The Terrible Problem With Skyrim's Magic (And Why Death Stranding's Is Genius)

When I first played Skyrim in 2013 and was getting familiar with the

magic

systems, I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but I knew something was wrong. I didn't understand what or why, but when I use

magic

on that. game and said fire as I quit in one direction and swung my magic sword like a mutated spider in the other. I never enjoyed it, I mean, don't get me wrong, I loved playing the game and I wouldn't have completed four full playthroughs if I had I didn't love it, but it was specifically the magic systems in that game that made me so nervous that in all my playthroughs I did I tried my best to avoid using that magic as much as possible and every time I've thought about it since then and it's been getting worse in the most irritating way, like an itch under my skin that I can't scratch because I've never come close to understanding it.

Why did Skyrim magic seem so boring to me? until I learned Death Stranding and Hideo Kojima helped me find the answer that I had long given up hope of knowing. Now Death Stranding is a divisive game. It's a mom game. You either love it or hate it because it's essentially the most complete game. A developed quest quest ever made for people who don't mind quest quests, it's a masterpiece but for people who do it it's the complete opposite, but while playing Death Stranding I struggled with the idea of ​​whether I liked the gameplay or not. More was weighing on my mind and at this point I just have to give credit where it's due because the world building in Death Stranding is beautiful, it's some of the best world building I've seen while playing.

I completely bought this fictional post. Apocalyptic America with joyful immersion, but once I finished the game and took a step back, I compared it to Skyrim and realized that, for all of that game's exhaustive world-building, Skyrim never came close to immersing me. in the same way Death Stranding did. and that doesn't make sense because Skyrim has this exhaustive gallery of gods, the wiki website has over 65,000 articles, for God's sake there are a million magic systems, thousands of characters, dozens of secret organizations, so many different intelligent species that make up the population and a hundred different cities and towns, there is an immense amount of world building in the Elder Scrolls series, yes, a game as simple as its

stranding

with a relatively simple world captured my imagination more than Skyrim.

I'm not saying that Death Strandings world is somehow objectively better than Skyrim's, you just can't judge things like that objectively, but what I am saying is that Death Stranding's world has a vital quality that makes Skyrim It is delayed, so it beats around the bush, that quality that

death

s are running. Skyrim's dozen is a feature there, after quite a bit of research I haven't actually found any cases where a writer has claimed a name for it, which surprised me a little because you'd think it's one of those components fundamentals to Well, building, for the sake of this video, just so we can name this and move on, we'll call this idea internal realism and what internal realism is.

Well, I would say that's how real the world is, but there are a lot of fantasy worlds. There's crazy magic to having this strong realistic feel, so I'd rather say that's exactly how it is, the world feels real despite the fact that it may be inherently unrealistic. Well, then you know which plot hole is right, it's when the plot isn't. It doesn't make sense because logic doesn't add up well when a creator has no internal realism, it's exactly like a plot hole, except it's not because of the story, but because of the world he inhabits. Well, as an example, in Skyrim there is a mission in the most Thor city, where you find yourself on the wrong side of the law and you are thrown into the local jail where the prisoners are forced to mine and when the player is thrown into this prison , they take away every piece of armor and weaponry. in their inventory is confiscated and that makes sense because it would be totally ridiculous for these guards to allow any prisoner to finish jail with any weapon of any kind, however I'm sure anyone who has played Skyrim before knows where I'm going. this because the moment you get thrown into the prison with the other unarmed defensive prisoners you can do this now is it just me or is there a subtle reason just a small annoying hole that doesn't make much sense here you can summon fire magic or ice magic or magic swords or use scream magic and massacre the prison population en masse the very moment you are thrown into this prison, there is nothing the guards do to take care of your magical abilities before you are thrown into the guards.

If the concept of a magic user being in their prison is a complete impossibility and if magic in this world was something extremely rare, it would make sense that they wouldn't think so much about magical safety, but the

problem

with this is that magic In the world of Skyrim it is far from rare, a large part of the population is well versed in the use of magical spells. I mean, as far as I can tell, every last man, woman and child has the ability to learn a spell that is capable of harming another person, so why in this prison?

The guards do their due diligence in removing physical weapons from prisoners, but do nothing to address the large percentage of the population who can wave their hand and burn someone to

death

. The answer. The excuse for this. feature in the world isn't just negligence from the guards' perspective, there's no excuse because if this world had even an ounce of internal realism, the gods would at least do something to try to nullify your powers before throwing you in with the others. prisoners and the fact that they don't is a tremendously incredible dive. I mean, there are potions that already exist in the game that inhibit magical abilities when taken.

Surely it would be standard practice for all prisons in the world to force these anti-magic potions on the

terrible

for all their prisoners, otherwise it would be a security nightmare. Bethesda added the magic systems from it and didn't consider what the ramifications would be if said magic actually existed, and as a result, the world is dumbed down because the world has a big hole. in it and Skyrim has many more holes than this, this is just an example to prove my point and we will explore other errors in Scarran's world building later, but before we do, let's compare that to Death Stranding, so when descending there is this element. called silly weather essentially as a result of this paranormal apocalypse the rain causes extreme aging in everything it touches when I first saw Ty in fall and death stranded where he touched the rattan his hair and it instantly turned gray.

I thought he was cool, he's creative. idea that we hadn't really seen before and I expected it to be a little more than a fun trick, but the thing is that it evolved to be much more than that, anything in the players supports Russ when it's raining, which degrades his condition and presents this whole

problem

that the protagonist has to deal with in his daily life, if you leave something out in the open, like a truck or a ladder, it will gradually rust and deteriorate due to the fall of time and all this is great, it makes the world sits more. dynamic as we see the repercussions of this fool time's existence, but then we see a guy fall to the gruesome fate of being trapped under a vehicle exposed to the open air and then this rain hits his face and instantly surrounds him, It's a beautifully horrible scene we have. see the

terrible

human cost that occurs when someone gets caught in the rain and this time falls, it gradually transcends a mere trick, it is becoming a downright fascinating aspect of the law of this world and the effect of this weather nonsense goes beyond of the human cost alone.

It also affects the ecology. When I played and looked at the landscapes, I noticed that this world is almost entirely moss and grass, but I mean, sure you come across the odd treetop here and there, but the vast majority of the landscape is this. barren swamp, but this is set in the United States, right, the US ecosystem is nothing like this, so why does this world have such simple plant life? And then I realized that it is because of the time there is, the reason why there are so few. trees and bushes is because time falls rapidly ages everything it touches, it essentially kills any living thing that is exposed to it, that means dear, that means squirrels, birds, insects and trees, that's why it's almost and grass because The rain has completely erased the life of this world. ecosystem and makes it so that only very short lived plants such as moss and grass have the ability to grow larger and one thing that is just the icing on the cake is that there is no in-game journal or wiki article explaining why the ecosystem is so devastated or even saying the ecosystem is devastated it's just there in the game and kijima passes the ultimate test of any world builder where he adds something really cool but has the discipline to not shove it in the faces of the world builders. players and, as a result, puts it on the back burner. most people probably won't even make the connection that this is the reason the landscape looks like that, but when they do, it just makes the world a lot cooler, now that the effect on the ecosystem is a Really interesting attention to detail and it really helps make the world feel more interesting, but I think the moment when I was playing this trend when it sealed the deal that I gave myself over to loving this world and loving you, I had to make this video is when I stumbled upon a brewery and this Turns out the brewery uses Tydfil, they consider that an extremely deadly rain has ruined society, destroyed the ecosystem and caused countless deaths, they apply some human ingenuity and use it to decrease the amount of time what it takes to make beer and carry out the entire production process.

Much cheaper so far we see how people take people's lives and ruin our day and generally be a total nuisance but in this little corner of this world we see these people exploit this deadly paranormal element in a creative way or it is actually a benefit to society. a change and that's just amazing if time was a thing in the real world of course someone would have the brilliant idea of ​​using it to decrease the time it takes to ferment alcohol. It makes the entire world of Death Stranding feel so realistic, so immersive because Not only are the ramifications of time extremely well thought out where every effect it would have on a living world is considered, but the people in that world not only act like the NPCs from Skyrim, but they act like humans and do the very human thing of trying.

To find creative exploits for even the most dangerous aspects of its setting, Bethesda did the antithesis of what Kojima did. He may have miscounted, but Skyrim has 100 magic spells. 100 is an incredible amount of magic. Most of the fantasy novels I read have like one or two magics. systems, but like 100, don't get me wrong, they're fun to use, but it seems like Bethesda's approach to that game's world wasn't to create a world so carefully thought out that it gave the player complete license to immerse themselves in it. feel the touch of fresh air on your skin as you climb the mountains or smell the warm spices of the bustling market under the midday sun.

Bethesda's method was to add one cool feature, then go ahead and add another cool feature, then another, and then repeat a few by filling the world a thousand times over with an enormous amount of world-building while simultaneously neglecting the effects those things would have on a truly real world (as cliché as it sounds) with Skyrim Bethesda made their world as wide as an O but as deep as a puddle and I'm sure you've heard of the author Brandon Sanderson, he's incredibly prolific, he writes some fantastic books and he really is the person you should pay attention to if you want to learn how to build a world, especially when you want to create a really interesting magic system.

If you haven't watched Sanderson's creative writing lectures on YouTube and have even the slightest interest in writing, you are missing out, for your own good go watch them right after watching this video. It's free on YouTube and I've learned a lot from his lectures, but a while ago Sanderson created three laws to consider when creating a magic system and when it comes to his third law, I found it quite interesting to delve into magic instead. to expand it. This is the idea that fewer things in a world-building situation that are well explored will actually feel like a bigger, colder world than a lot of things that are very superficially explored.

Well, it's the idea in Hollywood and in our own psychology that is bigger. better but bigger can have multiple different meanings. I think a magic system that you've explored deeply in an interesting way is far superior to a lot of things. Can I make them objecteach other? Can I make it so they are linked? economics with religion if I can tie all these things together with a couple of my magics I will have a better experience for the reader, the answer will usually be yes that is what will happen considering the ramifications of what you already have.

It's worth doing rather than creating something new, and here's the thing: none of this is to say that you can't have a tremendously wide world and have that world be immersive. There are many writers like Tolkien or George R.R. Martin you have done exactly that, but what? i.e. as you increase the scope of your world, that exponentially increases the amount of work you have to do if you want to make every aspect of your world really interesting and not feel like a Skyrim magic spell where it's just a surface level . thing, but as you add more elements to your world, like the butterfly effect of the ramifications those impacts have on culture, economics, and religion, it starts to get very crazy very quickly, so it's something worth a look.

It's worth considering when you're trying to create your own worlds, but as a general rule it's better to go deeper than wider and I don't know if one of you is going to flag this and say in the comments, that's the title of my sex tape, don't do it, They are better than that, but as long as they think things through. and sort of simulate in your head what would happen if this new element were introduced. As long as you do this, it will do wonders for your world to have a much stronger internal realism and, as a result, it will make it much easier for your audience to fall in love with your world and I mean, the last thing you should do, although the last thing you should do is introduce a spell into your world called transmute or I have never in my life seen a worse executed magic system in Like any fiction than the spell transmute everything in Skyrim, for those of you who are not familiar with Skyrim, there is a spell called transmute or by using it they can take a chunk of iron ore and turn it into an equal amount of gold ore with the low cost of some magic axe, this spell has absolutely no law around here, as I checked the wiki.

I search on the Internet. I pulled out of the 820 books in the world in this game, none of them like to mention this magical system of turning iron into gold like there are. there were no lines of dialogue as if a wizard was telling you the story and the impact of the spell on the world. The Craters didn't really spend a single second trying to integrate this magic into this world. They added it simply because it's cool. trick, but here's the problem and how the spell to create gold exists and the world of Skyrim has a gold-based economy.

May I remind you that the currency everyone uses in Skyrim is gold coins, which means that anyone who knows this spell can buy a ton of iron or turn it into a ton of gold, oh and all you need to do is create a set as a half-decent mold and now has the ability to literally print money. I'm not going to elaborate on this point because Bethesda didn't. Flesh your world, so why should you do that with your video? But if just one person in this world had the ability to make gold exist, the effect it would have on a gold-based economy would look like this and that's why the world of Death Strandings was trapped.

I mean, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is my favorite fictional world I've ever seen depicted in a video game, don't get me wrong. The Witcher 3 God of War and Mass Effect all have brilliant worlds, but what? What I love about Death Stranding is the impressive discipline that Hideo Kojima had when designing this world. He didn't do what so many amateur world builders do and go crazy. He didn't say, "Okay, now we're adding a new religion." a new species now we are adding a new economy based on a rare metal now we are adding ten new magic systems with people who could shoot fire from their hands and also ice because that's cool and let's also add another religion and Also, let's add another magic system, for good measure, he just adds one or two elements and then carefully considers the ramifications those things would have if that world were actually real, and as a result, it's a highly immersive world, you know, unless you consider it. that whole Monster Energy Drink ad out of nowhere, but people give Kojima a bad rap for Schilling advertisers at the end of the day.

I sympathize with him because he is just an influencer who sells his dignity to try to pay his bills, talking about what raid. Shadow Legends is a game and you shouldn't play it. I'm just kidding. I don't think they have sponsored this. A man might have some standards, but this video is not sponsored by Raid, but it was sponsored by me. They left the pass. That was so embarrassing, basically I just want to mention that if you guys are a long time fan of this channel and want to see me make more videos like this, it would really mean a lot to me if you could support me on Patreon like when I step out of my comfort zone and I make experimental videos like this one that is only possible thanks to you who already support me on Patreon, since they give me much more stability with my channel and allow me to have that creative freedom. and it's only for those people who are already supporting me.

Thank you so much. I love you because you are helping me live my dream and helping me have fun with this channel because I can do experiments like this and see what happens if you click that link in the description and support me you will find a lot of cool rewards you will get access to my exclusive sponsor called several, we have our own little exclusive community, you can watch all my videos five days before, you can put your name chromatid in the description and at the top and I have a little consultation session where I will take a look at your YouTube channel or I'll read a little bit of your novel or anything in between and tell you what I think you can do. to improve your audience, but by far the most important reason you should support me on Patreon is because I have to worry less about spending money to attack Shadow Legends, guys, this is blackmail, this is theft, you don't support me on Patreon . and I'm going to do Rain Shadow Legends Randall.

I warn you, none of us want to see it. I don't want to see it, but I will if you don't commit unless you click the link right now. support me, I will, I promise, as long as you support me on Patreon, I will never pay for Ray's shadow legends. I think if I only had the support of one person who gave like a dollar, I probably wouldn't run out of them yet. I mean I think if I was starving on the street homeless I probably still wouldn't pay them but anyway back to that just because you're adding fantastical elements like magic systems or rain that speeds up time that's not it . excuse for being lazy, the reason I say that is because I imagine there are people in the comments who are arguing, but it's a fantasy, it's not supposed to be realistic, you're okay with people shooting fire with their hands and rain that speeds up time but you're not okay with a little supervision in the security of a prison yeah, I'm not okay with that and you shouldn't be the argument that it's okay for your world to make no logical sense because it's a Fantasy is blatantly flawed in some ways.

Fantasy is identical to science fiction in the sense that the world sets rules that it must follow and when a writer explores the world he must stick to those rules if he is writing strict science fiction. of your world will be identical to ours and if you don't stick to them, it will erase the credibility of your world if you are writing a fantasy where magic is common and you don't consider something as simple as magical. Safety will be seen as a word full of magic, it will destroy the audience's immersion because there is no point in skimping on internal realism and your audience will see how that guy in the back of the shot is actually a cardboard cutout because he just fell.

You'll see that the gun the boys are holding is actually a prop. They will notice that that maid behind the bar is not an interesting living person, she is just a character, break the rules of your world and you will receive a harsh reminder that your fictional world is nothing more than a construction and a poorly constructed one at that. , but right now I think it'll be really cool if I stop talking about theory and give you an example of what it looks like when you put this into action. It's time to do Bethesda's job for them.

They have added so many magic systems to this game and each one is as poorly developed as the last, but they were going to be very nice and we will choose just one of Skyrim's magic spells as if it were just one. and we'll ask how it would affect Skyrim if that world was actually a real place, so in Skyrim there is a spell the player can learn called bound sword, essentially once you learn the spell you can with extremely low magic attack, suddenly you can cut that in the game it's just as effective as a real sword, its stats are pretty solid and while there are clearly more effective weapons in this world, it's certainly no more effective than the standard steel sword, so how does this affect to the world in the game as it is? well of course we already know the answer to not only does he like to transmute, all the magic was added because it's a fun trick and his impact on the world was completely ignored by the developers in the game Skyrim, the only case I've seen . where this spell was slightly developed is in the fact that some thermal soldiers you come across use it and that's it, you meet a very rare person in this world who uses this spell.

Now I imagine some of you are thinking, what a magical sword that people can summon that will have almost zero impact on this world, if any. I mean, steel swords still work well, they still work and cut things so people still use them. The only ramifications this would have in a realistic Skyrim are a couple of bandits and wizards using the spell in combat, that's right, wrong, like Christ, that's so wrong in Skyrim it's labeled as a beginner level spell, which It is the lowest level of spell that exists now. I'm sure there is some extremely dark book you can read in one of the above.

The 2002 Elder Scrolls games say that by law this is a very difficult spell to cast, but this game has the rebound sword spell labeled novice and by this game's own logic because it is the lowest difficulty spell and it seems that all humanoids in this world can. learn magic which logically means that anyone in this world with a little determination can learn to use this spell if you take Skyrim as it is in the game and run it as a simulation with a functioning economy and society, the effect would be tied sword in the economy it would be colossal the first effect we would see the blacksmiths would close because of course they would it would be inevitable that the existence of these souls would cause a dramatic decrease in the income of blacksmiths everywhere because now almost every soldier almost every last person If you ever needed a sword in your life you would abandon the steel and take up the magical one because it is a total improvement in almost every way, except for the one exception or the fact that there is a small investment of time to learn. how to use it now im not well versed in shadows oh i know damn how swords actually work but i can assume that in medieval times it was very expensive to get a sword made by a blacksmith some must take a huge amount of time .

Meanwhile, it would cost you a good amount of money and once you have it you will have to spend more time and money maintaining it, you will have to sharpen it, clean it and make sure it does not rust, you have to worry about losing it. Because it's an expensive piece of equipment, you have to worry about it being stolen, but now, who would want to use a steel sword when this much cooler magic sword is not only free but also incredibly lightweight and only exists when do you want it? Now you can summon it on a whim as a soldier, you don't need to worry about carrying this cumbersome sword on your belt at all times.

You can simply squid all your fingers and summon this sword on command if Skyrim were a real world. Every girl and general would want to save money anywhere they can because of course any king or government only has a finite amount of resources and teaching every last army soldier or every last guard in their city to use the limit. sword spell, it would save them an absolute fortune in equipment costs as they would never have to buy their soldiers a weapon again. Furthermore, as a result of the existence of this tied sword, we will see an impact on more than just the economy, it would also affect culture.

We would see weapon purists in Whiterun. There is a famous Warrior Club called Companions, which is where the best fighters go in search of glory. It would make a lot of sense if these hardcore warriors had a strict no-limits weapons policy, but like when you talk to their leader. he says a real warrior uses real steel and they refuse to let you in so you throw away all that magical crap and buy a real sword and thesePeers would be proud of the fact that they use real steel while no one else will. They brag about increasing when they're in combat about how they've done what no one else does anymore and how they use real metal weapons because they're that tough and don't get me started and how the spellbow also exists in this game so Everything Which I said applies to blacksmiths also applies to Bowyer's and Fletcher's because who wants to pay money for arrows when you could have an infinite supply of free arrows just by waving your hands?

Now poor Eleonora, who owes the drunk hunter a debt, joins the group. blacksmith in the bar trying to drink to dispel the pain because no one buys his bows and arrows anymore and he is about to go out of business and I appreciate that some details are too small to fully develop a builders disease exists and is totally possible to dedicate too much time to develop your worlds. I appreciate that worldbuilding for a huge world like Skyrim is a demanding task, and maybe that excuse would be forgetting one or two knock-on effects if these elements were real, but seriously, every single one of them. only logical branch that would occur if the battle sword was a real spell, you forgot the last one, you couldn't even have a single line of dialogue where a blacksmith complains that there are always magic swords and that they are inferior to real steel.

It would have been hard to add as an NPC in the bar who was a former blacksmith and since you talked to him and he must in this rant about how he lost all his income because of those damn inferior magic swords, how hard would it be for the developers to program him so that Do a good portion of the people you fight use these? strapped swords instead of steel swords like in the game, you run into the odd lack of more patrol using them, but it would make sense for a much larger portion of the population to use these fantastic weapons because they're free, look tough, and do more . damage are common steel swords, how about when you walk into a blacksmith shop instead of saying we have small weapons and big maces, daggers, that kind of thing, instead they try very hard to sell you the idea that steel real? weapons are superior to all that magical crap in an attempt to sell you a sword because of course I would if this world were real.

He's desperate to sell as much merchandise as he can because he's been selling very little lately and he wants to feed his family, how hard would that be and would he like a quest where there are two rival blacksmiths in a town and the town isn't big enough? For the two of them, the state of the economy means that the demand for their labor is too low to support both rival blacksmiths, so the player has to decide in the mission which of the blacksmiths they want to sabotage by framing them for a crime they want to help with. or the work can do nothing and let them bleed slowly. to death financially, how hard would it have been to add these things?

The answer is, of course, adding none of these things would have been no more difficult than adding any other line of dialogue or any other quest, but it would have done wonders. the world feels much more dynamic as the work would have this strong feeling that the world is real because it is so carefully considered and because it finally has an economy that actually works if only they had five spells instead of a hundred, but developed those five spells. so completely and wonderfully seeing the vast radical changes this magic would have on the world. I mean, sure we'd have to give up the ability to shoot ice from our fingers, but it would have achieved the fundamentals of great world-building. everything about this wouldn't make the world much more interesting, much cooler, immersive and/or inspiring, all at once, but let me know what you think, do you think I'm right or apparently business as usual?

I'm wrong, I would love to, don't you believe the comments below? Thanks for watching, don't forget to click the link in the description to support me on Patreon and I'll see you closer next time. look