great forest of whiterun hold multipatch

One example of a non-calibrated challenge that appears early in the game has been immortalised by Ozrek’s oft-repeated comment: “Everyone’s first mistake in Skyrim / ‘I wonder if I can kill that giant…'”3 The placement of an extremely difficult challenge early in the game-namely the two powerful giants just to the west of Whiterun, the first major stopping point in the game-essentially demonstrates the basic level of strategy inherent to playing a nonlinear game. It wasn’t just because giants are cool, it was because the game needed to impart a message: Death can lurk anywhere, but at the same time, you can always get around it. Galiher then breaks down why he believes the designers at Bethesda placed that giant camp right next to Whiterun, the game’s first major city. In the case of Skyrim, while most challenges are attuned to the main character’s current level, a great many others are not, and the player must adjust his or her behaviour accordingly. The trial-and-error process, as Juul suggests, allows the player to develop a nuanced understanding of the game. The reward is more efficient playthrough, while failure means redundancy (as well as an accumulating sense of ineptitude). The act of gameplay, then, can be reduced to risk assessment, a player’s appraisal of the likely outcome of a plot decision or combat tactic. Even this latter variable can be minimized by the player’s ability to save at virtually any point in the game, even in the midst of combat. Thus, the player is essentially evaluating temporal investments: Will this strategy cause me to lose and replay the entire fight? Did a plot decision I made hours ago lead to an unfavorable outcome? The size of a penalty can be measured as the product of likelihood of success multiplied by the amount of time involved in replaying. In it, he breaks down how the game’s difficulty works - it’s not about lost progress as much as it’s about lost time.

student Clifford Galiher has tackled this idea in this dense but accessible paper republished at USC’s Mediascape blog. But what about big, nonlinear games like Skyrim? How, exactly, are those games difficult?

Great forest of whiterun hold multipatch