E3 2011: Skyrim Demo Produces Dragon Battle Anxiety

I need you to know that I’m hopeful for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim‘s release and potential high quality RPG experience, however I was having a hard time resolving my expectations versus the presentation of the game world and combat. Let me take twenty steps back to explain exactly where this trepidation is coming from.

Skyrim was the first presentation I was treated to following the Tuesday opening of the E3 show floor. Thousands of Gamestop employees, games bloggers and assorted industry professionals crammed into the entryway elbow-to-elbow for about thirty minutes prior to the 12pm opening of the show floor. I’ve learned a critical lesson about not booking an appointment within the first hour of the first day of E3. Five minutes after the doors were opened and the biomass poured into the West Hall, I successfully navigated the herd and was sitting down in a very large (80+ occupant) theatre in the closed Bethesda booth for what looked to be a deep dive presentation of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Todd Hollenshead of id Software was off to my right, as was Todd Howard, looking at notes and calmly trying to join their booth’s WiFi network on his iPhone. At least ten more minutes rolled past before the room was more or less filled to capacity with media folk eager to see Bethesda’s latest open world fantasy epic. At the last minute, Justin McElroy from Joystiq came in and without many open seats, I motioned to him as there was an open seat to my left. Justin’s one of my game writing/humor Internet heroes, so I offered the seat to him as “King McElroy” which probably made me seem like a tool. Oh well.

The demo kicked off with a very relaxed Todd Howard handling an Xbox 360 controller and the screen showing off Skyrim‘s wintery mountain range forest environment. We were shown environmental details like insects, shadow effects and what looked like a vast draw distance. Todd explained that they debated developing Skyrim for next-gen consoles and PC specs, but drawing from their experiences with Oblivion, trying to develop a game with such a huge scope on new tools and hardware might not be as advantageous as working from a place of maturity on today’s established platforms.

I can’t speak about the visual quality of their PC version, but I for one wish they’d held back a few more years and struggled with new tech. Skyrim on Xbox 360 didn’t impress me as a major leap from Oblivion or the more recent Fallout 3. The environmental textures were pixellated, washed out and there didn’t seem to be any aliasing going on, so tree branches and other fine details were noticeably jagged.

The game’s not done and it was being demoed on a massive projection screen, so I’ll try and leave my complaints about the graphics engine aside. I had complaints about Oblivion (and to some degree Fallout 3) on account of how they handled level progression and character class design. Here they seem to have made a massive improvement by leveling your abilities individually instead of using the tired TES leveling system which was only functional for players who understood how to min/max their stats. In Skyrim, if you play like a battlemage, mixing spell combat with swordplay, you will level each skill accordingly.

Attribute bonuses are applied at special locations throughout the world in the form of magical stones which draw the player’s focus to the heavens where corresponding constellations (star signs) like “The Warrior” are displayed. I gave up on the first character I played for 8 hours in Oblivion because I didn’t level my combat abilities properly and was overpowered by every creature in the game. Hopefully with this new system, my play style will dictate the difficulty of combat, not some obtuse system that requires learning yet another RPG’s hidden designs for optimal character building.

Once we’d got a vertical slice of character progression, the new spells, inventory and weapon interfaces and functions were shown off. Spells have different levels of power depending on how long you take to cast. You can combine spells, each assigned to one hand, with impressive results. They’ve gone to great lengths to model each item in the inventory screens, so you loot whores out there will have thousands of bump-mapped items to rotate and inspect to your heart’s content.

There’s one new function that promises to add one more layer of flexibility to your battle arsenal: shouts. As “dragonborn” you are taught by the Greybeards (a group of secluded old men who are the only ones who can read the language of the dragons) how to read and speak words of power. You can compose more powerful shouts by combining these words of power. We were shown a high level shout “Wrath Storm Call” that summoned a lightening storm in the midst of a three way battle between the player a giant and two dragons. Yeah, that happened in our demo.

There are more details to share about how NPCs demonstrate their roles and jobs while in town, dynamic economies and multiple guild career tracks, but I’m going to wrap things up with a few words about combat in Skyrim. It’s the combat where Bethesda may have a hard time convincing the unconverted (see: mainstream gamer) that they’ve learned from past shortcomings and made battles as compelling as the other RPG trappings.

Todd explained that along with an overhauled graphics engine, they are now using Havok Behavior which he explained was an advanced animation system to provide more lifelike movement. We were treated to a classic dungeon romp through a sparsely lit cave, however once the sword started a’swinging I immediately lost the plot with the new animations. Every hit from the player’s sword seemed to produce a very unsatisfying reaction from the spiders, bandits, snow beasts, etc..

The swordplay still looks stiff and as clunky as ever from a movement and animation perspective. Maybe this is a greater problem with communicating melee combat from a first person perspective; the game can be played from an improved third person perspective as well, but I remain skeptical that this can be greatly improved on this late into production.

The final reveal for our 45 minute demo was Skyrim‘s marquee feature: dragon battles. As you’d expect there’s more to killing a dragon than one well-placed arrow or some harsh language. These beasts will be plentiful (nay, infinite) and yet, based on what felt like two battles that went on way too long, not a whole lot of fun to play. Todd attracted the attention of a nearby dragon by casting a fire spell (shout?) on an otherwise neutral giant, which caused the nearby dragon to also begin attacking the noble savage. The mechanics of how all of these members of the game’s ecosystem weren’t explained in great detail, but it was clear that using shouts allowed you some measure of interaction with the dragons of the North.

Not satisfied to watch the giant and dragon duke it out, Todd then proceeded to attack the circling dragon with arrows, spells and on the rare occasion it landed to deliver a plume of fire, he hacked at it with his sword. Apparently, this was one of the weaker dragons in the game as it soon fell and immediately began to turn to ember then ash, allowing the player to absorb some of its power. However, unexpectedly (based on my read of Todd’s reaction) a second dragon entered the scene and began kicking some serious ass. He explained that this wasn’t something you could expect to see too often in the game, but since their behavior was wholly dynamic, there was no way to control their movements (this was in stark contrast to the first dragon who appeared to be scripted to remain perched in preparation for our previous battle).

I admire Todd and the team for sticking it out and fighting a second prolonged battle, but this second fight only helped to reinforce my first impressions from minutes earlier – fighting dragons in Skyrim doesn’t look like any fun at all. Most of the time he was trying to hit the circling dragon as it flew around the area in menacing fashion. Only one time during the first battle did the dragon do something unexpected, which he explained was dynamic behavior (appearing lost behind a building then nearly stomping the player dead). What I would like to play is something that feels dynamic and frenetic; more akin to the dragon battle featured in Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire, where the dragon crawled all over the environment, gripping walls, hunting the player and feeling truly menacing.

Based on two extended battles I witnessed in the press demo, fighting dragons in Skyrim looks like an exercise in tedium and endurance. This is more of an indictment of combat as a whole for The Elder Scrolls franchise. While there have been years of major improvements in all conceivable areas of game design, the combat in each game feels like its stuck in the DOS age. I hope I’m completely wrong and the final product will scratch all itches: story, character, role playing, environmental immersion and combat. I just wouldn’t be surprised if all of the other ingredients excel at the sacrifice of the final element.