The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Five Things GameZone Wants

Another one of those “what we want to see” articles has surfaced for Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and this time it’s GameZone providing us with a five-point list. Interestingly enough, the complaints they level at Oblivion were never mentioned in their near-perfect review:

Better Looking Characters

Character models in Oblivion were, for lack of a better word, bad. The game’s creation tools offered sliders to adjust almost every aspect of a character’s appearance, but all the tweaking in the world couldn’t make your Breton, Orc or Dunmer look like it wasn’t severely beaten with the ugly stick. Believe me, I tried. It also didn’t help that Tamriel’s emperor resembled that giant turtle in The Neverending Story.

Almost worse than how they looked was the way in which the characters in Oblivion spoke. Not that the voice acting was bad. Far from it (see below). Instead, it was repetitive. Many NPC voices were recycled to the point of annoyance, eroding that sense of immersion game developers work so hard to create. Further adding to the disconnect were the dialogue cutscenes themselves, where the camera would slowly pan into the NPCs face and…stay there. Yawn.

Sadly, characters in Fallout 3 and New Vegas have fared no better. While characters that are too pretty can be a turnoff (see: every male Japanese RPG character ever made), perhaps Skyrim can find a happy middle ground between adrogynous beauty and carnival freakshow.