Skyrim is AWESOME!, 7.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating
As the bones of the dragon tumbled to the ground, the stranger sheathed his weapon and started to move towards the townsfolk. Amid cries of relief and shouts of joy, the mayor approached the stranger and exclaimed “Amazing! You truly are a gift from the divines to fight off so fearsome a beast with no help at all!” “That?” the stranger asked, motioning to the carcass with his thumb, “that’s nothing. I’ve killed at least fifteen of them this week. Goddamn dragons are like rats in this country. You want a real challenge, can you help me find twenty nirnroot? I’ve only got fifteen and I’ve been looking for them forever it seems.” Sadly, the townsfolk could be of no help to their new hero, and he ran off into the distance, into legend as ‘the man who would find twenty nirnroot.’

I don’t think there’s been any game with so much at stake in the past five years as Skyrim. Whether or not Bethesda Game Studios could re-work enough of the problems in their last outing into the Elder Scrolls would influence not only their future as a company, but indeed the future of purely single player games altogether. That appears to be a non-issue at this point though, as at the time of the writing of this article, Skyrim has shipped 7 million launch units, with at least half sold within the first 48 hours of launch. It’s also toppled records on Steam, with a high of 280 000 people simultaneously playing the game at one point, peaking today at just over 200 000, which certainly is put in perspective when the next highest figure, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 topped out at almost 72 000.

It’s certainly not surprising either, because as far as hand crafted, detailed, rich content (and an insane amount of content) goes, Skyrim doesn’t look like it’s going to be toppled anytime soon. At the end of my sixtieth hour, the ratio of unfinished quests to finished ones stood at 21:45, not counting any miscellaneous bits and bobs. What’s more is I count only two of the major cities that I feel like I explored exhaustively, putting seven more directly in my path, two of which I didn’t even visit at all. I rather objected to an interview Todd Howard did some time ago where he opined that games were certainly getting too expensive, but not Skyrim. His comments smacked of a “we’re special” attitude, but after digging into the latest Elder Scrolls offering, it’s increasingly easy to agree with him.

What an offering it is too, with more than just a few things reworked and tweaked to fix problems in the unfortunately flawed Oblivion. With every specialization much easier to dabble, tweak or focus in, the ability to play exactly the kind of character you want to create in Skyrim is seemingly without fault. Gone are the class based major/minor skill progression, with every single skill contributing to a greater level, and fallout-like perks unlocking based on your rating in a specific skill. As your overall level increases, you’ll find it requires more and more skill advancement to level up, but progress maintains a steady pace, and you never feel quite like you’ve plateaued. This new system is only complemented by the complete overhaul that smithing, enchanting, and alchemy have all received, putting a much higher value on what were notoriously secondary skills in previous Elder Scrolls titles. Magic in general is much more immediate and combat friendly as well, giving players the option to either dabble in it, or fully commit to it, with plenty of perks to increase your effectiveness.

These adjustments to the Elder Scrolls formula do nothing but shine, especially against the backdrop of Skyrim. Gone are the vanilla forests and townships of Cyrodiil, replaced by a richly designed hostile and alien environment, dotted with foreign looking crypts and caves, or the strange returning architecture of dwemer ruins. The clothing and accoutrements of nordic life similarly present themselves as meticulously designed, and singularly local. The weapons and armor you’ll find yourself equipping accentuate the cultural differences from imperial life, and it becomes much easier to get wrapped up in the world. This is also largely due to the redesign of the character models, with many plot-important characters having distinct physical presences, no longer just different heads fixed onto the same body types.

The characters serve an excellent purpose as narrative aides as well, with certainly the best voice acting any Bethesda Game Studios product has ever seen. Many of the plot problems from their previous games appear to have been fully addressed as well, with decently written dialogue. While not giving anything of the story away, the very fact that you enter the story as the hero, rather than the hero’s lackey (I defy anyone to justify to me how the player character is the hero in Oblivion, rather than Martin) makes the general experience of Skyrim the most rewarding Bethesda game since Morrowind. I even found the beginning an entertaining nod to their somewhat tired ‘start-in-prison’ mechanic, with the main character going to prison in the beginning, rather than being released from it. I will say however, that catching up on what happened in the couple hundred years since the events in Oblivion was somewhat shocking; the fact that so much epic drama was only explained in brief dialogue snippets and books laying about felt like wasted potential.