These days I am spending a whole lot of time slaying dragons and yelling at folks in Skyrim. This week as I was raging through a dungeon that I had just happened upon and didn’t have an assigned quest for I did the unthinkable…I googled the dungeon to see what the hell I was supposed to get other than some chintzy armor and crappy weapons.
First off I learned that the quest item (an epic sword) wasn’t there for me. Presumably because I didn’t yet have a quest line for it. Now I had spent an hour making my way through this dungeon with it’s enemies (who were kicking my level 7 ass) and complex puzzles only to miss out on the true prize. Bastids! Ironically, while that dungeon was a total waste of an hour of my life the tale that I had to tell served me well less than 24 hours later when I was able to use it as an example of why and how information gets scaffolded and why it’s generally not a good idea to jump the line and end up having to do the same damned dungeon twice!
Another interesting thing happened on my way through the YouTube videos, I noticed some sexual differences. Most of the video walkthroughs were done by men/boys with male characters…and they had male housecarls. Now I know that we can get different housecarls at different points in the game, but it made me suspicious that male characters are getting male housecarls. I have also noticed (anecdotaly) since I started playing the game that I have been fighting far more female enemies than I had in either of the 2 previous Elder Scrolls games that I have played. This actually got reaffirmed for me upon watching the walkthrough videos. Oddly, many of the female bandits that I was fighting were indeed male when the male characters in the walkthroughs were encountering them (and here I am talking about specific guards stationed at doors and such, not just those ambling along). So this has me thinking, what was behind this decision by the good folks at Bethesda? Were they trying to avoid too much male on female violence in order to not visually portray men beating women on sceen or were they trying to salvage the fragile male gamer ego by not having them be killed by female enemies? The cynic in me wants to say that it is probably the latter. Either way, I’m not sure that either is the way to go. While I am not advocating a game where the main goal is to kill as many women (or men) as possible (think Dead Island and “Feminist Whore”) I also don’t want to be condescended to in such a way that men and women are simply not allowed to fight one another at all.
Interestingly, Skyrim has become it of a primer for me as of late 🙂 So it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if you saw more of these kinds of posts from me in the future. So what do you think? Are they worthy?
3 thoughts on “Women Beget Women: Or, I Learned Everything That I Need to Know from Skyrim”
Interesting observations, Professor B! I’ve noticed with my female khajiit thief I seem to run into pretty even amounts of male and female enemies, but it seems like almost always the boss of a group of bandits is female (and therefore stronger and better armored than her underlings).
I wouldn’t be surprised by hidden values like this. Players already discovered that height and weight affect how strong you are in the game, so the super tall Nord male will always have a slight edge over the super short female Breton. (More info here: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1286166-hidden-stat-differences-based-on-race-selection/)
There’s something messed up about giving the Nords inherent superiority, (has Bethseda been listening to Ulfric Stormcloak or something?)
So Adam, the big question is do your male characters also have equal numbers of male and female enemies or is it just the female characters with increased interactions?
My male orc ran around the same bandit cave as my female nord back-to-back. Female nord encountered three female bandits, including the bandit leader wearing some kick-butt armor.
Male orc encountered zero female bandits. None!
More runs to follow, I think. I’m wondering if there’s other weird under-the-hood tweaks… For example, ss there a greater percentage of female spellcasters encountered compared to males?