10 Video Games With An Insane Level Of Detail (That No One Noticed)
5. Skyrim's World Is Fully Independent Without You
Before GTA V, Skyrim was the open-world game of all open-world games due to its unparalleled freedom in allowing you to do whatever the hell you wanted... something Fallout 4 will be revolutionising all over again later this year. But what makes this game impressive are the little, barely-noticed details sprinkled in everywhere.
The advanced AI for NPCs give each character their own independent life away from your antics, and will ensure that their interactions with you depend on whatever you do in the game world. There are some more obvious ones, such as when you drop some unwanted armour on the ground, someone might chastise you for littering or another might return it to you, for example.
When you've mastered a few skills, such as pick-pocketing, other characters will warn you to stay away - assumedly because by then you've got something of a reputation as a shifty character. And then there are those really subtle ones, like very slight dialogue changes with characters if you happened to speak to others first or did an innocent thing such as kill a random NPC.
Lastly there's the ridiculously detailed game world, which people already acknowledge to some degree. Specifically, there's the sheer amount of useless stuff you can pick up literally everywhere. Every single book in the game was specifically written as its own standalone story, and each of the nine stronghold areas were specifically and painstakingly designed to look and feel different to one another, such as the snow-filled Windhelm to the autumn-inspired Riften.