The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Skyrim takes place 200 years after Oblivion, and Tamriel has changed. It’s now the Fourth Era, and the Empire has weakened. The Septim bloodline is gone, and the Empire has survived a bloody war with the Thalmor, an alliance of elves that broke away. Now they have peace agreement that keeps the Empire under some rules, including banning the worship of Talos, the first Emperor and the Ninth Divine. The people of Skyrim aren’t happy about that, so Ulfric Stormcloak killed the High King of Skyrim and started a bloody civil war in the region. Also, dragons are back, and no one knows why. You start as a prisoner who escapes and has to find out why he has the power to speak in the words of dragons and absorb their souls. Begin the game.
If you’ve played an Elder Scrolls game, Fallout 3, or Fallout: New Vegas, you know the deal. It’s a first-person RPG that puts you in the middle of a big world and sends you on a vague quest you might or might not eventually get around to. It’s a lot of freedom, little direction, and an absurd amount of things to do. The main quest is a small fraction of the content, which includes taking a side in the civil war, rising through different guilds and groups (the Mage Guild is gone, but the College of Winterhold serves as the mage guild quest line), finding shrines and ruins, getting famous and becoming nobility in the different parts of the game, and killing lots of things. We’ve talked about this before. If you want hand-holding and a single path through the whole world, pick up a Final Fantasy game. In Skyrim, you can go anywhere you want.
Of course, that’s not always a good idea. While enemies grow with you and get better equipment and powers, the curve is much less linked than it was in Oblivion and Morrowind. In Skyrim, if you’re a low level and you find a saber cat, an ice troll, or a hagraven without preparation, you’re probably going to die. The combat feels more frustrating because of this less equal curve, but it also feels more rewarding, because the challenge is there and you get a real sense of power and growth as you play.
The character system has gotten an overhaul, with only three attributes (Magicka, Health, and Stamina) defining your character and everything else controlled by your skills and the perks in your skills. You get directly better at things as you do them, and the higher your skills go the more points you can put into their perk trees, which unlock very useful things. You can learn to cast destruction magic with both hands at once to make spells more powerful, make your favorite type of armor weigh nothing when you wear it, let you smith magical items, and brew more useful potions and poisons. If you want a class-specific benefit, you can look for the different Guardian Stones, which give you star sign powers, like turning invisible once a day or boosting your combat/stealth/magic experience rate. It lets you play the way you want and create your class while you do it, instead of pigeonholing you in a specific role and forcing you to put much more work into your off-class skills.
Crafting has become much more useful. You can still enchant items and brew potions, but now you can also smith your own items. More importantly, you can improve the equipment you already have based on your smithing skill, turning a good blade into a great one. It adds a new level of interactivity, giving you reason to search mines and toil at forges. When you have a (Superior) or (Legendary) piece of armor, it’s something you didn’t just find in a dungeon. It’s something you made your own. Like all Elder Scrolls crafting systems, this is easily abused with an alchemy enchantment-smithing potion cycle that lets you build up your smithing very high and create overpowered weapons. You shouldn’t do this, because it takes the fun out of the game. It’s also not something the game forces upon you, so even though it’s present it’s not something that automatically makes the game too easy. If you want to break the game, it’s your choice, and it’s not pushed on you.
The world is huge, with several dozen caves, ruins, and keeps that you can explore. There are nine Holds in Skyrim, each with their own town, so there’s plenty of urban adventure even if there aren’t any cities as large as Imperial City or Vivec. Several groups have their own lengthy quest lines, and you’re never more than a few minutes from a new lead on what to do. The Radiant Story system even nudges you towards parts of Skyrim you haven’t explored, by giving you random quests based on where you’ve been and how you play. Most importantly, the different places you can explore feel different, and I didn’t get any sense of the copy and paste repetition of caves and ruins I felt in Oblivion and Morrowind.
I talked about this before, but the story takes a back seat to the adventure in Skyrim, like most western RPGs. The story with the dragons is interesting, but it doesn’t rise above the war between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks, the intrigue of the College of Winterhold, or the secret of the Companions. There’s less a “main quest” and more a “quest you should probably get through to say you ‘beat’ the game as you play dozens of other interesting quests.” Unfortunately, most quests boil down to dungeon crawling and finding an item, but there’s enough variety to keep things fun.
The biggest problem with the game is the menu system. It doesn’t feel right for PC or consoles. While Morrowind’s menus were clearly PC-oriented, and Oblivion’s were console-oriented, Skyrim’s menus seem to be a strange compromise that relies mostly on text, partitioned into arbitrary columns on the screen. Items, magic, skills, and the map are separated by directions, meaning you have to either leave the menu screen completely and come back or jump up through several levels of tabs through which you’ve sorted your spells and items to find something else. There are no tabs, except in the quest screen (which is puzzlingly not even part of the main menu, and instead tucked away with statistics and save and load screens). A favorites menu lets you bring up your most commonly used spells and items, but it still feels like a convoluted mess. A patch that returns Skyrim to Oblivion’s menu system would be very welcome, even if Oblivion’s wasn’t particularly good.
Then there are the bugs. This is an Elder Scrolls game, so of course there are bugs. Lots of them. Quest triggers can sometimes fail to happen, NPCs can act confused, companions can act stupid, and Skyrim can sometimes simply freeze. It’s not perfect, and you will have to save often (at 5 MB a save).
Skyrim is an immensely rewarding game if you can push through the awkward menus and numerous bugs. You’re going to have to go through sections of dungeons more than once. You’re going to have to reload. You’re going to have to dive into menus more often than you should. Despite all of this, you’re going to keep coming back if you like even a tiny bit of the western RPG genre. There’s so much to do and so much to see in Skyrim that it’s a great game, even with its flaws. And there are many, many flaws.
I reviewed the PlayStation 3 version, but if you have a computer that can handle it, pick up the PC version. You can mod and adjust the game to be visually spectacular beyond the consoles’ abilities to show, and the inevitable mods from the community will add a lot of value to the game.
