Dhruin
SasqWatch
Thrasher sends in this deconstruction of Skyrim at Grantland. It's a lengthy article but makes some good points:
More information.There are other things — a lot of other things — you can do in Oblivion, but most of the roughly 200 hours I spent on the game I spent doing stuff like this. No apologies. For one of the first times in my gaming life, Oblivion offered what felt like a fully realized world populated by characters with alarmingly various social schedules.1 OK, maybe it was an often inert and nonsensical world, and maybe those characters were essentially robots with do-this and do-that timers on them; that didn't make either any less fascinating. What The Legend of Zelda felt like when I was 12, Oblivion actually was. All of this is why, for a lot of console gamers my age, that moment in which Oblivion's open world first opened up has something like moon-landing significance. A massive interactive system, thoughtfully designed, that allowed for player experiences of nearly infinite variety: Here, finally, was a clear argument for what video games might actually be for.
Except for one thing. Despite how much gripping, odd, surprising, and otherwise enjoyable content the Elder Scrolls games contain, you cannot escape the repetitive and somewhat entropic nature of the core experience, which is dozens of hours of heading into caves/dungeons/forts to kill bandits/necromancers/skeletons to find a tome/rune/amulet, after which you beeline for the nearest merchant/alchemist/blacksmith to sell/trade/repair all the picked-up crap you've arranged and rearranged your inventory to accommodate. Is this enjoyable? Of course it is. But there's a point at which this brand of enjoyableness becomes indistinguishable from compulsion, and it seems fair to ask when a game's expansiveness becomes an affable form of indentured servitude.