Skyrim vs. Witcher 3, part 4: Immersion
We’ve talked about deciding the fate of the world.
We’ve talked about how to tell right from wrong.
We’ve talked about what it takes to be the mightiest hero of all.
Now it’s time to finish it: the final chapter of my head-to-head comparison of SKYRIM and WITCHER 3, two longstanding icons of open-world RPG fantasy epics. And this final bout is gonna have some additional heads getting in the mix.
In their official description for the game, Bethesda Game Studios writes: “SKYRIM reimagines and revolutionizes the open-world fantasy epic, bringing to life a complete virtual world open for you to explore any way you choose.” This is generic marketing bullshit, of course, same as any other game would boast - but it’s especially funny if you’re actually acquainted with Bethesda’s games, because they all look, work, and act the same. It’s hard to explain succinctly in words, but if you watch some gameplay from each of them, it’ll become pretty clear.
How can SKYRIM revolutionize the genre when it’s essentially the same game as OBLIVION (and FALLOUT 3 for that matter)?
As far as I can tell, the most revolutionary thing about SKYRIM is that it was just the “biggest” game in its class at its time - as in, the general consensus is that SKYRIM had the largest game world, with the most people and most enemies and most…just, things in general.
But being the “biggest” isn’t revolutionary by itself. If it were, this genre in particular would be getting “revolutionized” by every other major studio release, as the big dogs all compete to spend the most money to inflate whatever metric indicates how stupendous their product will be - a million side quests! a hojillion voice lines! ten gorillion pieces of armor and weaponry! - like they’re trying to build the Tower of Babel out of stacks of cash (and developer crunch hours). At the very least, WITCHER 3 can make the exact same claims, as you can see in articles from the time of its release breathlessly tabulating how it might be “one of the biggest games…well, ever”.
It makes sense why open-world RPGs would care about having a “big” world - it seems like the obvious way to ensure there’s tons of stuff for the player to explore and customize, which are the two main promises of the genre. But at the same time, there’s more to making a game engrossing than just how much there is to do, or how many different kinds of shot glasses a player can collect while travelling across a virtual map. I want to look at some of the design elements that aren’t just a question of studio resources. I want to talk about how you build a feeling that a world is real and rich and vast through structural choices.
I want to talk about that word that comes up whenever people talk about why they love a particular open world.
I want to talk about immersion.
When we’re talking about the experience of being “in” an open world, immersion is often the culmination and the punchline of many of the other elements we’ve discussed so far. Bethesda’s combat mechanics or morality systems might fluctuate from game to game, but their approach to immersion has been incredibly consistent, from OBLIVION’s release in 2006 to FALLOUT 76’s in 2018.
And boy, it sucks.
Yeah, that’s right, we’re not mincing words here anymore. We don’t need the words that finely chopped.
We need big chunks of words.
We’re making, like, a word stew.
Look, forget the metaphors, just come on.
Noise pollution
Immediately after SKYRIM’s release in November of 2011, the phrase “arrow to the knee” became a meme. For the zero of you that haven’t heard it yet, it’s from a line that town guards in SKYRIM sometimes say to you when you’re near them: “I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow to the knee.” Both in the game and in the real goddamn world, you couldn’t escape that phrase.
The image I had on shirt that I’d bought when I was first playing SKYRIM. It glowed in the dark. It was kinda rad, honestly.
Spawning an over-repeated meme isn’t unique to SKYRIM - the same thing happened with “the cake is a lie” in PORTAL right after that game’s release in October 2007. In that game, you play as the prisoner of an artificial intelligence that makes you perform increasingly dangerous tasks, promising to reward you with cake at the end of your trials. It becomes clear pretty quickly that this AI is actually just going to kill you, as evidenced most directly by a hidden chamber where you find a previous victim had written “the cake is a lie” all over the walls.
Yes, I also had PORTAL posters in my apartment around the same time I had that SKYRIM shirt. Why do you ask?
There’s a lot of reasons why phrases like these get memey - including how ridiculous they sound on their face. I shouldn’t read too much into it. But I can’t help but notice something.
“The cake is a lie” is from a memorable moment in the game that directly relates to a main theme throughout the first act of the game (that also comes back in the final battle against the murderous AI) - that is, the repeated promise of cake as a comically insufficient reward for enduring lethal danger. In fact, the promise of cake in the first place was an early indication that something is wrong. It was meant to be significant in the game.
“I took an arrow to the knee” is just a thing that strangers say to you sometimes for no reason beyond “they are near you”. It is said exclusively by characters who have no name other than “[adjective] guard”. It’s a unique and personal story - except it’s repeated to you by countless faceless characters all over the entire world of the game.
Even at the peak of SKYRIM’s popularity, when everyone (myself included) could do nothing by sing its praises, the fact that this phrase was the slogan of the game was a sign that something was deeply fucked about SKYRIM’s version of “immersion”.
The guards throughout SKYRIM are the source of a lot of these memes. Their random dialog includes other empty filler like “Let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll” and “No lollygagging”, but their most memetic phrases (after “arrow to the knee”) are the ones where they talk about dragons, because the things they say are clearly contradicted by gameplay. And by each other. If you stand next to one guard and let them cycle through their random dialog options, they’ll both express disbelief that dragons exist and assert that dragons definitely exist and we need to be prepared for them.
Most hilariously, they can say any of these lines regardless of whether or not a dragon is physically present right next to them. Sometimes they say them immediately after having fought a dragon.
If you stand next to this guard long enough, they’ll complain that they don’t get to fight dragons
If we’re going to talk about the role of dialog in immersion, the first comparison that comes to mind for me here isn’t WITCHER 3, actually. Disappointingly, WITCHER 3 has a lot of these problems, particularly around bark pools (that’s right, this series isn’t just a WITCHER 3 fluff piece! Surprise!) - it just doesn’t have them anywhere near as bad as SKYRIM does.
The game that puts both of these major releases to shame here is a much more recent, and much smaller, game.
HADES is a wildly successful hack-and-slash title by independent developer Supergiant Games, released in September 2020. It’s a rogue-like (technically, a “rogue-lite”, but I hate that term), which means it’s a game in which you fight your way through procedurally-generated dungeons over and over again (the genre is named after the 1980 video game ROGUE, the first majorly successful game of this type). The nature of rogue-likes is repetition: although the chambers you battle through are randomized and therefore each run is unique, the atoms of gameplay are repeated. There’s only so many different enemies, bosses, items, etc., and you are expected to fail and try again in succession constantly.
But one of the things HADES is most known for is, in a sense, its lack of repetition - specifically when it comes to dialog.
In the game, you play as Zagreus: a prince of the ancient Greek underworld ruled over by his father, Hades. Zagreus is obsessed with escaping the underworld, a feat which is intended to be impossible, as even its topography re-arranges itself to keep its denizens trapped. Throughout and between each of your doomed attempts, you can talk to friends, family, and foes (all rendered with the same level of wonderful voice acting that Supergiant has been famous for since their first release, BASTION, back in 2011). And despite the repetitive nature of rogue-likes, the dialog in HADES stays fresh for a long time.
I played for at least several dozen hours (likely much more, it’s hard to tell - time passes differently, both in the underworld and during pandemic-induced isolation) before I encountered even a single repeated exchange.
Each character has several “storylines” that you iteratively reveal over your numerous attempts to escape, but they also have deep wells of stand-alone dialog too. They will comment on the weapons you are using, particularly if you are using versions of them that remind them of someone else. They’ll comment on your relationships with other characters (for a while, I took screenshots each time a new character mentioned my boyfriend in-game). Do you have an item whose name references a real-world myth involving a character you’re talking to? You bet your ass there’s dialog for it.
They’ll even comment on how well your current run is going.
Virtually none of that dialog gets repeated, either - especially not the unique, personal stuff (like a particular god’s memories of having used a particular weapon).
For several days’ worth of nonstop play, it seems like characters in HADES never run out of things to say. This makes the story feel uniquely engrossing. Whereas other games generally ignore the repetitive nature of gameplay, only treating your one successful run as “canon” in their story, HADES acknowledges each and every individual attempt, gradually building relationships between the player and its cast as you get to know each other throughout and because of your long struggles together, rather than despite them.
By contrast, in SKYRIM a single faceless, nameless guard can’t even remember whether or not they’re supposed to think that the definitely-real dragons that pop up everywhere actually exist.
My first inclination was to think that HADES just put more effort into writing and recording dialog than SKYRIM did. In multiple interviews, Supergiant’s developers mentioned that their approach was to try to consider everything they could, and make sure they represented it in the game’s script. I figured that HADES just had more here than SKYRIM. So, I looked it up.
HADES has just over 21,000 voice lines and 30 fully-voiced characters, according to the devs.
SKYRIM has over 60,000 voice lines and who-knows-how-many fully-voiced characters, according to articles from around the game's release.
And it spirals into repetitive goofiness fast.
Yes, a huge open-world game like SKYRIM is going to have way more people you can interact with, and since they can't possibly make each one an individualized, fully-voiced character, there will need to be a lot of repetition. At the same time, though, the sheer amount and ubiquity of that repetition shines a spotlight on how careless SKYRIM is with its dialog - and by extension, how thoughtless its attempts at immersion are.
For example: How is dialog approached in each game, to begin with?
In HADES, characters only talk to you when you directly engage them in conversation or do something notable in front of them - and when they run out of things to say, they stop talking. You go up to someone, have your one conversation with them, and that’s it - you can’t talk to them again until something new happens. If the character doesn’t have anything new to say, they’ll give you just one short filler line, and that’s it. In this way, dialog is limited to what’s significant.
In SKYRIM, characters talk to you constantly. Whenever you begin conversation with someone, they say a generic greeting, and whenever you end the conversation, they say a generic farewell - like they were answering or exiting a phone call. If a character is present when something “noteworthy” is happening, which in SKYRIM can range anywhere from “seeing a dragon” to “it’s nighttime”, they’ll say something. If a character is near you for any reason, they’ll face you and say a random piece of generic dialog.
My favorite thing about this line is that I was playing as a gay lizard when she said it the first time. (And the next twenty times.)
The latter is an example of a “bark” - a piece of non-player character dialog that is triggered by some external event, rather than being part of a conversation with the player. Barks often sound dumb, especially after heavy repetition, but they can be important gameplay elements. For instance, in games with stealth-based combat, barks let the player know things like where enemy characters are, whether they’ve noticed the player’s actions, whether they’re injured or healthy, etc., all of which is useful info for the player.
SKYRIM does have stealth combat sections, and barks serve their functions there. But people in SKYRIM also bark non-step throughout the rest of the game. It’s an entire world full of verbose yappy dogs. Why build it this way?
There’s no mechanical function to having random townsfolk bark constantly. The player doesn’t need to know that they’re there, and their barks aren’t informative beyond announcing “I exist!”
They might be intended to establish characteristics of the setting and its inhabitants, but the nature of establishing information in a narrative is that you don’t repeat it constantly. But that’s pretty much what SKYRIM is doing: exposition and flavor dialog is coded like it’s equally vital for moment-to-moment gameplay as enemy intentions in stealth games. So what should be world-building dialog gets repeated until it’s immersion-defeating.
Not only is that a dumb idea, it’s executed even worse.
A lot of the time, when a character ends up near you they’ll even stop walking just to face you and keep dispensing unprompted and unrelated quips until you one of you moves, like a cross between a Roomba and a chatbot. This can even happen when you’re in the middle of an important story moment, which disables your controls until the conversation ends (SKYRIM’s version of a cutscene). So you can be stuck in place, while a random passerby stands in front of you and barks over important plot dialog.
It isn’t just voice clips that overlap, either - it’s personalities, too. Important pieces of characterization get repeated across different people. It shows up in their animations (like the way two people with polar opposite personalities sit in the exact same distinctive way, as you may’ve noticed in part one of this series), and it shows up in their dialog. There’s almost too many examples to list, so I’ll just share one of my favorites: a certain character (Balgruuf the Greater) will acidly address you with “What do want, milk-drinker?” whenever you’re near him, after you depose him in the war - something meant to be a bitter insult based on your specific history with him. That exact line also happens to be one of the generic barks of an unrelated blacksmith who likes you (Oengul War-Anvil). It’s the same sound clip, too.
By relying so heavily on barks, and triggering them so constantly, the majority of dialog that a player encounters is repetitive and generic. This might not be the intended experience, but it is certainly by design. After all, every single conversation with any character begins and ends with lines from their bark pool.
And so the world of SKYRIM doesn’t feel like it has three times the dialog of a small-studio indie rogue-like praised for its deep wells of conversation. It feels like you’re in a simulation running on the minimum settings.
Before that episode of RICK AND MORTY gave us an update to THE TRUMAN SHOW for these sorts of metaphors, do you know what I always visualized when thinking of SKYRIM’s dialog?
This thing:
Take a good, hard look at it.
What is it?
Well, let me tell you.
You see, in SKYRIM, almost every object in the game has a fully-rendered model and physics. That bucket in the corner? You can pick it up. Those torn bloody rags you found on the floor of a dungeon? You can keep them. That shovel? You can’t wield it or use it, but you sure can put it in your inventory.
These items have weight, which means they count against your overall inventory limit, but they have no function. Some can be sold, but most of them can only be sold for the bare minimum, if at all.
Now, I’m not saying that the world of SKYRIM should be devoid of all candelabras and silverware and junk. But I am saying that rendering all of that shit as interactable game objects when they have no function feels like a violation of the video-game-version of Grice’s maxim of relevance - that is, if you can interact with it, there will be some reason for you to do so. But there isn’t.
Which brings me to that big weird-looking thing there.
That’s the collar worn by death hounds, a type of enemy introduced in SKYRIM’s first major expansion.
It has no function. Just like a burnt book or a hacksaw in your inventory. It has weight, it can be sold for a tiny amount of money, and if you drop it on the floor it has physics associated with it. But it doesn’t do anything. You can’t put it on display anywhere. And it is part of the loot for every single death hound.
Which means that when the developers decided which new content they wanted to spend time adding to their game, they made the deliberate choice to create even more junk.
That’s what all these unnecessary, goofy, constant barks are: junk.
It’s as if Bethesda’s primary approach to immersion is the raw quantity of junk. And in that regards, we can learn a lot from their games. See, it sounds impressive to say “we fully rendered every object in every household”, right? But at the end of the day…it doesn’t matter how many knickknacks are rendered in your physics engine, it doesn’t matter how big your map is, it doesn’t matter how many voice lines you write and record.
If you don’t assemble them with consideration to their role and function in gameplay, then your big Tolkien-wannabe fantasy epic is gonna end up being best known for a stupid bark repeated by personality-less nobodies.
Where the story things are
But there’s more to say about WITCHER 3 and immersion than just “it’s not as bad as SKYRIM”. Ultimately, “immersion” isn’t just a question of verisimilitude; a lot of “immersion” comes down to getting so engrossed in a setting that the player begins to interact with it as though they were present in it (to some extent, at least).
You don’t need to build a full reality-simulator for that - you can achieve a lot of it with certain types of storytelling. In this regards, WITCHER 3 really shines a lot. To illustrate how, I’m going to walk you through four little stories from the first area of the game: a small town named White Orchard.
1.
Before the events of the game, the town of White Orchard had been under the rule of Lord Verrieres, a local noble residing in a nearby castle. The people in the area paid taxes to Verrieres in exchange for protection. Typical feudal stuff.
Recently, the Verrieres lordship fell apart. The only remains of their rule is the derelict ruins of the castle in the area. Since then, White Orchard was fully independent - until immediately before the game begins, when they were conquered by the Nilfgaardian Empire.
The empire now has an outpost in White Orchard. For lack of any better location, it’s in the ruins of the Verrieres castle, whose history they don’t know.
2.
There is an optional quest to look for special witcher gear, hidden within a tomb in the local cemetery. Unrelated to that quest, you can interact with one particular tombstone. It reads:
“Here lieth the mortal remains of Florian Verrieres, who died childless in the flower of his youth, stricken by apoplexie while hunting. May Melitele forgive him his sins against nature and its laws.”
There’s no quest associated with this inscription. There’s nothing you can do with this grave other than read it, and wonder.
3.
Your main story quest in White Orchard is to hunt a griffin that’s been attacking livestock and soldiers in the area. As usual, your hunt begins with an investigation at the site of the most recent griffin attack. If you’ve already happened across the soldiers’ bodies while exploring, you can go ahead and examine them.
If you haven’t, though, you will be directed to talk to the person who found the bodies first. Their name is Mislav, and they’re a hunter that lives on their own, outside the town proper. If you track down the hunter, you find him at the site of another, even fresher, body. You can ask him to lead you to the soldiers’ corpses…but there’s an optional dialog path, where you remark that it seems like Mislav recognizes the body in front of him.
He does. It belonged to a stablehand of Lord Verrieres - back when Mislav used to be the lord’s official hunter. Before he was cast out.
Again, you have the option to pursue this line of conversation. At first, Mislav simply says he was cast out for being a freak. If you press further, he eventually explains: Mislav was the lover of Lord Verrieres’ son, Florian. This particular stablehand was the one that discovered Mislav and Florian’s romance, and outed them to Florian’s father. As Florian’s tombstone suggests, the prevailing religion harshly stigmatized their love, and so the lord exiled Mislav. Heartbroken, Florian later hanged himself - which in turn led his severe father to fall into drinking.
A sordid history whose viscera are now baking in the sun, known only to Mislav.
And you. If you were in the right place and time to learn it.
4.
Unrelated to the main quest, there is a contract to hunt a different monster in the vicinity of White Orchard. Outside the town is the remains of a smaller settlement, now completely deserted - and haunted by a ghost that seems to live in its well.
People used to steer clear of the haunted grounds. But after the recent battle with the empire, the nearby river has become polluted with the bodies of fallen soldiers - leading some to need the clean water from the abandoned well, which requires dealing with the ghost.
If you want to help some more people out, or if you just want the extra money, you can take up this contract.
Exploring the settlement reveals it was burned down, recently enough that you can still find the journal of one of its inhabitants in the rubble. Apparently, as the Verrieres lordship was waning, one of the locals decided to break off and form an independent settlement that wouldn’t pay taxes to Verrieres. The ghost was born from the founder’s wife, Claer, when Verrieres and his men hanged her in the well and burned the settlement down.
A simple enough story.
When you deal with the ghost and go to collect your pay, you have yet another optional dialog path - this time to ask the quest-giver if they knew anyone involved with the settlement. They don’t, but they heard that Claer used to be friends with the local herbalist.
At this point, the contract is complete. There are no more game-assigned goals for you. If you want, though, you can find that herbalist and ask her about Claer.
She only knows bits and pieces - but she does have some pretty important insights into what actually happened at the abortive settlement:
“The lord and his retinue rode there to convince them to return. They were to be civil - no forcing, no bloodshed, but…you saw. Word is Claer said something about the lord’s son, Florian. Somethin’ that made the lord furious. But who knows the truth.”
Did you hear that? The sound of private tragedies clicking into place like gears in some wicked machine that carved out the history of this place?
You can trace a clear narrative line from a stablehand walking in on a pair of lovers, through the collapse of a fiefdom, all the way to people falling ill because they can’t access clean water from a haunted well.
At the same time, there’s also gaps for you to fill in with your own interpretation of characters and events. Claer’s remark to the elder Verrieres about Florian clearly cut deep - but was it because some part of him felt guilty over what he did to Mislav and Florian, or was it because he was humiliated by the story? And why did Claer say what she did? Did she just innocently mention Florian - or was she making a cruel remark, for which she paid a disproportionate price?
This is a more environmental approach to storytelling.
The history of Lord Verrieres and White Orchard could be told in a very straightforward and conventional way. (And indeed, the part of it that is told to you directly by Mislav is.) But many parts of it are scattered around the environment for you to discover and assemble on your own. You can find little details whose meaning is only apparent in conbination with other details - like the fact that Florian’s tombstone, while lying about the circumstances of his death, nonetheless includes a coded reference to the fact that he died for loving a hunter.
Environmental storytelling is often very important for story-driven open-world RPGs in particular, because it’s a way for the developers to tell a story without constraining the player freedom that’s central to the genre. These games are built on letting the player explore at their own direction - so if you don’t want your story to feel like an obligation that’s at odds with that desire to explore, you’re going to want to put pieces of it in the places players are already going.
SKYRIM attempts this, at times, but it doesn’t work out as well.
Part of that is because the world of SKYRIM is too player-centric for it to feel like it has stories of its own for you to uncover. Did you join the Dark Brotherhood? Turns out you’re the only person who can commune with their patron deity! First day at the Mages’ College? Psychic super-wizards say you’re the only person who can save the world (in addition to your normal main-story duties of saving the world from a different, unrelated apocalypse)! You can end up the champion of 15 different demon-gods (several of which directly oppose each other) simultaneously, become landed nobility in every province, and kill the goddamn emperor (which, of course, has no impact whatsoever on the major questline about the war with the empire).
You can’t piss on a goddamn leaf in SKYRIM without it giving you a prophecy that results in you becoming the fucking philosopher king of an ancient institution after just like four quests. No wonder everyone turns to look and talk to you whenever they get near you like you’re a social black hole. It verges on self-parody, if not for the fact that it’s all played with a completely straight face.
Bethesda’s ethos of “don’t ever let the player miss anything”, combined with the fact that every narrative you can experience in the game is centered on you, mean that their stories are often just told directly to you in single installments - rather than fragmented around an environment for you to find an interpret on your own. You don’t need to do anything outside of a single questline to learn something about that questline (or the people in it), because that would risk you missing something.
So nothing you do - no matter how preposterously incredible - affects anything else. (This approach also contributes to the sense of “moral amnesia” I mentioned in part two, where none of your actions during quests reflect on you after the quest is done.)
The nearest approximation of environmental storytelling in SKYRIM involves the Falmer. These are subterranean elf-like creatures that have become blind and monstrous over generations spent living underground. They would be just another monster in the game, if not for notes you can find that refer to them as “Snow Elves” - an ancient race that used to inhabit the land that is now called Skyrim.
Other lore you can find in the main game will tell you that humans invaded and conquered the Snow Elves in a long genocidal campaign when they first arrived in Skyrim. The Snow Elves were driven underground, eventually becoming the monsters that you find in the game. The only other piece of the puzzle is found during a completely unrelated quest, wherein a master thief is trying to steal a gem known as the “Eye of the Falmer”, which is extracted from a majestic underground statue - hinting at their prelapsarian state, and suggesting that “sight” might’ve been particularly significant to this mysterious people, who eventually all became congenitally blind. Who were the Snow Elves? What were they like? And what led to their transformation?
This all would be an example of environmental storytelling - except that the first official expansion for SKYRIM directly answers all of these questions in its main quest. And it does so in the most Bethesda of ways: with a character looking straight at you and rattling off all the lore, while your controls are disabled. (The answers are about as boring as it gets, too: They were poisoned by an evil race that wanted to enslave them. That’s…pretty much it, actually.)
The statue containing the last “Eye of the Falmer” - a memorial of what could’ve been a richer story, better told
This is supposed to be the history of an entire people, of the original inhabitants of Skyrim itself. And SKYRIM can’t muster the tapestry of intimate details and human stories that WITCHER 3 weaves together just to tell the history of the area around one relatively small town.
To be clear, WITCHER 3 doesn’t fully embrace environmental storytelling; most of the main story is a string of one-at-a-time “go here, learn that” quests. It has such a long and specific series of events that it’s hard to tell environmentally, but I don’t know which came first in the game’s development: a story so granular it risked becoming incomprehensible if parts are missing/out-of-order, or the mandate to stretch the story over a long sequence of straightforward and linear quests.
Outside of the main story, though, WITCHER 3 has several compelling examples of environmental storytelling (like White Orchard’s history) that provide a satisfying and engrossing narrative reward for exploring the world of the game, and understanding how it was shaped by the people in it who aren’t the player.
Perhaps the best example of this is the wide and messy web of stories and quests in the mid-part of WITCHER 3 that I can loosely collect under the name “The Ladies of the Wood”. (There’s a single specific quest with that name, but I’m referring to the larger set of interlocking quests and backstories involving those characters - not just the one quest.) The stories involved here are so disparate-yet-interrelated that I’d need to spend a whole series just to relate them all to you. Like in White Orchard, you encounter parts of it over the course of playing out the main story - but you also encounter different branches of this larger narrative out in the world, through contracts and side-quests and lore notes and conversations. It spans ancient rivalries between primordial beings, and the banal minutia of individual villagers trying to survive in a hostile land. It’s a vast network of roots and blood undergirding and entire forest - like an ant colony, it’s both one big thing and many small things, each with their own beginning, middle, and end. And it’s all delivered without needing to freeze your controls while a talking head info-dumps at you.
It’s good. Possibly worth the full price of WITCHER 3. Good enough that, even if I had the space, I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you.
Fortunately, I’ve got another example of environmental storytelling that I’m totally comfortable “spoiling”, because it’s from a game where the story “doesn’t matter” - but it still rocks.
Digging up the past
It’s not surprising that the examples of environmental storytelling I’ve described so far revolve around uncovering history. It turns out, humans just love synthesizing narratives out of disparate collections of details, and so we engage in untangling some “environmental storytelling” just by exploring our actual environment - and through it, exploring the past.
So before I get to a game that’s famous for taking environmental storytelling much further than WITCHER 3 did, I have to talk about paleontology.
The Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry has the densest concentration of Jurassic dinosaur fossils we’ve found so far. It’s weird for two main reasons: there’s about three times as many predators as prey animal remains in it, and they’re almost all the same animal - Allosaurus, the largest predator in that ecosystem.
As far as I know, there is still a very real debate about what happened there. I’m not a paleontologist, so all I can do is share the hypothesis that I think is most interesting, which I learned from the awesome folks at Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong. It goes something like this:
This prehistoric ecosystem cycled through two major seasons: wet and dry (like parts of modern Africa and Australia). The area in what is now the Cleveland-Lloyd quarry appears to have been around a temporary lake formed during one of the wet seasons, which drew in a variety of different herbivores and predators in roughly normal proportions.
The rains stopped, as they do, and the herbivores started going through all the plant life that was there.
But the rains didn’t come back. Which meant the green food in the area was vanishing for good.
As the herbivores succumb to starvation and predation, the ecosystem starts to implode. We can tell there was an unusual rate of herbivore death here because the fossils show evidence of bones that cracked due to exposure to the elements before they were fossilized, indicating that there were tons of carcasses just lying out in the open.
At first it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for the predators, but their food source is also running out. As they fight for what’s left, the apparent apex predator - Allosaurus - drives out all its competition. We can see this progression in the fossil record, as the proportion of Allosaurus remains gradually increases until they’re the only animals left at the site.
Visualization of the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry fossil record, taken from the Allosaurus episode on Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong
And still the rains don’t come back. There’s still no food. We start seeing juvenile Allosaurus remains. Which means that Allosaurus are dying young. Which suggests desperation-driven cannibalism.
By all indications, Allosaurus was an incredibly resilient animal in a harsh environment. But it doesn’t matter how strong or fast or clever you are if there’s just no food. Past the event horizon of this ecosystem, competition is only good for figuring out who dies last.
This is the sort of world you inhabit in DARK SOULS.
Released just a few months before SKYRIM, DARK SOULS is a fantasy RPG that emphasizes brutal and unforgiving combat in a highly lethal world. The story that you play out over the course of the game is extremely minimal, all things considered: You are an anonymous human cursed with undeath, and you challenge monsters and mythical figures simply because someone tells you it’s your destiny.
Despite this minimal story, the game (and its sequels) have inspired entire YouTube channels dedicated to cataloguing all of the lore and history in this setting. Outside of the opening cutscene, there is no exposition in the game. Virtually all of the lore is delivered through item descriptions and oblique clues like what type of damage an enemy is weak to, or where you find a specific corpse. As far as I can tell, DARK SOULS might be the game that put “environmental storytelling” in the lexicon of so many mainstream game reviewers.
In the setting of DARK SOULS, the very first time fire appeared it changed the world. The supernatural First Flame fueled the rise of ancient mythical beings, who ushered in an era of gods and heroes and prosperity known as the Age of Fire. But all flames run out of fuel eventually, and so the First Flame will fade, and with it, the Age of Fire…and the world as its inhabitants currently know it.
When the game begins, the First Flame is almost gone, and the world is derelict. Human civilizations have been consumed by a curse of undeath that grants effective immortality at the cost of one’s mind…so people shamble around their old homes and parishes as violent brainless husks. The survivors among the old gods and monsters of myth can be found, pacing in their lairs, waiting to slay whoever draws near as they too circle the drain. Most of the game’s memorable boss battles take place in ruins, empty castles, and graves. The game’s final boss is the god-hero that channeled the First Flame (now reduced to just embers on his sword), and after you defeat him you have the choice of rekindling it with your own body for another few meaningless years…or letting it go out right now, and being the last and mightiest Allosaurus to die alone on the cracked earth where a vibrant world once thrived.
Along the way, you can root around the remains of great beings and kingdoms if you want, and try to learn why you are doomed. But you are doomed all the same.
A lonely sword, barely orange with heat and surrounded by eons of ash, is all that remains of the First Flame
The choice you make at the end of the game ultimately doesn’t matter - the outcome will be the same, sooner or later. In a real sense, the story is over before the game begins. Instead of scripting moments where story will be delivered to you, DARK SOULS buries it, and it’s up to the player to dig it up.
This provides an additional type of reward for exploration - narrative. When in-game item descriptions provide most of your insight into the world, every piece of loot you find can be valuable regardless of its mechanical utility. Some item descriptions even reveal the closest thing the game has to “plot twists” - i.e. deceptions about the characters and world around you that you might not otherwise discover. The result is that fans are still excavating narrative details from item descriptions and hidden character models to this day.
Obviously, not everyone is into this stuff - especially in an action-centric game - but compare it to the sorts of rewards you get for exploring in SKYRIM: at best you get nondescript fungible loot, at worst you get junk that serves no function but to clog your inventory.
When you compare SKYRIM to games like WITCHER 3 or DARK SOULS, it becomes clear that Bethesda doesn’t seem to really know how to tell a story in an open world game (despite their ostensible decades of practice and “success”, fiscally if nothing else). These games are fundamentally about exploration, but the stories that SKYRIM wants to tell you are largely not found by exploring - they’re played in front of you, force-fed into your eyeballs like that scene from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
“…Thus, your Dragon Blood gives you an inborn ability to learn Words of Power. All Shouts are made up of three Words of Power. As you master each Word, your Shout will become progressively stronger. Master Einarth will now teach you ‘Ro,’ the second Word in Unrelenting Force. Ro means ‘Balance’…”
The things you do find through exploration are junk, with the biggest reward being a unique item that has no gameplay function (either literally, or just because it is obsoleted by another item, or useless for some other reason). Other developers have figured out that to tell an immersive story in an open world game, the story has to be in the world you explore - and you have to be able to find it by exploring.
In SKYRIM, everything either happens in front of you, or because of you, or not at all.
In DARK SOULS, everything has already happened, and you have to dedicate yourself to sifting through the bones of the past if you ever hope to understand their story.
Somewhere in between is WITCHER 3’s approach. There is a conventionally-told story that you can experience, one chapter at a time, by following the scripted linear path laid out by the developers. But the world is also shaped by people other than the protagonist, and you can find the imprints of them all around you - not just in physical objects and places, but in conversations with the people affected by or related to these events.
Is WITCHER 3 the apex of open-world storytelling? No, of course not. But it does manage to pull off some really impressive narrative experiences. And in particular, I’m impressed by how human they are. Where DARK SOULS tells mythological stories about beings that were so hungry they turned into a giant mouth, or where “gazing into the Abyss only for the Abyss to gaze back into you” isn’t a metaphor but a thing that literally happens, WITCHER 3 tells stories whose actors are people like the player. And in telling those sorts of stories, they just might invite us to see our own world in a similar way - to see human decisions as tapestries of desire and circumstances and history and momentum, to see the full messy web of intentions and outcomes and uncertainty that is what our lived stories look like in the real world.
At the very least, despite being a big-budget, corporate-made luxury good, WITCHER 3 shows that these sorts of narrative ambitions are within the scope of video games - even fun, dumb, addictive ones.
Emergent Immersion
a.k.a.
Tucking you in goodnight
On the product page for the VR version of SKYRIM, Bethesda claims it “reimagines the complete epic fantasy masterpiece with an unparalleled sense of scale, depth, and immersion” - as though the act of controlling the game’s camera with your neck instead of your joystick or mouse would change how the world is built, how everything is self-contained and irrelevant, how everyone barks at you and every drawer is full of junk.
But you know what?
There actually was a time when I did feel immersed in the game, kinda.
The people I talked to never seemed real, and lack of consequences for your choices pretty clearly seemed not to matter, but I still felt like I inhabited the world, in a weird way. I experienced this the most when I got my first house in the game.
Once I got it, refurbishing it became my top priority. After that, I spent hours fastidiously organizing everything within it, like I was a kid making my magical dream home. I picked which books went on which shelves. I organized all my alchemy ingredients. I allocated certain drawers and chests only for certain types of items - one was my wardrobe, which was separate from my gearbox, and separate from where I kept my potions, etc. For a while, I only went out adventuring to get more stuff for the house - restocking on food for the “kitchen”, for instance.
And each “night”, I would travel back to my house, change into a pair of robes I had decided were my pajamas, and went to bed.
The game didn’t give me any directive to do any of this. The most incentive it provided was a minor temporary buff that you get from sleeping in a bed you own, which I think got me started down this path, but then I ended up recreating some cozy facsimile of fantasy domestic life on my own.
I think there’s something really compelling about being able to basically play a (tiny version of a) life simulator like THE SIMS, in a totally different game built to handle things like magic and dragons and stuff. I dunno; something about being able to tuck yourself in at night in the game where you can shoot lightning from your hands makes it feel like you really can do anything in that world.
Of course, I’ve spent thousands of words outlining how little you really can do in SKYRIM, and how those things don’t matter - especially compared to how WITCHER 3 handles things. But this is one thing that SKYRIM let you do that WITCHER 3 doesn’t: deliberately pointless mundanities. I don’t think that’s something inherently valuable, and I definitely don’t think it’s really an intended experience, but I think it speaks to why so many people have the impression that SKYRIM is this deep and immersive experience.
There’s just enough stuff in SKYRIM that there’s plenty of potential for emergent play experiences - that is, for experiences that aren’t designed by the developers, but arise from the interaction between the players and the game’s systems. Things like deciding to tuck yourself in at night.
These aren’t typically qualities of heavily story-driven RPGs like SKYRIM. In a way, the reason why WITCHER 3 doesn’t let you do this sort of stuff is because it more competently delivered on its story elements, and tied its mechanics more closely to those story elements.
I’ve heard some reviewers say that they feel like Bethesda games are in their own genre, and I think we’re getting at why that is. They are branded and marketed as lore-heavy, story-driven, open-world RPGs - but they aren’t designed to deliver the expectations set by those labels all that well.
On the one hand, you have emergent experiences that seem like they want to evoke MINECRAFT: A vast world with enough components (and ways to arrange them) that feels endlessly explorable and customizable. (MINECRAFT’s official release was the same year as SKYRIM, but it had been available in early access for two years before then. SKYRIM even includes an Easter egg referencing MINECRAFT.)
And on the other hand, you have RPG elements so shallow and laser-focused on addictive play patterns that the game plays less like a fantasy epic and more like a sort of proto-looter-shooter. The term “looter shooter” wasn’t really in circulation when SKYRIM debuted, but it describes the core loop and instincts of SKYRIM very well: The main drive behind discovery is, 90% of the time, just loot. And the vast majority of loot is junk. Looter shooters like BORDERLANDS 2 gained some notoriety for exploiting the fact that players tend to feel rewards more acutely if they are somewhat infrequent and randomized. Thus, loot chests in those games tend to have junk in them, as the developers finesse the balance between payoff and bullshit to make a maximally addictive experience. If you think about a location in SKYRIM as being analogous to a loot chest in BORDERLANDS 2, a lot falls into place.
Like why the design elements outside of SKYRIM’s core loop of “walk around, find stuff” are so bad.
At the end of the day, a game like WITCHER 3 is better than a game like SKYRIM not just for the execution of any one individual element, but because so many more of the elements are in agreement with each other.
Once you take a long, hard look at SKYRIM, you can’t help but feel that on some level, the people making it didn’t know what game they actually wanted to make. Beyond want it to be big and epic and engrossing, what did SKYRIM want to do? It’s hard to know, because there’s not much of it that’s tailored to any particular end beyond the superficially apparent ones. They wanted you to be impressed with how big and detailed the world is, so it’s full of junk and people that equally just say “Look at me! I’m a thing in this game! Look how many things there are in this game!”, and nothing else.
It’s been said that the best thing about SKYRIM is the fact that you can mod it, and I completely agree.
The best version of SKYRIM is basically a weirdly-specific MINECRAFT server - a sandbox in which players can ignore a huge proportion of the narrative and setting that the developers assembled, and instead build their own visions out of the game’s pieces.
When I was working on the previous entries in this series, I vented at some friends about how hard it was to find screenshots of certain things from SKYRIM that made the game look good (believe it or not, I tried). One friend suggested I use mods to get the effect I wanted, and I think that’s just such a perfect encapsulation of this game.
WITCHER 3 is what it is, and it stands on its own as a coherent, cohesive, and compelling work.
The best parts of SKYRIM are what you brought to it.
And having gotten all that out of my system, it’s time for me to tuck myself in.
Goodnight.
Dream of better games.
