Telling Tales: Skyrim and Dark Souls
How do you tell a story? Once upon a time there were two games, games of similar leanings that turned out entirely different – Dark Souls and Skyrim. Both have their tales to tell, a myth-hoard parcelled out through audio, text, environmental details and other characters. One stops being a game to do this. In the other, it just happens. Dark Souls is about looking and learning; Skyrim, looking and listening. Both are fantasy RPGs, but the methods they use to engage players in their worlds are wildly different. Skyrim is a much larger canvas, an opulent and detail-packed space of boggling scope where everything’s upfront – conversations, thousands of pages of in-game books to read, and exhaustive quest descriptions. It’s a sprawl that’s absolutely packed with things to find. Dark Souls’ narrative approach is ambient and minimalist – the tiniest details of its world fit together, rarely is anything made explicit, and understanding what’s going on requires a considerable investment of time and brainpower. Though it’s smaller in terms of acres, Dark Souls’ world uses 3D space much more elaborately – all places are in an exact relation to one another, their deranged architecture unfolding and pulling back together like an accordion. Read more…
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