After putting nearly 80 hours into Skyrim, I feel informed enough to give a quality review. Having said that, I could very likely double that amount of time with the quests I have left to do. So I can’t honestly say that I’ve experienced everything this massive game has to offer, but I have experienced all of its core systems and hope that will be enough to give you a fair and informed opinion.

Five and half years after Oblivion, three years after Fallout 3, Bethesda has finally made their triumphant return to video games with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As technically impressive as those games were when they released, there’s really no contest when compared to Skyrim. Not only is this game world much bigger than its predecessors, it also feels more alive because of an ecology of dragons, giants, mammoths, and dozens of other creatures. And every nook that those beasts find their way into is so unique and visually stunning that you’ll wonder how you ever trudged through Oblivion‘s cookie-cutter dungeons. Every inch of Skyrim begs to be explored so it can tell its story. Like every other Bethesda game, those stories tend to involve crippling bugs, weak characterization, terrible AI, and simplistic combat, but the sheer immersion offered by this colossal world where you can essentially do or be anything you want whenever you want makes Skyrim an unforgettable experience.

Breaking the studio’s tradition of opening in a dungeon of some sort that eventually leads to your first jaw-dropping glimpse of the world at large, Skyrim kicks off out in the open with a wagon ride into a nordic village that’s got a chopping block with your name on it. It’s also being kept warm for Ulfric Stormcloak–leader of a rebellion against the Imperials. Good thing for you, Ulfric’s got some friends in high places and just as your head settles into the bloody stone, a dragon–the first one in ages–swoops in to wreak havoc on the village. The fire-breather’s merciless destruction of just about every building in sight gives you a chance to escape, and from there, you’re free to aid the Stormcloaks or Imperials in their civil war, follow the main story-line to quell the dragon crisis, join up with various guilds, get married, chop wood, become the world’s greatest cheese thief, or anything else you can think of.

What’s truly impressive is that you’ll set out on most of your adventures not because some NPC told you to, but out of an insatiable compulsion to explore all the beauty Skyrim has to offer. With mysterious and ancient monuments shimmering on the horizon, imposing fortresses bordering that bridge you want to cross, icy crevices diving into hidden cities, and so on, there isn’t a game out there that can distract you as well as Skyrim can. And I mean that in the best possible way; delaying the task at hand for what turns out to be an hour long trek through a dank, cobwebbed hideout of vampires can be more rewarding than pushing the plot forward. And it’s precisely because every seemingly trivial cave or fort or campsite is so finely detailed, so distinct from everything else, that exploration comes so naturally. This is to say nothing of the dozens of bustling cities and scenic villages that fill out the landscape. There’s just so much to see in Skyrim–all with its own unique flavor that still manages to conform to a greater aesthetic–that it can feel like the real world sometimes.

Of course, if you take the time to look at textures up close, you’ll ruin the illusion; a game this big simply can’t look cutting edge under the microscope. But Skyrim is a game about the sum of its parts, and when everything’s moving together the way it should, the cold, stony, nordic setting is downright breath-taking. It’s easy to get caught up in Skyrim’s majestic version of the Aurora Borealis, but a dragon’s semi-stiff animations might detract if you let them; the swirling snowdrifts of the north can really place you in the storm, but poorly lit conversations with NPCs can pull you back out. In short, Skyrim isn’t the best looking game out there, but its pervasive and varied art direction never fails to make you feel like a mighty hero risking life and limb by adventuring through grimy sewers or crumbling tombs.

The sound effects also go a long way in establishing that immersion. Whether you’re wielding a sword, ax, mace, or shield, the clangs of combat are always weighty and lethal. The blood-letting sounds especially gruesome when the camera pulls out for special Fallout 3 style kill animations. These slow-mo stabbings and bludgeonings are doled out with moderation, making the squish of an fatal entry wound all the more effective. They usually take place in third-person, but occasionally go in for slick first-person kills that feel really satisfying. And if you’re not hearing battle up close, the twang and thwick of a bow and arrow should satisfy your aural senses from range. But nothing’s more exciting to the ear than the crackles and whooshes of high-powered magic. Casting different spells from each hand can really feel like conducting an orchestra of mayhem sometimes.

The score is equally engaging with its deep drum rolls, exultant horns, and commanding chorus; it really echoes the nordic culture of honor and glory. The only place that Skyrim‘s audio really falls short is in the voice acting department, where roughly half a dozen actors do the voices of every character in the game, and poorly at that. There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, you’ll want to punch every NPC in the face if you have to talk to them for more than twenty seconds because the lines are delivered so lazily. Frankly, Bethesda should be embarrassed to have released such shoddy, repetitive work. And the few times when you actually want to hear what someone’s saying, it’s not uncommon for background music or NPCs to completely overpower the character you’re talking to. This can get annoying during important story moments. Along those same technical lines, you can expect frequent framerate drops, texture pop-in, and more than a few freezes. At least there are some funny bugs and glitches to balance all the frustration out.

For better or worse, Bethesda’s particular brand of RPG has never been about characters and an emotional story. Bethesda games put you in a sandbox and let you fill in your own story while choosing to play virtually any kind of character you can dream up. Skyrim is no exception. The joy of exploration is the real draw of the game, with combat simply giving you something to do while you dive deeper into the world’s rich history, both written and waiting to be discovered. And in a true feat of world-building, that rush of discovery never gets old. There are so many different kinds of enemies that all inhabit their own distinct regions that you might run into new ones dozens of hours into the game. At higher difficulties, different foes can require different tactics, but at the default setting, you may as well be invincible by level 20 (which isn’t that high).

Among the bandits, trolls, giants, witches, wild beasts, werewolves, vampires, and more that you’ll encounter, the headliner has to be dragons. The first time you’re just strolling around some swamplands or plains or mountains and a random dragon swoops down to light your horse on fire, it’s pretty frickin’ awesome. It’s even more insane when villagers run out to help you fight the monster or when you simply come across a dragon already fighting with a giant and his herd of mammoths. Everything about it feels really organic, even if close observation of the AI makes it seem anything but natural. But when you actually man up and go in for the fight, you’ll find that dragons are perplexingly weak creatures that rarely offer a challenge. Whether you’re facing a fire dragon or a frost dragon, they just aren’t nearly as intimidating as those in Dragon Age. And as long as I’m inviting that comparison, it sure would have been nice to have some special kill animations for Skyrim‘s ticket-seller.

The only thing that ever makes a dragon fight difficult is when they’re flying around and evading your hits (this is actually the premise of one of the most poorly designed boss fights I’ve ever encountered). Thankfully, at a certain point in the main storyline you gain access to a special “shout” that can ground the beasts for some quality strikes. But that’s not the only shout. Because your character is a “dragonborn” with dragon blood in his or her veins, you have the ability to “speak” the dragon tongue. Turns out that their conversations usually come down to breathing fire or wind or ice, becoming ethereal, calming animals, conjuring lightning storms, etc, etc. There are dozens of shouts to learn in the game, all unique and all with varying degrees of power that can be mastered. They’re essentially magical attacks that don’t use up any magic, but they’re all kept in check with recharge timers. They can generally help you out of a tight spot when standard attacks aren’t doing the trick, but they never feel especially powerful.

As for those standard attacks, don’t expect many changes from Oblivion. It is true that combat has been reworked so that each hand controls one attack–giving you a wide array of options like dual wielding, dual casting for more powerful spells, a balance of melee and magic, or two-handed heavy weapons–but at its core, you’re still just hacking away without much thought. The animations are slightly better than its predecessor, but they certainly don’t compare with most other Fantasy RPGs. And don’t even think of playing in third-person, because then the comparisons get really embarrassing.

But the combat’s not nearly as bad as the tacked on puzzle-solving you’ll find throughout. Some of it is intentional, like doors that can only be unlocked by arranging stone icons in specific arrangements. The first time you encounter one of these you’ll probably be very lost because without any indication whatsoever, the developers expect you to use a zoom feature to closely examine the key to the door. Hidden away on the underside, as tiny as can be, is the order you’re supposed to use. At least you know better for the rest of the stone puzzles, but that still doesn’t make them any more interesting. Then there are the unintentional puzzles; by that I mean that vital chains and levers are so frequently hidden in ridiculously stupid nooks and crannies that you might mistakenly think a door is glitched shut. I mean, I looked for these things, hard, with night vision on. I still couldn’t find them until I went online and watched videos. It’s certainly not the case for every dungeon, but it happens enough to become a problem. Maybe a hint system could have helped. Or maybe friendly AI that doesn’t just stand in the way with a dumbfounded look on its face.

Where Skyrim makes up for its less than visceral combat is with its breadth of supplemental systems. Fighting gets a lot easier once you start crafting and upgrading your own weapons and armor. Then again, if you don’t want to spend points in the Smithing or Enchanting skill trees, you can always invest in Alchemy to coat your weapons with poison and fortify your own attributes. Or you can avoid combat all together and go the stealth route with Sneak, Lockpicking, and Pickpocketing skills. The point is that you can play how you want, and no matter what path you choose, the systems you’ll use are deep and rewarding. As long as you can find the materials–various metals and leather for Smithing, wild ingredients for Alchemy, etc–you can forge your own equipment. Your abilities at lower levels can be disappointing, but after enough investment in any particular tree, you can start to do really cool stuff.

For example, I invested heavily in Smithing, Enchanting, and Heavy Armor (among others). I crafted my own armor, took a potion to temporarily boost my Smithing skill even more, and upgraded it to “Legendary” levels. I then proceeded to enchant it with magical properties that I derived from destroying magical loot I’d found throughout the world. And in my Heavy Armor tree, I invested in a perk that allowed my unarmed attacks to add my gauntlets’ armor bonus modifier. Because my particular race (Khajiit) starts out with an extra 15 damage for unarmed attacks and my handcrafted armor is so good, my unarmed attacks became significantly more effective than any weapons I came across for a good portion of the game. But then I decided that I wanted to use a sword instead, and before long, I was deadlier than ever.

Conversely, you might invest heavily in Speechcraft and open up economic benefits that I haven’t. You could buy the best equipment at every shop and get by that way. It really is up to you how you want to play. And thanks to some thoughtful streamlining, leveling up and investing in skills is easier than ever. Rather than gaining arbitrary “experience points” and then spending them in a menu, you get better at everything you do by doing it. Wear light armor a lot? You’ll become more effective with it. When enough of your skills have advanced, your character’s general level will go up, giving you the option to upgrade your health, magic, or stamina. After you do that, you get to pick a “perk” from any skill tree you want. Better perks require a higher level in that particular skill, but since each skill increases the more you use it, it’s easy to unlock the coolest perks for things that you actually use. The perks themselves have a wide range of effects, with some simply making your armor or weapons X% more effective, and others doing cool stuff like disintegrating enemies with low health if you use electrical magic on them. You can even save your perk points for later if the specific perk you want isn’t available yet. It’s a really smart, rewarding system that’s all packed into an aesthetically pleasing, if not somewhat difficult to navigate menu.

That menu literally plots your progress as constellations in a colorful, stardust infested sky; it looks wonderful. The other menus are surprisingly minimalist in comparison. In fact, navigating to your inventory or map or magical powers looks so clean and modern that it feels inconsistent with the rest of the game. It’s not a real issue, but the actual navigation can be a bit counter-intuitive at times. Going to your menu takes you to a sort of central hub where you can navigate in four directions to get to where you’re going, and then you proceed from there. It works fine, but for some reason, once you’re in a sub-menu, pressing B or O like you would in any other game menu on the face of the Earth takes you out completely and puts you back in the game world; you always have to use the directional control, sorting through varying levels of sub-menus to get back to the hub. Once again, it’s not a huge issue, but it’s a recurring problem that many gamers will never get used to.

Similarly, there’s a “Favorites List” that serves as a sort of quick pause for hot keys. Most developers have come to realize that consoles are best fit for radial menus that can easily display close to a dozen hot options that can be selected in seconds flat. Skyrim, on the other hand, simply offers a vertical list of things that you can favorite in the main menus. There’s no limit to what you can add to the list (as far as I know), but anything more than five requires scrolling up and down a list (with no continuous scroll) where you can easily mistake one favorite for another. Furthermore, this list provides no information what so ever on what you’re selecting, so you might accidentally select a shout thinking you’ve selected magic. You also can’t tell how much damage anything does from this menu. For that matter, the main menus aren’t particularly informative either; you’ll have to memorize which weapons are one or two handed based on name alone, which isn’t as easy as you’d hope. They also lack crucial sort features, making it a real pain with all of the weight-induced micro-management that’s required.

Ah, yes, inventory management. Some consider it a hall mark of Elder Scrolls games. What would we do without it? While I do agree that it shouldn’t be axed entirely and that it does add a lot of depth to the game, I simply can’t stand spending ten minutes figuring out what I want to drop three separate times in one dungeon. Maybe if there were some auto-sort features that showed what armor configuration is best, or if there were even a simple weight sort or value sort, maybe then it wouldn’t be such an issue. But instead you’ll be spending a lot of your time paused in menus. And when you finally get back to town to sell all of your loot (with the exception of the stuff found in Dwemer ruins, most loot isn’t worth keeping), you’ll find that most shop keepers don’t have nearly enough gold to buy your goods. It’s not uncommon to travel to multiple cities so you can make some money and get back down to your regular weight.

Rounding out your time in menus is the quest log, which quickly fills with dozens of tasks if you don’t manage it carefully. It’s easy enough to deactivate quests so you only have what you’re looking for on your navigation bar, but it’s not so easy to know what you should deactivate. Some quests initially appear as full-fledged side quests or main quests, while others fall under the “miscellaneous” category. Most of the time, miscellaneous quests are simple fetch or kill missions that are procedurally generated to always take you to unexplored dungeons. You do the deed, get paid, and then do some more if you want (the generation is unlimited). However, for some reason, many full-fledged side quests start out in the miscellaneous menu, so you can never really be sure what’s worth ignoring and what could lead to one of the game’s most memorable quests. Why? I couldn’t tell you. But at least there’s in-depth stat tracking so you can keep count of how many innocent souls you’ve slaughtered in trivial fetch quests for fear of passing up narrative material.

Silent monks make for memorable characters, right?

So if the combat’s so simplistic and easy, the pacing is bogged down by an overabundance of micro-management, and the menus are under-informative, it must be a gripping narrative that drives you forward and compels you to keep playing, right? Well, not exactly. Skyrim‘s main story certainly isn’t bad; in fact, it’s pretty epic. But in all likelihood, you won’t be able to remember more than two or three characters’ names a month after you beat the game. Bethesda just doesn’t do interesting characters. Everybody’s an archetype and that’s just the way it is. That’s something that most video games are guilty of, but fortunately for other games, they usually have some semi-interesting set-pieces and halfway decent mission design. Skyrim certainly has some opportunities for awesomeness (there’s a part where you ride a dragon, but you don’t actually get to see or play this), but it doesn’t capitalize on any of them. When put up against some of the more interesting team-based stuff BioWare has been doing with their core missions in recent years, Skyrim‘s “go here, kill this in the same way that you’ve killed everything else, and don’t break a sweat doing it” philosophy is rather disappointing.

Thankfully some of the guild arcs offer more interesting experiences. For me personally, the funnest way to play Elder Scrolls games is stealth, and the Thieves Guild offers plenty of that. It doesn’t really compare to Oblivion‘s Thieves Guild questline (that finale was gold), but it’s still good. More action-oriented gamers will probably enjoy the Companions line, which is essentially Skyrim‘s version of the Fighter’s Guild. This arc is actually better than its predecessor’s, with some cool werewolves to boot. Having said that, being a werewolf isn’t nearly as awesome as being a vamp in Oblivion because they’re super weak, but hey…you know. There’s also the Dark Brotherhood, the College of Winterhold (i.e. Mage’s Guild), a civil war that lets you choose between two sides that are both a bunch of fatheads, and dozens of non-guild questlines or one-off quests. Personally I haven’t run into anything as memorable as Oblivion‘s “A Brush with Death” or “Whodunit?” but I’ve still got a whole lot of side quests to do.

Skyrim is a bit of a conundrum. When looking at it objectively, it’s filled with major and minor glitches, the load times are super long, the combat mechanics are simplistic and grow boring due to lack of challenge, there’s way too much micro-management, there aren’t any particularly memorable quests in the 80 hours I’ve played, it doesn’t do much to push the genre forward in terms of mechanics, and it’s just way too big and unfocused for a healthy adult to enjoy without sacrificing other parts of his or her life (in case this sprawling review didn’t reflect that enough for you). But I love it. I want to play another 80 hours. I want to start new games with different character types. I want to do these things because excepting its predecessors, there aren’t any other games that offer so much freedom in such immersive worlds. Skyrim takes my obsessive compulsive personality’s favorite aspect of RPGs–exploration–and builds an entire game around it. The size and depth of its beautifully crafted game world raises the bar for all other open world games, and realistically, with PC mods, you could play this game for years without getting sick of it. Just don’t stop to compare individual parts to other games, because it’s not Bethesda’s M.O. to do any one thing better than anybody else. They’re a company devoted to the big picture, and Skyrim is a picture that will stay in your head for a long, long time.

"Hold on: I've got to brew a lil' somethin' somethin' to keep from getting distracted."

Share/Save

It’s a damn shame that he won’t be able to complete the main story like that. Give us true freedom, Bethesda! Still, this sort of role-playing is impressive and fun to watch (at least for a Skyrim junkie). Maybe if Bethesda ever makes an MMO Felix will make a return to glory and tell tales of his Skyrim travels to legions of followers.

Share/Save

If the posting here at IB gets a little scarce over the next week (or month), you’ll know why.

Share/Save

Some people call it Skyrim.

Share/Save

And if you’re looking for a closer look at some of the country’s renowned wild life, we’ve got you covered past the break.

Share/Save

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is real, folks. This stuff is happening all around us, and we don’t even notice! Or, at least, that’s what this live action trailer leads me to believe. And once 11/11/11 gets here, I’m certain I’ll be too absorbed in the game to notice what’s real and unreal anyway. But in the meantime, I’m going to find me some real dragons to kill.

Share/Save

Game director Todd Howard narrates this extensive look at the world of Skyrim, and, boy, I can’t wait until 11/11/11 when I can hole up in my room, jobless and school-less, and do nothing but play Skyrim for days on end. Read on for parts 2 and 3 of this Skyrim extravaganza.

Share/Save

I'd be willing to pay for a horse that could walk on two legs...

With Oblivion‘s DLC ranging from horse armor to The Shivering Isles, and Fallout 3‘s post-release offerings coming in five mid-sized adventures, a lot of people are understandably curious about Bethesda’s DLC plans for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. According to Mr. Todd Howard himself, there aren’t any specific DLC plans yet.

I thought I’d bait you with that cliff hanger since it’s so strange for a developer not to have a separate DLC team preparing content for day one release. Kind of nice. But whenever Bethesda does get around to releasing some downloadable content (and they will), Howard says that “we’d like to do less DLC but bigger ones. You know, more substantial…we don’t know what we’re going to make yet, but we’d like them to be closer to an expansion pack feel.” The 30 or so hours I spent in The Shivering Isles vouches for the goodness of this idea. Now can this game please come and give me an escape from my increasingly depression real life?

Share/Save

Well, not really, when you consider there’s not much class in blatantly ripping off other games (read: Team Fortress 2). And hey, they even managed to do it without retaining any of the humor or personality! Oh, I kid, I kid. Brink is actually looking like one of the more interesting FPSs this year, what with class-based combat that’s more concerned with objectives than kill counts. The support abilities that every class can offer to their teammates should make for an especially fun an co-operative experience. More video below!

Share/Save

Or lose control of any other bodily functions. It’s just that good. Like. Seriously. I want to take next semester off so I can just play this game day in and day out, soothing any trivial problems my life might have with the sweet numbing embrace of this virtual shrine of all that is good and right in video games. November 11th can’t come soon enough.

Share/Save