9.5
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Review (PS3/360)
Site Score
9.5User Score
0(0 votes)
Click to vote
Skyrim is a labour of love. That much is clear from the first time you see the distant peaks and hear the melodic notes as the game draws you in. There are few open world games today that feel as complete as Skyrim does – everything you see and every animal or person you encounter fits into the game world perfectly, and after just a few hours of playing you aren’t simply playing another game – you’re living another life.
Once again you begin as a prisoner, two hundred years after the events of Oblivion, and headed for the chopping block. Being punished for a crime that nobody ever elaborates on, you are rescued from death at the last second by the appearance of a dragon – the first of many. After the quick formality of a scripted escape session you embark on your journey which will take you to the deepest dungeons and the highest peaks of Skyrim, where you realise your destiny as a Dragonborn.
Skyrim has, in some ways, been reduced and refined down from previous Elder Scrolls games to make this total immersion even easier. You begin by picking a race – just a race. You define how you look and then the menus end. I, for example, chose a Nord, native to Skyrim, and this choice granted me an inherent 50% frost resistance. This is the only character customization available to you before you play. You are released into the world and simply told to explore it, with a hint of where to go if you want to follow the game’s main quest. The rest is up to you.
Bethesda have done away with many of the character creation menus and the more in-depth RPG mechanics to allow the player to make their own way in the world. Many skills have been scrapped – athletics, mysticism, intelligence and endurance to name some, and to increase a skill in a certain area you simply have to use it. Some may grumble about the apparent ‘dumbing down’ of the game, or the narrowing of choices and it’s true, you can no longer drink a custom acrobatics potion and leap over mountains. But the changes result in you spending more time in the world and less time navigating around menus, trying to work out which skills would work best with your specialisation – that’s old hat. In Skyrim, you just play.
A new feature to the Elder Scrolls series is the perks system, taken from Bethesda’s Fallout games. Each time you reach a new level, you look to the heavens and choose an upgrade to one of the eighteen skill trees, or constellations, available to everyone – remember there are no classes or specialisations limiting your choice in The Elder Scrolls V. The perk you pick will enhance its corresponding skill in some way. For example the Light Fingers perk in the pickpocketing skill tree will give you a pickpocketing bonus of 20%, and so on. This is how you customise your character in Skyrim, as more powerful perks require a higher level of skill in their respective trees. As you delve deeper into a certain play style, more bonuses will become available to you.
It’s not an original system, but it’s well balanced. It adds enough upgrades to your character without going overboard and making you an overpowered killing machine, or providing a cookie-cutter build that you needed in order to compete with your enemies. There is just as much advantage to going down the Speech skill tree as the Destruction, if that’s how you want to make your way through Skyrim.
One of Skyrim’s chief directives seems to be ‘less menus’, but it’s worth mentioning that the menus they do have look good. Bethesda have replaced the medieval looking text with an elegant typeface that’s easy to read yet hints at timelessness. The different panels are easy to navigate, although they are definitely configured more for consoles than the PC. So much so, in fact, that it’s easier to use the WSAD keys than to use the mouse, and even better to plug an Xbox controller into your PC, if you have one. Nevertheless the menus are well organised which is crucial in a game that sees you accumulate vendor trash quick that a litter-picker at a festival.
On to the world – and what a world it is. As with every Elder Scrolls game, nearly everything you see can be interacted with in some way, and Skyrim’s mountainous regions with their inviting peaks encourage you to climb and explore. The environment is a harsh one; chilling in more than one sense, you’ll frequently be lost in snowstorms and find yourself atop a lonely peak, looking down upon a desolate ice-field or abandoned ruin. The game resonates much more like the unforgiving world of Morrowind than the rich Cyrodiil. That doesn’t mean you won’t find beauty, in fact there are areas abundant with greenery. But if you wander off into the sunset, brace yourself for a potentially daunting trip. The sound design is the cherry on the cake – it booms and applauds, and recedes and creeps at all the right moments. It doesn’t feel like the game’s soundtrack so much as your own personal score that emphasises every important moment you experience in Skyrim.
Bethesda managed to condense Skyrim into a little over five gigabytes, which surprised many. However when you look at the game closely, you can see where they saved the space. The game looks very pretty when you’re viewing a large vista, but when you examine the world closely, you’ll find that the textures are pretty basic – painted on, and with the occasional glitch. Not that this takes away from the game too much. Indeed, Bethesda’s M.O. has been to create a world so large and immersive that the occasional bug can be overlooked as the player appreciates the game as a whole, instead of the sometimes buggy parts.
The dungeons themselves should be noted for their sheer variety. A team of eight people designed the dungeons in Skyrim, an increase from the solitary one designer for the Oblivion dungeons. The result is a lot less cut and paste and a lot more creativity. You’ll find rank, dirty tunnels and huge, sprawling caverns that you could fit a city into. When I came across an abandoned mine, crypt or lair, I just had to go in and see what was inside. While the environments are great, the enemies are less varied. You’ll encounter a range of critters inside these dungeons, but it’s mainly one or two types per dungeon, with incremental difficulty increases as you progress through them. Despite this, there is a definite improvement over past Elder Scrolls games. These dungeons are there to be looked at and you want to investigate, which is the whole point of Skyrim in the first place.
Down to the meat of it – questing. Skyrim will have you fill up your quest log faster than any Elder Scrolls game before it. The NPC’s actually have meaningful conversations with each other as you pass them in the street, instead of the inane babble that we were forced to listen to in Oblivion. If you pass two or three people arguing over, say, a family feud or a stolen necklace, chances are you can talk to either party and receive a quest to try and resolve, or enhance the dispute. And these side-quests are everywhere. I tried to power through the main quest line before I reviewed the game, yet I was still distracted by conversations that were just too interesting and compelling to ignore.
Part of what makes questing so easy is the revamped conversation windows in Skyrim. No longer do you zoom into someone’s face and watch their awkwardly animated mouth as you’re locked into their story. Now, the camera simply focuses on the character and you’ll talk to them in a much less intense way. You can also quit the conversation at any time, and the NPC you’re talking to will still finish their sentence as you walk away. It’s much easier to engage people this way as you don’t feel like you’re committing to a long and potentially boring dialogue. The improved character design helps too. The people actually look like people, with much sharper angles to their faces that make races like Orcs and Khajit more fierce, Elves more noble and Argonians even stranger.
The main quest itself is not overly long – if you put your mind to it and ignore the majority of the side-quests it should only take you a few hours, although that is not, admittedly, the point of Skyrim. Nevertheless it is a decent story largely due to one thing – dragons. The inclusion of dragons in Skyrim instantly makes the world more interesting for obvious reasons, and Bethesda did well to make them a focus of the main story. You’ll have to duke it out with some of the toughest dragons that Skyrim – or Tamriel – has ever seen, making many fights throughout the quest line undeniably epic.
This also means that there are dragons roaming the wild, and the effect this has when you’re out adventuring cannot be overstated. The potential for a random dragon encounter, at any time, will have you scanning the horizon with both fear and anticipation. They are not easy creatures to kill by any means, and different dragons will bring different abilities to the table. Some breathe fire, some frost, and as you level up you will encounter the more powerful and ruthless of the breed. A single fight will have you running, hiding, and chugging all kinds of potions like there’s no tomorrow. The elation after a victory is something to be experienced. And because of Skyrim’s dangerous and populous world you’ll come across dragon fights in progress too. More than once I’ve crested a hill only to find a dragon and a giant going toe-to-toe on the other side.
A whole host of spells and weapons are available to your character, but remember, you are no ordinary adventurer. As a Dragonborn, you can learn powerful ‘shouts’ which you can use to battle mighty dragons, or destroy meeker foe. These shouts are learned through gazing upon ancient texts, and activated with the souls of dragons that you have defeated. You can find some of these shouts through the main quest, but many are simply out in the world, waiting to be discovered. The shouts can burn, freeze or push enemies, as well as summon helpers or blast you towards a target at high speed. Once you begin playing around with them they can become very useful at helping you out of a tight jam, or defeating a particularly difficult foe. They serve the purpose of levelling out the difficulty curve to some extent, which is indeed a very useful thing. Plus, when you get down to it, it’s just cool to yell fire at people. The novelty will both drive you to explore the world and also defeat dragons when they appear, instead of taking the easy option of running away.
When you do get out there and start racking up a body count, you’ll find the combat similar to previous Bethesda games, at least at a basic level. You still pick a weapon or spell and swing or cast it freestyle, until your opponent is dead. Once again there is no locking on to targets or quick time events, just a button to ‘attack’, hold it to power attack. But in Skyrim you use both hands at all times – this could mean any combination of weapons, shields and spells. For example, a popular choice for me was to have a sword in my right hand and a healing spell in my left, so I could hack at the enemy and recover as needs be. If you duel wield a spell it can become more powerful, with certain perks enabling you to ‘overcharge’, giving an increased effect. Again it comes down to choice; whether to charge in with sword and shield, or sneak around with a bow and a spell of invisibility.
Skyrim makes it easy to pick and choose, too. You can mark any item in your inventory or spell list as a ‘favourite’, which places it on a menu which appears at the touch of a button. That means you can put all your go-to abilities and weapons into one place so you don’t have to trawl through menus, which makes it much easier to switch things up in combat, and make a fight more interesting. Although the basic mechanics haven’t changed, Skyrim sees many tweaks that focus on increased choice and accessibility. If you didn’t like the style of combat in Fallout and Oblivion then you may not like Skyrim’s either. However if you enjoyed the combat, then Skyrim offers you more ways to kill and makes it more convenient – and who doesn’t like easy killing?
If you want achievements in Skyrim, you’ll have to travel the length and breadth of the world to get them. You’ll have to join all the organisations, complete all the quests, advance a wide variety of skills as well as buying a house, getting married and reaching level 50. Achievement hunting in this game will take you many, many hours but will expose you to everything the game has to offer which make it in no way a bad thing. If you go for all 1000 points, then by the end of your adventure you’d have had the most complete Skyrim experience you could get – and there’s still more to do!
The game has bugs, as all Bethesda games do. There are a few that could lock up your console or crash your PC, and we’ll just have to hope that they’ll be patched in due course. More prevalent are the host of minor glitches that range from the frustrating to the hilarious. The bugs that fit into the ‘frustrating’ category mainly revolve around your followers and allies, who can get lost or run off for no reason. If this could be your first Elder Scrolls game then my advice would be to accept these flaws as part of the game world. Many veterans of the series could tell you stories of the craziest, stupefying bugs they’ve encountered over the last decade of Elder Scrolls, and they really are a fact of life in such an expansive open world game. By no means am I excusing the bugs, but they do not detract from the world of Skyrim in any major way – when I see a mammoth floating six feet of the ground I simply nod my head in understanding and move on to the next adventure.
Skyrim is captivating. It will swallow you up and trap you within it’s world, in which you could happily carve out an entirely new existence. Not only is it adventure on the most epic scale but the attention to detail is astounding – revealed through idle chatter, complex local politics or simply staring at a waterfall until you finally notice the butterflies, hovering around you just waiting to be caught. This is not a game without flaws, but they do not sully such a well crafted world. As an RPG it is one of the best of its genre, and you would be remiss if you didn’t investigate its many possibilities.
No Comments