Skyrim Review

There are some games you can just tell will be good. The Elder Scrolls series has been going strong for years but I have never really been a huge fan. One of my brothers spent a lot of time with Morrowind but for some reason I never got around to playing it. Then, when Oblivion came out I decided to take it for a spin and was not impressed, at all. That effectively ended my interest in anything Elder Scrolls related. Strangely, the announcement of Skyrim piqued my interest. It just seemed different enough from Oblivion to warrant a closer look. As time went by and the release date neared I had made my decision. Although there was a chance I might regret it, Skyrim was a game I had to play, and I’m sure glad I did.

The character creation sequence is pretty similar to its predecessor’s with one major difference, you can actually create a character that doesn’t look like some type of mutant troll. The human races, while all distinct, tend to turn out looking really good. The elvish faces seem to end up a bit pointed for my taste. It’s as if the developers took a cue from their pointy ears and made everything about their face intensely angular. I’m sure its just a matter of personal preference. The other races look quite nice as well.

The beginning of the game was fantastically done. Your journey starts in the back of a horse-drawn carriage where you are carried along with other prisoners to an Imperial town where you will all be executed. You are given brief snippets alluding to a much grander conflict between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks. Eventually, once your name is called, you are brought up to the executioner when suddenly a dragon comes roaring through the sky and begins attacking the city giving you a chance to escape. Yes, that’s right, and its no surprise, dragons have entered The Elder Scrolls.

When you take a step back and think about it, dragons are a very logical step. Everyone who loves fantasy loves dragons and yet The Elder Scrolls have managed to become one of the premier fantasy franchises without including dragons in their games. Well, what better way to blow the lid off then combine the two and that’s exactly what Bethesda did.

Skyrim takes you through a fantastic adventure that pulls you and you won’t ever look back. The main storyline of the game takes you on an epic quest to prevent the world from ending. However, you do not accomplish this as any random hero, but rather as the only person who can save the world. It is a very interesting and well paced story which takes you all over the continent. If this was the only questline in the game, Skyrim would still be a great game.

With that being said, the real jewel of Skyrim is simply the whole world that has been created. There is just so much going on and so much that you can do and become involved with. Almost all games exist in the format where you can pretty easily cover all the content in the game. If you see a building somewhere, it exists because there is some purpose to it being there. This might be a nonfunctional building just for looks, or maybe there’s a treasure in their to reward players for exploring. This format simply does not exist in Skyrim.

Bethesda has created a spectacular world full of different cities, peoples, factions and all kinds of other sweet goodness. Now when I play “normal” games, I tend to be a bit of a completionist. I go everywhere, see everything, and get everything. Looking back, my guess is that I do this for the reason explained previously: in most games everything in the game is there for some sort of “game” purpose. The radical thing about Skyrim is that things were created just for the sake of having this wonderful world.

I distinctly remember a point in the game where I was following the bank of a river to get to my desired destination when in came to my view was a building with a watermill on the other side of the river. Instinctively I pivoted to run across the river to the mill to discover why it was placed there in the game but then I paused for a moment. The idea came to my mind based on my previous hours in Skyrim that there probably wasn’t any “gaming” reason for that watermill to be there . . . but what if there was some “gaming” reason to go check it out? I decided I would leave it there and continued, gratified, running down the river to my destination.

It is amazing to think of all the activity going on in Skyrim. Very early in the game I anticipated there would be the “major” questline involving the dragons and there would also be this whole Imperials vs Stormcloaks ordeal going on that would somehow tie into the main story. That wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Everyone in Skyrim has their own agenda. There are numerous factions, and other groups of people all working for their goals in a way that seems very reminiscent of what happens in real life. This wonderful world puts you in the position where you can really push to do almost whatever you want. With all the various options you can surely find your niche in the world where you are able to accomplish what you want and have fun. The real kicker is that all of these different pursuits aren’t just side questlines that do their own thing. They are all interconnected and end with big moments which impact Skyrim as a whole.

I really enjoy the leveling system with the whole “do what you want to do without restrictions” type of mentality. You could roll through half the game wearing heavy plate armor and still decide that it would be cool blast people with a fireball. Skill points are not unlimited so a single character cannot have access to everything, but there are definitely enough skill points to enable you to have a multi-faceted character. For the most part, skill increases seem to accrue at a good pace. The higher the skill level, the longer for it to go up again. Pretty standard.

The one area where the skill system seems week is with crafting. The inherent problem is that anything you do related to the skill, counts towards that skill going up regardless of how trivial it is. So for someone with a Blacksmithing of 90, they would get a bigger increase to their skill if they crafted a piece of Daedric armor but they would still get credit for crafting an iron dagger. This is a problem because the cost differential between crafting these two things is far, far greater than the difference in skill increase you get. This yields a system where I simply made many, many iron daggers to hit 100 blacksmithing, before I had hit level 16.

There really wasn’t anything else worth crafting to raise my skill. I moved from crafting a set of steel armor, to dwarven plate, to dragonplate, got those skill increases and was left with nothing else worth making. While it was exciting to be decked out in dragonplate in what I felt was pretty early in the game, it was a bit disheartening to go through many, many more hours of gameplay without ever upgrading my armor after that.

All of the skills work like this but it only becomes problematic with crafting. In theory, you could raise your two-handed weapon skill to 100 by killing a million rats. This won’t ever happen because there isn’t easy access to a million rats and because its more fun to go kill other stuff. With crafting, you have pretty easy access to purchasing tons of iron and there isn’t really anything inherently fun about crafting more difficult stuff that you’ve already made and are already using. In reality the crafting system should have been tweaked so that you can’t infinitely raise your skill by completing trivial tasks like making iron daggers.

Much has been discussed regarding the visual quality of the game. Honestly, a lot of it has been blown way out of proportion. It is impossible for a world has huge and diverse as Skyrim to look as fantastic as some FPS game where you pretty much just run in a straight line and shoot things for about 8 hours to beat the game. Its just not going to happen. I will say that Skyrim is the most beautiful RPG I have played. The people look nice. The enemies look nice. The scenery is gorgeous. You can’t run through an area of birch trees and not be impressed. Once again, what is marvelous is that the scenery and environment just seem to mimic how things would be in real life. For example when you’re climbing a mountain, trees begin to thin out as you near the top. All these little details create this fantastic world that is a joy to play in.

One area that could have used some more work is with the companions that follow you around. I know this isn’t a party game and that it is meant as a single player game with optional sidekicks. However, these optional sidekicks needed to have a better control system in place. The biggest problem I had was with them disappearing. I’d be somewhere, wanting my companion for something, and they wouldn’t be around. There’s no little icon anywhere telling you you still have a companion. Without the companion there, you have no way to know whether there is actually someone tied to you at the moment. Did they die? Did they leave you? Where did they go? This could have been readily solved by creating such an icon somewhere and give it some option where you can summon your companion if they get lost or something.

Thankfully this is an example of a game where attention is paid to audio. The ambience is great and the music is stellar. You’ll have “Dovahkiin, dovahkiin . . ” rolling through your head in between play sessions and you won’t be upset by it.

There’s a reason why nearly every organization awarded Skyrim “Game of the Year” and those that didn’t aren’t worth reading. Just do yourself a favor and play Skyrim. It is the most beautiful fantasy RPG ever created and continued proof that traditional RPG’s can do very well if done right.

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Release: November 11, 2011