The MMO Answer to Skyrim: DDO?

The idea that there ought to be an MMO that takes its cues from Skyrim is something that’s been talked about incessantly since 11/11/11. The modding community is giving it a try, but we’l see where that goes and in any event, making it work is going to take a while. And at best it’s not going to be an MMO version of Skyrim, but something more along the lines of a Minecraft multiplayer server, where a dozen or two people occasionally gather to axe stuff up. That’s worth keeping an eye on, but meanwhile back in the MMO realm, what have we got that’s close?

Well, not much. But there are a few games that have some of the pieces. Vanguard, for example, has a big immersive world, although it’s nowhere near as interactable as Skyrim. I might snidely argue that Vanguard replicates Skyrim‘s single player experience rather well, since the population is so low.

Too, there’s Darkfall, which is a lot like what Skyrim would look like as an MMO if the interface were somehow, amazingly, even worse than it is. And if it were about PvP and nothing else. I’d argue that the sort of unrestricted PvP that Darkfall embraces is not at all in keeping with the virtues of Skyrim, a game which is not remotely about “maximum challenge” but the novelty of exploring a living world. But down in the nuts-and-bolts of how the gameplay actually functions, Darkfall is closer than most.

From this perspective of the fundamental gameplay, though, it occurs to me that Dungeons & Dragons Online is actually a remarkably good match. You have the mostly targeted combat rather than hard targeting, a decent stealth game if you’re playing a Rogue type, and missile and spell combat that’s a decent implementation of the same ideas. DDO lacks Skyrim‘s exploration angle, which is a particular weakness of the game when you look at it through the lens of traditional MMO’s, but I think that wasn’t a design goal. Rather, what DDO set out to do was replicate the D&D tabletop experience as closely as possible within an MMO-like format, a paradigm in which the primary locus of play in is the dynamic of the party’s interactions among themselves and with the dungeon environment, in which widespread instancing of dungeons and outdoor zones isn’t as harmful.

Given the big fuss about DDO’s summer expansion Menace of the Underdark, I found myself playing a bit of it over the weekend, starting a new character on Khyber and farting around in the (very familiar) Korthos Village content. Having touched the game very little for the last year or more, I found myself playing it in a strikingly similar way to how I’d just spent weeks playing Skyrim. That the mob pathing is very problematic and much weaker was a detriment to this, but it basically worked. Stealth also doesn’t work as well, although there may be things at higher levels to mitigate this somewhat.

It’s not that Skyrim and D&D Online are especially similar games — in terms of core competencies I’d say they are about as far apart as two fantasy RPGs are going to ever get. But the actual button-pressing parts are remarkably similar. If DDO had a true first-person mode it would almost be uncanny.

Revisiting Star Trek Online

As we all know, Star Trek Online went freemium last week, and since then I’ve managed to drop a couple of hours into the game. I’d last tried STO a couple of months after launch, I think, and kind of liked it, rough and half-done as it was. But there’s that little guy in my head that asks, when trialing a subscription game, “do you like this enough to pay $15 a month for it?” And the answer was no. It’s the same process I went through with Rift and later, SWTOR, that led me to not buy those games as well, even though neither was bad in any substantive sense.

Although I am indeed able to spot some changes, I don’t know that I can see a remarkably changed game today versus when I was last logged in. But then, a big part of the issue at that time was lack of content, and that seems, by all accounts, to have been remedied — at least as long as you’re Federation, and aren’t at the level cap. There has been an almost year-long content drought for reasons Cryptic discussed with Massively today.

Star Trek Online is a conventional MMO in most respects… very conventional if you look only at the ground game, which functions mostly as a veteran of WoW or any of its clones would expect. But not entirely — you have an Away Team to back you up with their own progression and abilities, and some of the missions do seem to require some care and attention to get through. So that’s novel.

There’s also crafting, which appears unsophisticated to my eye. It’s similar to but narrower than the system in Champions Online. The in-game economy… well, I haven’t seen any sign that one exists, really, so this really isn’t out of line with the source material.

And there is, of course, the space game, and I give Cryptic a great deal of credit for including both ground and space operations in the finished product. The space game is both more interesting and better-developed than the ground game (which I’m told is much improved from where it was.) It’s no EVE Online, but it captures the basic feel of starship combat in Star Trek fairly well; I’m definitely getting a Star Fleet Battles vibe, although it’s not nearly as complicated at least at the start. Just as you can improve your character as you advance, you improve your ship as well, and eventually you unlock new ship slots and ships.

STO is also pathy and linear, but not quite in the usual way. In most such games there’s a linear quest/mission progression that you go through one piece at a time. The main story sequence in STO is like this, and there are side missions as well, but there’s also a great deal of content that scales to you, and a regular cycle of in-game events. I think the variety of content I have seen so far is pretty good, although I am guessing (and I hear) that this gets stale after a while.

It’s early yet (I just hit Lieutenant 7 today) but I’m enjoying myself reasonably well so far. STO is not a flawless game by any means, but you know, at least it took some chances, and I’ll take an ambitious but flawed game over a polished but pedestrian one any day.

An Epic Year For Dungeons & Dragons

2012 is shaping up to be a fairly big year for Dungeons & Dragons, so far — both online and on the tabletop.

First off, we have the news that a fifth edition of the game is in development. This surprised no one — the writing was on the wall when Monte Cook was brought back aboard as a “special consultant” — but it’s gotten a lot of very high-profile attention from places like the New York Times and Forbes.

It’s also no secret that the current fourth edition of D&D isn’t doing as well as it might. It is, in fact, being beaten out by Pathfinder in many markets. In my own opinion, as stated many moons ago, it’s a good and cleverly designed game that happens to not resemble D&D very much except as an emulator of one particular style of D&D play. Part of the reason it didn’t catch on is that the designers failed to fully appreciate that they weren’t designing in a vacuum, but in an environment with a very strong sense of history and heritage. Too, there was no widespread clamor for a new edition at that time — many people had issues with various aspects of 3.5, but relatively few people felt it was a fundamentally broken and crappy system. This is in contrast to the late 2e era, when it seemed almost everybody felt that way, even those who were playing it. In changing the game so completely, WotC badly misread the community and fractured the community far worse than it already was.

This “edition war” among the D&D-playing community was always evident, but it became especially fierce when WotC put out a radical new edition that effectively disinherited old players and the 30+ years of materials they had accumulated; one of the greatest crimes of fourth edition is its total lack of backward compatibility. So deep was the chasm that opened up between the proponents of the various editions that there’s now a dedicated Old School Renaissance, dedicated to promoting play and producing product up to the scale of full “retro-clones” in the style of the pre-D&D3 era on back. While guilty of certain excesses along the lines of “This Is The One True Way,” this community has proven to be creatively fecund, releasing outstanding games like Adventures Dark and Deep and Swords & Wizardry and Castles & Crusades, which helped kick off the whole movement but which has been largely disowned by it for sticking too close to 3e.

The clamor for materials in the older style has apparently been noticed — finally — at Wizards of the Coast. PDF versions of older material have long been unavailable, but now they’ve committed to bringing back the original three AD&D 1st edition books in April, albeit in a limited edition. Part of the proceeds from the sale of these books will go to the Gygax Memorial Fund, which is trying to raise enough to erect a statue of Gary in his (and TSR’s) hometown of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Personally, although I have multiple copies of the original books, I lust after these, and I figure it’s for a good cause. I have absolutely no doubt that these will sell out very quickly, and hopefully WotC will take notice and start to make more of the older stuff — tens of millions of words and thousands of products — available in print or electronic format. This would erode prices in the collector’s market, but that’s not WotC’s problem.

Too, Cryptic’s Neverwinter, a second D&D-based Online Multiplayer RPG, is almost certainly going to release in 2012. While MMO-playing folks aren’t taking it very seriously at this point, and neither are tabletop fans since by its own admission it’s not going to lean much on any version of the tabletop game, it has the potential, if popular, to help to raise the profile of D&D again in the video gaming world. It used to be a popular and powerful brand, and then it just seemed to wither away, for which we can probably blame Atari.

More promising still, though, is Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online, which is a high-quality, well-produced game invigorated in 2009 by its industry-shaking shift to free-to-play. DDO is based closely on the 3.5 rules and 2012 promises to be a titanic year for it. There’s a major content update coming in February that will include a free adventure pack, a cosmetic pet system and other stuff, and slated for the summer is the game’s first full-scale expansion, Menace of the Underdark.

Yes, you’re reading that right. While DDO is set in Eberron, the expansion will take players to Cormyr in the Forgotten Realms, and thence to the titular Underdark. Too, Druids are finally going to make their long-awaited appearance in DDO, and the level cap is increasing to 25 — which will be epic levels.

Even if, as I expect, D&D5 doesn’t release this year, it’s looking like D&D will be a very active property in 2012 — and it’s only January. And there’s also Pathfinder Online in the works, which I’ve discussed previously, which will effectively be another D&D MMO as well.

WoW-Killer, My Ass

Some might call this grave-dancing, but me, I call it I told you fucking so.

Yes, SWTOR is underperforming. And contrary to EA claims, its budget may have been well north of the $300 million figure cited by the infamous EALouse. A figure which was sneered at by SWTOR devotees, but which, as I demonstrated long ago, twice, makes it a virtual impossibility for the title to turn a profit for EA, no matter how much magical accounting they do. Because the money spent on it is not actually imaginary.

Even in the MMO blogosphere, we’re starting to hear discontent, and not just from the people, like myself, who never bothered buying it. SWTOR’s first real patch broke level-cap PvP hard, and they’re scrambling to fix it. They are probably working less hard at letting players unsubscribe from the game.

I like Bioware and am rooting for them, but the budget doomed this project the minute it went over $100 million. I still think it’s going to hold on to subscribers better than most new MMOs that launch these days, but EA had better take a hard look at how Trion Worlds worked to keep players in Rift. But it doesn’t really matter. The only people who will be happy with the checks they get are the ones at Lucasarts.

World of Darkness Online Interview

Check it out. There’s not much really new here, but its appearance now reinforces CCPs continued commitment to the title.

The Road Ahead: 2012 in MMOs

An end is come to 2011, and it was, shall we say, not a banner year for MMOs. The year saw two successful launches of games mired in their lack of ambition, and the rest of the year was older games doing interesting things like going free to play or launching nostalgia servers. Still, as we say in Cleveland, “there’s always next year.” Which is now. So what’s on the horizon for the next twelve months (minus a couple of weeks,) and how will current market entries evolve? Here are my (only slightly late) predictions.

As far as I can see, the only “triple-A” title with a real chance to shake things up in a big way is Guild Wars 2. Even if it doesn’t come through with everything it’s promised, it’s going to make the year’s big splash, with top-notch production quality and a stated desire to abandon some of the hobby’s most pernicious leftovers from the EverQuest days. Holy Trinity, this means you. The move toward dynamic world events rather than static quests may provide a sense of non-linearity. On the other hand, I worry about the cohesion of its world and the side systems that are so important to fleshing out an MMO, like crafting. And the semi-static cutscenes, while artfully done from what I’ve seen, may subtract from immersion and sense of place. There’s also the technological element that I tend not to favor in a fantasy game, and the inevitable cutsey race, but I intend to do my best to live with those.

A game that will have less impact but which may be just as innovative is Funcom’s The Secret World. It ought to be graphically top-notch, if system-crushing. It’s going to fill the modern supernatural niche that’s been underserved by MMOs up to this point, and also promises to depart significantly from established tropes. It’s scheduled to launch in April, but my guess is that it’ll be pushed back to July. The big fear with this one is that, as they did with Age of Conan, Funcom will mis-target the game and end up courting the wrong bunch of players. But hopefully they’ll have learned a lesson from AoC’s troubled evolution and the marketing and community folks will be rowing the same boat as the developers this time.

Not likely to shake things up at all is Mists of Pandaria. More of the same, yawn. Blizzard has unquestionably left the era in which they can do no wrong, and their Big Dog will continue to shed subscribers, but by late in the year — November or December — Mists will cast off, and WoW will still be on the top of the heap. Expect a formal announcement of whatever Titan turns out to be at Blizzcon.

I’m now thinking that my earlier prediction for Star Wars: The Old Rebublic — 2-3 million subscribers at peak and 500K six months later — is going to bust. I now think it will peak substantially lower — say a million and a half — but that it will hold on to the players it has much better than recent history would suggest. Whether it’s actually a profitable enterprise for EA is likely to remain murky, no matter how many people are playing it. Don’t be shocked to see it holding on to a million subs by the end of the year… but we’d better see some substantive update/expansion news by then, too, or we’ll see it start to peter out after that. The slow rollout of new content is poised to hurt SWTOR more than other titles because it’s likely to be even slower than usual.

I predict that TERA will be the next Mortal Online – mildly hyped before launch and sinking like a stone after. But I could be wrong, and if the game pulls off the action-style combat at its heart it could do better than I expect. TERA is going to live or die by two things: how well the combat plays, and how well the combat plays one-handed, if you catch my drift.

WildStar looks promising, if conventional, but I don’t think we know enough about it to dismiss it just yet. It’s coming out of the NCSoft House of Winners, so my expectations are low, but it’s not being developed by NCSoft, so there’s a chance it will turn into something palatable. Its visual style, though, sings “WoW Clone,” and many might not be able to get past that even if it varies from bog-standard more than expected. I think it will release in Q4 of 2012.

Dust 514, the ground-based counterpart of EVE Online should finally launch in 2012. It had better — Microsoft and Sony are gearing up for the debut of the next generation of consoles, and this year is likely to be the last chance for titles to make a big splash before people start looking more at the new round of hardware than the current one. I predict modest — very modest — success on this one; it’ll be hobbled both by CCP’s lack of cred in the shooter marketplace and by its exclusivity on the lagging PS3. God only knows how clean it will launch, but nobody is better than CCP at shepherding a title through a modest debut and into long-term growth. Expect to start hearing about a PC port around the end of the year.

Speaking of CCP, we may or may not hear anything new on World of Darkness Online. It’s not shelved, exactly, but expect the focus for the year to be on EVE and Dust. Next year I think we’ll start to hear some serious noise about this title.

Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium will not launch in 2012.

Neverwinter is a wildcard. Like TERA, it’s supposed to be action-oriented, but my hopes are not high for it in this department. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to seeing it. I’m predicting a Q3 launch.

Korean entry ArcheAge has all the hallmarks of a Vanguard — big promises, low quality control and a lead developer past his prime. No other game manages to look so promising yet elicit so many utterances of “really?” Open world, super-detailed crafting and construction, mass battles on land and sea… and player run jails and other harebrained-sounding stuff make me excited yet extremely leery. It may release in 2012 — I think it will — but my guess is that a North American release is months behind the Korean launch, maybe into 2013.

Less worrying is The Repopulation, despite its awful title. With early talk centering around the influence of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online, it’s not likely to be a massive hit, but it’s got a chance to shake the hobby out of its torpor. I expect a launch in 2013 at the earliest. It’s one to keep an eye on.

Planetside 2 will launch in 2012 with major problems and withering scorn in the blogosphere, but will be a modest success for all that. “Modest success” is the best SOE is going to manage for the moment… but they have a big opportunity to do something special with EverQuest Next. Let’s hope they don’t blow it, but in any event I expect to hear only token news about it in 2012.

Vanguard will still be running as of the end of the year. I hope to see a freemium move, but SOE appears to not be considering that for the moment. I should finally see some long-awaiting development and new content, which may boost its (currently dire) numbers.

The most promising-sounding thing in development is Pathfinder Online. Goblinworks seems to be telling me all the right things… start small, don’t spend a gazillion dollars, don’t plan for more players than you have even the remotest chance to get or keep, and create a realistically-scaled sandbox world. But it’s really early, and I’m not even convinced that the project will materialize at all. These guys are really new and untested, so I think they’ll either bring a number of fresh ideas to the table and actually advance the state of the art, or evaporate before accomplishing much of anything. I’m rooting for them.

Among older games, EverQuest II, LotRO and City of Heroes will keep on trucking under their new freemium models. EverQuest will continue to endure, but I think we’ll see another historic sunset some time during the year. My guess would be Dark Age of Camelot, but Warhammer Online is very, very vulnerable, especially with a companion game (Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes) that takes the fun(ish) part from WAR and makes it a game of its own. Bioware/Mythic may also decide to tighten their business up if they’re taking to big a bath on SWTOR, the basket all their eggs are laid in, so Ultima Online could fall here as well.

We’re going to start to see the many entries in the freemium MMO marketplace shake out into tiers. This has already started, but it’ll become more apparent in 2012. The biggest player in the freemium market is going to continue to be LotRO unless something very dramatic happens, but APB is giving it a good run for its money right now, and Star Trek Online has a shot at landing in the top bunch if it can hold together.

We’ll see in a year how I did.

Idle Time and Idle Mind

In a way, I am deeply unhappy with Skyrim because it has so dominated the part of my head that deals with gaming. I have a lot of other prospects to play, but I’m having trouble getting into anything else… so, of course, what time I have had to play has pretty much stayed in Skyrim.

This week we have Star Trek Online going free to play at last, and I’m planning to give that a whirl. Meanwhile, I have been dabbling a bit in Wurm Online, which is (graphics aside) the closest thing to Skyrim in the MMO world, even surpassing its immersability in many respects. (Nota bene: Wurm is not much like Skyrim at all, and I’m only comparing the two in terms of immersion. Gameplay-wise it’s a lot closer to Minecraft.) Still, I’m finding it best in small doses.

On something of a lark, I installed League of Legends and took that out for a spin. As I’d predicted, it’s not for me. I also reinstalled World of Warcraft with the thought of using my long-idle trial account on their new “free” plan, and played close to ten minutes of that before realizing that it’s just too stale these days. I will say, though, that Blizzard has done a fine job of making the download and install a great deal less painful than it used to be, so that’s something.

WoW’s linearity these days seems to be the deal-breaker for me, which even Blizzard seems to be recognizing. Unfortunately, this comes after the complete revamp of Old Azeroth into Linear Land that Cataclysm brought. It’s good in a way, because I will be less tempted to dabble in a game I now regard as permanently spoiled.

At any rate, I find myself at something of a loss. I have installed and could readily play LotRO, Champions, DDO, APB, Fallen Earth or EQ2, and that’s just the MMOs. Yet my desire to play any of them is at an all-time low. Perhaps it’s time to unearth a long-fallow tabletop project.

The End of Skyrim

It had been my goal for the weekend to finish up the main plotline in Skyrim and move on to dabbling in Hearts of Iron 3, which will fit better with my schedule now that school has resumed. I had gotten about a third of the way through the main quest up to that point but had strayed far from it, logging close to 100 hours total and reaching level 41.

Over the break I finished up the story, and was very pleased with the outcome. I don’t want to spoil it, but the very final battle was a bit less epic than it could have been, but that was probably me being a bit overpowered for my level, with a full hit of Legendary Dragonplate enchanted out the wazoo and a bunch of Legendary weapons to boot. The level scaling in Skyrim is much more forgiving than it was in Oblivion. There’s a really nice way to play the denouement, too, that I really appreciated.

I did indeed start a game of HoI3 on Friday, as the French in 1936, based on the assumption that they should be easy to get started with in a very complicated game, and that any performance better that they did historically (they collapsed in six weeks) would be a moral victory. But when my primary time slot for gaming opened up on Sunday morning… I made a new character and played some more Skyrim. I’m probably close to finishing up for the time being, until some DLC and mods hit, but you never know.

Skyrim and Oblivion

At 81 hours into Skyrim (according to Raptr, which is probably pretty close to correct,) I’m one-third of the way through the main questline at level 39, have hit 100 only in Smithing, have resolved the civil war in favor of the Imperials, finished the College of Winterhold storyline, have completed most of the main arc of the Thieve’s Guild line (which is probably a fifth of the whole thing measure in playtime,) finished two Daedric quests, and have done the first couple of Companions quests. I’m a mildy stuck on the latter – I need to complete a Radiant quest to progress further in the storyline, but I let it get away from me and now I’m not sure which quest it is in my journal, thanks to the non-greatness of the interface.

In short, I am nowhere close to my interest level evaporating or running out of things to do, and I haven’t even started an alt yet. (When I do, that guy will be a straight thief.)

The mod scene is still very young. I’m keeping an eye on things but we won’t start really cooking until the toolset releases (hopefully) this month. Right now I am taking a very minimalist approcah, running only SkyUI and Categorized Favorites Menu, which between them improve the default UI a great deal. Moving forward, there’s some really promising-sounding stuff being worked on, and when the toolset is released we’ll see a ton more.

One interesting side effect of playing so much Skyrim is that it’s made me want to play more Oblivion, a game I never put as much time into as it warranted. And Morrowind, for that matter, but I don’t own that and it didn’t show up as a daily deal during the Steam sale; $10 is more that I would like to pay for a game as old as it is, although I will surely spring for it at some point – it’s not as though I don’t have a number of things keeping me busy already. (Also, classes start today, so my time will be much more constrained than it has been for the last few weeks.)

This exercise is most interesting becuase Skyrim and Oblivion are so structurally similar, and playing them side-by-side makes this especially obvious. You’d expect it to be the case, of course, but even such novel elements of the newer game as the randomly-spawning dragons find their roots in its predecessor. Are they really so different than the almost-random Oblivion gates?

The two games have pretty much the same structure, the worlds are designed very similarly, and both character advancement and quest organization work the same way, more or less. The biggest difference between the two lies in the execution; Skyrim improves on Oblivion in every way I can think of, save one – you can’t design custom spells in it. But this will surely be modded in at some point, officially or unofficially, and in every other respect the fifth iteration improved upon the fourth, particularly over Oblivion‘s semi-broken advancement system. and bland, samey landscapes. Sure, stats went away and a couple of skills did as well, but I can’t see that as a particularly troublesome loss. The strength of the series has never been in the depth and complexity of the core gameplay, after all, but in interacting with the world, and I don’t think anything was oversimplifed in comparison with the earlier game.

Because the leveling in Skyrim is much less problematic than in its predecessor, it’s more forgiving when it comes to playing the kind of ultra-broad character that I’m always tempted to play in an Elder Scrolls game. For Oblivion, then, I started a fresh new character, with a lot of mods installed but not any that change the level scaling (I realize this goes against the conventional wisdom,) and will be doing strictly mage stuff with him, with maybe a splash of thief stuff as well… and completely ignoring the main questline for now. Which I am also doing with Skyrim, more or less.

Ardwulf’s Game of the Year 2011: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the best video games I’ve ever played. It will not come as a shock that it will land on many Game of the Year lists, as it does mine. It is to my great annoyance that for the second year in a row an MMO blogger is compelled to name a non-MMO the standout game of the year, and for the same reason: Skyrim has a better, more immersive and more interactive world than any MMO that has come out in the last couple of years. The new releases of 2011, namely Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift, are both good games in absolute terms, but neither compares to Skyrim.

For those late to the party, Skyrim is the fifth in the Elder Scrolls series. The first two were released back in the DOS era where even Dragonborn fear to tread, so the modern Elder Scrolls experience began with Morrowind. Later games are not sequels to earlier ones despite being set in the same world. The series as a whole has been noteworthy for sprawling sandbox worlds and deep flaws, but for many the virtues – a kind of sandbox rare elsewhere – outweigh the lingering issues. In virtually every respect Skyrim represents a huge improvement over Oblivion. Morrowind deservedly retains its vocal defenders, but for my money it looks and plays too dated unless you mod it to high heaven, and its setting is a bit esoteric, hampering its accessibility.

Where Oblivion sometimes felt empty, Skyrim, which has a map of about the same size, is much more densely packed with things to see and do. The world is the deepest I have ever seen in a video game, and there are stories everywhere, some that you can take part in and many that have already ended. A shrine in the wilderness with flowers placed at its base, a kindly old woman with an dark secret or a mine taken over by bandits hint at chronicles untold. And there are hundreds of in-game books available with text to read if you so desire; some of these are easter eggs for players of the previous games, but even for a neophyte the net effect is of a world lovingly crafted and incredibly rich in lore and history.

The best parts of Skyrim, though, aren’t the tales placed there by Bethesda – although those are excellent – but in the stories you inevitably make for yourself as you interact with the world around you and the world interacts with itself. I ambushed a party on the road and while I was killing one fellow the other ran off, and after dispatching his comrade I set out on a breakneck pursuit through miles of wilderness, on the way stumbling into another party that I also felt obliged to massacre. When I finally caught up with my quarry he was in the final moments of a struggle with the huge bear who’d jumped on him. It’s this kind of completely unscripted stuff, emerging from the player’s interactions with the world and the world’s interactions with itself, that makes Skyrim special.

A watered-down iteration of Oblivion‘s level scaling mechanic makes Skyrim‘s quest lines largely nonlinear, and the main plot supports this as well, because as you adventure in Skyrim you learn more words of the dragon language, fortifying you against the day when you have to face the final villain… and even after that, you can keep on adventuring as much as you like. Meanwhile, the game sets you up to go where you like and do what you desire. There is some direction through the main quest, but along the way you will acquire and stumble across a huge number of additional things to do and places to explore. Skyrim is densely packed with activities including harvesting, crafting, housing… you can even get married to one of a large number of NPCs.

The modified level scaling, where some encounters scale to your level while others do not also makes it possible to feel like a total badass and still be challenged. Sometimes enemies scale to your level when it’s important to one of the many available storylines, and the semi-random encounters with dragons always do, but creatures in many parts of the world have flat levels, so there are a few places where you need to tread carefully.

As many have pointed out, Skyrim is not flawless. Bugs and glitches are common, although it’s far more polished and stable at launch than its predecessors in the Elder Scrolls series. Even the graphics, which look absolutely amazing on the surface, have some serious issues upon closer inspection, with chunky shadows and depressingly low-res textures, and the character models aren’t all they could be. The UI out of the box is a work of art in its terribleness; it’s a bad console UI even though console players are accustomed to clumsily pawing their way through menus with a controller, and ported to the PC it is simply atrocious. It’s usable – if it weren’t Skyrim would be taking a lot more heat than it is – pretty but opaque and unwieldy and the worst thing in a game as otherwise close to perfect as you’ll find.

Despite these and other flaws, Skyrim deserves the raves and the ratings it’s gotten. For all the problems, none of which are new to this fifth Elder Scrolls installment, it’s just that good. If you’re a fan of open-ended, open world adventure there is simply nobody doing it better than Bethesda, and no series so strong as the Elder Scrolls games. Certainly, no MMO has or had a world this open and interactable, and most MMO developers aren’t even trying. Even out of the box, its flaws are forgivable.

But there is also, for those not confined to Console Hell, a modding community which, despite lacking a formal toolset, has already accomplished some pretty remarkable things. Texture replacements, FPS enhancements and a Large Address Aware patch (as well as the inevitable nude mods, for those who have neither left puberty nor discovered that there is actual porn on the internet,) came very quickly, and now there are full UI replacements, magic mods to add new spells, new crafting options and a great deal more… and a very ambitious multiplayer package is being worked on which will either prove that this kind of game can work with nultiple players or highlight why it can’t. Once the toolset, set to launch in January, does release there will be an avalanche of additional content, world features and so on, to say nothing of the confirmed DLC and two expansions. If Skyrim stands up to modding remotely as well as Oblivion did, there will be years of this stuff built on a foundation that is already far more solid.

Skyrim is a game you don’t want to miss, even if you’re annoyed by the meme-spamming. It’s the first legendary classic of the decade, and players will still be recalling their experiences in it by decade’s end. It sold eleven million copies in the first month, is the hands-down best selling and most played PC title of the year, has spawned a dozen memes already and is shattering concurrency records on Steam. Within its subgenre of video games it is peerless and even by MMO standards it is spectacularly good, a better MMO than almost any MMO. MMO developers should be very uncomfortable that a game that is neither muitliplayer nor online has managed this.

This year’s runner-up is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Despite Eidos’ inability to make sense of Latin, it’s the strongest cyberpunk game I have ever seen, and extends that genere with new and more up to date ideas about how the cyberpunk future might actually look. It is immersive not in the same way as Skyrim but in the same way as the Mass Effect games are, with a compelling if linear story and a well-drawn world.

I again decline to name an MMO of the Year. Star Wars: The Old Republic provides nothing new, and its only competition is Rift. Good games, as I said, but not much of a contest. Even among extant MMOs it was an unexciting year, with all of the biggest news in the transitions to hybrid f2p models that are now old hat. Next year might show us something new in Guild Wars 2 or one of the indie offerings. For heavens’ sake, I hope so.