The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Editorials and Timelapse Video

Reminding us that there won’t be any break with Skyrim-themed news for a fairly long time, we have rounded up a couple of editorials dedicated to Bethesda’s latest chapter in the Elder Scrolls franchise, the first of which, coming from GamePro, is really only a list of some flaws that the author felt were particularly notable:

‘¢ What the hell happened to my follower? — We were in a fight, in a dungeon, which we won. I walked outside, fast traveled somewhere else…where the hell did she go? For the life of me, I can’t find my companion anywhere. I’m wondering if she’s stuck somewhere because I accidentally told her to wait or something, do I need to go back to that dungeon and look for her? Because if I do, I’m breaking up with Lydia on the spot. After I get back all my enchanted weapons she’s muleing around for me.

‘¢ My companion keeps blocking me. — You know what, I really don’t miss her. Especially considering how much time she spends blocking doorways. I mean, come on Lydia! This relationship clearly isn’t working.

‘¢ Can I get some better directions? — OK, I know they don’t have GPS in the alternate fantasy reality of The Elder Scrolls. But is my only solution to just follow a marker on the horizon that may signal something that’s miles away? How am I supposed to navigate the pathways to get there? If these people can shoot fire out of their fingertips, they can figure out a way to show me a more detailed path along the ground or something.

Videogamer feels that the lack of character creation, and classes in particular, is the future of RPGs:

It’s telling that Skyrim has dropped traditional classes altogether: It’s an imperfect system for anyone who wants to completely mould their character in the way they see fit.

For a genre whose bread and butter lies in being immersive, this kind of full-on control is like watching a developer eagerly try to prove a point: Yeah, this here is role-playing. Breaking from the restrictions imposed by a game, that’s role-playing. Erasing the lines between where you stop and the character starts that’s role-playing.
This time around, the design philosophy for Bethesda has been to wave goodbye to the pre-sets it gave you at the beginning of Oblivion, and hello to the possibility of playing any class types, simultaneously, with both hands. One hand can be used for melee weapons, one hand can spellcast. The result is a system that lets players decide how they want to play at any point in time.

GameFront goes for another list and tells us what they think are the six things Bethesda should fix in the next chapter of The Elder Scrolls:

5. Boring Conversations

Skyrim’s voice acting is better than Oblivion’s, but it’s still woefully uneven. I’m still trying to figure out if NPC’s with different Northern European accents come from different parts of Skyrim. This inconsistency isn’t helped by the dialogue’s tendency towards taking an info-dump.

Still, both these problems could be forgiven if it felt like the conversations you have with people had more of an effect on the game. Most of the time, however, they’re just about moving on to the next step of the quest. Games like Mass Effect set the standard for meaningful dialogue that has a real impact on player experience. The Elder Scrolls VI doesn’t need to rival Mass Effect, but there should at least be some reason to pick one response and not the another.

Finally, Eurogamer‘s Digital Foundry offers a time lapse video, which shows the night and day cycle and weather effects in various locations.