Skyrim vs. Witcher 3, part 1: The Open World
My brother and I have a bit of shared history with THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM. Collectively, the two of us have put well over a thousand hours of playtime into the game. We have a lot of fond memories with that game, which we revisit through constant in-jokes to this day.
We also both agree that it’s a very silly, very bad game. We’re laughing at it, not with it.
Some time after we first played SKYRIM together, my brother started recommending I play THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT. I spent a couple of years agreeing that I would give it a try but forgetting to actually get the game and start playing it.
One day I came home to find a copy of WITCHER 3 waiting in my mailbox. Fair enough, bro.
It didn’t take long after the game’s opening cutscenes for me to feel some pretty potent déjà vu. And it didn’t take long after that for me to go “Wait, is WITCHER 3 just a strictly better SKYRIM?”
I mean, yes, there are a lot of major differences between the games. Most of the core mechanics of gameplay aren’t the same, at all (combat and leveling up are fundamentally different across the two games). These aren’t the same game.
But in terms of cultural status, they share a lot of the same space: they’re both big-budget releases by major game studios (and were released only four years apart, after roughly the same amount of development time); they’re both extremely successful sword-and-sorcery action RPGs; and they’re both still considered exemplars of open-world games.
And fuck, SKYRIM is still being sold for its full initial retail price on some platforms, today, just about a full decade after its release. So even though more current titles like THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD are taking open-world games to new places, we clearly still have a closet full of cardboard boxes from our last move that we might as well unpack.
This will be the first entry in a series that compares SKYRIM and WITCHER 3, focusing on how each of them realize the concept of a high-fantasy, open-world game - a concept that is both commonly recognized, but also pretty complex. To do that in a way that takes less time than a full playthrough of these games, I’m going to talk mostly about high-level design choices, in terms of both mechanics and writing, that set these games apart.
If you’ve finished customizing your character’s nostril width, then let’s begin our discussion of open-world games in the obvious place: the actual world you inhabit in each game.
Setting the stage
In SKYRIM, you begin the game in the middle of a bloody conflict between an oppressive empire (bringing order but squelching local culture) and the local people called “Nords” (who value freedom and fighting, but are xenophobic, racist, and distrust magic).
In WITCHER 3, you begin the game in the middle of a bloody conflict between an oppressive empire (bringing order but squelching local culture) and the local people called “Nordlings” (who value freedom and fighting, but are xenophobic, racist, and distrust magic).
Neither game is about this conflict, but it’s the political backdrop of the world you explore in the game.
First, just to get it out of the way: This conflict has some real shitty themes. The false dichotomy between “a government that provides major social programs but is oppressive” and “a nationalistic sense of pride that champions freedom but is super racist” is a bullshit “culture war”-style perspective that excuses racism as a reasonable outgrowth of pride in your heritage and asserts that fixing issues on a societal scale necessarily requires unjust oppression of “the little guy” (who are usually the local racist majority, rather than the stand-ins for real-world marginalized groups). It’s a bad take now and it was a bad take back in the 2010s when these games came out. Open-world games often do this sort of thing cos they want the setting to seem “complicated” with “no easy answers”, so they saddle every ideology with exactly the drawbacks that its opponents accuse it of having. It’s the SOUTH PARK approach to “moral ambiguity”: just call both sides dumb, and don’t pay any attention to the cultural assumptions you’re making in doing so. SKYRIM actually does this slightly worse than WITCHER 3, but I’m not really gonna go into all the little reasons why. The rest of this essay isn’t about these issues; I just can’t responsibly talk about how the player interacts with the setting of each game without at least calling out this aspect of the setting first. It sucks.
OK, so now let’s talk about how the player interacts with the setting of each game.
In SKYRIM, you’re invited to choose a side as soon as you finish the first quest. Once you do, you have just one chance to defect to the other side (but not to reject both of them), after which you are pledged entirely to their cause, forever. From that point on, you become the greatest hero of your chosen side, single-handedly winning the war for them.
Despite this, you have no ability to actually engage with the meaty stuff underlying the war - you can’t argue with leadership about goals or methods, you can’t influence the ideology, none of that. Essentially, you just decide which side you want to call completely and unambiguously correct, and then you’re given a bunch of quests to go somewhere and kill all the enemies there. The civil war is simultaneously elevated to the foreground of the game’s narrative and demoted to the same status as a sidequest to exterminate rodents in a brewery basement.
Over the course of the questline, you reshape the political landscape of Skyrim. Each region in Skyrim is ruled by a Jarl, some of whom favor one side or the other in the war. After you win the war, the Jarls who favored the opposing side are replaced. This is often both frustrating and inconsequential.
For example: The region of Riften is initially ruled by Jarl Laila Law-Giver. If you press her, she admits that she favors the Nords over the empire, but she’s got bigger problems than the war. Her citizens are terrorized by a crime syndicate that’s responsible for shakedowns, sabotage, assassinations - the gang’s all here. The organization is run by Maven Black-Briar, a character whose dialog consists almost exclusively of variations on the phrase “If you don’t do what I say, I’ll do something terrible to you”. Regardless of your stance on the civil war, Laila is a clearly sympathetic figure, and Maven has no ideology to speak of beyond simple greed.
But technically Laila opposes the empire. So if you side with the empire in the war, Laila eventually gets replaced…by Maven. Yeah, really. This is both terrible and dumb: Appointing a crime boss as Jarl of a region has nothing to do with the goals or ideology of the empire, nor is it part of some larger message about corruption in the empire or anything.
And the kicker is that this doesn’t really change anything in the world of the game, beyond the outfits of the person who sits on the throne and the guards standing behind them.
Laila Law-Giver, a Jarl who wants to help the people of her impoverished region escape the grip of crime families
Maven Black-Briar as Jarl, who only has two dialog exchanges where she isn’t threatening and/or insulting someone
In WITCHER 3, you're not the hero of the war - you’re just a passer-by. While you have sympathies for the Nordlings (who are being invaded by the empire of this game), you also have friends and enemies spanning every side of the conflict, many of whom are just trying to survive. While you are still an impossibly powerful RPG action hero with direct connections to people like emperors and kings, you are still only a small part of the political stage - the conflict here exists on the scale of armies, not individuals.
As a result, you engage with the conflict on a individual level. You never do anything like declare an unchangeable allegiance to one side or another, which leaves you the freedom and flexibility to express your own personal ethics with a lot of nuance.
(You can work your way up to changing the outcome of war - but you only get the option to do so near the end of the game, after having completed a long and complex series of quests that you have to go out of your way to find.)
For example: In the first town, the local blacksmith is the only dwarf. Since the empire is occupying this area and the local garrison has the smith fill their orders, a villager who thinks all dwarves are greedy went and burned the blacksmith’s shop down.
After you find all this out, you get the option to turn the arsonist over to the dwarf, which I definitely did without any hesitation. But then the dwarf - feeling like the town had turned against him - turns the brat over to the occupying army, and they promptly execute him. This didn’t feel great: I wanted to see the racially-motivated crime be answered, but I also didn’t want to invoke an extrajudicial execution by an occupying force.
However, the game wasn’t forcing me to pick a side in the larger conflict at play. Although turning in the arsonist made the empire happier with me (in a very minor way), I still refused every work offer and sidequest from the occupiers, and helped the people of the town as much as I could.
SKYRIM basically asks you whether your favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate or vanilla, and then makes you kill everyone who chose the other flavor. The morality of the entire setting consists of two options, and the game asks you to buy into the entire package up front and without reservation.
In WITCHER 3, I was open to see how I wanted to participate in the larger conflict at the scale of daily life. The world didn’t need me to decide unilaterally who was right and who was wrong.
But morality will be the topic for the next entry in this series. For now, let’s talk a bit more about changing the world.
What matters in the end
Open-world RPGs often have issues around giving the player choice (especially story-driven ones), which partly comes from two genre tendencies:
Open-world games prioritize player-led exploration
RPGs prioritize player-led customization
No genre definition is going to be perfect, and any given game will manifest these tendencies to different degrees, but these are pretty observable trends. When you put the two of them together into one game, you get something with an identity that heavily relies on:
Giving the player a world in which they can do/see/collect/etc. as much as possible, to be found at their own direction
Giving the player as many meaningful decisions as possible, to express their own unique character/storyline/etc.
There's kind of an inherent tension between those two things, though. On one hand, the game wants to make everything available to you - and on the other hand, it wants you to choose certain things at the expense of others. Making decisions means taking things away (typically).
This isn’t a new dilemma, but it is an important one. Each open-world game has to decide how it’s going to handle this tension - and the approach taken has major implications for how the player experiences the game’s world. Lemme walk you through a couple questlines from these games to show you how SKYRIM and WITCHER 3 each tackle this challenge:
. . .
Skyrim’s questline: “Dawnguard”
“Dawnguard” is the first expansion for SKYRIM. Instead of picking just one quest, I’m going to talk about the series of quests that comprises the main story of the whole expansion.
Some context: An ancient vampire clan has arisen, and their evil patriarch wants to perform a ritual that will permanently blot out the sun - giving vampires total dominion over the world. Your main companion in this story is the daughter of the vampire patriarch, who thinks maybe this isn't super groovy (despite being a vampire herself).
Early on in the quest, you are brought before the evil patriarch and given two choices: Become a powerful vampire lord and help them cover the planet in eternal night, or fight to stop them.
Amazingly, your decision doesn’t change the story.
If you reject them, you keep on fighting evil vampires just like you were doing before, then eventually you kill the evil patriarch and stop the ritual, saving the world from eternal darkness and vampire rule.
If you join them, you get to be an evil vampire and keep humans in cages like cattle and all that…then the daughter tells you her dad is insane and must be stopped anyway, so you still gotta kill him. If you want, you can then complete the ritual yourself - which, again, blots out the fucking sun - and…that’s it. Nothing changes.
I mean, sure, you get some minor perks half the time (e.g. your stamina regenerates slightly faster than it normally would during the day), but the world is essentially the same as it was before. You're the vampire lord of the planet and there's no sun anymore, but town guards still say “Let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll?” when they pass you by.
Oh, and the sun only stays dark for a day at a time. Yeah, turns out the big scary ritual apparently needs to be reapplied daily (evil patriarch should’ve at least gotten a year-long subscription). Why were we in such a hurry to stop this, again?
Things that are optional in SKYRIM, a partial list: Side quests; self-reflection; the fucking sun
Joining the evil vampires isn’t even the only way to get super vampire powers - the patriarch’s daughter can give them to you no matter which way the story goes.
SKYRIM’s developers wanted to make sure you could always do everything you want, regardless of any decisions you make. So, the result is that your decisions can’t matter, because that would lock you out of stuff. Indeed, how can you make your big choices matter while still keeping the open world...open?
WITCHER 3 solves this through narrative: Your choice don't necessarily change the world or the overall story, but they do change what happens to characters. And that matters to you, because you get heavily invested in those characters.
. . .
WITCHER 3’s Questline: “King’s Gambit”
Some context: The various clans of the Skellige Islands are about to choose the next king to rule over them all. Among the candidates are a brother and sister, both of whom are brave warriors. The brother, Hjalmar, is a stereotypical Viking: hot-tempered and battle-eager. The sister, Cerys, is more level-headed and thoughtful, but a lot of the islanders don't think a woman could rule them. The quest begins when you attend a feast being hosted by the siblings’ family before the clan heads select the new king.
At the feast, some of the attendees turn into bears and go berserk, and many die in the ensuing bloodbath. Once the bears are dealt with, the siblings have different instincts of what to do next: Hjalmar thinks he knows who is behind this and wants to immediately go to their house and crack some skulls, and Cerys wants to examine the carnage for clues while the scene is fresh. You can side with either sibling, or go and do your own thing.
I thought Hjalmar was a dumb jerk, so I went with Cerys. We had ourselves a fun little mystery romp - we tracked down clues, someone tried to lock us in a deathtrap, there was a chase to catch the culprit, we grilled him to find who the real mastermind was - and it all culminated in a dramatic confrontation with the mastermind, who despite all of our sleuthing nearly gets away with it until an emotional revelation from an unexpected source unravels their deceit. I laughed, I cried, it was a fun ride for the whole family - four stars.
So why am I telling you about this little whodunit?
Well, in the next quest, Cerys got elected queen of the Skellige clans for her part in solving the mystery and bringing the guilty to justice - at which point, I figured that whoever I help becomes the new ruler, kinda like how you end up picking the Jarls in Skyrim based on who you support in the war.
So, I looked it up - and yeah, your choice of who to help out during “King’s Gambit” does in fact determine the next ruler of Skellige. But the quest plays out pretty differently depending on what you choose to do:
If you help Hjalmar, you do indeed ride off and crack some skulls. By avenging those who were killed at the feast, he clears his family’s honor and proves his mettle, and for those accomplishments he is made king…but you never find out who the mastermind is. They go undiscovered and unpunished.
And if you didn’t help either of the siblings? Then the mastermind’s plan worked, and someone else becomes king. Later on, Skellige is attacked, and Hjalmar and Cerys die in battle - cutting them out of the roles in the game’s story that they would’ve otherwise had later on. Not only that, the new king changes the laws of succession, and establishes the first hereditary dynasty in Skellige. Multiple characters die and the laws of an entire region are changed!
Things that aren’t optional in WITCHER 3, a partial list: Eyeliner
Now, of course, the game-world doesn’t end up mechanically all that different regardless of who sits on the throne of Skellige, just as it’s not mechanically different regardless of who sits on the throne of Riften. There are just enough mechanical consequences that it doesn’t feel as empty as “the sun is gone forever! jklol”, but a lot of the bigger pieces are still ultimately in the same places on the board.
But even though the destination is loosely “the same”, there are asymmetrical payoffs depending on the path you take to get there.
If you’re motivated by the story, you can go sleuthing with Cerys, which gives you story-related payoffs like discovering the mastermind and learning more about the politics of the region. If you’re motivated by combat, you can roll up with Hjalmar, getting a bit more experience points for your trouble, which you can then invest further into combat abilities. (Cerys’ path also has some unique loot along the way, so it’s not like siding with her is strictly worse from a mechanical perspective.) By giving you asymmetric options, the game lets you make a decision that has a more satisfying payoff.
By contrast, SKYRIM’s developers wanted to make sure you could virtually always get everything you want, regardless of any decisions you make - especially for the major storylines. So, the result is that the biggest decisions you make (in narrative terms) can’t matter, because that would lock you out of stuff. In combination with the fact that there’s not much narrative payoff for choosing one option over another (it mostly just changes who talks to you), the result is that there’s very little reason to make one choice over another - so why make them at all?
The road (not) taken
A common impulse when replaying games with branching decisions is to make different choices from the first time you played (e.g. "OK, now what happens if I play the game like a bad guy, and make all the evil choices").
To a degree, this comes with the territory - players will often be curious to know what’s behind the other door; it’s a way of exploring more of what the game has to offer. But I think that if you look at the underlying motivations to want to take a different route in subsequent playthroughs, it can reveal something about the nature of the choices themselves.
After finishing the main story on my first playthrough of SKYRIM, I swiftly made a new character just to choose the other side in the war. I wasn’t particularly happy with how the side I had initially chosen ended up, so I was hoping to find something that played out substantially differently from my first playthrough. But there was none: the quest line for each side in the civil war is a mirror of the other side. Because the developers wanted to ensure that there is no opportunity cost for basically any major decision you make, the decisions themselves don’t have meaning, and therefore the game has less content that you would find satisfying. The decisions I faced in SKYRIM had so little weight or payoff that I was totally ready to go “aight, what if I did the all of the exact opposite things”.
By contrast, when I replayed WITCHER 3 I made pretty much all the same major story decisions as the first time around. I felt like I had enough agency to make decisions that reflected my own feelings relatively well, and I was satisfied with the payoff that resulted - so replaying the game as my own evil twin didn’t have anything to offer me. On top of that, I was invested enough in the choices I did make that it felt uncomfortable to go against them. I replayed WITCHER 3 not because I was hungry for better content, but because I was happy with the content I got, and I wanted to continue enjoying it.
This isn’t black-and-white. Not everyone is going to relate to their decisions in these games the same way I do - I spent like 30 minutes staring at my ceiling trying to make the “right” choice at the end of BASTION even though it literally only affects which ending cinematic I get - and wanting to replay a game and make different choices isn’t always a sign that the choices don’t matter. Hell, the ability to replay a game and experience a different narrative is one of the unique properties of games as narrative media.
But SKYRIM is a story-driven RPG, and it’s telling that one of the more common traditions with it is to explore a complete moral inversion of your initial decisions. A new playthrough becomes, essentially, a cosmetic re-skin of your first playthrough. When a game removes both the opportunity cost and the payoff for your decisions, then each juncture is just a chance to talk to a cardboard cut-out with a voicebox taped to it, that asks you a question but then always says the same thing regardless of your answer.
That’s not an open world - it’s an empty world.
