Hacker Cinema
Behind the Wall: The Making of Skyrim
2012 · Film · documentary · 41 min
Directed by Jolyon Hoff
Behind the Wall: The Making of Skyrim contains exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, including interviews with the Bethesda Game Studios team as they take you from concept to creation and provide insights into the story, gameplay, setting, legacy of the Elder Scrolls franchise, and much more.
1 positive4 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I understand that certain segments of the population have remained completely disassociated from videogames, and that's fine, but that doesn't make it a niche or an expert topic.
Games make significantly more money than movies and TV now. More than 65M people bought Skyrim, and many more millions would recognise Fus-Ro-Dah just from spending time on the Internet anywhere near to gaming circles.
The defendant could have told their lawyer and it would have been trivial to research and demonstrate. Not sure what went wrong there.
Personally, I see it as an equation of Story/atmosphere quality x mechanical pleasure x length where story is the trump card.
A game like SOMA has low mechanical pleasure (it's a walking simulator, essentially) and a short length, but the story and atmosphere are so high that I will forever remember the experience.
Cyberpunk has decent length, decent story/atmosphere (obviously this is subjective) and decent mechanical pleasure so it's a great game.
CoD has a short length, decent to high mechanical pleasure (well at least I hope so for their sake since it's supposed to be about the multiplayer shooter replayability) and low story/atmosphere because it's just a string of action movie clichés. I think that's what makes it sound very mediocre compared to Cyberpunk.
Other gamers might see mechanical pleasure as the trump card, and I can definitely understand their POV (Portal 1 for instance). I'd venture a guess that length is rarely a trump card except if you are stuck with the games you do have. Usually for length to be the most important factor, you need at least a decent degree of the two other factors to go with it. For example, what people love about Skyrim is that the basic gameplay of walking around and doing things is fun and you can just pick up the game everyday for months and still have things to do. The story is nothing special, but the atmosphere is comfy enough. You know the game is there for you when you come back from work.
Modern Western games tend to be closer to movie soundtracks in that regard. Personally, some of my recent favorites for just that thing are the work of Skyrim (Jeremy Soule), Darksiders II (Jesper Kyd) and Dishonored (Daniel Licht, Jon Licht, Voodoo Highway, and Copilot Strategic Sound).
Have we considered, frankly, the cost of a AAA title these days? IMDB Estimates the budget of Skyrim at $100m (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1814884/). That isn't an unreasonable number – there have been a number of recent games which hit that as well. Grand Theft Auto IV had a budget estimated at $100m as well.
This points to the fact that the engine and the tools available are but a small part of what is needed. Granted, a big start would be getting publishers to donate their game engines to development teams for learning environments.
But... what makes these games incredible is the millions of dollars that goes into voice acting, motion capture (as I recall much of the model rendering is informed via mocap. Look at things like the woodcutting animations in Skyrim to see where this benefits), model rendering, textures, etc.
What's needed is to figure out how to reduce the cost of these things, or get collaboration from professional teams/publishers willing to donate time and/or resources to projects.
Otherwise, you'll end up with a bunch of learning environments using the same game engine as skyrim but with none of the magic.
Well, here's an idea for Skyrim: languages.
It's actually very simple: translate all the voice acting into your language of choice - let's say Norwegian. (Probably dumb the vocabulary down a bit.) Now add subtitles.
You're done. Go play the game. You'll absorb the language as you play, and because (unlike a film) you'll hear the same phrases multiple times, it'll actually sink in to a useful extent. I've only played about 20 hours of Skyrim so far, but I'm pretty sure if I was playing the subtitled version I'd already be able to say "Are you looking to defend yourself, or do some damage?" in Norwegian.
(Of course, I'd still have to add modern language to my knowledge after 200 hours, but hey, it's easier than learning the entire grammatical structure and all verbs.)
For a much more effective but much more offputting version - don't have subtitles. Have a few characters who can speak a bit of English, but have most of them only talk in Norwegian. You'll need to customise the dialogue a fair bit too so that the player doesn't miss important bits (essentially, have the NPCs periodically stop and say "WTF? Are you stupid? THERE'S THE GODDAMN DRAGON!"), and probably have the usual range of dialogue options - in Norwegian - plus a standard "I'm sorry, I don't speak Nord" which will get you all the really essential stuff.
That would be very, very hard to play - although surprisingly immersive if you're playing a non-Nord character, particularly if the other non-Nords were the characters who were likely to speak your language - but would definitely teach you the language.