Game Review - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Once or twice in a console generation, there comes along a game that just blows everything out of the fucking water, and sets a new bar. NES had Super Mario Bros. 3; SNES had Yoshi's Island or Starfox; N64 had Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time; sixth gen had Knights of the Old Republic and Grand Theft Auto; now we have Skyrim. It's going to be very hard to put this into words. Because after putting god knows how many hours into this, I'm pretty sure I can say that I've never played a better video game in my entire life.

Bethesda first hit it big with Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind in 2002. I've never met anyone who has played the first two Elder Scrolls, but Morrowind is what put them on the map. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out in 2006, which took place in Cyrodiil, capital province of the empire. All these games take place on the continent of Tamriel, all part of the same empire. Skyrim takes place 200 years after Oblivion.



I've spent at least a couple hours on the Elder Scrolls wiki reading about this world's lore and history and politics. It's fucking insane. You don't have to read about it at all if you don't want to, the games never explain any of these things in the story. The way you find out about them is by reading books within the game. I'm not talking about "using" a book and then pretending like your character read it, like what you would expect from a video game, I'm talking about Bethesda literally wrote books, and you can read them if you find them.



I spend a lot of time just hunting down books to place in my library in my house. There are history books, instruction manuals, books of the dark arts, and choose-your-own-adventures (really) and even smut. Smut. Here's the classic Lusty Argonian Maid. Argonians are the lizard people.

Act IV, Scene III, continued

Lifts-Her-Tail: Certainly not, kind sir! I am here but to clean your chambers.

Crantius Colto: Is that all you have come here for, little one? My chambers?

Lifts-Her-Tail: I have no idea what it is you imply, master. I am but a poor Argonian maid.

Crantius Colto: So you are, my dumpling. And a good one at that. Such strong legs and shapely tail.

Lifts-Her-Tail: You embarrass me, sir!

Crantius Colto: Fear not. You are safe here with me.

Lifts-Her-Tail: I must finish my cleaning, sir. The mistress will have my head if I do not!

Crantius Colto: Cleaning, eh? I have something for you. Here. Polish my spear.

Lifts-Her-Tail: But it is huge! It could take me all night!

Crantius Colto: Plenty of time, my sweet. Plenty of time.

END OF ACT IV, SCENE III

It's the little things like that that make the game. And the history is really interesting too. Going through the game, you'll see a lot of racial tension between the Nords and the Elves. If you never opened an in-game book, you'd never understand why. All humans in Tamriel are descended from the Nords of Skyrim. Led by Ysgramor, the humans originally landed in Skyrim from some vague continent way up north, fleeing a civil war. The Elves were already living in Tamriel. The Nords and the Elves initially lived peacefully, but the Elves got scared because they thought the Nords would eventually become too powerful. So they waged a war of extermination, and when they burned the last human city to the ground, only Ysgramor and his family survived to flee back to their continent. When they returned, the civil war was over and there was peace. So Ysgramor gathered up an army, sailed back, and conquered Skyrim.

And this history feels real. You can go and visit Ysgramor's tomb. You can hold Ysgramor's battleaxe. Unf.



And the great thing is, if this stuff seems boring or nerdy, you don't have to pay attention to any of it if you don't want to. You could just wander around killing people and be a dick and ignore the story entirely. And sometimes that's exactly what I do. And Skyrim makes it very easy to do such things, because you are Dovahkiin, Dragonborn. You wield the magic that dragons use -- shouts -- which don't use mana like typical magic, there's simply a 15-30 second cooldown. The first time I acquired Fus Ro Dah, this is what I spent an hour doing.



It's awesome when you get about five or six enemies right in front of you, and you just effortlessly send them all plummeting off a cliff. BEST.

The main plot of the game is that dragons are coming back. They went extinct centuries ago, and nobody knows why they've returned. As Dovahkiin, you sort of become their main target, since you are the only one capable of stopping them. Once you reach a certain point early on in the story, dragons will start attacking you in completely random places at completely random times. They could attack you when you're wandering on the road, or they could attack you when you're in a city. You're not safe anywhere. Okay, tired of reading? Wanna see some gameplay? Watch what happens out of fucking nowhere when this guy starts fucking with some giants and their mammoth herd. This is completely unscripted.



To help you truly grasp what this game is about, let me describe what happens every time I sit down to play it. Last night, I decided I needed to work on my blacksmith skill. To do that, I need ore to work with. So I went off to the mines. A few hours later, after I stopped playing for the night, I still had not reached those mines. I could've reached them fairly easily if I had just made a straight shot, but the world of Skyrim is so utterly massive, with so many things to do and find and explore, that I got sidetracked probably a dozen times on my stroll.

The first thing that stopped me was some ancient ruins I stumbled on. I decided to check them out. When I entered, a fucking ghost walked up to me and told me that some long dead warlord who's buried there is gathering power, and he's planning his return to conquer the world. So then I spend an hour or more traversing through these ruins gathering the ancient relics I need to stop this guy, before the final climactic battle to shut him up for good. This wasn't part of any quest. I was never told about these ruins. I wandered in just because I could. These random scripted events are spread everywhere throughout the game, and it's like a drug. You're constantly wondering what you're going to see next.



What stopped me next was a city which was fairly close to these mines I'm trying to get to. The first thing I see after wandering in? Some guy murdering a woman right in the middle of the street. I couldn't do anything to stop it, but I immediately ran up to the murderer and ran my sword through his back, which may or may not have been a good idea, I didn't know if I could've questioned him or what, but in the heat of the moment I felt I needed to kill him right then and there, and so that's what I did. Instead of going to the mines, I'm sidetracked for another hour or two trying to track down what the hell just happened. The city guard tried intimidating me to look the other way. When I refused to do so, they killed the man I was working with to solve this murder, framed me for it, and locked me up. They threw me into their mines to work slave labor for life (not necessarily the type of mining I had in mind when I set out from my home in Whiterun). And the thing is, this game gives you so much freedom, that you didn't even have to go quietly if you didn't want to. And I didn't at first. I must have killed at least five city guards before finally sheathing my sword and going peacefully. I just wanted to see what would happen if I did. I could've escaped the city if I wanted to, and I would've never been arrested.

On the inside, I ended up meeting the man responsible for the murder I saw on the street. He was a revolutionary leader fighting against the Nords, who was giving orders from prison. After getting all buddy-buddy and earning his trust, I shanked him in the back, and used the secret passage he meant for both of us to escape in.



The string-puller of this city greeted me at the exit, the man responsible for framing me. He had received word that the revolutionary was dead, thanked me for it, gave me a full pardon, and even gave me his family ring for the trouble. The moment he turned his back to walk away, I slit his fucking throat and ran like hell. I'll probably never return to that city again. Nobody crosses me and lives. Nobody.

See that? "Nobody crosses me and lives." This game is making me develop an entirely new personality for my character to use. This is typically called "role playing," and I usually make fun of gamers who do it. Here I am doing it, and I can't even control it. For example, one time I met a very old orc along the road. He told me that he doesn't want to pass away in a bed like a coward, and his only wish is to die with honor in battle. I agreed to fight him to the death. After I had done the deed, I felt so proud for him that I wanted to stop and bury him, and then I got pissed that the game doesn't allow me to dig holes. Then I felt a little weird for wanting to do this anyway, because it wouldn't affect the story in any way, and as soon as I walk away, the body would despawn and never be seen again. I felt a little better once I saw what the redditors did when they came across him. One guy said he took the body to an outdoor shrine nearby, laid him on it, and then put his weapon in his hands. Another guy said he dragged him into the river, and shot an arrow out at him to give him an old Nordic funeral. They felt just as weird about it as I did. What the fuck are you doing to us, Skyrim. This game does that to you. It immerses you inside of an entirely new world, and you feel like you're a part of it. Every time I stop playing Skyrim, I feel like Neo waking up from the Matrix, disappointed at how much this world sucks. Here's a short video from Bethesda describing just how much effort they put into creating this world.



Oh and did I mention you can get married? The game even lets you get teh gay married, if that's your thing, gender doesn't matter. There are dozens of people you can marry, and if you don't mind cheating, you can use the console to open up the marriage dialogue with literally any person in Skyrim. Me? I chose Aela the Huntress. She calls me "dear" and "love," and she also cooks me dinner. She also happens to be a werewolf. We went on our honeymoon crawling through an ice cavern underneath an lighthouse, killing giant bugs.



And I haven't even mentioned mods yet. The Elder Scrolls modding community is fucking insane, and it doesn't help that Bethesda releases all the tools the need, encouraging it all. The nude mod was out only three days after the game's release. Three. Days. But there are still a lot of cool mods out there worth downloading. There are ones that improve performance, others that improve textures and graphics. A couple days ago, a mod was released enabling you to kill children, who were previously invulnerable. I need to check that one out. In the last game, Oblivion, the modding community completely rebuilt the province of Morrowind in Oblivion's engine. They remade the entire fucking game. And you want to know what's even better? Skyrim players were messing around with noclipping, and discovered that south of Skyrim, the entire province of Cyrodiil is inside the game. And what's more, they even found the gate leading to it. It's locked. This screams expansion pack, which Bethesda says they're going to be doing instead of typical DLC. And if not, then the modding community will take care of it.





I don't really know how to end this. I could keep talking about this forever, and I sort of want to. I think this is the best game I've ever played. It's perfect. I guess I'll just end it with a bunch of screenshots I've taken. I don't even know why the fuck I wrote this, I'm going to go play Skyrim.