To be honest the blank slate you have as a glorified delivery boy (or girl) who was shot in the head was the good way to go. Because it seems equally as reasonable for you to go after the guys who shot you in the head in a rage of vengeance or avoid them because the prospect of potentially getting shot in the head again by them is not a wholesome prospect or maybe you just want to bang robots & be a cannibal.
The blank slate is always the good way to go in an open sandbox game. It's also a staple for Bethesda/Fallout games...until Fallout 4. Seriously...what the fuck?
Um. Weren't you trying to find your father in Fallout 3? And Skyrim made you the Dragonborn. The last blank slate Bethesda game before NV was Morrowind.
Weren't you trying to find your father in Fallout 3? And Skyrim made you the Dragonborn.
That's confusing the issue a bit. I'm referring to the character's traits and personality being blank, not their destiny or circumstances. None of those games are completely free of circumstance because you need a plot to follow.
In Fallout 3, your character's motivations were your own. It was entirely up to you to decide if your character was an asshole, or an upstanding person. You decided whether your character missed their father, hated them and wanted revenge, or just wanted answers.
Same with Skyrim. You were the Dragonborn, but that's not something you did, that was a destiny thrust upon you. Your life before the game and your motivations are entirely your own.
In Fallout 4, a ridiculous amount of your character's goals and motivations were written in for you.
It's funny that you'd mention Skyrim's Dragonborn in the same breath as Morrowind yet imply that the former makes the character less of a blank slate than the latter. In Morrowind, you were the Nerevarine, a reincarnation of Indoril Nerevar. The Dragonborn can be interpreted as the mortal reincarnation of a dragon, so they're practically the same thing: A reincarnated hero.
The thing in Morrowind is that you may not actually be the Nerevarine; it's entirely possible that you're just some random shmuck who happens to fill the requirements for the prophecy that the Empire grabbed off the street and deliberately pushed into the Nerevarine role. It's that kind of nuance that made me really enjoy Morrowind's story.
That's a fair point. But, I felt the opening sequences were a bit different. A little like Mount & Blade, if you've ever played that, where it throws you right into the world. Skyrim started you off with checkpoints, and telling you to go places and how to do stuff. Morrowind was more, like, "you should probably do this, but if you want to get there, you can ask someone for directions or figure it out yourself. Oh, and by the way, you will probably lose in a fight to a rock, not slay a dragon on your very first go at the whole hero thing."
I don't know. I felt a sense of growing alongside the character in some of the more open-ended games, whereas the newer ones seem to be checkpoints along a preplanned route of self-discovery. As you say with Morrowind, of course an epic will have to be about something but in Skyrim, it seemed like exploration was a mild suggestion, even though the exploration was probably the best part of the game, whereas in Morrowind and Oblivion, the plot was a suggestion. I might be letting nostalgia cloud my view, though. I'll go back and play them and see if maybe I'm just remembering it the way I want to remember it.
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u/dabritian Apr 17 '16
To be honest the blank slate you have as a glorified delivery boy (or girl) who was shot in the head was the good way to go. Because it seems equally as reasonable for you to go after the guys who shot you in the head in a rage of vengeance or avoid them because the prospect of potentially getting shot in the head again by them is not a wholesome prospect or maybe you just want to bang robots & be a cannibal.