Skyrim has no soul

After saying I wouldn’t buy it, I ended up picking up Skyrim when clearing out the credit on our Gamestation card (on the assumption that soon, Game/Gamestation might not be around to honour that credit).

I played Oblivion, and it’s big and sprawling and lacking in focus, and I knew Skyrim was going to be the same, but what the hell; it’s huge, and let’s you play ‘whoever you want to be’ right?  Well actually, no, not quite.

I totally agree with the content of this review, specifically this bit,

I finally realized the problem I was having with Skyrim: It felt soulless. I may as well have killed Agnis and taken her stuff, because what did it matter whether she was there or not?

But I think there’s more going on that just lacking in soul, I think Skyrim only offers the illusion of choice, through some badly designed quests.  One of things you get to choose when roleplaying is if you’re a good guy, or a bad guy, or somewhere in between.  At each stage you decide if you’re going to do the right thing, or the wrong thing, or that you’re not going to get involved.  But with Skyrim, sometimes there’s only one outcome.  Sure, you can ‘walk away’, but that’s not easy to do when you can’t remove quests without completing them, and when it’s not always clear what the outcome will be.

Here’s a specific example, with spoilers for Skyrim so stop now if you don’t want to read it.

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