Ah, Bethesda. What can be said about Skyrim that hasn’t already been said about 2006’s ultra-powerhouse hit Oblivion? Well as it turns out, quite a lot can be said because the anticipation for the latest Elder Scrolls was met with an astonishing result that despite being tremendously similar to its predecessor, is also remarkably different. Sure we have been graced with memorable titles such as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas in between the two latest Elder Scrolls installments, but as impressive as both post-apocalyptic titles were neither really managed to come close to recreating the magic Oblivion enchanted gamers with. No other developer was stepping up either to try and capitalize on the incredibly successful formula that was created by Bethesda’s dungeons and dragons inspired epic. It was becoming apparent that the only game that would again deliver us into such an engrossing open-world with endless quests and more ways to create a dark elf than you can shake a wabbajack at would be another Elder Scrolls title. Skyrim is full of reasons to fall in love with the franchise all over again, should you be one of the unlucky ones to not have experienced Oblivion than Skyrim will make you fall in love for the first time.
Skyrim throws us into a familiar setting and a familiar story; only this time instead of merely being a part of past lore, dragons are alive and present and are quite active in the snowy world of the Nords. Being the chief feature that the game’s hype train has been circling, a sense of epicness is apparent from the beginning and is one of the few features that Skyrim really outdoes its predecessor in. Not five minutes into the game (time taken to create a character not withstanding) do you bear witness not only to your first dragon, but the King of the Dragons himself Alduin. Indirectly saving your character from certain death from an imperial headsman’s axe you escape; after a brief tutorial style run-through of the game you are cast out into the world of Skyrim with the same endless limits of the previous Elder Scrolls titles.
Before jumping into anything however, the first big task to conquer is creating your character. There is a tremendous amount of variety in the creation tool, with attributes from cheekbone height to face paint being fully customizable. The primary races of the Elder Scrolls series are back; you can choose from Nord, Breton, Imperial, Dark Elf, High Elf, Wood Elf, Redguard, Argonian, Orc and Khajit. Each race has their own definable features and innate advantages, and a substantial amount of ways to diversify them from one another. Unfortunately the extent of the creation begins and ends with physical appearance; Skyrim does not offer the class designation or primary skill allocation from Oblivion. Instead Bethesda allows players to level up any of the available skills at their leisure, and every skill increase regardless of what players want their character to specialize in contributes to the overall level up. While it does allow more freedom and room for change throughout the progress, it does slightly take away from truly differentiating multiple characters from one another by reasonably limiting them from straying too far outside their specialty. Of course this would only be seen as an issue should you want to create more than one character. The class system was also nice because it actually came into play in Oblivion, influencing people’s opinions about you through comments and willingness to give information. It also made things friendlier for newcomers to the series by making sure they didn’t hinder their growth by spreading out too much; as it is typically more difficult to optimize a character while putting skill points into heavy armor and light armor, or all magic classes simultaneously.
Now that you’ve created your dark elf assassin, orc warrior, or imperial bard or what have you, it is time to step foot onto the soil of the best representation of an open world in any video game, ever. The map of Skyrim defines endless limits better than any of the franchise’s previous maps; it is larger in size, population and amount of locations to discover. For those not familiar with the vastness of the many different worlds Bethesda is used to offering, simply travelling from one city to another, let alone one end of the province to another will result in coming across dozens of content outside of the quest you may be doing at the time. Such occurrences include random world encounters like a group of imperial troops fighting members of the rebel faction known as the stormcloaks, a highwayman attempting to rob you of your gold, or a dark brotherhood assassin making an attempt on your life if you’ve pissed off someone bad enough. There are also a plethora of locations in between any given point A and point B to be discovered and explored; with many of these come additional side quests or miscellaneous objectives and favors to complete for NPCs. Of course to top it off it is possible at any point on the world map to be accosted by a dragon flying overhead. Not even the majority of the great city walls can prevent an attack from happening, so best sharpen your dragon slaying skills quite early.
Every location has its own way of coming alive and adding a feeling of authenticity to the atmosphere. Cities and settlements are bustling with people going about their daily business, whether that is tending their merchant stalls or hunting in the fields outside of the city walls. The inns feel cozy with a touch of sleaziness, sitting around the fire listening to the bard play instruments and sing while patrons around you indulge in drink and make passes at the barmaids. Guards make your business their business especially when they are suspicious of your bounty or the way you look; they will comment on the type of armor you wear or that you look sickly should you have contracted a disease. Mostly, they will just reminisce about those days when they were adventurers too…you know, before they took an arrow to the knee. Caves and ruins are littered with decomposed corpses from failed adventurers past, undead Nords known as draugrs, trolls, disease ridden skeevers, and burly bears who want nothing more than to maul you. Bandits seem a little redundant in their lack of variety, but it never gets tiring wiping them out and leaving their corpses scattered.
The sheer amount of quest are also quite extravagant; Skyrim features two “main” storylines to follow, one dealing with the ongoing civil war; on one side stands the Imperial Legion who began to occupy Skyrim following the high king’s death and the treaty signing that ended the war with the High Elves, on the opposing side are the rebel Stormcloaks who believe their traditional Nord way of life and beliefs are in peril since the province has seen an increase in empire occupation. The other storyline deals with the return of the ancient dragons, why they are here, and of course putting an end to the threat they pose to the land. Even completing both of these stories however would only be scratching the surface of what Skyrim offers as it pertains to content. The amount of side quests in the game is impossible to count, and many are more detailed than simplistic fetch or delivery endeavors. Faction questlines such as the dark brotherhood and thieves guild are detailed, lengthy, and quite rewarding with gold and equipment which cannot be obtained through any other means. It is exceedingly difficult to truly run out of things to do, and even when not actually completing any tasks exploring the nooks and crannies of Skyrim just for the hell of it is a time-consuming yet enjoyable way to spend ones time.
Combat is greatly improved in terms of variation in attacks. Dual wielding weapons and wielding spells in one hand with a weapon in another are possible for the first time. This benefits all types of characters, from the aggressive warrior types to the hybrid magic users; finding the right combination for your character is a major part of the fun. Allocating skill points in a particular school of magic will allow dual wielding magic to be more effective as well, so wizard users rejoice as well! Shouts learned from utilizing dragon souls that have been assimilated can be set to another button altogether so it can be used in conjunction with whatever combination of weapons or spells you desire. This also pertains to any other sort of special power learned throughout the game.
The graphical wonders present in this game are also strongly evident in not only the dragons and character models, but with the world itself. The mountains are so realistic looking and the larger ranges seem thorough and endless. Nothing has been half-assed or phoned in when it comes to the complete image of what something is meant to look like, as if we were there in actuality. Dwemer ruins, daedric statues, and the majority of the major capital cities are particularly well designed. Arguably the most breathtaking of all the sights of Skyrim however can be seen just gazing upward at the night sky and seeing any harmonious clash of stars and northern lights, or even just the clouds in the daytime with birds randomly passing by. Such beauty in detail should be highly commended.
The soundtrack is also exceptionally grasping, from the epic chanting of a good dragon battle to the calming orchestral pieces that accompany a stroll through a city. The voice acting is decent, and the accents believable, though after a while it becomes easy to realize that it seems to be the same seven or eight voice actors doing every NPC in the game. It isn’t terribly bothersome, but a big restricting in its own way. Sound effects from the spells to the clash of a steel weapon against a stone wall are solid and definitive. After a while even the sound of a blacksmith at work at his forge becomes a welcomed melody in itself.
There is very little that can be said about Skyrim in a negative sense, at least very little that can affect the game to the point of disenchantment. What can be said however is a pretty significant issue which has required multiple attempts at fixing already through patches. I speak of course of the myriad of glitches that plague the game. This was to be expected, as none of Bethesda’s big open world games of the past have ever been glitch free. In fact, they probably suffered from more glitches than a couple of months’ worth of games combined. Most are menial graphical hiccups like a backwards weapon or a missing design feature, but others tend to be more malignant. Game freezes are not uncommon on the Xbox or PS3, even if relatively infrequent. Backwards flying dragons are one of the worst because while the visuals are hilarious, these dragons don’t attack and never land making fast-travel impossible for the period of times the dragon is close enough to your character. Killing from a far is the only way to best this glitched foe, otherwise you’ll be running an awful long way before finally losing it. The Elder Scrolls have hardly been technically perfect games, but in a way a lot of the smaller non-hindering glitches have become a part of the charisma factor. There are always humorous moments to be found and will always be a memory to bring up later, such as an NPC spazzing out for no reason or a courier delivering a letter to you completely naked. Either way, while the severity and frequency of the glitches may not affect Skyrim harshly enough to dethrone its obvious game of the year qualities in every other aspect, it is what keeps the game from a completely perfect score.
The PS3 Experience (Justin Belin)
At Games Abyss we have put hundreds of hours into Skyrim across all possible platforms. While the above review represents the general experience of Skyrim in its purest form, a thorough review would be remiss not to mention the problems that plague the PS3 version of the game. Depending on who you listen to and what message boards you troll, the frame rate debacle in which Skryim’s frame rate is inversely proportional to the size of your save file (ie. play time) is experienced by a either small vocal minority (as Bethesday maintains) or an angry majority (as the message boards proclaim). Well, we feel justified to comment on the issue as the one ps3 copy amongst our reviewers has been so stricken. With a mere (!) 60 hours on the save file, the game is noticeably choppier than its 360 and PC cousins. Any play time in excess of 1 hour without a reset brings about incredibly frustrating dips which inconvenience everything from combat to simply wandering around towns and the world. The patches up to 1.3 have not effectively addressed the issue for most and Bethesda’s soft recommendations (turn off autosave, don’t drop items in the game world, close doors behind you etc) essentially amount to a small band-aid for a gaping wound. Bethesda has promised to address this issue in a future patch but many question whether it is even fixable given the PS3’s architecture. Which begs the question, did Bethesda know about this seemingly ubiquitous problem prior to release? PS3 gamers are presently faced with the dilemma of either a) playing a broken game and adjusting their play style to accommodate frame rate and freeze issues b) putting the game back on their shelf to await the hope of a future patch or c) avoiding the game entirely. Either way, at present, the PS3 is clearly the trailing platform in the Skyrim experience. While no gamer, including those who only have a ps3, should miss out on this experience, those who have the option to play on 360 or PC instead should be encouraged to do so.
Fun Factor: Skyrim is a hundred kinds of fun, and it never slows down. Even repeating quests can be enjoyable with a different character with a different approach to interaction and combat. Exploration and discovery are largely satisfying and you just can’t beat the feeling of taking down a dragon.
Difficulty: This will completely depend on the way you fashion your character and the gear he or she uses. Enemies and rewards are leveled with your progress, but it isn’t always a one to one ratio. The game can range from challenging, to pretty difficult. But that is part of the fun, finding out several ways of approaching a certain situation. Save often and keep multiple saves.
Length: Hundreds of hours are possible. Hundreds.
On the Negative Side: Glitches may have you wondering what’s going to go wrong next, but most are not so bad that they will hurt your gameplay - except on the PS3 where it does affect the quality of your experience.
Bang for Your Buck: Simply put, it is conceivable that people will be playing Skyrim up until the point the next Elder Scrolls game comes out. No game is worth the money more than Skyrim is.
