Game Facts
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released in 2011 on Steam across many gaming platforms to much critical acclaim. It is a first/ third person perspective single-player action orientated role-playing game set in the cold north of the Elder Scrolls continent of Tamriel.
Opinion
So, like all the other millions of roleplaying gamers, I dragged my dragonplate-clad behind, and an assortment of Daedric weapons and bits of dragon skeleton, round the hundreds of beautiful square miles of Skyrim.
I must say, even though I had not played any of the previous Elder Scrolls games, I was in a state of breathless anticipation when the portentious release date of 11.11.11 finally arrived, having been well and truly fired up by the trailers, clips, music videos and previews.
Did it live up to the hype? Well, in my view, yes and no. Yes, the graphics were amazing (and even better with some of the later community enhancements) and the world was huge – not for me in terms of the actual area size, but the amount of content within it. The music – by Jeremy Soule – was also amazing, the best in any video game in my opinion. An abiding memory is of simply going off to climb that far-distant mountain, and reaching the highest pass just as the grand sweeping music of one of the daytime themes swells through the speakers.
Other high points were:
- venturing out after dark for the first time on a clear night and suddenly being treated to the Aurora Borealis dancing gloriously across the heavens
- climbing the thousands of steps up the highest mountain in the land to a Monastery to discover my Dragonborn heritage
- discovering Blackreach, a huge weirdly-lit underdark-like cavern spanning much of the area of Skyrim
- facing my first dragon, then learning my first dragon shout
- the journey through Sovengard and the final main quest battle.
But there were also things that were either slightly frustrating or not quite to my taste.
For some reason, it irked me that the best music ever in any game simply played in the background behind a load game screen. What about the amazing preview trailer, and the Christopher Plummer narration? Yes I know we mostly just press escape after the first time, but sometimes I just like to let such intro cutscenes play out when starting a session to get me in the mood.
The combat was a bit shallow for me. There was just a bit of co-ordination to learn with the left and right attack and parry moves, and the trick to step back and forward, and to attack to abort power attacks, and to parry to block normal attacks. Later on, there was the combination with Fus Ro Da – surely the most famous magical words since Abra Cadabra – to set the enemy on the back foot… or flying. That was it. Perhaps it was my fault for min-maxing a double handed sword style and putting everything into stamina. That meant for short lethal combats, possibly with few tactics. Later on I tried using the bow, which was well implemented especially when sneaking, but the magic mainly consisted of blasting, summoning and confusing. Somehow it still left me feeling slightly cold, certainly compared to 3rd edition D&D but also to the Witcher.
The character generation and levelling up were also not to my taste. I didn’t like the lack of ability stats to start, though I appreciate the design principle that it was removing “baggage” from the game system. Levelling up didn’t change the way I played much. It just made me better at the tactics outlined above. And levelling up didn’t do half as much for my character as one single skill – smithing. Before I discovered smithing, I was struggling around looking for a better sword. Then I discovered that at a very low character level, I could keep making iron daggers, selling them for profit, and gaining so much in smithing skill that I could then make a sword that would have a hugely greater impact than the equivalent time spent levelling up by adventuring. The same thing applied to enchanting weapons, and the apparel that would increase attack damage. So it was more boring to make daggers, but the power-player in me, and in others I suspect, couldn’t really stop until I suddenly realised I had just ruined the game for myself. It went from being a bit on the hard side to being trivial over the course of one gaming session. I soon had equipment that would deal 467 + 68 elemental damage per hit as just a baseline without any of the charge and other bonuses. I don’t know how exceptional that is.
The trading system was also a little annoying. I understand the design principle that limits merchant gold for selling items to avoid players gaining millions very quickly, but it was just so irksome to have to go round all the merchants of Skyrim to sell my loot from a single expedition. And you had to have the steed stone active to carry a decent amount of loot in the first place. You could spend a feat to give a merchant a bigger till, but it didn’t seem that much. My home chest became full of stuff worth those millions. I could only console myself that there wasn’t anything to buy with the millions, compared to what I could make myself.
The side-quests were often very well thought out, but the only reward was to check them off in the journal. The payment wasn’t that great, and of course there is no experience reward. You could manage just as well doing all the work for side quests but never bothering to complete them because all the experience was already earned on swinging your sword, getting hit and healing yourself. Or you could earn the same experience parrying a mudcrab a million times.
I couldn’t understand why half the NPCs sounded like Arnie. I found it false. All the spot-on regional British accents of the Witcher were fantastic in comparison. Could we not have had genuine accents of different regions of Skyrim – perhaps “posh” English, Scottish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, German and Russian?
Finally a bug where you could not drop plot items from the bard college cut significantly into my carrying capacity, and it was annoying not to be able to dump loot safely until you had progressed a certain way through the game and spent thousands on a home.
But overall it has to be said that the game is a magnificent achievement on the part of the designers, and it seems like being a spoilt child that one should criticise it as I have. And that is where the problem lies. It slightly left me feeling cold – somewhat ironic given the setting – and that made me hate myself for being a spoilt child. Was I so jaded that nothing could give the same thrills from computer RPGs of yesteryear? There was this constant nagging feeling that I should be enjoying it more – the beautiful landscapes, the endless and varied side quests, the peerless soundtrack, the main NPC voice acting, the solid main quest plotline. It somehow seemed to amount to less than the sum of its parts.
I wondered it it was because I am a D&D freak, but then I had no such problem with the Witcher. Was I indeed irredeemably jaded with the whole genre? Too much playtesting in the NWN toolset? And then I played Planescape: Torment for the first time and realised I wasn’t!
What Next?
At the time of this post, various bits of DLC and an expansion have been released. I understand there are plans for a massively multiplayer online game. Who knows what Bethesda will do next? Elsweyr? Black Marsh? Or some mythical land? How can they top Skyrim, short of controlling whole fantasy armies? Or maybe the idea is that there will be MMO armies. I suspect the next true sequel, ie. Elder Scrolls VI, will be a long time in coming, and who can blame them given how much work went into Skyrim.
Summing Up
I think Skyrim is a magnificent design accomplishment but lacks an indefinable something that makes it a classic experience. Perhaps its sheer size dilutes the quality. Perhaps it gives players the open world they always dreamed of, but what they really need is a focussed story. Perhaps the key to power-gaming lies in boring tactical choices so it seems a grind. Perhaps the PC’s responses in dialogues are much more bland than in Bioware style games and so there is less feeling of actual role playing. But play it you should. The enormous time I spent logged on to that cursedly accurate hours-spent Steam message are a testament to its quality. But at the same time the fact I never bought any of the expansions are a sign of there being something missing.
PC Gamers Court 