Review: Skyrim Very Special Edition
Role-playing games (RPGs) are a particularly interesting genre of #VoiceGames, in so far as they have both a great potential for user engagement and retention, but also a considerable challenge in balancing meaningful degrees of freedom with the limited options of a voice user interface. Let’s start our deep dive into this very special genre by dissecting Skyrim, one of the most popular #VoiceFirst RPGs.
Wait, wasn’t this released back in 2017 or so?
In the fast-paced world of voice tech it certainly feels that way, but actually this #VoiceGame was released in June 2018. You might remember this popular release video by Bethesda:
From the trailer it’s pretty clear that it’s a parody version (based on the meme that Bethesda pushes Skyrim to every platform) — But to work as a good parody, it needs to reflect key elements of the original Skyrim experience reasonably well.
In this review we will investigate if and how it succeeds at that.
Alright, let’s start with some high level aspects. What’s the story of this #VoiceGame? And how does it fit into the Skyrim game world?
Skyrim’s Very Special Edition contains neither elements of the original Skyrim story of the Stormcloak rebellion or the dragon legacy, nor a story arc of its own.
However, it captures one aspect that typically occupies the Skyrim player way more than following the main quest: Roaming the open world and doing an endless series of side quests, most of which have the structure “Go to the dungeon, clear it, and (optionally) bring back a quest item”.
Doing such side quests is one hundred percent of what the game is about, story-wise. In fact, the structure of a quest is so fixed that it’s easy to reconstruct a state diagram for this game:
Hm, sounds rather monotonous. Is the game engaging then?
Quite so, and I would say for similar reasons that doing side quests are engaging to do in a video game:
- There’s some novelty in the esthetics of each quest, such as different quest givers, stories, dungeon types and layouts, opponents and quest items.
- By investing more resources (mainly time) into side quests, you get a more valuable experience out of the game, e.g. by increasing your skill level and improving your character stats and inventory.
- You’re up for new challenges.
Skyrim’s Very Special Edition has plenty of the first, a bit of the second, and little of the third.
How many different quests can there be? Don’t they get repetitive after a while?
They don’t really, because each quest is a combination of randomly selected elements. For example:
- The quest giver’s location can be a quaint farm, an abandoned tower, a foggy dock, a fortified town, an ancient standing stone, etc
- The quest giver can be a Redguard blacksmith, an Orc thief, a North forrester, a wood elf alchemist, etc
- A quest item is optional, but it can be a well-aged bottle of Skooma, a ceremonial blade etc
- The dungeon can be a misty mountain, an ancient fortress, a nearby cave, a dense forest, etc
- Dungeon passages vary by dungeon, but in a case of a forest dungeon could be a stream-filled glade, a foggy deadwood growth, a misty trail, a steep hill, a grassy footpath etc
- The opponents can be a deranged Khajiit, a black wolf, a flame atronach, an apprentice ige mage, a frostbite spider, a Draugr warlord etc
It’s interesting to note, however, that none of these randomly selected elements change the gameplay — From a game mechanics perspective, there’s no difference in fighting a flame atronach in an abandoned fortress to retrieve a quest item, or a werewolf in a dense forest to avenge the quest giver.
Of course, these auto-generated quests do become repetitive after a while, which is probably between the third and fifth quest. A strong factor that balances the randomness of the game experience are Alexa’s entertainingly dry inside joke remarks about game features:
Are there any kind of meaningful decisions you can make in the game?
While the decisions about which way you take in the overworld or within a dungeon are indeed meaningless, there is genuine game mechanics at work around engaging opponents: You can choose to either attack with a weapon, cast a spell, or use a shout (i.e. do a special kind of magic based on invoking the ancient dragon language, for those not familiar with Elder Scrolls lore) — Or flee, as a measure of last resort:
The game states that some opponents have partial resistance or complete immunity against some attacks (like draugrs against weapons, or atronachs against magic), but in my experience you can defeat any opponent with a maximum of five attacks of any type.
The way in which your choice of attack type is not meaningless is that it triggers a feedback loop: Each use of an attack type accumulates experience and contributes toward increasing your skill level for this type. Especially in the beginning your level increases quickly (I think it’s an simple arithmetic progression of 1, 2, 3, 4 etc successful strikes to get to the next level), and with increased level you deal out more damage.
The increase in level is typically accompanied by a text about you learning a new spell or shout, or finding a stronger weapon while looting the opponent’s remains:
Even after increasing your skill level and learning new spells and shouts, and obtaining new weapons, you can’t exercise any fine control over which spell, shout or weapon you want to use — There’s no inventory at all, so the line about health potions and ‘eating ALL THE CHEESE’ from the video doesn’t reflect what the actual game offers (‘The cheese is a lie’, to quote another games meme). The skill level system is a key feature of the actual Skyrim’s gameplay though, and makes the Skill itself more relatable to actual Skyrim players.
The increased power and use of stronger skills, spells and weapons definitely contributes to engagement (and retention, so some degree), in so far as you already made an investment to your character, and already get a slightly more enjoyable experience by being able to complete dungeons faster. Also, there’s a small factor of curiosity about the next spell, shout or weapon you can unlock.
Let’s talk a bit more about game esthetics. In the sample audio clips, we mostly heard Alexa talking. Are there sound effects, voice-over, background music or any other ways of spicing up the game experience?
Surprisingly, there aren’t — Quite in contrast to other media franchise Skills like Alexios, Mr Robot, Westworld, Jurassic World, Runescape and others, which make great use of voice acting and sound effects. This is especially surprising in so far as the Bethesda developers could easily have used audio assets from Skyrim without the need for voice acting.
I can only speculate about this decision, but one aspect I see is that the auto-generated quests work heavily with templates and slots, which would have posed a challenge in merging different voice-over audio files without disrupting the natural sentence prosody.
Another aspect is that Skyrim Very Special Edition is a parody Skill after all, so the immersion shouldn’t be too deep. The joke is that you can play Skyrim even on Alexa, which is as unlikely to provide the rich immersion of a video game as a pager, an Etch-A-Sketch or a smart fridge, so making use of Alexa’s voice is part of the parody.
So… Is it a good joke? Is Alexa a poor platform for a real RPG?
Good question, and it will take a couple of more reviews to answer that. But for the case of Skyrim we can state that it does a good job of conveying some of the original Skyrim feeling with a very constrained user interface, which is quite the astonishing achievement. For myself, I can easily imagine a highly immersive #VoiceGame that builds on this Skill’s mechanics, adds a background story, some more degrees of freedom and richer esthetics!
Did you play either the original or the voice adaptation of Skyrim? Do you think it’s a good example of how a #VoiceFirst RPG could work? What do or don’t you like about the Skill, and what are your thoughts on my analysis? I look forward to your comments, either here or in Twitter. Thanks for reading! :)
