Off the shelf - The Elder Scrolls V
(Skyrim)
11.11.11: TESV: Skyrim is released...
A few years on, a gamer picks it up off the shelf, his girlfriend wants to watch...
Now when I first heard about Skyrim, I was a little sceptical. Having clocked over 100 hours on Oblivion, I was sure nothing could beat it.
I was right.
Now don't get me wrong, Skyrim was and (5 years on) is an excellent game, but it wasn't the same. It didn't have that early 3d RPG excitement to it. Gaming was a very different place when Skyrim was released. It felt more fleshed out, deeper, more immersive. But it certainly had lost the charm that was so present in Oblivion and Morrowind. It's actually very difficult to compare them, they're barely even the same series.
But this isn't a review of Oblivion.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim really did surprise me. Not because I expected it to be "Bad" but because I didn't quite expect it to be as good as it was. The game, from the very moment I spawned into that wagon being carted to my execuution, had me gripped. I left Helgen breathless, I walked to Riverwood in awe, but when I saw Whiterun; that's when I knew Bethesda had made a game I would continue to play for years to come.
The (main) story line is rather long so I won't review that, all I will say is that it was quite fast changing, they never seemed to focus on one aspect of it for very long. This can be good depending on how you like to play, for me it was perfectly paced for my style of gameplay. But of course one of the things Bethesda does best is side stories. There were plenty of these to choose from, from the glorious Companions (Skyrims version of the Tamriel Fighting Guild) to the Secretive Dark Brotherhood. In my time playing the game I've had my hand at all of them at one time or another, for me, the best would have to be either the Stormcloaks Vs Imperial Story line or the College of Winterhold Storyline. Both had their gripping moments. Also pretty far up the list was the revolution in Markarth as it brought to light a lot of historical political points.
Everyone knows that Skyrim is a graphically pleasing game, for 2011. Looking back at it when I picked it up for this review it could use some work, but there are plenty of graphical mods with loyal fan bases to download that are still being updated and/ or created. In fact, Skyrim (on PC) caters very well to mods and add-ons, which is hard to find it seems now. But even on console the graphics are still pretty charming and occasionally leave you standing at the top of a mountain with a case of the wows.
But of course, Skyrim isn't PERFECT. In fact it's very far from it. To list the obvious faults in the game:
-blood and gore glitches
-Arrow glitches
-Clunky combat
-Fucking physics
-Voice acting
-MAJOR clipping
Personally, I would say that the charm and immersiveness of the game can outweigh these, but sometimes they do get a little annoying.
Of course, while I was playing through the game once again, my girlfriend wanted to give it a try.
She's not much of a gamer but I thought we might all value her input slightly:
I loaded her into a new save and gave her the controls from the very first moment in the wagon at Helgen. She looked at all the people in the cart before looking down and screeching: "Where are my legs!? Do I have legs? Is this normal? Did I break it?"
From there she completed the tutorial, which she did struggle to get through, as there are some points where you stand around and wait for stuff to happen. She seemed to enjoy fighting the enemies underground, despite getting freaked out by the small army of Frostbite Spiders and the bear.
From the mountains at Helgen she decided to follow the campaign, even though I gave her the choice to run around and do as she wished, Of course she hadn't quite grasped the concept of paths yet so decided to be creative and independant by making her own way down the mountain to Riverwood.
To cut a long story short, she got stuck halfway down in a hole. After she gave me the controls to get her out of the hole, in which I used some of them good old Skyrim physics of jumping onto various points on the rock hoping I'll glitch through one of them, she eventually made it to Whiterun.
Here I asked her: "What do you think of the game so far?" to which she said: "5/10, Too many cliff holes to get stuck in. Plus people talk to me whether I want them to or not."
It was after watching her struggle through Bleak Falls Barrow that it finally occurred to me Skyrim's biggest flaw. It caters very poorly to beginners. Despite it's command prompts whenever you open a menu, it doesn't really explain how to do anything and can be pretty difficult to get your head around, although I suppose that most of the audience of Skyrim came from oblivion so they'd know all Bethesdas old tricks...
