If you want to leave university with a degree, do not buy Skyrim. If you have a job you want to keep, do not buy Skyrim. If you have any relationships you hold dear, do not buy Skyrim, because this game – much like the dragons, bandits, or any of the many other monsters and baddies contained within it – wants your life. And given the slightest of chances, it will take it and never give it back.
After a brief sabbatical to the Capital Wasteland in 2008’s Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios have returned to the fantasy world of Tamriel in this, their fifth Elder Scrolls game. If you’ve played Morrowind or Oblivion, you’ll know what to expect. If not, the general idea of The Elder Scrolls is that you are presented with a vast, rich, and diverse fantasy landscape, and simply left to do what you want and be what you wish to be.
If you want to save the world, you can. If you want to be a mass murderer, you can. If you want to hone your skills at the forge and become a master blacksmith, you can. If you want to join the Thieves Guild and steal everything that isn’t bolted down, you can. Or if you just want to hunt game, catch salmon, and harvest lavender, you can do that too. Complete and utter freedom is the order of the day here.
Set 200 years after Oblivion in the northern province of Skyrim, the game drops players smack in the middle of a civil war. And to make matters worse, dragons – long thought to be extinct – have reappeared with the sole intent of setting the world ablaze.
However, as you progress through the story (if you want to that is, you can ignore the main quest completely if you want), you discover that you are Dragonborn, the last in a race of mortals with dragon blood and the ability to harness dragon powers through the absorption of vanquished dragons’ souls. So, naturally, it falls on you to not only win the civil war for whichever side you choose, but to kill every single scaled beast patrolling the skies.
Now this all sounds like a high fantasy Dungeons and Dragons-esque geek-o-rama, but Skyrim’s fully realised landscape and its gargantuan cast of multidimensional characters makes the whole set-up totally believable to the point where you don’t even bat an eyelid when you cross paths with a man with a cat’s face. That’s a feat in and of itself.
Graphics play a huge role in selling any video-game experience, and those who have played any of Bethesda’s old games will know it’s not exactly their strong suit. Breathe easy, the plasticine-faced characters of Oblivion and the robotic movements of Fallout 3 have been eradicated – for the most part.
But any graphical hitches, like the odd floating mammoth or some pixelated shadows, don’t break your sense of immersion when you consider Skyrim is possibly the largest and most detailed open world environment ever found in a game. Sure, if you press your nose against a rock or a tree, the textures reveal themselves to be rather low-res, but taken as a whole, the scenery is breath-takingly beautiful.However, all of these graphical advances would be pointless if the game wasn’t fun to play.
Thankfully, the gameplay in Skyrim is as much an improvement over Oblivion as its graphics. The basics are the same – you wander about getting quests by talking to random people and then head off into the big bad world hacking, slashing, zapping, and burning everything that stands between you and your goal – but everything that was wrong with Oblivion, like the repetitive combat and quest structures and the awful levelling system, has been fixed.
Unlike Oblivion’s class system which forced you to choose your play-style from the off, Skyrim allows you to make those choices as you play. You level up abilities by using them. So if you are a heavy armour two-handed sword kind of guy but you decide you want to dabble in some sneaky archery or some magic, you can. Nothing is off limits.
Simply, with its slick and intuitive interface and evolved gameplay, Skyrim is the tightest and most streamlined entry into The Elder Scrolls series, allowing anyone to pick it up and play instantly but with enough variety to keep players glued well into hour number 142.
The depth and breadth of content in this game is, frankly, astounding, especially when put up against games like Uncharted and Modern Warfare whose single-player campaigns can feasibly be completed in a single sitting. But with Skyrim you can spend hours upon hours simply exploring the wilderness and you can never go too far in any one direction without discovering something new. The sheer size of this game is mind-boggling.
Skyrim is not perfect. There are glitches, bugs, and freezes that force you to reset the game, but the only real problem with the game is it sucks up every free second you have. But when you’re having so much fun hunting Frost Trolls, carrying out assassinations for the Dark Brotherhood, and raiding bandit hideouts, you won’t care that you’ve missed all of your essay deadlines and you no longer have any friends.