By Aubrey Sitterson March 14, 2012
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I love Skyrim.
Honestly, I really do. Maybe not as much as UGO's own Sal Basile, but
definitely more than my fiancé, friends, family and religious leaders would
prefer. But despite what you might have heard, Skyrim isn't perfect, and in a lot of ways, suffers by comparison
to another one of our favorite pieces of fantasy-based entertainment: Game of Thrones.
Sure, they're totally different experiences and mediums,
with overlapping but largely separate demographics - but that doesn't mean we
can't make some arbitrary declarations about which one is better than the
other, does it? It's the kind of can-do spirit that Westeros was built upon, so
join us as we lay it out for you why exactly Game of Thrones is better than Skyrim.
Game of Thrones Is Shorter |
A hefty gameplay experience is something to be cherished. If
I plunk down 60 American dollars for something, I want to know that I won't be
bored with it 20 measly hours later. So, on the one hand, I appreciate that you
can easily lose more than 100 hours of your life on a single Skyrim character, even though the
largest percentage of it will likely be spent mixing potions.
But is
it reasonable to spend 100+ hours getting through a single fantasy epic? With
all that time, you could have watched Game
of Thrones and plowed through all five of the currently available Song of Ice and Fire books, with time leftover
to work on a first draft of your Renly and Loras slash fiction. Believe me - I
timed myself. It's nice knowing that I can always go back and lose another
month of my life to Skyrim, but I've
still got something like 17 Dune books
to get through over here.
Game of Thrones Has Fewer Glitches |
It typically didn't bother me too much, because they were mostly
of an aesthetic nature and didn't really affect gameplay, and even when a Skyrim glitch was really awful, you
could usually fix it by restarting your machine while you take a Mountain Dew
Code Red break. But some of those glitches were game-breaking, or at the very least
momentum-breaking, as I've still got a Briar Heart I'm trying to get rid of,
and a lute trapped behind a busted set of puzzles.
Meanwhile, you'll never see the ground in a Game of Thrones city suddenly disappear
from under a building, and if I remember correctly, there aren't any
unobtainable lutes (or any lutes at all for that matter - another plus in my
book). In fact, Game of Thrones doesn't have a single glitch, unless you count the fact that Tyrion Lannister,
who is supposed to be grotesquely ugly, is being played by World's Handsomest
Dwarf Peter Dinklage (sorry, Warwick Davis).
Game of Thrones Has No Puzzles |
Puzzles can be fun. Everyone's taken the stickers off a Rubix
Cube and rearranged them, there was the 8 month period when we all went apeshit
bananas for Sudoku and if you get me drunk enough and stick me at the beach
during inclement weather, I've been known to try my hand at a jigsaw puzzle.
But the "Spin the thing to change the animal showing" nature of Skyrim's puzzles isn't exactly putting
together a 2500-piecer with a wicked buzz on, and I could go the rest of my
life without zooming in on another claw to look at what animals are depicted
there.
You won't ever have that problem with Game of Thrones, as thusfar at least, the series hasn't featured a
single puzzle. Mysteries, conundrums, enigmas and artifices, sure, but not one
actual puzzle. The week that Game of
Thrones ends with the audience being asked to trial-and-error their way to
the next episode will be the exact moment I go back to that stack of Dune novels.
In Game of Thrones, Kids Can Die! |
Or at least get seriously, seriously wounded, as seen when
Jamie Lannister knocked Bran's stupid ass out a window like an absolute
sister-banging BOSS. Everybody can get killed in Game of Thrones, and generally speaking, spoiler alert, everybody
f'ing does. Other notable children to get what they had coming to them include
the peasant kid Arya was friends with, the young Targaryens prior to the start
of Game of Thrones and Daenerys'
unborn child, which may or may not count depending on how you feel about
Planned Parenthood.
In Skyrim though, killing kids is strictly
verboten, thanks to the prudes and/or fascists over at Bethesda Games. You can
beat, stab and set children on fire, but you can't actually kill them, which we
think sends a bad message to today's youth. Kids need to know that if they're
obnoxious enough, someone will legit murder them - fear of your elders is one
of the basic building blocks of any working society.
Game of Thrones Has an Easier Backstory |
You can play Skyrim without knowing a lick about the Elder
Scrolls series as a whole, but good luck giving a good goddamn about what
plane the Daedra come from, what the hell an Elder Scroll actually is or even
feigning interest as a too-talky Khajiit lisps its way through some half-assed
remembrances of Elsweyr. Of course, you could always try and get yourself up to
speed, but that would involve some combination of playing outdated, pixel-y
looking video games and/or collecting and reading fake books in a video game.
The only thing worse than collecting real books is collecting fake books, and
if I want to play a terrible looking game, I'll go to the iTunes AppStore,
thanks.
The
world of Game of Thrones is no less
expansive than that of Skyrim, but
its history is doled out on an as-you-need-to-know basis, and compared with
figuring out whoever the hell Barenziah was, wrapping your head around the Valyrian
Doom is an absolute dream. I could barely get through Tolkien's book of
painfully drawn out continuity and explanations of canon, what makes you think
I want to do that on a video game?
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