Variety Friday: Why Skyrim Tries to Make Me a Dick


Skyrim is said to be the “Masterpiece” of modern day RPGs, but I don’t see how it can truly be a masterpiece when they don’t focus on morality. Morality is one of the best features a modern day RPG can have, and by morality, I mean giving the player choices, and letting them choose their character’s versions of right and wrong. It allows a player to choose between being an intelligent character who values the lives of others, or a berserker who kills all in his path. But in Skyrim, I found there to be a severe lack of moral choices, it’s almost like Skyrim is trying to make my character into a big dick!
First, I’m going to touch the basis for moral choices, which are choices within dialog. In most major RPGs you see the majority of moral choices within the game’s dialog; this is how essentially all choices are giving within the Mass Effect series. But within Skyrim, in main and major quests, the game does tend to give you choices, but not enough differentiating ones. And within side quests, you usually don’t have any moral choice at all and they are usually forced onto you with no other choices present. I found that usually moral choices aren’t even present in the main dialog and that it’s just different ways to say the same thing, and that you essentially will do what anyone asks of you like a bitch, without question. There are also no big choices that would affect a large span of opinions, say I just led the resistance to victory across Skyrim, and at the end, there are no big choices such as “I was wrong about you, and I don’t think you’re fit to lead *STAB*” and I don’t mean in this certain instance, I mean there are no choices like this within the whole game.
But, that example does bring me to another problem, which is unkillable NPCs; throughout all Elder Scrolls games I found this to be one of the biggest downfalls. If I thought the leader was unfit to lead, I don’t have the option of killing him myself, since he can’t be killed! So what if it doesn’t allow access to a quest or two, what matters is that it would have repercussions across the whole land, which would just expand the feeling of a living world, but instead you do the one biggest mistake a developer can do, which is straight up tell the players “no.”
Now telling the player “no” is acceptable in certain games, such as games like Dragon Age where it doesn’t allow you to kill any NPCs unless it’s part of a specific quest, but that’s less telling the player “no” than it is simply saying “it’s not within the mechanics of the game” which is fine. But since Skyrim allows you to randomly murder almost any NPC you want, having certain NPCs that you can’t kill isn’t excusable. I understand not allowing the player to kill core, main quest NPCs, but anyone outside of that should be killable by the player, though I never said they had to be easily killable. The difficulty of killing them would probably have something to do with the character’s level, which I would assume would be in a “tier” such as in DnD, only characters at the highest tier of level could kill a very important a well guarded person, but now I’m rambling on into RPG leveling and that’s a topic for a whole other Variety Friday, so moving on. Non-Killable NPCs may not have anything to do with morality upfront, but if you wanted to kill a crime leader or town mayor, those choices would be governed by what the player chooses as being right or wrong for their character.
Continuing on with moral choices within gameplay I find that random people tend to run up or try to kill me way too much. Now this wouldn’t be a problem on its own if the game would give you ways of knocking out or restraining NPCs other than a shout and about two spells, that really isn’t enough ways to give the player a choice of killing or not, more than half the time I find myself running away since I don’t actually have a reason to kill whoever’s attacking me, and I don’t want to be a dick. Also, the world of Skyrim isn’t as alive as the developers may have lead on to; I took the time to save a stranger I didn’t even know from execution and I saw him safely run away while I held off guards, then went and talked to him to have him simply say “hello”, and to find next time I came back to town that according to the citizens I didn’t save him at all!
If the game is going to let me stop an execution, at least allow the game to support the fact that I did stop an execution, instead of simply saying “What? No you didn’t…..” This is worse than a lack of moral choices, in that it is actually the false sense of choices. If you are going to try and build a living world, or at least a believable illusion of one, there’s no point in giving the player a false sense of morality because it ultimately takes away the “living” feel of the game, and makes the player less engaged. A game like Skyrim needs to focus on moral choices, or it will ultimately feel less engaging and not as good of a game. Because not having moral choices takes the depth and connection to the character away, makes the world feel less alive, and can ultimately force the player into acting like a dick.