Skyrim - Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls

Eurogamer has a piece that contrasts the story-telling methods in Skyrim and Dark Souls. The upshot is author Rich Stanton considers the Skyrim methods "stale", "banal" and have "little narrative sophistication":

It's a stale template, a thought that solidified as I picked up and threw down book after book without reading any just to see if I'd bag a skill point. Such an undercooked attempt at incentivising suggests Bethesda's designers weren't quite sure what to do about all these tomes either. It's not that the books are terribly written - some are, some aren't - but that they're a symptom of Skyrim's biggest narrative flaw. The banal attention to detail in its world building is boring. This is a universe that's constantly being fleshed-out, and one where I skip nearly every conversation.

But perhaps you don't - and are doubtless salivating at the prospect of reading Waughin Jarth's A Dance in Fire (Chapter 4). The problem is that Skyrim is a videogame, and when it's in narrative mode it stops being one. This passive delivery is the rock on which Skyrim's lore founders - flicking through virtual pages or skipping through conversations counts as interaction, just, but it's of a rather dull variety.