Skyrim is still going strong. The energy is not just in the new Elder Scrolls Online. Some people, apparently, still want to life their alternate lives in solitary splendor.
And put an amazing amount of work into improving the experience for everyone.
Project Aho is a massive new adventure in the Skyrim universe, released as a free mod on March 22 of this year. There is much good to say about it and I intend to do so here, but that is not the main purpose of this mini-review. That purpose is to address an elephant that was in the room, and the way in which this elephant seems to be selectively visible.
First, the mechanical stuff. It plays smoothly and looks professional. That is a lot more work to achieve than you might think. It isn't enough to have nice-looking scenery; you also have to play-test the heck out of the stuff so players and AI's don't get trapped in intersections of the geometry or end up clipping out of the world entirely. Big budget AAA games have shipped with these kinds of bugs. I didn't encounter a single one in playing Project Aho.
The assets are not just well crafted, but artistically inspired. The characters are alive and interesting, the voice acting almost without flaw, the settings intriguing and unique as well as spectacular. The music is also outstanding, and it all works to support the core conceit; of this hidden community with its own bizarre ecosystem and rituals.
This is the greatest strength in play as well, but it goes hand in hand with the greatest weakness. Your existing Skyrim character is ripped out of their usual surroundings and deposited -- trapped -- in this new and confusing land and has to explore and interact and try to make sense of it all. The first third of the game is slow and almost meditative as you slowly learn your way around this strange place and begin to adjust to its ways and rhythms.
Here is the weakness; the way the writers chose to place you here is to kidnap and enslave your character. Which is manipulative, rail-roading, in a way that goes against the basic play style of Skyrim. Skyrim is an open-world game, where you can take off in any direction at any moment, explore freely whatever you can reach. And a game in which you always have choice.
It is built into the basic philosophy, a philosophy shared by the hardy Nords who call this region of Tamriel home; it is all about choice. About the freedom to make your own moral and ethical way, and accept the consequences of your own actions.
In any quest in Skyrim you may find yourself being asked to do random fetch quests, to trudge through tundra or tunnels in search of some random item just because someone else wants it and has asked you to get it for them. Making your character a slave, and the only path to freedom to complete these tasks, changes the perception of this process. You can't walk away, other than by closing the game.
Yes, this is only perceptual. This is a strange world, you don't even understand how it works much less how to escape. So you start doing favors for random strangers. That's how RPGs have worked, from well before KOTOR. It is just a little...odd...that you are doing this despite being, you know, a slave. It becomes more and more off-putting as people interact with you as if you are the ordinary wandering Joe adventurer. Instead of someone who was kidnapped here, is being actively threatened with torture and murder by their master, and is trying desperately to escape. "Could you help me find my wife's wedding ring? I think it fell in a haystack" takes on an entirely different flavor than the one the writers presumably intended.
The last two thirds of the game are epic dungeon crawls with tons of combat. This is a Nintendo Hard mod, with the leveled monsters being much, much tougher than their main game equivalents (let me put it this way; my mage was getting killed by mid-level enemies inside Project Aho, but after she escaped she polished off a leveled Dragon without breaking a sweat).
Which makes for an odd contrast, but anyhow. The quests are amusing enough and the build decent, although the quest markers could use improvement. Another quibble I have is that there is far too much loot. Not only is it unbalancing even within Project Aho, it is grossly unbalancing to the main game. But that's not even the worse of it; the worst is there's simple so much it gets in the way. You finally have to just ignore it.
Eventually you are brought to a moral choice. Of a sorts. And here is where the elephant becomes overwhelming.
Your murderous, largely-insane master is discovered to be embarking on a mad scientific experiment that threatens the entire hidden community. You didn't, of course, get to do anything at all, anything active, anything productive towards the revelation. But for some reason the powers that be announce they'd prefer to have you working for them anyway and offer you your freedom in return for stopping him.
Actually, its a little odder than that. They say, "Sorry for kidnapping and enslaving you. Here's your stuff back. You are free to go. But if you stick around to stop the bad guy, we could see about slipping a little extra cash your way."
The thing is...the thing is...
They are still a slave-holding culture. There are slaves in the room when they are making this grand offer. Which is twenty feet from where, while you were on the auction block, they murdered another slave before your eyes. This is slavery in one of the worst ways; the slaves (with you as an odd and rather unexplained exception) are voiceless and nameless. Literally. Their tongues and their names are taken along with all ability to resist (a control collar that, in game only acts on you as an invisible wall and the annoying inability of people like Dear Master to die when you firebolt them at point-blank range.)
This is where that selective visibility comes in. Because there's no dialog option to talk about it. No place to make a different bargain. No way to work to change that society. No option, ever, to free a single one of your fellows in bondage. Apparently, you are supposed to be happy that you got all your stuff back.
And the writers may not be wrong. I took at look through comments at the Nexus and Steam and I couldn't find a single person speaking about this. It is a sobering blindness.
It is a lovely place, of course. Almost a utopia. I can understand why the writers believed that players would be happy that they were free to leave, and would then be happy to jump right in to the community, buy a house there (yes, this is very much an option), go on all the remaining little fetch quests, hang out with the people there, etc. Their own private little garden tucked into a corner of Skyrim.
Yes, players just may be that selfish. But the writers should have been better than that. Leaving this status quo was unacceptable. Letting them get away with taking more people from their homes and freedom and stripping their very voice and name from them was unacceptable.
I went back to Dear Old Master and when he said, "I'm about to throw this Big Red Switch over here because I'm mad and evil and I want to see what happens," I said, "I'll help!"
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