Introduction
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the latest release from Bethesda Softworks, following up The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (2002), The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006), and a detour to Fallout 3 (2008). As with their previous efforts, Bethesda used their long production cycle to create a huge world where you’re given plenty of things to do — or not do, as you see fit. I spent well over 100 hours playing the PC version of Skyrim, and what you’ll find in the following pages are my (somewhat critical) thoughts about the game.
Character Development
As with all of Bethesda’s games, you’re not forced to choose a class when you create your character. Instead, you’re just asked to select a race, a name, a gender, and an appearance. The race gives you some minor bonuses plus an ability, but the name, gender and appearance are all cosmetic. I played a Redguard in the game. This gave me a 50% resistance to poison plus the Adrenaline Rush ability, which allowed me to quickly restore my stamina.
As you play through Skyrim, you’re allowed to use any of the game’s 18 skills, which span magic, combat, thievery and crafting. The more you use a skill, the more ranks you gain in it, and the more experience points you earn for your character. Interestingly, skill use is the only way to gain experience and levels in the game, and so it pays to be well-rounded and try out different things. My character focused on One-Handed weapons, Heavy Armor, Blacksmithing and Enchanting, and he eventually reached level 57. There isn’t really a level cap in the game, but if you max out all of the skills then you’ll reach level 81.
Each time you gain a level, you’ll get to increase your magicka (needed for spells), health (needed for combat), or stamina (needed for skills). You’ll also get to choose a perk. Each skill has a “constellation” of perks available, where each perk acts as a bonus for the skill. For example, the One-Handed skill has perks that increase the damage you do with one-handed weapons, reduce the stamina needed to perform power attacks, and give you a paralyzing attack. There are 251 perks total, but chances are you’ll only be able to select about 50 of them when you play through the game. Since there aren’t any attributes (like strength or intelligence), your choices with perks pretty much define your character.
Overall, the character system works well enough. It’s better than Oblivion‘s odd system (where I frequently didn’t want to gain levels), but it’s not as much fun as Fallout 3‘s SPECIAL system. Bethesda likes to allow characters to learn everything and become godlike by the end of the game, and I prefer that not to happen. For me, games are more fun (and replayable) when you have to make choices for your character, and when you face limitations. Skyrim doesn’t have either of those things (even with the perks you can cherry pick the best ones). My guess is that the game would have worked better with a level cap around 30.
Campaign
When the game opens up, you’ll find yourself bound in a cart being taken to an Imperial keep for your execution. Luckily for you, a dragon will show up and disrupt the proceedings, and you’ll escape into the countryside. From there you’ll get to do the usual Bethesda thing — explore the world, join factions, complete quests, and defeat lots of enemies, including skeletons, bandits and spiders.
During your explorations, you’ll also encounter more dragons, and you’ll learn that you’re “dragonborn,” which means you possess the soul of a dragon and can perform special “shouts.” These shouts are sort of like signs from The Witcher, and include effects like breathing fire, slowing time, and charming animals. Your status as dragonborn and your dealings with dragons make up the main questline for the game, but that’s only a small fraction of what you’ll be able to do. Skyrim is mostly a game of side quests and random exploration.
As an example, when you reach the city of Riften you’ll find the Thieves Guild, and you’ll discover that it has fallen on hard times. If you join up with the guild (which doesn’t actually require much in the way of thief skills), then you’ll trigger a series of quests to restore it to power, and you’ll eventually become its guildmaster. This is all optional, of course — you can completely ignore the Thieves Guild if you want — but completing its quests will supply you with some nice rogue gear and also put you into contact with a bunch of fences, which will make it easier for you to sell your excess items.
Along with the faction quests, you’ll also stumble across several daedra (evil demon) quests, where you’ll be given the option of helping the daedra (for a nice prize) or not (for the betterment of the world). The daedra quests are some of the most interesting and memorable in the game. For one quest you’ll visit an
Alice in Wonderland style mad tea party, and you’ll be tasked with curing a former emperor of madness. In another you’ll need to invite a priest to dinner — where he’s the main course — and you’ll have to decide if you want to partake or not. In a third you’ll experience a
Skyrim version of
The Hangover, and you’ll have to remember what you did with a magical staff during a drinking binge.
Unfortunately, the quests in the game have two major problems. First, they have almost no impact on the world. No matter what you do or don’t do, nothing much will change. This is most noticeable during Skyrim‘s civil war, where the Imperials want the status quo and the Stormcloaks want more religious freedom. You can pick a side and end the conflict violently, but afterwards you might not be able to tell the difference. Worse, during the war itself, you’re allowed to walk right up to the enemy faction leader and talk to him, and not only will nobody think to stop you, the leader will calmly exchange pleasantries with you, even if you’ve been cutting down all of the soldiers in his army. Other than some random comments here and there, the game just doesn’t notice what you’ve done.
The second problem is that for some reason Bethesda went heavy on “miscellaneous” quests, which are mostly just one-sentence mini-quests to kill somebody or retrieve something or deliver a message. These quests get tiresome pretty quickly (especially the oft-repeated quests to kill anonymous bandit leaders and wayward giants), and they don’t add anything to the lore of the world or to the campaign. They just give you an excuse to visit some of the caves and lairs and hideouts scattered throughout the world. Sadly, you’re probably better off ignoring most of these quests and focusing on the core quests.
Gameplay
Skyrim‘s gameplay mechanics are about what you’d expect. You use the WASD keys to move your character, the mouse to steer, the left mouse button to swing your main hand weapon, and the right mouse button to swing your off hand weapon (or shield). You can also use the 1-8 keys (but not 9 and 0) as hotkeys for weapons and spells, and Bethesda actually added in some hotkeys for interface pages (like M for the map page) so you don’t have to go through the tab key for everything.
Sort of oddly, spells in the game are handled like weapons, where you have to equip them and ready them in order to use them. That makes spells a little cumbersome to use. For example, for my character to cast something simple like “candlelight,” he has to swap out his shield for the spell, then ready and cast the spell (which takes a second or two), and then swap out the spell for his shield. And since the spell only lasts a minute, he has to keep repeating this sequence over and over again every time he explores a dark cave, which isn’t a lot of fun. Life would be much easier for casters if they could just press a key to cast a spell rather than repeatedly reshuffle their equipment.
The gameplay itself is in line with Bethesda’s other games, with a balance between combat and conversations. The combat engine works pretty well, with smooth animations and nice lighting effects, and between spells, shouts, abilities and weapons, you’re given lots of options for how to grind up your foes. Conversations, on the other hand, are a little more simplistic. Sometimes you’re given the option to persuade, bribe, or intimidate, but otherwise your dialogue options are just a way to learn more information or to say “yes” or “no” to quests.
To keep combat interesting, Bethesda employed a bit of level scaling, but not to the extent seen in Oblivion. Instead of converting all enemies to your level (and making your level meaningless), Bethesda decided to create a variety of enemies and then change which ones you see during your explorations. So early in the game you might run into some basic bandits, but then later you’ll encounter bandit thugs, bandit plunderers and eventually bandit marauders. Other enemies, like dragons, trolls and giants, appear to have fixed levels, and so they’re nasty when you first meet them but then get easier by the end of the game.
Skyrim also has a collection of traps and puzzles to keep you on your toes. The traps function more for ambiance than as a threat to your character’s life (they don’t do a lot of damage, and your character regenerates health anyway), but they made me think of Indiana Jones more than a few times, and that’s always a good thing. The puzzles, meanwhile, aren’t especially challenging (most only have 27 combinations) but Bethesda did what they could with levers and rotating columns, and it’s always nice when locations are more interactive rather than less.
The problem with
Skyrim is that while everything works pretty well, you never see anything just once. You see stuff dozens and dozens of times, well beyond the limit of when they might be considered interesting. For example, early in the game you’ll discover a puzzle door lock, and you’ll receive a clue for how to open it. Getting past that door is fun, but then you’ll see 10 more doors just like it, and they’ll open in exactly the same way. That sort of “cut and paste” mentality is just annoying. I didn’t like it in
Dragon Age II (where all of the locations looked the same), and I don’t like it here (where all of the contents of the locations look the same).
Or consider dragon battles. The first time I encountered a dragon, it was exciting, and I had some soldiers helping me out to make sure I survived. After that, I had to fight a few dragons on my own, and so the battles remained exciting — at least for a while. But by the end of the game, I must have defeated over 50 dragons, and after awhile it just ventured into tedium, especially since dragons tend to fly around and ignore you, and it takes a while to kill them. In my view, Bethesda didn’t create nearly enough content for their world to support a 100+ hour campaign, and the repetition is deadly.
Finally, I played Skyrim on the default difficulty setting, which is what I always do when I write a review. The game started out challenging, and I had to use a lot of potions and poisons to survive. Then somewhere around level 20, the tide started turning, and by the end of the game everything was trivially easy. I don’t think the final boss even damaged me. Possibly switching to a higher difficulty setting would have helped, but I’m guessing Bethesda like every other developer out there intended their game to be easily finishable, and for a real challenge we’ll have to wait for some balancing mods to come out.
Graphics
As a whole, Skyrim looks pretty good, even if your computer, like mine, isn’t powerful enough to display the ultra-high settings. The animations are fluid, the enemies are detailed (especially the dragons), and the spell effects are colorful without being overly garish. You’re even given the option of painstakingly creating your character’s face, even though you probably won’t ever see it again once you start playing the game.
Where Skyrim really shines is in the world design and in some of the ambient animations. There are so many forts and hideouts and lairs in the world that they all start to look alike after a while, and I don’t think there’s much Bethesda could have done about this (short of spending way more time on them than they probably deserve), but the major towns all have a unique look and feel to them, and some of the ruins are impressive. For example, one dwemer (dwarven) ruin has an “under the sea” theme. It’s hued in blues and greens, and it appears to have giant jellyfish floating around. I’m not sure how any of that is possible, but the site is eerily beautiful to explore.
But the most impressive part of the graphics is the world animations, particularly the snow and water effects. To put it bluntly, Skyrim has the best water effects I’ve ever seen in a game, and it’s not even close — and Bethesda must agree, because they put streams and waterfalls everywhere (I’m pretty sure “Skyrim” means “land of running water” in the Nord language). Meanwhile, with the events of the game taking place in the northern part of the world, you have to trek through many a snowstorm, and the animations for these are effective enough that you might feel like you’re actually there — and need to grab a coat or some snowshoes.
Sound
Unlike the graphics, the sound in Skyrim is much more workmanlike. There is a ton of dialogue in the game, and while it’s all performed by voice actors, they tend to read their lines without much in the way of emotion (or acting, really), and nobody stands out. Skyrim is actually a pretty good argument for the people who think role-playing games would be better if not all of the lines were acted. I’d rather hear quality acting in a few places rather than ho-hum acting all throughout, and I bet the game would have reacted better to my actions if not all of the dialogue had required an actor.
Meanwhile, I barely noticed the background music at all. At one point I turned off the music when I was working on a quest to find nirnroot (which produces a low tone when you get close to it), and I went about half the game before I remembered to turn the music back on. The part of the game I played without music wasn’t particularly better or worse or different than the part I played with music.
Probably the most notable thing about the sound in Skyrim is that somehow Bethesda screwed up the volume control. The dialogue is all at about half volume, meaning you have to crank up your speakers (or turn on the subtitles) to understand what’s going on. Then for some reason daedra voices are at full volume, and so it seems like they’re all shouting at you. This is just a weird bug in the game, and I’m surprised that Bethesda hasn’t fixed it already.
Interface
PC game interfaces always suffer when games are created for multiple platforms, and Skyrim is no exception. It has many of the problems you’d normally see in this area, like clunky menu systems, no tool tips, and the inability to name your saved games, but it also has an odd assortment of other issues. Most notably, the game seems to have trouble dealing with a keyboard and mouse. Frequently I’d click on a dialogue option, and the game would choose something different. Or I’d use the mouse wheel to scroll through a list, and suddenly the camera would start zooming in or out. Or I’d press a hotkey to do something, and the game would ignore it. I almost always had to press F at least three times to switch between the first and third person perspective.
But even beyond the PC shenanigans, the interface is just subpar. In some places it seems like Bethesda had no idea what it was doing — like with the inventory, which is handled via long lists of items, and where it’s sometimes difficult to do even basic things like check what you’re wearing or sell your excess loot — and in other places it seems like Bethesda went for “pretty” rather than “useful.” The most obvious example of the latter is the world map, which gives you a very high overhead view of Skyrim, complete with clouds. This looks great, but it doesn’t show any roads, and it forces you to do quite a bit of wandering around as you hunt for a route up to some of the mountain locations. Finally, as with all of Bethesda’s games, targeting from the third person perspective doesn’t work very well, but clearly this is a problem that Bethesda doesn’t care about (or else they would have fixed it two games ago).
Technical Issues
I’ve heard of people having all sorts of problems with Skyrim, but it worked pretty well for me. I didn’t encounter any dragons flying backwards, or any broken quests, or excessive load times. The game did crash for me a dozen or so times, but given the number of hours I put into it, that’s not bad at all, and the autosave feature always prevented me from losing much.
About the worst thing I can say about Skyrim is that it is a jealous game. It doesn’t want you checking the Internet or reading your mail or doing anything other than playing Skyrim. That is, alt-tabbing doesn’t work very well (it was the #1 cause of the crashes I had), and even if you play the game in a window, it’ll keep hold of your mouse and not let you switch tasks. This will be a major problem for me when I start working seriously on our Skyrim walkthrough, but I’m guessing for most people it will just be a nuisance.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, then you’ve probably figured out that I wasn’t a huge fan of Skyrim. This isn’t too surprising, since the elements that I care about in role-playing games don’t mesh well with much of what Bethesda typically has to offer in their games. I prefer PC games, the third person perspective, clean interfaces, story-driven campaigns, and complicated character builds (with actual numbers), while Bethesda prefers exactly the opposite. We are not a match made in heaven.
But even so, my issues with the game are mostly a matter of opinion. I found it to be rather large and dull, with way too much repetition and only a handful of interesting quests, but other people might enjoy the sightseeing and the spelunking, and not notice the deficiencies at all — or not even consider them to be deficiencies. I was one of the few people who enjoyed Hellgate: London, and it’s possible I’ll be one of the few people who dislikes Skyrim (at least for the first six months, before the critical editorials start coming out). Regardless, Skyrim is a game worth checking out, if for no other reason than to see what everybody’s talking about. Just don’t go in expecting it to be a nearly perfect RPG, or you might find yourself a bit disappointed.
