Skyrim

Game Info

Officially known as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the heretofore known as Skyrim is a huge open-world RPG with hundreds of plots and quests for your character to work through.  Explore, fight dragons, become a vampire, really just about anything you’d like to do in a well-realized fantasy realm is yours to accomplish in this ambitious but deeply flawed game.

Skyrim is at once both huge and confining. The country, with its nine city-states and hundreds of areas to explore, has 10 different enemies and 3 different combat encounters. Although you can walk the coast and avoid combat, you’ll most likely be ineffectually hacking and burning wolves and trolls until they decide to flop over. Do you like bandits? I certainly hope so, because even though you’re clad in hellforged armor made of daedric hearts and obsidian shards, cutpurses will think nothing of attempting to rob you. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood AND the leader of The Companions AND a Nightingale AND the master of the Thieves Guild… a guy with fur boots and an unleveled iron sword needs those 10 Septim if you want to cross his bridge.  Your quest log will fill with missions, some actually quite interesting and others nothing more the fetch quests.  But attempt to head to any one of these and try, really TRY, to not get pulled in to some interesting-looking cave, or chat with a local who needs help.

The newly improved leveling system is a welcome addition.  Instead of gaining points solely in areas you’ve used, your character also gains general experience which, when leveled, can confer some interesting bonuses.  Use destruction magic, for example, and soon you’ll be able to cash in your levels for bonuses to damage or Magicka recharge.  The downright obtuse leveling system in Oblivion was a huge gaffe, so it’s nice to see this get some attention.  Gone are some of the stranger things to level up in, allowing you to focus your character more finely.

But let’s talk about fighting, which is why you came here, right?  Daunting and a downright joy to explore, Skyrim is terribly ham-stringed by awful combat that forcefully wrenches away any sense of immersion. You can do anything or be anyone, but once you start swinging your sword, you enter into the most boring sparring match in the history of combat. Sometimes, with a massive blow, your enemy will falter. Other times, they won’t – unless they fly backwards as if hit by some serendipitous force.  A killcam will sometimes show you executing your opponent in some grisly fashion – and sometimes it won’t.  At one point in my game, it actually took less time for me to run away until I could sneak again and then assassinate my opponent, then it would to flail my arms to kill them with a mace.  Ranged combat is weirdly disconnected, as well.  Arrows travel slowly, unless your enemy is shooting them at you.  In that case, they’re fast and supremely accurate.  Magic combat fares better, though.  The new dual-wield mechanic, wholeheartedly snagged from Bioshock 2, allows for some pretty interesting combinations of spells or spell/weapons.  My favorite was a flame spell coupled with a sword that did additional damage to enemies that were on fire.

The graphics are a vast improvement over Oblivion, at least.  Character models are especially improved, and are actually attractive to look at, instead of the ugly sameness that was Oblivion.  The world is also sharp looking, and definitely adds to the enjoyment of exploring.  Most enemies look good and fearsome when they’re supposed to, and the crisp textures keep things from blending together.  A particular treat is the werewolf transformation animation, which perversely elongates your character’s arms and legs, and looks especially painful.

Swelling orchestral music and a wide voice acting pool round out the sound of Skyrim, which does a serviceable job of immersing you in the world.  All characters are voiced, and most people are particularly chatty, so there’s definitely a lot to listen to – but thankfully this can (usually) be skipped if you read faster then they talk.  Of course, the lizard people all hiss and the cat people all sound sneaky, with some generally light dialects coming through for the human races.  As an added treat, every once in a while you’ll run in to an NPC voiced by the immersion-breaking redneck yokel guy, a voice actor I’m fairly certain they found foraging in Bethesda’s dumpsters one afternoon.  I’d only encountered him twice, but listening to him hurf out lines is its own brand of hilarious.

And then there are the bugs, which this game is certainly filled with.  Skyrim is the plot device in a bad 80’s Batman comic book.  “I know what I’ll do,” The Joker says, cackling.  “I’ll make a video game that’s addicting but full of bugs!  That way, the kiddies will play and play, but never get anywhere!  Batman will be doomed to release patches that fix bugs, but will create other bugs!”  Mammoths fall from the sky in dead heaps.  Dragons fly backwards, and in random directions.  Sometimes your shield won’t actually block.  Play for too long on the PS3 and everything slows to a choppy, frame-skipping crawl.  Combat is spastic flailing – oh wait that’s supposed to be a feature.  I can’t remember when exactly we were expected to accept buggy open world games, but I suspect Bethesda is glad we’re all basically okay with it.

I’m bashing Skyrim, but these are really footnotes to an overall positive experience.  My save file is 60something hours deep, with hundreds of locations explored and dozens cleared.  I’ve killed kings and generals, mice (lots of mice) and men.  Giants quiver at the sight of me – their mammoths don’t, though.  Seriously, don’t mess with them, they’ll ruin your day.  When I put down the game, I have to make a concerted effort to not pick it back up for a while.  It sucks you in.  But for a game this vast, Besthesda should’ve really brought their A game.