Train
Is that all you got?!
I've observed many things in Skyrim, for example, in nearly every direction you look, it's a picture perfect scene. The design of great games makes you want to play them more due to certain elements: sound, feel/aesthetics, gameplay, story, scenery, camera movement, camera placement, even down to the accomplishment one gets during play, to the struggle of fighting that one enemy that you're so close to beating. When you finally do, it cycles back to add to accomplishment through that struggle. I shall only address the camera placement/scenery and sound in this article.Scenery/camera:
Skyrim is unique, this is the first sand box RPG game I've ever played that takes every camera angle into consideration. This is mostly because its hand sculpted by artists that put a lot of thought into the scenery rather than letting it be too computer generated. Notice when looking out over the landscape, distant mountains, nearby trees, and even the character (when in 3rd person) fits into the shot just perfectly.
In every picture an artist draws, there's a grid that they fit things into, the grid is like a tic-tac-toe box, but using the intersecting lines rather than the empty squares. Objects that go into the picture or shot must either be on the left, right, top or bottom depending on their distance, importance and what part they play in telling the picture's story (yes, even a still picture tells a story). This grid is something every artist lays over their image either physically or just using their eye to do so.
Objects need only be approximate; it depends on the picture itself where things go ultimately.
Every direction you look in Skyrim (just about) you can see that objects fit into the grid almost perfectly, there's nearby objects (trees, rocks, etc.) that anchor the scene relative to the viewer, these are foreground. Then there's middle ground objects that are usually staging the main activity in the shot (i.e. what you're really looking at) which also anchors the image as a whole, then background objects (distant mountains or even just sky for example) that give depth. All games have foreground, middle and background; very few have any of these lining up so precisely.
Note: Interior scenes generally have only foreground and background objects, in which case foreground becomes the primary element.
Now that you’re looking at Whiterun, notice the lines. This is nearly impossible to describe, so I have to use a picture. A real artist would have me executed for drawing something this bad, the grid is perfect, but the other lines might be way off. They'd also be excited that I even know about this stuff at all:
Notice the elements lining up on the grid? Also realize that I didn’t have to even try to make things fit this well, and I could show you literally thousands upon thousands of pics like these that are perfect all over Skyrim. Markarth might be my favorite, every which way I turn in the Reach I see stuff like this. The white circles are to show the approximate distance certain objects should be from these areas, known as the Rule of Thirds. Dragonsreach, the tree, the road and the brush could hardly be placed better, this is good enough to frame; well, except for the lines I’ve drawn all over it.
Note: Dragonsreach is perfect, my mind is blown away by this. Remember, I wasn't trying hard at all to line this up, but somehow its dead center where it should be.
The blue line is indicating a loop that I noticed while studying the picture, it starts near the bottom left and travels to the right, then goes up to the city and back around. Your eye is automatically drawn to do this loop. The white squiggly line is indicating another path the human eye takes when looking at this picture. It starts at the very top of the city just past Dragonsreach and travels down near the stables until being caught by the mountains in the background (the tree is actually part of what’s doing this). I see a picture similar to this every ten seconds while playing Skyrim…and yes, in my head, the grid lines are there, if you must know.
I'm sure there's probably more going on with this picture than I've seen so far, but these are the main points.
Sound:
Sound is the unsung hero of any video game, the music, the effects, the birds chirping, the water gurgling, the footsteps, the voice actors, the foley artists that bring you sounds that are practically impossible to get from real life. Every tiny, little, seemingly inconsequential sound that you hear, and some you don't even realize are there, are really what makes it come to life.
Mark Lampert is the genius that put together much of the sounds you hear in Skyrim, and though he's done stuff for other games as well, I think this is his masterpiece. He even talked about how he recorded himself banging on a dryer at home, didn't use the sound for the longest time but had it in his library. Then at some point needed a sound like that, so he grabbed his dryer sound and plugged it in. You have to be either genius or crazy to do that: "dude, your dryer's in a game set in a fantasy realm with Elves and extinct Dwarves"...and I think I know where he used it, my guess is in one of those Dwemer ruins.
I was working on a project myself some time ago, and I needed a gunshot sound for something. I listened to about ten different gunshots that I found, but none of them had the bang I wanted…so I put five of them all together. Let’s just say that now it has the bang I was looking for. I had to line each one up in the editor, play the whole sound, then adjust each one to make it fit properly. A couple tracks had an echo effect on it like it was recorded outside, some were just dry and short like it was done inside a building. However, stacked on top of each other perfectly with the volume levels turned up or down accordingly, and it sounded beautiful. The level of care I took isn’t even par for the course in a serious studio though, if I had given that to Mark Lampert he’d have told me to go look for another job, but to the average listener it would be mind-blowing.
Studios don’t play around with sound, its serious business, and it’s designed so that we don’t even know how good it is. If it wasn’t that good, then you’d know something was wrong, but when it is good it’s the last thing you think about. Such is the way of sound engineers, they do so much, but nobody notices unless they don’t do enough. That actually applies to many different forms of art, but sound gets the worst of it. Something you can see you either say you like it or you don’t, something you can’t see just goes to our subconscious unless it’s done poorly. The sounds of Skyrim are magnificent, but how many have stopped to just pay attention to one of them, even if it’s just a song? Much less the crackling of thunder or the splish-splash while walking through some water.
