easy. No locking main content behind harder difficulties, no fake endings, no mockery or passive-aggressiveness. Instead, it is much better to acknowledge and reward skillful play instead; with harder levels, enabling different ways of restrictions and so on. A game can’t and does not need to cater to everyone, but even a little seasoning can make it much more approachable to lots of people.

Beyond just different game modes, there are couple of noteworthy and, notorious patterns of difficulty I encounter in games:

Undoing huge amount of progress:

This is quite nasty. Old games did this a lot with limited lives, but the thing is, they were outdated even in Super Mario Brothers(1985). And that game was aware about this, it gave lots of extra lives and short-cuts so that players wouldn’t be too bothered by dying. I really like when games allow me to build to grow and be stronger, and don’t like when it demands me of re-take the challenges over and over to satisfy an arbitrary level of excellence. There is a case to be made about games with permanent death mechanic however. I am not too sure, because I have never played a game like that, but perhaps, because the game sets the player up for the end from the very beginning, it fosters a different kind of mentality than simply forcing them to making no mistakes. Otherwise, perfect runs can be offered as an optional mechanic.

Locking the ability to save:

I hate it, I really do. I should be able to save as much as I like, full stop. I don’t like checkpoints too, but I can tolerate them if they are numerous enough. This is the worst way to mess up with the player’s progress without openly trolling them. There is one fairly ubiquitous reason tampering with saves: To prevent “save-scumming”, in other words, loading old saves over and over to get a favorable outcome, as it usually bypasses the challenge to a certain degree. Here is my answer to this: Save-scumming is a response to faulty game design. It is usually not that fun. I would rather not do it, and I feel a lot of people wouldn’t too, but players don’t want to lose progress. Save-scumming happens either when something crucial is dependent on luck or the challenge is too demanding to take on at once. If the player is expected to embrace randomness, the feeling should be instilled very early on and the cost of failure shouldn’t be unbearable.

Europa Universalis 4(2013) is a game whose gameplay is heavily in the hands of fate. Battles, sieges and quite a few actions are influenced by dice, there are random events having positive or negative outcomes, there is at least a little randomness in almost every part of the game. Some of these random elements can be mitigated, a stronger country can weather more bad outcomes and, but even playing as a super-power, player is still sailing a boat on a raging ocean. And I get it, while it is frustrating sometimes, trying to recover from bad luck has its own charm. However, this completely turns on its head when trying to get difficult achievements. Now, not only I am only interested in optimal behavior, because of higher requirements or weaker starts I need to deal with, there is little room for failure. Obviously, for a “true challenge”, you are not allowed to load older saves during gameplay. Also obviously, I save-scum by quitting the game from desktop before it auto-saves. I am not going to risk hours of gameplay because of something random, ( or I misread the game’s not-ideal UI or it gave me wrong information or a glitch occurred or…) Randomness and perfection do not mix together.

Most games often do not have a graceful difficulty curve, there is usually that one place players fail again and again. And, it’s very understandable not to want to overtake a difficult challenge repeatedly just because of a single mistake. As I said before, demanding perfection can make players optimize themselves to boredom, and this is perhaps the most common way this happens. Again, having options help here. More tips, easier modes, cheats, perhaps allowing to skip levels are all better solutions than limiting saves. Besides the specifics of game design, the other solution is to avoid pushing players into perfection all together. Some games evaluate player’s performance at the end of the level. Missing a good score might be thing that pushes players into save-scumming. To prevent this, players shouldn’t feel like the game is screwed out of feeling complete. Giving player’s opportunities to recover from mistakes or dividing the challenge with checkpoints might convince players to keep going instead.

However tedious save-scumming might be, it’s always preferable to the anxiety of spending long stretches of time not being able to save. Some games try to be more experimental about save points, treating them as resources. for example. LISA: The Painful(2014) has one-time consumable save points, thankfully as an optional difficulty mode. Ori and the Blind Forest(2015) has limited saves, but the game is generous enough about them, and they actually serve to choose the re-spawn location. In most other cases, I don’t like deviations from convenience. This might seem narrow-minded, but I feel this is an issue beyond any issue in gameplay, it is a matter of fundamental user-friendly software design. Games are already time-consuming as they are, frankly they have no right to be so callous about player’s progress. There might be a troublesome glitch, a power outage, some sort of emergency, or player simply just wants to quit and continue later. I cannot ever see a justification of such entitlement to force players to play for an arbitrary about of time other than “People have adjusted themselves to a bad tradition.”. And as I said, I truly believe if save-scumming alone actually ruins the challenge of a game, that game’s design is truly flawed. Look at Trails in the Sky(2004), does it restrict saving and loading at all? No! Because, it’s a good game that is confident in it’s design.

Hiding Necessary Information

A boss turns out to be immune to the attack. The useless item from the beginning is maybe vital to get the best ending. Sometimes there is no map and there is no clue about what to do next. The intention is to give to player a sense of uncertainty and mystery. This can be used to great effect to make the player feel more adventurous, or heighten the sense of horror, but usually it just makes me to look up a guide. Game guides are fun, I love to learn about a game I enjoy as much as possible. and I even enjoy stumbling into secrets as much as anyone, but at the very least the game mechanics should be transparent as possible. Doing A yields B, getting X needs Y. I am not really sure what makes game devs so hesitant about this. Perhaps they are scared of their game looking too complex or maybe it’s assumed showing too many numbers break immersion in “cinematic experiences”? If the enemies in the game has level scaling for example, isn’t it much better to know that from the start? And surely it would be nice if player could make educated guesses about how their builds fare in the late game. Thankfully, at least as far as contemporary games are concerned, lack of information is never severe enough to stop players from soft-locking their game, but it’s still perplexing and occasionally frustrating that games are reluctant to explain themselves.

I love games which are honest about their challenges , rewards me for the progress I make and appreciate when they try to accommodate different levels of skill. I am also well aware that media is not produced tailor-made for me and respect games aiming for niche experiences, but I never look highly to games which are openly disregard user-convenience or accessibility to create challenges. Moreover, a game aiming for being difficult does not give it a blanket protection from criticism on it’s difficulty. One can desire a good challenge and can still find what’s offered overwhelming, tedious, or unfair. It’s always better to have an honest discussion on design instead of mocking people for playing badly. No one has to be good at the games and super majority of games are intended to be beaten, most anyone can beat a game if they put the work on it, but sometimes people just don’t feel it’s worth their time.

This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Laura Watson, , Makkovar, MasterofCubes, Morgan, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.

What is Skyrim?

Media criticism around The Elder Scrolls: V Skyrim(2011) did not help me articulate the connection I had with the game. The game either is "huge epic world where you can do anything you want", or "wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle." Neither describes what Skyrim feels like to me: So, here I will exactly try to do that instead.
[caption id="attachment_1308" align="alignnone" width="600"] A mudcrab[/caption]

Teaching the Adventure

The beginning of the game  is not great. It is a several minutes of nothing but dialogue, followed by a linear hallway where enemies can be dealt with your follower. Aside from creating a great deal of false expectations and not really fitting the spirit of the game, it's an inferior tutorial compared to what comes after it.
When the player exists the first cave, they can go anywhere they want. They are nudged to follow their accomplice but  nothing really stops them. If they listen what the game says,they are made to choose a birthsign and then guided to Riverwood. It is a small town but neatly packed with tutorials. The blacksmith's lessons on crafting is an obvious one. Most of them are subtle however:
The player quickly learn how crime works, where they can enter, what they can take, and whom they can attack freely. The town serves a safe place to practice stealth. This learning process feels organic compared to the one in the cave, where the sleeping bear is much less alert than every other bear in the game. The town as a whole serves as a template for all the other towns and introduces the player how quests work.
Player is then directed to Whiterun. Along the way they can see some warriors fighting a giant which both informs them of guilds and alerts them to random encounters of similar nature. Upon entering the city, the player is allowed to have a quick demonstration of speech skill.
Whiterun is special as it's towards the center of world map and a place where player likely revisits a lot, especially during some of the longer questlines. Compared to other cities, its layout is simpler and all main utilities are neatly placed closed to each other. The "thane" system and house ownership is also introduced here.
Next up: There is the dungeon clearance quest. This dungeon serves as a warm-up to future dungeons and informs the player how to obtain "shouts". Upon completion, the player introduced to dragons, and then shouts. And so, the game is now fully open to explore. .
Overall, the game is very good at teaching itself, without needing long texts or breaking the game's pace. The real beautiful part is, if player goes completely off-road from the designed path, they could still have a similar tutorial experience, the world can adapt very quickly to the player. This plays into the strongest asset of Skyrim: Exploration.
[caption id="attachment_1309" align="alignnone" width="1211"] Giant hitting a guard, resulting in the guard being flown to the sky[/caption]

A Seamless World

I won't bother the reader with yet another endless praises of Skyrim world, To summarize it: it's really good, with excellent ambient music very act of walking becomes joyful. Instead, I will focus how the other systems in the game contribute to this feeling.
Just by stumbling into a place, player can get new loot, some weird encounter or easter-egg, a little piece of lore or a whole new quest. Wandering around never feels like a waste of time, and the more player follows their curiosity the better they are rewarded. Quests in Skyrim are criticised for their basic go-get-something structure, but that also plays into this. It's usually possible to just randomly pick up a quest item and start the quest from there. The world has very few truly inaccessible places, the player can swim, climb, find shortcuts, encounter something new.  Even the lukewarm reception glitches got can be tied into this; they just become another attraction to see.
Skyrim is very dedicated to make sure player doesn't feel frustrated or trapped. No dungeon is truly undefeatable, their level is set on first encounter so to they can be defeated later. Tougher enemies can often avoided by sticking to certain roads. It's also always possible to adjust the difficulty from the menu. The player can always have enough cash and resources to continue.While I don't think game is a cakewalk in the first couple dozen of hours, challenging the player is definitely secondary to seamlessness of exploration.
Battle system also plays into this. The game is easy on reflexes, there is hardly any number crunching, the skills naturally grow in players journey, all is self-explanatory. The game doesn't punish the player for trying out things. They can start by wildly swinging axes, then want to sneak around for a while and try out some spells along the way. It is designed to be as accommodating and as possible. From the melee fight animations to hitting someone from afar, the game instantly rewards the player with something new. Poisons, shouts, environmental hazards, various types of spells, lycantropy, weapons with magic effects, magic staffs, even their naked fists are at the disposal of player. Fighting in the game is basic and crude at times but its simplicity keeps it in the way to be an obstacle to exploration and it is satisfying to have some demon lords cleave through the enemies, repeatedly shooting people through their head from shadows, or just thoughtlessly hurling oneself at the enemy with a fire breath in one hand and a sword in other.
While there is a shout to run faster, the walking speed itself feels just right. The dungeons are often just long enough to not feel tiresome. There is never a sense of walking in endless, empty void. The most importantly, while the exploration is at the heart of the game, it's not made mandatory. Player can often just follow quest marks and fast travel. This is criticized for ruining exploration but making it on player's terms overall makes it stronger. There are some quests without map markers and they make a nice pace of change. And keeping it to specific quests ensures that when player wants to explore something, it's always on their terms. Therefore, the act of walking never feel feels like a chore; on the contrary, it's a quite meaningful in on itself.
There is certainly a sense of adventure and wonder in Skyrim. In these areas, the game solidly carries the true spirit of a player RPG(*). For the rest, the game starts to get confused sometimes...
[caption id="attachment_1312" align="alignnone" width="800"] Two blue butterflies[/caption]

Dragonborn? What Dragonborn?

The game is not confused on one front: Dragonborn does not matter as a character. Not only in the sense they are an empty vessel, no, the game is vehemently focused on making Dragonborn utterly irrelevant and minimizing the level of abstraction between the world and the player.
This is quite obvious from the way lore looks back at past Elder Scrolls protagonists. The Agent, the Nerevarine, the Champion of Cyrodill are all recorded in the same manner. "They came from nothingness, saved the day and one day, vanished mysteriously." One might think this is to not have a certain canon to invalidate the player's choices in the past game. However, this premise is absolutely ridiculous. Yes, the details can be lost after a long period of time and medieval recording is not the best, but no, Elder Scrolls protagonists can amass an absurd level of financial/social influence to be completely forgotten like this. If they merely interested in keeping the canon vague, they could use the typical unreliable narrator style of Elder Scrolls writing. However, not only the texts speak very little of these nameless heroes, all of their achievements are undone in the next installment of the series: The Empire is shattered, factions of the pasts are in decay. The game makes a strong statement with this: The Dragonborn is merely a legend for the player to wear, only the wearer is important for the game.
This is reflected well on the rest of the lore as well. The more one reads the books and spends time in the world, the more discrepancy between the two becomes clear:

• The weirder, more magical side of the lore almost never comes up. Daedric quests are usually just shinier "go-get-item" quests. The whole mage guild quest is just another defeat the large evil plot. The player almost always interacts with magic in the most mundane gameplay level.
• The interactions and backgrounds of races almost never affect the player. Sure, Khajiit traders aren't taken into cities, a Khajiit Dragonborn or their followers won't ever have any problem. For all the talk of prejudice, the player themselves never experience any real inconveniences, just some rude talk at worst.
• Almost no information from books or rumors comes useful or at least even vindicated during the game. For example, at no point in the game you can confront Ulfric Stormcloak with his past or his views on other races. Those things are just happens, player has to always contend third-party information.

The quests have a hollow feeling to them, furthering the theme of Dragonborn's irrelevance. When player is given narrative choices, those are crafted very deliberately to either arrive at an equal or similar conclusion. The quest in Riverwood will make the player lie about one of two love interests for a woman. The two guys are equally invested in lying about each other, there is no way for the player to make a moral choice. This isn't a gray morality choice. The choice is what player gets as a reward, an archer follower or a melee follower? This faux gray morality comes up again and again throughout the game, the most glaring one being in the civil war questline.
One might think it's a choice between a corrupt repressive empire vs. nationalists but the game tries it's hardest to make sure the player can't reach any clear conclusions. Are Stormcloaks racist? Yes, but not too much, it seems more of a Nord thing in general? In that context it's kind of laughable that they can immediately trust a High Elf Dragonborn. Are Imperials repressing freedoms? Yes, but not too much, secretly they allow it, it's enforced partially because of Ulfric's actions anyway. Both sides are secretly helped by Thalmor to continue the war, both sides can't see the threat of Alduin. The player never gets to feel too bad for favoring one side, the choice really boils down to color: Red or Blue?
The moral meaningless gets bolstered by the fact that Dragonborn doesn't have any kind of morality themselves and player can't fill in the blanks. Without any hesitation from the game, the player can happily murder people for a death cult; do basic chores to help people, join a civil war to little personal benefit , adopt kids, endlessly desecrate graves and slay creatures in the pursuit of power, play matchmaker between shy lovers, join a vampire clan all the while saving the world from existential threats. The player can simply opt out of quests they find unreasonable, but they will be always in the quest log. Ready to be completed, if the player finds the reward appropriate...
The final aspect of Dragonborn's worthlessness comes by the lack of impact and permanence of their actions. After the main quest, not much changes for the world. The living legend does not gain a social leverage in a society that highly values warrior culture. The dragons does not cease to attack. They can be leader of all factions in the game. Again very little changes and all Dragonborns earns is to doing low-rank chore quests that will never end. They can fight in a devastating Civil War, but the victory does not change much besides uniforms. There will be always remnants of enemies to fight, no actual policy will be implemented, they won't even be able to see a formal crowning they have fought so hard for. Becoming a vampire-hunter and destroying a thousand-year old vampire clan does little to stop the player becoming a vampire lord themselves. The game will respect the position of an apple after the player knocked them off from a table more than literally anything Dragonborn ever does.
[caption id="attachment_1313" align="alignnone" width="1031"] A black kettle on the head on a woman. The kettle is obscuring her head to chest.[/caption]

Quests As Both A Success and Failure

What the quests, dialogue and story are for then? The quests are all about tangible gameplay rewards and pushing the player for more exploration. They either come in the form of very simple "kill/Get X for Y" or theme park attractions, where player enjoys some distraction from the usual exploration cycle: Player assassinates the Emperor, joins the hijinks of a Daedra lord, infiltrate a Thalmor base at a party. All the writing exists is to give some context to player's journey and spice up their themepark ride. Looking at from this perspective, radiant quests aren't so bad. They are just a way to ensure player has something to do at all times, they just lack the packaging of lore. Regular quests are usually just fine as well: Explore the Dwemer ruins and unfold the story of an adventurer, clear out a vampire cave but while doing so, reveal the hidden vampire in the town. At their best, the themepark quests are memorable and can feel like a refreshing break from all the fetch quests. The inherent absurdity of Skyrim improves the otherwise-dull parts too. One can only take a story so seriously when their follower starts to shout "Let's kill someone!"in the most inappropriate moments.
At their worst, they feel detached from rest of the game in a way that renders the player's typical activities sour. In master level conjuration spell quests, the player needs to obtain a stone, so they need to tame an unbound Dremora Lord into giving them by defeating them several times. The player engages with magic that's different from merely using them weapons, the quest delves into the nature of summoning otherworldly beings. It tackles the lore, perfectly fitting for a college of mages too... but it also makes the generic "thwart the doom" plot really dull in comparison. Normally, the player is conditioned to expect lore staying in the background, they are used to purely functional quests, but the existence of a quest like this makes one wish for more.
The player agency is very central to Skyrim, and player is trained to treat narrative branches in a utilitarian way. The linearity of quests is often elegant enough as to not make the player feel railroaded to something. One quest really sticks out like a sore thumb however: The quest about murder investigation in Markath. It's decent expect the part the player is marked as guilty and has to go to the jail. The player can either accept going to jail or... not be able to advance the quest while dealing with an infinite number of guards. The question shows itself like a midday sun: If there isn't a real alternative, why that choice exists? Sure, it's absurd to a person not ever thinking about resisting a libel, but it's a familiar absurdity that is stitched in every corner of Skyrim. This quest feels out-of-place.
We tend to think immersion only in the sense of believability of a world from a narrative sense, but there is a level of immersion provided by coherent, consistent game rules. Tetris(1985) doesn't feel "real" but in its abstract way, it feels meaningful. In Skyrim, some characters having immortality is absurd but it's an accepted premise, just like accepting a premise of a fantasy world. The game teaches the player the functional linearity of the quest and is fairly consistent about it, but then there comes the first Dark Brotherhood quest. After the player kills the abusive runner of the orphanage in Riften, Astrid -- the leader of the brotherhood -- adducts the player to a shack for "a kill they must repay" The player is told that one of three hostages in the room has a contract on them, and the player needs to kill the correct person, Those three people all have reasons to be disliked by people but the player can't ever know who the real contract is. Of course, the sense of choice is fake, Astrid does not actually care whom the player kills and the player is destined to be a cold-blooded murderer for a death cult from here on out. It's the narrative linearity and faux-gray morality in its purest.
But wait! There is a real choice: The player can kill Astrid, thus fail the quest and start the one for destroying the Dark Brotherhood instead!. In a vacuum, this is a brilliant twist: Players who are long conditioned to expect important characters as unkillable has to think outside the box. In the larger context this brings two problems: This weakens other quests that logically could be altered with eliminating key people, and the quest after that is a complete joke. Destroying Dark Brotherhood is exactly like any other "kill these people quest", the player just casually is given the location of secret base and password of the magic door. At the cost of giving up one of more entertaining storylines of the game, tons of gold, cool gear and spells and more. It's as if the game is making fun of the player for ever thinking Dragonborn could make a meaningful difference or assert any semblance of personality.
The so-called main questline is emblematic of both strengths and the weaknesses of the quests. Individually, climbing to a top of mountain, capturing a dragon, infiltrating an embassy are all fun and memorable, the rewards are good, Paarturnax is one of actually interesting characters of the game, and even the trip to Sovngarde could be a nice distraction. Collectively however the main questline, which should be a high mark Skyrim, goes against all of its ethos. The game starts to care Dragonborn as a character, for a little while, but the legends, lore and exposition alone just does not make a compelling story. Sovnguard is in particular a low moment for the game. Functionally an empty, linear hallway that ends in with an inferior repeat of a fight several quests ago.. The main questline" could be much simpler, most other quests in it could be independent adventures, without the excess forced dialogue and traveling back-on-forth. Together with the examples above, this reveals some lack of confidence in game's design. Previous Elder Scrolls games all tried to be a lot of things at once, but Skyrim is usually very adamant in putting player at the center, just occasionally it feels like it needs to mimic every other Western AAA RPG. For better or worse, Skyrim is not like any other.
[caption id="attachment_1310" align="alignnone" width="1852"] A Vigilant of Stendarr standing near a vampire and a daedra, two things he is supposed to hunt[/caption]

The Heart of Skyrim

It's even different from the player-RPG tradition too. Dragon Quest(1986) ends with player becoming the king. The dungeon-crawling adventures end at the last door, last floor, last creature. Some of them, like Pokémon(1996-2018) series have post-game content that might infinitely continue, but they still carry a credits screen, a bookmark that the player reached at the end of adventure, they are just free to stay for more. Skyrim does not end. Not in the way of an arcade game that ends when player runs out of lives or an MMO which are kept alive by upgrades. No wonder the opening and "ending" feels so alien then; Skyrim is an eternal world frozen in time which Dragonborn can only change minimally. The main quest is just another quest in the log.  Dungeons cleared re-fill in a short time. There are always radiant quests to make.  Most enemies and weapons re-spawn indefinitely. Player can level up forever. The game does not leave the player goalless mind you, there are rare items to collect, houses to buy and craft, tough enemies to defeat... But this don't change the fact that only way to end the adventure is to quit the game.
This speaks to the very heart of Skyrim. A lot of RPGs make a point about respecting player agency but Skyrim demands agency. There are a lot of, really a lot of ways to play the game, but there aren't many extrinsic incentives to play like one way over others. The player can make the combat trivial in just couple of hours.  All damage is governed by a simple difficulty slider. The games will be never difficult unless player explicitly wants the game to be hard. Quests aren't really that special from other activities: Being obscenely rich with alchemy, adopting kids and making them go to their beds, climbing mountains with a horse, stealing an entire town's worth of people's clothes and have them act casually with their underwear, rolling dozens of cheese wheels on top of a hill, having a library of all books in Skyrim. From the moment the player exits the Helgen Cave, they are free not to follow the arrow.
There is a certain game design philosophy that says a game should be meticulously crafted for a specific experience. "Players will optimize the fun out of game."  as it goes. Skyrim stands as the complete opposite of this idea. More than any aspect of the game, this is the turn off of many people. It's even seen as a revolting-idea for an RPG, as a hallmark of a lazy, "dumbed down" game design, just a sandbox of content. Despite enjoying the game, I felt a similar distastefulness when I got eventually bored with the game.
I don't think so now. Skyrim ends when the player gets bored, and that's okay. It might be after 3 hours, 30 hours or 330 hours. The game just wants the player have some nice adventure for a while. They can rake a trip in the woods, see a mudcrab and a bear fighting, fight with a bandit but don't have to think too much about it. Yet they can also think too much about it, spend a lot of time in details of the game, hopefully the game has something for them. The game even directly addresses this with Ebony Warrior. He is a nameless warrior who can actually seriously challenge him. He specifically exists for a high-level quest: He completed all quests, defeated all challenges, there is nothing else to do, he says and wants the player to defeat him as a last fight. Dying is the only way he can quit the game, but if player thinks there is nothing else to do, they can just quit right there. If dungeons started to feel repetitive after 100 hours, maybe they need a break from them.
Skyrim has a certain influence on endless content open-world games we have today. However, it is actually not one of them. There are two fundamental differences. First is that Skyrim actually doesn't mind player quitting, it's not a cynical live-service game. (Although Bethesda would certainly like to be the case) The second is Skyrim doesn't want to be everything,   Unlike today's giant 100+ games, Skyrim is usually consistent and honest in what it wants to be.  It has a soul in it that gently guides the player into finding the meaning of Skyrim. Sometimes this is glitches, annoying characters and memes. Sometimes it's adorning the game with a lot of mods. Sometimes realizing it has not much meaning anymore and ending the journey.
For me, it was the funeral for my dog. During one of our adventures, we have been ambushed by a group of vampires. Of course, as the master wizard I am, they were no match to me, but the dog was a frail being. I didn't even realise it until the fight was over. I am proud save-scummer but here something stopped me. I guess... I felt it was like a disservice to everything. Instead I carried the dog to near river. Under the weird moons of Tamriel, I put down some flowers over its body. Sent three pulses of light to the sky and waited in silence for a while. While the game's moody night music is playing I did nothing and watched until the lights run out. Then I gave the dog to the river, and it got carried away... and away....
[caption id="attachment_1311" align="alignnone" width="600"] A dirty brown dog[/caption]

Masterpiece?

This is why, Skyrim is a profound, refined experience and I can't agree with the criticisms about game's shallowness. It can get rough around edges, but it clearly connected to me on in its unique way even other TES games could not provide. It has a simplistic but enduring charm. I would even call it the masterpiece of Bethesda. Yes, the game journalists were right about this, but not for the reasons they were usually praising the game. Surely, today Bethesda can make games with better graphics, more polished combat, larger world, more voice actors etc. but if they continue to chase the tail of today's trends then I can't expect too much from a future installment, certainly not the magic of Skyrim. Thankfully, it seems that Skyrim won't leave us anytime soon...
This article is written thanks to my dearest Patrons and special thanks to: Acelin, Alexandra Morgan, Emelina, Laura Watson, MasterofCubes, Makkovar, Otakundead and Spencer Gill.

---

(*) RPGs where the player char. acts as an avatar for the player instead of having a uniuqe personality or one constructed by the player. Read more, here...