Still Playing: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

EDGE’s Nathan Brown has penned an editorial on Skyrim, or rather, on why he switched to the PC version of the title after initially going for the PlayStation 3 version.

Here’s a snip:

It’s winter again, of course, and once again there have been cold days spent in front of the fire, pad in hand. It’s business as usual, then, but for one thing: the freshly built gaming PC under the TV. I built it for indie games I couldn’t play on anything else, for the best-looking versions of new games, and because the other boxes under the TV were starting to show their age. With an already swollen Steam library and so many other new experiences a few keystrokes away, Skyrim is far and away my most played game so far. And, despite the wealth of character customisation and playstyles at my disposal, I’m playing it in almost exactly the same way as on PS3: as a female Imperial named Cwenhild (a medieval girl’s name which means ‘˜battle queen’, courtesy of Google), bow and arrow out in the open, and sword and shield in dungeons. That’s partly because of my fondness for melee combat and lack of imagination, admittedly, but mostly it’s for closure. It took a year and a depleted savings account and a couple of fraught evenings building my first PC, but at last I’m playing Skyrim the way its creators intended.

In fact, that’s not quite true: it’s even better than that, because PC’s advantage here isn’t just in stable performance and better textures. It’s got mods, thousands of them, both on Steam Workshop and the incredible Nexus Mods. For every hour I’ve spent wandering Skyrim’s frozen tundra, every hour routing the undead and looting the depths of this sprawling land’s caves, forts and dungeons, I reckon I’ve spent an hour and a half tinkering. Seeking out, downloading and installing mods, loading the game to check for performance hits, then quitting to desktop and installing another. It’s quite the addiction, and one I can heartily recommend.