Skyrim. If you’re a connoisseur of modern RPGs, you’ve no doubt heard the name. In case you’ve been living under a WiFi-disabling rock, Skyrim is the latest installment in Bethesda’s award-winning Elder Scrolls series. With titles like Morrowind or Oblivion behind it, games that – while flawed- were nonetheless pretty damned popular, it’s rather interesting to see whether Skyrim rises to the challenge its forebears laid down, but is a game mainly for teenagers, so if you have smaller children, getting an indoor play centre installation is the best choice for this.
Spoiler alert: It does.
Graphics
Taken as a whole, Skyrim is a huge step up from previous installments. Coupling an interesting almost-stylization with the graphical quality one would expect from this generation of games, Skyrim manages to avoid many of the problems Oblivion had, with its pure photo-realism. It should be
noted that when I say “almost” stylized, I mean that it errs on the “cartoony” side of photo-realism. This isn’t such a bad thing, however; The game benefits quite a bit from the change, as it possesses a wealth of colour that could match even Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion.
Beyond simple graphical quality, Bethesda kicks the volume up to 11 on a lot of other things. They’ve drastically improved their lighting (And I don’t mean visibility, I mean light placements, shadows, that sort of thing,) the various magical effects you’ll see (Even the lowest spell makes you feel like an engine of death,) and various character animations, leaving the game a whole head and shoulders above Oblivion on these matters alone. Seriously, have you ever looked at your character walking in third person in Oblivion? It’s ridiculous.
Something else you’ll probably want to know about are their characters. They’ve improved. They still don’t look entirely human, per se, but they look much less like the Playdough freak-shows that have populated every single Bethesda game they’ve ever made.
Gameplay
The gameplay is what you would expect from an Elder Scrolls title. The combat is energetic, the ability to dual wield providing a vast trove of options to the entrepreneurial mass murderer. Will you use your staff and sword, today? Perhaps dual-cast fire and ice spells? Or the good old two-handed battleaxe. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking addition, but it adds some fun to a combat system rapidly growing stale. My only real
complaint is that you can’t block when you’re dual-wielding, something that makes absolutely no goddamn sense to me. Parrying is practically the whole purpose of having an off-hand blade! Despite- Or, in spite of this- just being able to have an axe in one hand and a sword in the other makes one feel rather badass.
Bethesda saw fit to include their standard Alchemy system. Not much has changed from how it was implemented in Oblivion, excepting the fact that you don’t instantly know the first effect of a given ingredient. Instead, you need to eat it to discover what it does. Did I mention that these ingredients can be anything from flowers, to the ashes of vampires, to a butterfly you plucked from the air moments previously? Yeah.
There are also smithing, enchanting, and cooking systems. Smithing and enchanting have their own skills (Named smithing and enchanting. Coincidence?) and while simple can add quite a bit to your game. You can live off the wild, hunting and skinning beasts in order to make yourself some leather armor. Or you can suck the soul from your enemies in order to enchant your blade. Lastly, cooking. Cooking doesn’t have its own skill, but it’s useful if you want to bother with it. You can gather ingredients- Separate from alchemical ingredients- that you can combine to make dishes. These dishes heal your hit points or your stamina (sometimes both,) making food a cheap alternative to potions.
Time, I think, to talk about skills. Something you’ve likely heard is that Bethesda have done away with the old leveling system. Instead of Oblivion’s “some skills help you level! Some don’t!” system, that encouraged min-maxing and fucking with the mechanics, every time a skill raises you get a bit closer to leveling. And instead of adding points to various attributes, when you level you get to add 10 points to either Magicka, Health, or Stamina. It makes the leveling process a little more streamlined, until you factor in… Perks. See, each skill has it’s own perk tree. It works like you’d expect; When you have a certain level in the skill, you can take a perk. These perks vary in effect, from simple “Make axe hit harder” to “Choose two effects when enchanting.” Needless to say, the higher level perks can be quite interesting, making specializing very tempting.
Level design. Now, anyone who’s played Oblivion or Fallout 3 knows how absolutely horrible Bethesda treats their dungeons. It’s analogous to baking shortbread cookies with your children; You give them a cookie cutter, because the little bastards want a hundred of the bloody cookies and you don’t have time to hand-craft each individual one. So you use the handy template. Now, that’s still the case in Skyrim, but it’s less noticeable. There are obvious templates, but the dungeons themselves don’t look quite nearly as “cookie-cutter.” They get a bit samey eventually, but that’s around the 50 hour mark.
Finally, I suppose I’ll talk about the voice-acting. Oblivion suffered from Everyone-Sounds-The-Same-itis, as evidenced by talking to absolutely any two NPCs. Skyrim alleviates this problem by having more than five voice actors. There’s actually quite a few, and some of them are rather good! There are some hammy performances, sure, but it’s a huge leap in Bethesda standards. There are problems where sometimes a character will cut another off and they both keep talking, but that’s a manageable problem.
Story
If you’ve seen the trailer, you likely know some of the story already. Dragons have returned, and it’s up to this mythical Dragonborn (Three guesses
who that is,) to stop them. Though the main story is filled with cliche, it’s all rather engaging. You feel important, and you feel like a part of the world. Characters will recognize that – hey- you’re kind of a badass, and they’ll comment on this. The main plot-line feels a bit short, but it takes you to some breathtaking areas that I won’t spoil here.
Being a Bethesda game, however, where Skyrim really shines is the world. There’s a metric fuckton of back-story to this world. From the hundreds of books you can find, to the rumors and stories you’ll overhear, to the songs you’ll hear bards sing in taverns, to the little ‘stories’ you’ll find in dungeons, it’s easy to tell that this is a deep world, filled with many stories beyond simply your own. It’s easy to get lost in, even with it’s Bethesdean flaws.
