My Further Adventures in Skyrim
This Place Sucks, But How Can You Ever Leave?
(HI! Welcome to Caterpillar Steps, a newsletter by the writer and photographer Corbin Smith. I am writing today’s post from the Amaro’s Table location in Hazel Dell. When I was in high school it was an Applebee’s, but now it’s the only place open after Nine PM near my house. I worry that I present an inconvenience to the staff when I do this but sometimes you gotta leave the crib, because the crib is where Skyrim lives. If you like the newsletter and want to help me buy a new camera lens, you can feel free to deposit some cheddar in my Venmo account, @BigCorbs. Also please share with anyone you think might enjoy it.)
It’s 2023 and for the last few weeks Corbin Smith has been playing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on his Nintendo Switch. Skyrim is a famous video game from a decade ago created by Bethesda Gameworks. Once, Skyrim was a product at the bleeding edge of open world game development. It isn’t that anymore but it’s still satisfying, even while you’re in the middle of the game and tabulating all of its flaws one after another.
The combat and level design are clunky! (Unlike the last two Zelda games, which could be described as ‘Skyrim with design principles) The dialogue and characterizations are fucking terrible! (Outer Worlds, a product of Bethesda’s bete noire studio, Obsidian, is MUCH sharper) The ‘decision making’ if you can even call it that, only leads the player to varying degrees of butchering someone with a sword! (Baulder’s Gate III, Disco Elysiym). It looks like farts!
But when I sit down and fire it up I just… I vibe. Pull up the mission list, find one that could be fun, follow the little pin to where and whatever it leads me to. I’ve got two daughters I adopted, real estate holdings across the map, august titles in various cities, I am the defacto leader of a group of Werewolf themed adventurers, I’m enrolled at the magic school, I have a set of armor I got from a guy who was trapped in a goopy logic world, I’m an accomplished blacksmith, I killed Ulfric Stormcloak with a sick sword (his body is still in the throne room: clean this shit up guys!), I beat up an orc in prison. I’ve done it all baby and I want more, I demand more even though I played this game ten years ago and there are many, far superior games (and, like, books) that could (Should?) be drawing my attention at this point in time. (In fairness, one of those games, Baulder’s Gate III, doesn’t work for my Mac computer yet. It’s driving me insane.)
I’ve played so much that I began to feel I should get something useful out of the time I’ve dumped into it. And so, because no editor in the world is looking for Skyrim pieces in 2023, I am here, on my newsletter, sharing my thoughts about spending more time in Tamriel’s dumpiest, most racist subkingdom.
ONE: STARDEW VALLEYI have dumped an inexplicable amount of time into Stardew Valley. I own it on three different platforms, all with crops and wives and completed Jujubee packages and unlocked and children who are being neglected. If I redownloaded it again, I would get sucked in again, lose whole days to its soothing forward push, grind away one more day after another waiting for my corn to mature or my gold mining to pan out or whatever.
I am such a hopeless simp for the game that I deleted it from my Switch. Like I still own it, but in order to re engage I would need to go on the app store and redownload it from there, instead of seeing it on my main games menu and feeling the draw of temptation. It just devours my time, yanks on the fibers of my mind, keeps me dumping twenty minute increments into it’s endless maw for weeks at a time.
I am not sure Stardew Valley is a good game. It’s well designed, well balanced, it has a big canvas you can work on, but it’s also so… simple. It takes nothing to jack in, presents no challenges that time or organizational skills can’t overcome. There’s no friction, no challenge. Some of the storytelling cycles are a little interesting, but they all end after ten support levels. It’s an infinitely massive bar of soap and you are a razorblade, cutting more and more satisfying shapes into its surface and peeling them off deep into the night.
At some point during this recent Skyrim binge, I think when I was killing hundred of Falmer with an enchanted sword so I could meticulously harvest their grand souls so I could enchant some sick glass armor I had been working on for a while, I recognized Stardew Valley feelings and became distraught. Had I merely found a new hole to dump my compulsive progression piss into? Was this game actually bad?
Here is what I decided: no, it’s good. It’s good because the combat is good, and the combat remains central to everything you do, and if you play at a high enough difficulty, it’s hard as nails, a brain twister that wrenches your skull out of your head. When I say combat is good, I don’t mean the action feels good. As an action game it is clunky and weird. But even though it resembles an action game, it’s not really an action game: it’s a one man Real Time Roleplaying Game, with pausing and resource management and weapon selection and strategic shit.
This playthrough I’m sitting at expert (I tried master a while back… too hard, but maybe I’m just a fucking coward…), playing as a battlemage, I guess. I have some spells I uncork, I use summoning a lot (Draws your enemies off you), I have a battery of enchanted swords and a shield I use in one-on-ones. I was, at the outset, fucking with some steal stuff, but I bailed on it eventually. I played as a rogue guy when the game first came out and I wanted to do something else this time, I guess. I’ve got other ideas for guys, if, god forbid, I return to this game again in ten years. An Orc in heavy armor, playing stationary and surrounding himself with runes to disable the suckers when they come by for their whoopings. Mage, no armor, only stealth, sneaking around and executing people with Ice Spike over and over. Nord light armor warrior guy, no magic (Maybe restoration: obviously better than potions unless you’re in a pinch) but I’m also going whole hog on the werewolf mechanic, devouring dudes and living the good life AND I join the stormcloaks this time even though I find their whole Nord nationalism thing odious. I don’t even know what alteration magic does! Can I build something around that!?
Stardew Valley doesn’t have much of this. Sooner or later you unlock the greenhouse, you fill it with ancient plants, you make a bunch of wine, you age it in your basement, you never worry about money ever again. But you do feel, in building this little weirdo dragonborn, you’re the master of yourself, the fantasy freak of your dreams. There’s challenges, you have to solve them in the window you make for yourself, and it’s fucking fun. Even if some things feel constricting (more on this in a second), the sense that you’re just up to whatever when building your beast is so fun, so alive. I don’t regret it any more than any other video game I’ve played, which is to say, only a little bit.
TWO: THIS STORY IS TERRIBLE… OR IS IT?
Story, dialogue, characters… all very cursory, the product of a studio rushing to dump as much as they possibly can into this thing, design or narrative heft be damned. Sometimes it hits a fun note (Killing the orphanage owner and watching her miserable charges celebrate comes to mind) but usually you’re just skipping dialogue to get back to the glory of executing tasks and errands.
But I wonder if the vast expanses of space where characterization lives in a different game provide something that gives Skyrim the juice. Because even if the shit isn’t punching as a matter of specificity, there’s an affective forward motion to stuff that makes the feeling of being in it feel so alive. Someone needs something delivered across the map. You do it and the guy there mentions something about a cave or a lost ring or something. You go to the cave, which seems like a normal cave at first, you go deeper, and it turns out it's filled with ancient dragon shit. You fight hundreds of draugr, a big nasty final draugr, you stumble through the last door, you acquire a new power word and a banging sword. The specifics are nothing but your mind fills in the adventure in their absence. “My muscles were bulging there, I was deep in community with the fuckin devine. The Dragonborn does it again, baby.” You get the ring, return it to the guy. He says oh thanks, totally ignorant of the grim, psychedelic journey you have been on. He gives you five hundred pieces of gold. You sigh, because this is NOT in proportion with the length of the quest, but you are given a moment to realize that it wasn’t the reward you did it form, it was the journey. Rinse, repeat, forever into the infinite.
Points flying separate from each other and coming together in distinct little threads. You talk to some guy and the next thing you know, you’re in the shit. That shit… it’s good. It’s good in a way that only a video game can really pull off, the feeling of wandering snapping into something concrete, and the feeling that you, yourself, were the one who chose to make it happen. Even if the specifics are borderline nonexistent, the discovery unfolding in front of you is so soothing.
Other games have managed this in their ways, worked from this template and produced a superior product. They usually focus on character a little more, delve into specifics, make the tasks a little less sprawling. But the jank, the cruft, the burn parts just taste so good, here, when you find something worth cutting into. It makes you dream of a game that improves on this, maybe some better dialogue, maybe some more disciplined game design, without getting rid of the vagaries, the total control you have over your guy, the sprawl you can crawl around in. Look, TOTK is amazing, but don’t you miss the dank, sometimes?
The dank, Moe! The dank!
THREE: WHO IS THE DRAGONBORN???
When TOTK was coming out, I pitched a piece about Link. Who is Link? Is he you, is he you but better, more driven, is he a very specific separate elf boy from Hyrule who is good at swordsmanship? A citizen in the dream of a giant fish? I wanted to explore all the answers I could think of, the different ways the games have answered the question throughout the years. Editors weren’t into it, because I’m not a video game writer.
I will use this space to ask a similar question about the character from Skyrim: who IS the Dragonborn? My Answers:
ONE: Whoever you want them to be. (Aesthetic, tactically)
TWO: The entity doing whatever task is currently highlighted on the map.
THREE: A plague stalking the land and killing as many people as they possibly can.
The jank is good, but if we’re ever going to improve on these endless choose your own adventure sandboxes, we’ve gotta find solutions to shit that involve effort or skill but don’t inevitably end up with someone getting fucking run through with your sword. Today I did a quest on the Morrowind Adjacent DLC island in the Northeast (Cool part of the game check it out if you haven’t). A guy got kidnapped, I went to the shack where he was being held, I ran through like three Thalmor agents with my sword, he said hey man they want me to make nasty weapons for bad boys and I can’t let that happen, go find them and steal their map with all the nasty magic ore marked on it. I go to the ship and talk to the leader of the Thalmor. I select one dialogue option, clear the speech check, and he says ehh fuck it take the map I’ll go home. I was disappointed that I didn’t get to run them through with my mighty blade and I think that’s probably a huge flaw with the game.
The designers put some of this stuff in here but it never feels true like dealing death does which is weird because you deal way, way too much death for this to seem rational. IRL most people go their whole lives without killing someone. Someone who kills like… ten people has done way, way too much murder, so much that you have to declare their soul forfeit in some way. But in Skyrim you kill thousands of people, animals, monsters, ghosts, zombies, witch-bird-ladies, goblin boys, everything else you can imagine. You are a killing machine, first and foremost.
Skyrim has lore, Tamriel and the Elder Scrolls and all that, and the game gives you a sense of a living history that precedes you that you’re adding to on your journey as the Dragonborn. But musing on the stacks of corpses you produce, considering what students in Tamriel University seminars will be saying in seven hundred or so years… it doesn’t feel GOOD, you know? “Yes yes he rid the land of dragons and the machinations of the Thalmor and we are all thankful for that. Yes he was the leader of two different guilds and was also rumored to be the driving force behind the Thieves guild AND the Dark Brotherhood, a Thane in ten different cities, he beat Mirak in a goopworld, single handedly ended a Civil War one way or another… he was clearly accomplished, the most influential person of his era, but did he really have to personally create ten thousand plus corpses? Should we really be CELEBRATING this Dragonborn fellow, considering his terrifying individual body count? Wasn’t there another way to accomplish SOME of these goals?” I guess you’re sort of like Napoleon but if Napoleon didn’t command armies and he instead killed all of those people with his bare hands?
Look, I hope that someday someone makes a 3-D action/adventure open-ended simulation that integrates all this stuff without sacrificing the feeling of something that really sprawls out in every direction. In the absence of that game, Skyrim does fine for now. I am going to walk home and play it some more, now.