I got the itch to boot up Skyrim recently for the first time in four or five years. Miraculously, my old mod loadout still worked. Because it was the Ides of March at the time, I named my character Marcus Brutus and decided my main mode of combat would be Stabbing.

I had my fun, but it hit different than it has in the past. I’ve played a lot of other games since 2021, and Skyrim has never felt so dated to me, even in a way that Morrowind doesn’t feel. Every once in a while I think of what The Elder Scrolls VI will need to change if Bethesda wants to stick the landing. I think the most obvious update would need to be to the combat since in 2026, Skyrim combat feels janky and bad (especially when you’re dueling someone with knives in first person). But the actual structure of Skyrim felt strange to me this time, like, the degree to which it is a game about being a serial killer is kind of absurd. I don’t just mean if you join the Dark Brotherhood - as a Good Guy you are instructed to go out and murder hundreds of undesirables.

Obviously, most fantasy games are very violence-centric, but the ubiquity of the Murderable Bandit No One Will Miss here felt really bad to me. Baldur’s Gate 3, maybe the current best fantasy RPG, is also overwhelmingly violence-centric, but they justify it there by putting you in incredibly hightened, extreme, exaggeratedly dangerous situations at all times. It makes killing feel less weird because the alternative is you getting killed by an alien or an insane demon or something that has specific beef with you. Even then, there are a ton of ways to avoid combat or resolve encounters in non-murder type ways. But in Skyrim, why is the Jarl asking me to go murder twenty “bandits”? I’m just supposed to believe that if you’re in organized crime you’ve forfeited your right to life? Like, if it was set in the modern day and the mayor was giving the player carte blanche to kill all Crips, the dissonance would be weird, right? Like that would feel insane and bad? The gameplay buys into this really pessimistic view of the moral worth of your fellow man.

The racial politics also hit weird, not necessarily the weirdness of the universe’s race system (something fantasy franchises have been pulling away from in the years since 2011), but how much the NPCs talk about race in game. Hello NPC on the street, what do you mean “have I ever seen a cat person”? What do you mean “have I ever met a redguard”? We’re in a major urban center of a racially diverse, thousand-year-old continent-spanning empire! Like, I know its not a surprise to anyone that fantasy settings are ahistorical, but its funny that this Roman Empire analogue is made up of 19th-century-ass ethnostates and people have national identies tied to race and everyone acts like nobody is travelling or settling in other places even though that’s obviously actively happening.

Finally, a bunch of stuff just hit kind of… cringe? I did the whole Dark Brotherhood questline because I was Stabbing and everyone there talks like they’re in a lame horror movie, salivating over blood and bones and stuff like that. Like real murder perverts, but you don’t actually see them do anything fucked up the whole time! You don’t even see them assassinate anybody, you do all that yourself, so it just feels like you’re at a Halloween party full of people who are trying too hard. Cicero is the best part because at least he’s camp!

All this was making me think of a post I saw at one point that went like: “if you feel bad about a movie misrepresenting the place you’re from, remember that most of them are made by people in Southern California.” By that token, Bethesda games are made by people in the Washington, DC suburbs. These games have a suburban perspective. Everything has an incredibly sheltered vibe to it, where like, its an M rated game because of the graphic portrayals of violence, but at the same time none of the narrative around that violence has any weight to it. Everyone’s just doing violence because they think violence is fun, not because they’re resorting to it for a reason. There’s kind of a synergy to that, of course, because you the player are also playing the game because you think violence is fun.

I think playing Starfield and not liking it is what kind of broke the Bethesda part of my brain. The problems I had with that game boiled down to the fact that I don’t want to shoot NASA astronauts with guns and I don’t understand why they would be shooting at me. That’s not the activity I want to do on the moon. It just felt stupid to me while I was playing it. The final nail in Starfield’s coffin for me was going to the Drugs Planet and visiting the Drugs Club to see just how edgy the game could get. And everyones just like, dancing badly, to lame music, going “wooo I’m on druuuugs!” I’m not a like hard drug user but it made me wonder if the people that made this had ever even been drunk at a bar before. So I turned Starfield off forever and bought a copy of Cyberpunk: 2077 the next time it was on sale.

I can see how I’m backporting this perspective onto Skyrim. It has the same problem where it wants to contain M-rated topics but the target audience is a suburban teen who doesn’t know or really care what those things are like. And like, I was a suburban teen when I played the hell out of Skyrim, but I’ve since, like, read books. Experienced life. Etc.

I won’t say this makes me worried about The Elder Scrolls VI, it’s more freeing than anything. I’m not chomping at the bit for it anymore. Also… I can see Bethesda’s desire for dynamic, “infitinite” gameplay getting in the way of an intentionally written, ludo-narratively harmonious experience in these games, and I can see the all-consuming corporate push to use AI in AAA games, and I go: oh no, TES 6 is going to be full of meaning-free AI-generated voice acting, isn’t it?

This all being said, nobody plays Bethesda games for the writing (Morrowind fans excepted). They play them because they have bugs like this in them: