Another post that’s nominally about Skyrim, but actually about a broader topic related to game design, using Skyrim as an example and as a springboard. Here we go.

So there you are in Skyrim, going about your business, stealing, killing, saving the world. Maybe on a mission, maybe just wandering about. Maybe new in town, talking to people trying to get a sense of the place, excited by the prospect of making some profit, ehhh I mean helping the poor.

You’re an offbeat outlander wearing a ghastly mask and a blood soaked armor, but they deem you worthy all the same, their very own watershed moment, and they tell it all within seconds. About family feuds and curses, about private messages to be delivered, some by word and some by the sword, about stolen heirlooms and dark secrets of sadness and cruelty; they tell it all, because they need your help, urgently. You are the perfect stranger, a strand of silver hanging through the sky.

So now you get another quest. They stack up, time passes, attention goes elsewhere many times over. Naturally the details start to blur or get lost entirely in the fog of fading memories, especially since many of the quests aren’t that interesting or relevant to begin with, and since it might have been tens of hours since you got some of them.

As the quest list grows longer, a curious phenomenon emerges: you start to accidentally make progress on, even completing, quests.

You talk to some random guy, and suddenly you’re unexpectedly informed that you’ve taken the next step in a quest you’ve long forgotten. Turns out some women gave you a quest 27 hours ago to inform her brother about some herbs or something, and now you’re unknowingly talking to that brother for some other unrelated reason, maybe trying to get a sense of a new town, and in the course of the conversation delivered the message and made that old forgotten quest progress.

Well, that was easy, but, needless to say, advancing a quest in this manner doesn’t feel very meaningful. Completion still gets you the in-game reward, and to the person you’re helping you may very well be a savior, but you clearly aren’t immersed in the quest narrative.

Heck, even deliberately trying to get engaged in these (to you) small and sometimes rather pointless quests is often a challenge, and you run the risk of completing them by simply going through the motions following the quest arrow, rather than actually caring.

And this, all of it and more, is quest soup, bon appétit. A chaotic unwieldy mess of many forgettable and forgotten quests that are being stacked up in a ten mile long list and completed without immersion, by accident or otherwise. (Which is not to say that Skyrim doesn’t also have some quests that are more interesting and more inherently immersive, but they’re not central enough to the experince as a whole to dissolve the soup.)

I’d like to think quest soup isn’t inevitible in a game like this (Mass Effect compares favorably, for one thing), neither in terms of game design or playing style, but that’s a topic for another day.

Meanwhile, ponder the fact that I’ve said quest more than one hundred times in this short post. I just don’t feel “mission”. And “investigation”? Are you kidding me, what is this, a detective game?

End captain’s log.