Sojourning Skyrim Again, or a Confession

Skyrim is nearly two years old, and the fun returns on the game have diminished little. After my Hard Drive Crisis of '13, I lost some of my save games--specifically my original character--but thanks to the Steam Cloud service, I retained the rest, specifically a female dark elf named Elaris. Burning stuff her thing. Burning it with * M A G I C *

I put about six hours into her game long before I got a new hard drive. By that point, I had returned to my original character, the defaultly named Prisoner whose Redguard background in one-handed weapons fueled his bloodlust. I had started Skyrim's expansion Dawnguard and joined a band of zealous vampire slayers to, uh, quite literally guard the dawn. My interests shifted back to The Witcher 2, so it was a long while before I traversed the cold mountain and Skyrim, home to Nords and giants alike.

I reinstalled Skyrim last week and saw only Elaris--no Prisoner--remained. I did not click on her save, instead I hopped into a new game. the long familiar intro of my character wheeled up to a small village in a prison wagon was still the same chore to sit through, but finally I was called up for execution, which meant I was called up for character creation. It's a curious thing that one's character should be birthed only a moment before they rest their neck on a chopping block. Leave it to those clever bastards at Bethesda.

Skyrim is a game of sandboxy freedom, and character creation is an extension of that. Want to be human? You've got four choices. Elf? Choose from a few different pointy-eared dudes. Cat-man? Sure. Lizard-lady? Fine. Dwarf? Go screw yourself.

Skyrim is part of a long series of games with an established lore that while they threw fifty different variations of fantasy tropes en masse towards your face, they wrote out the single best demi-human race the genre has even known: dwarves. Sure, dwarves are referred to and you can explore their steampunk ruins. But they're not Tolkien's brand of bearded badass. Oh no, they're just an extinct society of elves. There's a reason why The Hobbit focuses on a band of dwarves and not elves. Because elves suck.

And I don't mean this from an "elves are gay" position, because that's just an insult to the LGBT community. When it comes down to it, I cannot separate the word "elf" from its Christmas connotations. I've been immersed in fantasy long enough that I know full well that Tolkien was not referring to Santa's Little Helpers. I don't have this same issue with dwarves and Snow White because they mostly perform the same function. When they belt out "Hi-ho, it's off to work we go," you better believe they got some mining to do for gems and ore and stuff. Sure, we don't see them tear it up with ale and battle axes, but that's because Disney's a family company and they can't show that Sleepy's just in a perpetual drunken stupor.

So what do I go with in Skyrim? Khajiit, or anthropomorphic gypsy cat. Why? Because they're naturally stealthy, got claws they can use as weapons, and I DON'T LIKE ELVES

A Tale of Two Diablo IIIs, or Prelude to Couch Crawl

June 2012 saw the release of the long awaited sequel to Blizzard's action RPG franchise, Diablo III. The months leading up to its release were filled with excitement and anxiety as rabid fans salivated over the return to Diablo's dark fantasy world of Sanctuary but also dreaded its lack of gothic darkness. When it finally came out, the game was a polished product for sure, but Diablo's mechanics felt gutted. Some found it difficult to call it an RPG as character customization had now been limited to what breastplate your character was wearing. To some it was a failure, but to most critics it was a decent release, garnering an 88 on Metacritic.

Since its release, the auction house has come and gone and many who missed the previous iterations' depth of character progression had left to try alternatives like Torchlight II and Path of Exile. But in September 2013, we saw the release of Diablo III again, but this time for consoles. PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 users could now enjoy the hack and slash loot farming from their couches as opposed to leaning into a computer screen. Reviews for the console versions strayed not far from their PC counterpart with both versions getting an 86 on Metacritic.

This is not Diablo's first foray into the living room. The original crawled its way to PlayStation in 1998, only a couple years after its PC release. Gamespot gave Diablo for PSX an 8.1, praising it as a mostly successful translation of Diablo's addicting hybrid gameplay with a few animation hiccups. All in all, a formula for success. So it's no surprise that Diablo III saw the LCD light of flat screen televisions.

I bought Diablo III shortly after its PC release in 2012 and played it for about a week. Leading up to it, I had been playing Torchlight, which borrows heavily from the first two Diablo games (no doubt because of Torchlight's development team containing Diablo developers) and adds some unique mechanics like a pet to send all of your extra loot back to town for selling. A worthy successor for sure. Yes, it was cartoony to the point of bordering on juvenile, but the mechanics were something to write home about.

Diablo III lasted about a week for me. The story was middling at best--though who plays Diablo for the story? And while the dark aesthetic was preferable to Torchlight's, environments began to feel stale and recycled. While the randomly generated level mechanic of the Diablo series had made a return, there was only so much variety to see. Multiplayer was an alright experience when you had someone to play with, but I too was feeling miffed that I had no say in what stats to increase every time I hit a level. Sure, the monk's fisticuffs looked like a dream in full three-dimensional rendering with Havoc physics to boot, but for Cain's sake, I thought I was playing an RPG.

That's not to say I didn't like the game. I find it fun in bursts. But playing the game by one's self feels more like a chore than outright fun. So, I figure let's give the Xbox 360 version's couch co-op a shot. Sam doesn't game but she's been such a loving girlfriend to feign interest and give it a shot with Bioshock Infinite (damn her motion sickness!), and she's agreed to jump into Sanctuary with me. We'll give the demo a shot before we invest any further into the game (hello nearby Redbox).

God help us.

Whose Story is This Anyway?

Grand Theft Auto V offers a unique twisting of video game narratives with its new character switching mechanic. While the idea of switching from character to character on the fly is hardly a new idea--tactical World War II pseudo-shooter Hidden & Dangerous comes to mind--GTA V's concept offers an alteration to the concept that may be aped and explored in future games.

For the uninitiated, GTA V follows three protagonists--Michael, Trevor, and Franklin--as they paint the great fake state of San Andreas all the morbid shades of red that a vicious psychopath can fantasize about. At almost any given time, players can knock over a convenience store in Trevor's boots, press a button, and drive a (stolen) taxi as Michael, or go golfing with Franklin. The world is your blood-soaked oyster in which the player is arguably in three places at once. While playing as one character, the other two don't go into cold storage in a base location--they live their own lives. As the camera descends on a newly selected Trevor, the player discovers the unhinged self-made man shirtless and vomiting into a fountain. Switching to Franklin might show a less visceral scene of the rising young criminal Franklin washing his car in the driveway. 

GTA V's mechanic isn't mere suit-changing, however. While Hidden & Dangerous and GTA V couldn't differ more, H&D exemplifies the closest example to what we've seen of GTA V's quick head-switching. The same novel simplicity of pressing a button and seeing a different body with a different gun and different skill sets is present in a game that predates Rockstar North's latest release by over thirteen years. The basic AI can control the non-player-controlled characters to some degree while the player can select his own unit to play soldier with. They all work in tandem to complete their Nazi-blasting objectives.

But unlike GTA V, each character lacks a defining narrative. While each one might have a rich, elegant back story (unlikely) written up by the developer, they are inherently separate from the narrative of the game or the gameplay itself. Michael, Trevor, and Franklin's narratives never let up until the player takes the reins, and even then the player's agency in each character's story extends only so far. In between missions, players are left to their own devices--steal cars, evade police, sex up strippers--but when they get to the mission side of things, they only have so many choices to make. The choices increase during the game's exhilarating heist missions, such as who to hire on your crew or what approach to take, but then there is a struggle between whose tale the game is telling.

In Hidden & Dangerous, the player was not the commandos simultaneously but their commander. GTA V, however, wants us to believe that the player is an unholy trinity of sociopaths, three-in-one. I can't help but wonder if Rockstar wanted to revise the experience of GTA IV and its Episodes from Liberty City into a singular new game, and also grant players the ability to choose who to play as and when. In truth, GTA IV's collective protagonists never team up except for Niko and Johnny, but translating that dynamic into V would only serve to problematize the narrative. Players might find it harrowing to choose between playing as Niko present from a smuggled diamond deal or to play as Luis who interferes with said deal with the sharp report of an AK-47. But GTA V doesn't share that problem. The characters are allied.

From its beginning, I found myself wondering whose story is told in GTA V. The game continues to tell me that it's all three of their stories, but my brain keeps arguing otherwise. I find myself relating to Michael insofar as he is a white male with a keen interest in movies. But could this be an answer in itself? Could my relation to Michael be what makes the game his story? Could it be Trevor's story for another person? In a sandbox game like this where the characters come pre-developed, it's hard to say it's the "player's story," but in a series dominated by lone wolves, it's a shock to the system to have three rabid dogs with their own personalities. But GTA V is, after all, a game of freedom and choices. Choose your gun, choose your wheels, choose your avatar of destruction.