My Skyrim rant, which may also count as a review…

Hubby got Skyrim, and after watching him play through the first few levels on the Imperial side, I chose to play the game through as a Stormcloak. What I discovered in my short time playing is that Skyrim may possibly be the worst role-play game ever. This is because no matter which side you choose, or race, or gender, nothing about the story changes. There's no role-play in this RPG. This is a ride on rails offering players no choice except not to engage in the main story, and should you choose to only play side quests, the game makers call this "choice." It is not, and the moment you decide to go back to the main quest, the story proceeds as if you'd just come back from Helgen. The game world does not suffer for your procrastination, nor does anyone else step in to fill your "role." The prophecy cannot proceed without you, so the dragons all just sit around twiddling their talons until you're ready to come and kill them like a proper hero should.

I have a long, long list of problems with this game, but before I get to the glitches, I want to talk about my experience with the first dragon of the game, and use this to illustrate how almost all reviewers are nothing short of delusional for praising this game for "offering choices" to players. To call this the game of the year implies that nothing else came out in 2011 that was better, and I refuse to believe this garbage is the best that any company can do after blowing a few million in development. Sure, Rage sucked, but it didn't suck this badly. If we just have to hand out the award to someone, why not hand it to the latest Assassin's Creed? I didn't even play a demo for that and I'm sure it had to be better than this shit.

Let's talk about that dragon. I didn't kill it. I got up on the tower, thinking it would sit in a defensible position and shout down on the soldiers like it had at Helgen. No, the dragon changed from this good tactical choice and instead opted to fly around collecting arrows from the soldiers I accompanied. It collected enough arrows to stop flying, and the surviving troops brought the dragon down with swords and axes. I went downstairs and watched a guy climb onto the dragon's throat to stab a sword through the bottom of its jaw. That dude walked off, and I'm pushed to go to the body. Then bamf, I'm hit with the dragon's soul, and from there on out, everyone talked about how I killed the dragon. Even my own journal reads, "I killed the dragon." I didn't have anything to do with it. Minstrels have more involvement with this story than I did. And yet, the story doesn't care. There's no attempt from the writers to take alternate choices into account, so no matter what really happens, the game will still project the desired outcome to keep the ride firmly on the rails.

Let's talk about race. I chose to play as a Redguard, the black people of the game. I did this precisely because I thought there had to be something to playing a character who wasn't one of the white guys. Nope, not really. While I was in Whiterun, two Redguards are told they're not welcome in town. The Redguards also tell me that they're not welcome in town while telling their story. But the same guards who stopped them at the main gate let me into town, no problem.

After that point, I realized that only one guard had checked my credentials once, and then his only reason was because the dragon was "making everyone jumpy." It had nothing to do with the fact that I was the wrong race. And even though the guard claims everyone is jumpy, nobody acts jumpy. Not at my presence, and not in general. So thereafter, I started trying to get the guards to notice me. I went sneaking around new cities in the middle of the night, acting suspicious on purpose. But when I'd run into a guard, they'd either give me a passing glance or make a random comment like, "Need a new weapon? See ___, the town armor vendor." Oh, sure, that's a logical thing to say to a complete stranger sneaking through town in the middle of the night with flames rising from her palms. But no, once that one guard in one village is placated, all the others in every village just treat me like a regular member of the village. Even if my character wasn't black, this would be suspicious. That the game seems to acknowledge the two Redguard NPC characters' race, but that no one recognizes mine, shows how little thought was put into these so-called "random encounters."

And let me debunk this bullshit idea that "anything can happen in Skyrim." You will never see anything randomly occur. You will stumble over scripted events, and those events will force you to fight and kill something. If "anything" could really happen, then you should run across a traveling caravan of dwarves who challenge you to a drinking contest, or sneak across a scene of two wood elf lovers making out on a riverside. But here, the only "anything" possible is that something else will try to eat, rob, or kill you.

But let me keep going on the race problem. In Whiterun, there's a little old lady who walks up to you and asks point blank if you want to "do a good deed for a little old lady." Setting aside the fact that I'm a complete stranger that everyone talks to like a neighbor, the fact is, an old white woman wouldn't just walk up on a young black woman and address her as an equal. Not in a real world, and not in a high fantasy world where people are at war and suspicious of outsiders.

And this is how every NPC acts, like the member of a small hick town where nobody locks their doors, not paranoid villagers in a world at war. This is lazy writing, and every encounter is the same stroll through Mayberry RFD while the writers are telling me it's really tense around these parts. Really? Because you certainly can't tell it from listening to the gossip at the markets. (And yes, I really did hang out in the market to listen to the shit dialogue. At this point, I wish I hadn't, because it's all a waste of time, and a badly acted waste to boot. In this game "vocal talent" can only be applied in the loosest of meanings.) It's not just a little oopsie that makes the world slightly flawed. It's completely unrealistic given the setting, and that few people playing the game acknowledge the disparity between what the actors are saying and how they're acting irks me to no end.

Let's talk about animals. The game makers put game animals in so you can eat meat. Fact is, you can choose not to eat anything and you'll never starve. You don't need food to complete the game, and you'll never suffer ill effects from starvation. (Or sleep deprivation, though the game claims to give you bonuses for sleeping in a bed. The sheer stupidity of a sleep bonus is bad enough, but if you don't need to sleep, adding the bed doesn't change the game. It's another pointless distraction that was poorly implemented.) You don't need food at all. Gathering meat and hunting are just an extra feature tacked onto the dragon killing game.

Which would be great if the game hunting was a satisfying experience. But watching animals scale cliff walls at a 45-degree angle to the surface they're walking on makes me realize that the animal AI wasn't even coded to recognize when animals were in an inaccessible area. Their walk cycles look fake on level ground, and they don't react to damage because the modelers were too lazy to code those animation cycles. I watched a deer walk into a river, pause for five minutes with its head under water, and then walk out the other side of the river. Who knew deer were amphibious? I saw a deer walk up to a bear and get killed without once recognizing that a dangerous animal was in the area. Yet the same deer reacted to my presence, and they do seem to react to the wolves…after being bitten.

So no, hunting does not involve looking for tracks and following them, or looking for fecal piles or using other tracking skills. No, hunting in Skyrim means that when you finally stumble over a game animal, you kill it before it runs too far away. Wow, it's just like hunting in the real world, except that it's completely unrealistic and nothing at all like real hunting.

And, by the way, If you set animals on fire, they don't continue whatever else it was they were doing until the damage makes them drop. The animals weren't coded to react to spells or to blows from weapons. Like everything else in the game, just putting in the animals and assigning default behaviors was good enough. Actually making them simulate animal behavior was too hard for a development team with millions at their disposal.

The snow. God, I saw comics and read jokes about how amazing the snow is, how even people who hated snow in Britain were mesmerized by the "magical snow." Just one problem with that snow. It looks like shit. It's a particle effect with two kinds of generators. One is making fog to hide the origin of the snow particle generators, so it looks like the snow is smoking. This is something less than magical. Also? The particles aren't coded to die when they hit the ground plane. So many particles pass through the ground before an invisible wind kicks them back into the sky.

The violent wind on Skyrim blows particles of different types around the word every season, as if trying to convince me that the wind is pushing things around with gale force. Yet the trees are perfectly still. The weeds clustered here and there to hide the shitty grass texture don't move no matter how strongly the wind blows. Characters with long hair don't have so much as a stray lock fly up. Your arrows are unaffected by the wind whether you fire with, against, or across the simulated direction. This is like every facet of the game, where the designers made only the lowest level effort at simulating an action or effect, and even if the effect looks like shit, it was deemed good enough.

Once you get outside of the towns, the only other people you will encounter are bandits. You can't really avoid them or sneak around them, because the game's compass will intentionally walk you into these battles. You have no choice at trying to talk anyone down. You just kill things.

Bandits also pop up in places they shouldn't be. Take the first dungeon, where the character is pushed to go to learn how to "shout." When entering the site, you are attacked by bandits who are already on site to look for "the treasure." This would be the artifact that a wizard has been studying, and which no one else should know about, and yet, everyone and their mother already has a working knowledge of the location and "the treasure" it contains.

You enter the dungeon, and three tunnels are blocked by cobwebs. Yet, the bandits are already inside, somehow phasing through the webs even though they don't display any magic casting abilities. Then you rescue a thief, who somehow made it past a booby-trapped, puzzle-locked door, and then closed it behind himself and reset the lock…on the other side of the room which is now completely inaccessible to him. But setting aside the impossibility of his being in the tunnel ahead of the bandits who are also ahead of you, and who already got caught by the giant spider that sneaks around the bandits to reset the cobwebs, this thief tells you, "You're a fool, I will take the treasure for myself!"

The thief then dies in the next room, killed by a mummy who has already gotten back in their catacomb home and put their cobwebs back up before I could round the corner. The dead thief conveniently has the key I need to get through the next puzzle lock. Yes, because this location is really well known in the criminal world despite the wizard who hired me saying no one believes in these obscure legends anymore. BUT EVERY BANDIT IN THE WORLD KNOWS THE LEGEND AND BELIEVES IT ENOUGH TO COME TREAUSRE HUNTING. The writers say one thing in their world-building, but in the actual world, everyone is already more aware of the situation than the writers have claimed. It's like these villagers are all wearing smartphones and they're getting news updates as they happen. *Bee-deep* "Oh, guys, we have to go to this dungeon. The boss says he sent another hero to look for the dragonstone." (My version, despite being stupid, still makes more sense than the bandits already being on site at the dungeon and knowing about the same artifact I'm hunting.)

Reviewers are ignoring all of this, and they're praising the game like it's the greatest thing in the world. I haven't even mentioned actual bugs, or the awful blurriness of the textures. I'm just covering how bad the underlying design is. The bugs and textures are inconsequential at this point, because the game, even running properly, is a dog. And an ugly, mangy three-legged dog at that.

I wouldn't be so upset if people acknowledged the flatness of the world, but players are hyping this as "great world building" No, not really. Not even fucking close, hoss. This is a desperate, awful attempt at world building that falls flat in every way because NOTHING is thought out. It's a fantasy story as written by a hyperactive five-year-old after an all-night bender of snorting Pixie Stix off his sister's ass. The game is the same no matter what race you play. The game is the same no matter what choices you make. It's badly written. The side quests are stupid, and the extra skills built into the game are all distractions meant to hide the fact that the main game is shit. Nothing about the game looks or plays well. But this is the game of the year? Why? What did it do right to deserve such high praise?

When I play things like this, and I see how other people ignore all these flaws, I feel even more isolated from others. I shouldn't have entered a bleak depression just because a game sucks. But I'm in a bleak depression because so few people seem to notice how badly the game is made. It boasts a dozen races to choose from, and then becomes color-blind and plays the game through for every race as if you're a white human male. Making a racial change won't affect what spells you can or can't get. You'll still get the same skill tree with the same skills regardless of who you pick. I didn't even have to do anything to have a fireball and heal spell by default. Everyone is a mage, even if they aren't supposed to be.

"But Zoe," you say, "If Bethesda really wrote different stories to take race, gender, and characters class into account, it would take forever to finish." But ponder this, random stranger who conveniently says what I want to help me make my points: this game took forever to develop, and this is the result that came out of the process. It's got lazy writing, bad acting, poorly designed human and animal models, a combat system that is just awful…I really could run out breath before I run out of problems. But, y'all don't care about any of that "technical stuff." This is the game of the year, enough said. Best game ever.

Well, fuck you, fanboy, because I feel cheated after listening to you drool over this pile of shit like it was chocolate mousse. I have a sour stomach from being so angry, and I probably shouldn't be so upset. But every time I start to calm down, I think how this game cost millions to produce, and nobody cares that it's a shit job for what it cost. I feel like that one kid screaming, "But the emperor is butt naked!"

And I wouldn't mind so much if the fucking fanboys didn't tell me that the real reason I don't like it is that I'm against "this kind of game." It's not true! The reason I don't like the game is that it looks and plays like shit. You've chosen to ignore everything I see that's wrong in the game. Fine. Play with shit in the catbox and pretend it's awesomesuace in an open sandbox. But don't dismiss my problems like they don't exist, or like I'm just looking down on a fantasy game. The flaws are there, and you're choosing to ignore ALL OF THEM to praise the game. So when I complain about what's wrong, you ask me, "Why can't you see the good parts?" BECAUSE THERE AREN'T ANY GOOD PARTS, FANBOY. NOT THE STORY, OR THE ACTING, OR THE BASIC GAME ITSELF. It's a shit sandwich from start to finish.

So, I wouldn't just call Skyrim a little bad. I would call it soul crushingly, depressingly awful. It's so bad, I want to erase the game from my system and never acknowledge that I bothered trying it. If someone gave me a few million as a working budget and a team of software engineers, I could come up with something better than this shit. I give Skyrim no stars, and I find it lowers my faith in humanity for all the praise it's been given. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to open a bottle of rum, get drunk, and try and crash stuff in Forza 4. (A game that looks great no matter what speed I go.)