Summary
Whether RPGs are better off prioritising player freedom or endeavouring to have several doors slam shut every time you put another foot forwards in order to encourage multiple runs with different characters is, to put it bluntly, something I reckon will still be a matter of debate in the year 4000. We’ll all have evolved in non-corporeal beings floating in a galaxy that’s been racked by such change that even the six million copies of The Elder Scrolls 5 we’ve littered the Earth with will have been swept away into the great recycling bin on the gods’ desktop, and there’ll still be sniping going on about whether it’s ok that Skyrim lets you be a master thiefssassin who leads the companions, knows every spell under the sun, and slapped up a world-eating dragon for fun. For what it’s worth, the game’s lead designer reckons both games that do and don’t let you do that have their merits when executed well. Speaking to The Examined Game, ex-Bethesda dev Bruce Nesmith talked about being “pleasantly surprised” when playing Baldur’s Gate 3 just how much he enjoyed making “consequential decisions that closed off gameplay”. In Nesmith’s view, Larian “redefined things in a certain way” with their take on the D&D universe and the fantasy rules it plays by. However, he argued that there’s still merit to taking an approach more akin to Bethesda’s post-Morrowind Elder Scrolls entries and striving to make it possible for the player to see the majority of what the game has to offer in a single playthrough. “They were both fun,” he said. “They were just fun in different ways and that to me was part of the surprise. I would have expected to fall on one side or the other, as if they were things that you couldn’t have both [of]. The lesson learned is you can have both. I can enjoy this game over here that does it this way and enjoy this game over here that does it that way.” Watch on YouTube Nesmith made clear that he still thinks the idea of, with a few exceptions like Skyrim’s civil war, not gating the player off from the likes of doing multiple faction questlines is a “very good philosophy” that he supports. As much as it’s always a bit of a cop out to declare that everything’s equally good, actually, I do think that there’s merit in both approaches. I love the dedication the likes of New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and The Witcher 2 have to making you pick a path and see where it takes you at the expense of not seeing other stuff. Hell, the latter game’s infamous for being totally different depending on who you choose to waltz off with at the end of the opening act. That said, Skyrim’s open-endedness was undoubtedly one of the factors which made it so easy for me to get majorly into when I was just cutting my teeth in RPGs as a teenager. There’s value in such games existing, even if for plenty it might be as a gateway drug to games with crunchier and more challenging narratives that do demand you plug in your brain and carefully consider every choice you make. Whether there’s still as much value in being the gateway drug nowadays compared to in 2011 is the question The Elder Scrolls 6’ll likely answer whenever it rocks up. Coming as it is after the likes of BG3 and The Witcher 3 have had near Skyrim-level gangbusters success while leaning a lot more heavily into the hard stuff typically pegged as having less potential for mass appeal. For what it’s worth, while you can very much argue about the execution, Fallout 4’s main quest was a lot more choice-heavy than Fallout 3’s. So, Bethesda may well opt to pivot or make compromises in their player freedom-first ways if they feel some crunchier choice is in order. Read this next
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