Cruise Elroy

After hundreds of hours with Morrowind and Oblivion, I’ve learned that much of my enjoyment of an open-world game hinges on its ability to conceal its boundaries. Once I’ve explored the map, grokked the AI, experimented with all the skills, and otherwise consumed the lion’s share of the “world” content, I feel like I’ve depleted the game in some way — regardless of whether or not I’ve finished the quests and other ostensible “game” content. It’s as though a switch flips in my brain and the setting changes from a world to a sandbox, and once that happens, no amount of squinting can make me un-notice the setting’s artificiality. While that doesn’t stop me from having fun, playing becomes a qualitatively different experience once the illusion is dispelled.

I’m sure that same switch will one day flip for Skyrim, but the scope has increased in so many directions that it’s proving to be incredibly resilient. More towns, more dungeons, more quests, dragons, shouts, housecarls, cooking, mining, smithing… The overwhelming sense of freedom and possibility persists as I close in on one hundred hours, and I still feel as though I could play the unmodded vanilla game forever.

So, yes: I like Skyrim a lot. With that said, though, I want to talk about one thing that’s been bothering me: Radiant Story.

The common wisdom with open-world games is that developer-created quests are all well and good, but the real story emerges from the interaction between the player’s choices and the world. That rings true to me, but most players still rely on quests over freeform exploration to push them along towards those moments. Bethesda realizes this, and has introduced a new system called Radiant Story that places potential quest markers over virtually everything in the game.

The general idea is that key elements of the story — the one told by the game, not by the player — can be generated procedurally to direct players to the most appropriate content. So, for example, the quests you pick up at the inn or guild hall can point you to a variety of locations and NPCs, and will prefer level-appropriate ones that you haven’t seen yet. From a purely mechanical perspective, this is a big win. Narratively, it’s not.

While I’ve always found the Elder Scrolls world compelling on a macro level — visit the loremasters at the Imperial Library, or read Kateri’s mind-bending series “The Metaphysics of Morrowind,” to see fans who appear to be playing a completely different game — I’ve never felt very strongly about the in-game stories. A few are great, most are serviceable, and some are dull. Many, though, are ultimately forgettable.

To its credit, Skyrim makes progress on this front by imbuing its characters with a bit more life. Thanks to improved voice acting and tighter writing, I could infer the motivations and foibles of Balgruuf and Ulfric in a way that I never could for, say, Baurus and Martin. (Even Lydia’s much-derided delivery of “I am sworn to carry your burdens” packs more personality into one line than some NPCs mustered over all of Oblivion.) No one’s going to confuse Skyrim for a Tolstoy novel, but it’s a welcome improvement — it feels like something more is at stake here than in past games.

Unfortunately, Radiant Story subverts that feeling; its biggest weakness is its tendency to make characters lifeless and interchangeable. One quest I got involved killing a random wild animal — in my case, a sabertooth tiger — that had invaded someone’s home. When I arrived, the tiger and I fought by the front door while a young girl watched from the living room, unfazed. (Her parents, presumably, were out at work.) Another quest tasked me with roughing up a random NPC in retaliation for some unspecified offense. As it happened, I had to pick a fight with Rorik of Rorikstead, a war veteran so revered that he had a town named after him, in the middle of an inn. Once the deed was done, no one acknowledged that anything had transpired between us — not even Rorik.

The implementation is crude in other ways as well. Because the people and places involved vary, quests are awkwardly presented in writing to circumvent the voice actors (or, worse, the relevant information simply appears in your quest log with no explanation). Also, some Radiant Story quests are repeatable — that is, you can keep going to the same quest-giver and keep getting new quests to kill animal x in location y, highlighting the system’s artificiality. Such a coarse approach obliterates even the meagerest attempt at telling a story.

Radiant Story frays Skyrim’s narrative threads exactly where they are already weakest — not only are the quests often nonsensical on their own (as with that indifferent girl and her neglectful parents), but they erode the progress made towards creating more distinguishable characters (as with Rorik’s obvious inappropriateness as a target). And by laying bare the mechanics of its quest construction, it threatens to flip that world-to-sandbox switch in my brain before I’ve fully absorbed what the game has to offer.

To be clear, this is not meant to be an indictment of procedural story as a concept. Skyrim is a first cut, and it’s easy to a imagine a more sophisticated system that addresses the issues I have. In fact, Bethesda designer Shane Liesegang has a great blog post on the potential for procedural story, and I’m confident that future iterations of Radiant Story will only improve. As implemented, though, its addition is doing more to dispel Skyrim’s magic for me than any number of quest bugs or repeated lines of dialog.