There are also only about six of them, so it gets repetitive fast. Well, maybe they are good, but there is no effort put into making them sound good. The problem with these songs is, frankly, they’re not very good. There’s even one that doesn’t unlock until after you finish the main questline. Naturally, there is a ballad about the Dragonborn, and there’s “Ragnar the Red,” a fairly generic myth of Skyrim song. There’s both a pro-Stormcloak and pro-Imperial song, which provides important context for one of the major conflicts in the game. The bard songs in Skyrim do tell you a little bit about the world and history of Skyrim. Walk into any bar in Skyrim and you’ll find one, you can even hire one to work at your houses in the Hearthstone expansion, and there’s even a large bardic college. For maybe the first couple of hours of playing Skyrim, this is pretty novel. But the bard in the modern fantasy video game usually isn’t that interesting, though many franchises have put their own personal spin on it.īards are pretty much everywhere in Skyrim, for example, and it’s one of the first RPGs I’ve played where the bards actually sang songs and didn’t just play generic lute music. A bard can literally insult an enemy to death, for example. In D&D itself, where combat is less of a focus than in modern video games, this can get pretty interesting. Since pretty much every modern fantasy RPG is based off of Dungeons & Dragons, where bards are considered their own unique class, the bard is now found in most fantasy games as a rogue class, usually with stat buff abilities. In the real world (particularly in the British Isles), bards were poets and storytellers, many of whom were funded by the nobility to practice their art. The bard has a long and storied history as part of the fantasy RPG tradition, but rarely do they actually serve the purpose that real bards ever did. It’s a huge missed opportunity in my opinion, but a few recent games have attempted it to varying degrees of success, most particularly Skyrim and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Even fantasy RPGs, where the bard is literally a combat class a large proportion of the time, rarely have original music with lyrics. Noire was surprisingly good at this, so many of the songs on the radio in that game are very catchy happy sounding songs about murder), but it’s a rare event when fully lyrical original songs to make their way into a game world. The best of the latter curate their playlists carefully to make sure that they fit the theme of the game ( L.A. Music is a major part of any video game, but confines itself to either sweeping orchestral harmonies that accompany you on your grand video game journeys, electronic music, and occasionally the hits of days gone by (like the radio in Fallout) or random pop or rock hits.
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