The dulled resplendence of the wasteland surrounding me, a gun in my hand that barely functions and enough bullets to drop two, maybe three radroaches. Fallout is the series that first exposed me to the beauty of a game that stretches nearly into infinity, one where I could choose any direction to walk in with the full knowledge that adventure would be waiting for me there, and I would have true freedom to experience it in any way I wanted. Fallout: New Vegas, specifically, was the first game where I would just load it up and walk, get lost, and then get killed by some pricks from Caesar’s Legion. I never actually finished the game, because never has a story been more about the journey than the destination than with Fallout.
Before I began to explore the ruins of the Nevada desert I had, in fact, spent well over one hundred hours playing through The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. One might think that this game should be the one given the honor of introducing me to the ideal of the unending personal story set in an unbounded impersonal world, but I don’t think it is, that came later. As with a lot of thoughts that cross my mind on a drink-hazed friday night, I didn’t fully understand why it was that Fallout was different, that Fallout managed to make me feel not like I was playing a character in a nonsensically proportioned game, but myself exploring a place as real to me as Narnia is to Aslan.
At first the setting seemed the obvious culprit. While Fallout is itself set in a fantastical world it is one grounded in concepts that seem very real to me, like guns, cars and poor customer service. Skyrim, conversely, is a world grounded in the concepts of fantasy while being set in the mundanest of worlds. Talking cats everywhere, men wearing ill-advised hats, racism. The universe of Skyrim bears more similarity to the internet than it does to Earth, and it does little within this world to make it more interesting than the sum of its clichés.
The settling, however, isn’t the biggest factor. Perhaps the stories are what lets Skyrim down, preventing it from transcending virtual reality to become something that is virtually reality. It is true that side quests in Fallout vary from a murder mystery ending in brutal vigilante justice to finding a new brain for Elvis Presley’s robot dog. Those in Skyrim, barring the occasional interesting Daedric quest involving talking dogs and Wabbajacks, usually run along the lines of murdering vampires, saving life trees and other rote heroisms.
While these elements are important, personally I think the bigger problem is the philosophy of quest design in the Elder Scrolls compared to that in Fallout. While the morality meter is oft-maligned by those who quite rightly argue that virtue is more complicated than a swingometer, it quantifies the idea that there is no thrill to being the hero when we have no other option. Some quests in the Elder Scrolls let you make a choice, and these are often the best quests, but most do not. The ones that do often offer a choice that is either amoral or black and white. The concept of choice is not one that permeates the Elder Scrolls games in the same way that it does Fallout, and freedom without choice doesn’t feel very free at all.
Games like the Elder Scrolls and Fallout often suffer from poor central questlines. This is, of course, because these games are not about one line of narrative but are instead about lots of small stories coming together to tell you who the character you are playing really is, and what his or her place in the world could be. While it is often an illusion, by being so centrally focused on choice Fallout gives you the space to be anybody you want, neither good nor evil but somewhere in between, and by doing so it gives your character a viewpoint from which to look upon their world. The Elder Scrolls, on the other hand, gives you a painting but no frame, letting you experience a world but at the mundane level of a mundane character. The times when Skyrim lets you be who you want to be are the best, but by not committing to these moments The Elder Scrolls shows itself to be content with being explored by a faceless, voiceless protagonist.
