Posted January 03, 2014
There's actually a misconception about Elder Scrolls games that not all that much effort goes towards making the gameplay more interesting. The issue with them is that there's just SO MUCH GAMEPLAY. When designing gameplay mechanics, Bethesda has to design, implement, test and balance a mad amount of stuff, so much that it'll never work together flawlessly.
Let's just take a quick look at the stuff they have to do all that for: Alchemy, crafting, various forms of combat including archery, stealth, various forms of magic including stuff like necromancy, enchanting etc., and they have to polish the subsets of all those things as well. They have to do all this because TES games are all about player choice and accomodating for as wide range of gameplay options as humanly possible - every player will play a TES game differently, using different sets of skills, of equipment, all of this even further strengthened by the perk system added in Skyrim. You don't get your usual archetypes - you build a character you want to play, from a combination of skills you want to use. But that also means that playing a sneaky archer should feel just as good as playing a dagger-weilding assassin, which should feel just as good as playing a hardened warrior, which should feel just as good as playing an alchemist - basically, all these mechanics have to at least as good as the next one.
Most players don't see that tho - most players will just play a character they want to play and don't notice how is it they're able to do so. Let's say somebody plays a sword+shield wielding character - they can immediately start drawing comparisons to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, saying that the combat system was far superior there and that of TES is not deep enough. Of course it's not, combat is not the sole focus of TES (altho admittedly, Dark Messiah pulled stealth off rather well too. Mostly as a supplement to combat tho.) Every aspect you find in a TES game has been done better elsewhere - but I have not seen any other game which would combine all those aspects nearly as well as TES games.
Let's just take a quick look at the stuff they have to do all that for: Alchemy, crafting, various forms of combat including archery, stealth, various forms of magic including stuff like necromancy, enchanting etc., and they have to polish the subsets of all those things as well. They have to do all this because TES games are all about player choice and accomodating for as wide range of gameplay options as humanly possible - every player will play a TES game differently, using different sets of skills, of equipment, all of this even further strengthened by the perk system added in Skyrim. You don't get your usual archetypes - you build a character you want to play, from a combination of skills you want to use. But that also means that playing a sneaky archer should feel just as good as playing a dagger-weilding assassin, which should feel just as good as playing a hardened warrior, which should feel just as good as playing an alchemist - basically, all these mechanics have to at least as good as the next one.
Most players don't see that tho - most players will just play a character they want to play and don't notice how is it they're able to do so. Let's say somebody plays a sword+shield wielding character - they can immediately start drawing comparisons to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, saying that the combat system was far superior there and that of TES is not deep enough. Of course it's not, combat is not the sole focus of TES (altho admittedly, Dark Messiah pulled stealth off rather well too. Mostly as a supplement to combat tho.) Every aspect you find in a TES game has been done better elsewhere - but I have not seen any other game which would combine all those aspects nearly as well as TES games.
