I've always loved Bethesda's Fallout 4 for being a stupid simple RPG that I can create neat builds pretty easily. It's definitely not the best RPG. A lot of the game play is very samey, so even when you're playing different builds, the overall game plan doesn't change too too much. Fallout doesn't have a lot of unique systems that the player can build off of, as something like Baldur's Gate has. Baldur's Gate has multiple classes that force the player to play completely different ways. In my first play through I played with my older brother so I only had to worry about 1 character Pavlovia my moon druid who would transform into an owl bear and jump in the middle of combat as a tank bruiser, but in my second play through I wanted to try something different and when I looked for new play styles I saw all sorts of very different party styles that could be played. For example, there was one build which involved covering the field in darkness using a summoned familiar unlocked with the Ranger class who's negative effects could be ignored by using select gear from select quests. Meanwhile, in Fallout, you are stuck with "do I do damage with explosives,energy,or ballistic" and "do I apply damage with ranged,melee,or throwables," which means that the amount of unique builds is often limited to how many stat multipliers you can stack in a specific category. This may sound like a point against Fallout 4, but there is a reason why I have 67 hours on Baldur's Gate compared to the 400 hours I've played Fallout 4. That reason is simplicity. Sure, I can go on and plan my whole team's stats out beforehand and make sure I make it to certain quests on time in order to get select Items that I need to get my build to be perfect. Or I can boot up Fallout 4 for the 100th time and just kinda wing it with a vague idea of what I wanna do.
While some people enjoy the in depth nature of complicated interwoven systems like Baldur's Gate, I'm a simple person who prefers simple games. While sometimes I'll seek out a game that challenges me, like Baldur's Gate. Most of the time, I just want to relax and do stupid stuff in stupid games, and it doesn't get stupider than Bethesda. The world of Bethesda games tend to be one big playground to allow their players to do whatever they want with very little consequences. Do you want to complete the Minute Men quest line by murdering every settlement you come across and claiming it as your own? Sure, why the hell not? You're the general after all. Do you want to launch multiple mini nukes into Diamond City center and kill 70% of the population, go crazy, just make sure you sleep at another settlement for 7 days and 7 nights, and Moe will polish your swatter with a smile on his face like nothing ever happened. This looseness of responsibility allows people like me to simply have fun with the game, see what we can do in it, and test the boundaries of what's possible in this game world. If I may get a tad philosophical for a moment. We humans, have an impulse to explore, try new things, and impose our will on our surroundings. However, this impulse is confined to consequence. Life is full of consequences, every action informs another, and every day we live with the weight of the actions of yesterday. We may want to confess our feelings for someone we're attracted to, but our fear of the consequences halts us. We may want to crack a joke or break the ice on a conversation with someone interesting, but again, we are stopped, even if for a moment, because of consequence. In this way, games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim serve as the perfect playground to let our urge to see what happens carry on without worrying about consequences. If I wanna beat the shit out of Mama Murphy for an hour, I better be able to god damnit
Now that I've defended myself for liking Bethesda slop, I can talk about the game I started writing this blog post about. Skyrim does everything I like about Bethesda games perfectly; it presents the player with a set of systems and allows them to explore them however they may like. For example, I've been a big fan of the Alchemy tree, in my current play through, I'm playing as a druid like character, and one of the more relaxing things is searching for various ingredients to craft poisons to tip my arrows. I always have fun whenever I kill a new monster or find a new ingredient in the vendor's inventory because I get to see all the new potions and poisons I can make. One big plus this game has for me is the way you level up. In Skyrim, most skills level as you use them. Whenever you pick pocket a ring you get a lil pick pocket XP. Whenever you cast Soul Trap on a dead Skeever, you get a lil bit of XP in Conjuration. The system's intended purpose, I imagine, is to encourage players who know what they want to zero in on one or two main skills while also letting players who are new to the game level skills passively as they figure things out. It would be an incredibly elegant solution to leveling if it weren't for the cheesing. Like with all things Bethesda, there are ways to cheese the leveling. If you cast Muffle a bunch, your Illusion will skyrocket. If you cast soul trap on M'aiq the Liar a few hundred times, you get to Conjuration 100 in like 20 minutes. While it would be a game breaking whole in most games, I feel like it works in Skyrim mostly because I couldn't care less about progression.
If Skyrim were a game like Baldur's Gate, where you got stronger as you explored the game world, and that was your reward for exploring, I think it'd be an incredibly shit system. However, as I said before, it's Skyrim, and if you give a shit about progression, just don't cheese it lmao. That is something I will say I didn't like too much about the game when I played it on legendary, now granted, these next few sections are going to be filled with skill issue but, but I feel like melee characters die too quickly on the harder difficulties. I could probably finish legendary pretty easily if I just rushed max level conjuration and had an army of Atronachs at my back, but for melee, you don't really have that option. I'm sure there are ways to go about cheesing the melee levels and armor levels, but I never did any of that, so my opinion on the matter is truthfully not that worth while. Skill issue over. I'm outta things to write about Skyrim, I wrote this more as a place to point to whenever I gotta defend myself for liking slop. So yeah, thanks for listening to me write words about vidya
