Skyrim

Well I've played an undisclosed but inordinate amount of hours playing, it's probably time I actually sit back and review this puppy. And by puppy I mean massive RPG. Practically the same thing right?

Before I proceed to heap inordinate amounts of praise on this game (because yes, like the rest of the world I really liked it), let's get some history out of the way. Back in the dinosaur years around 1996 a little game called Daggerfall came out, also known as Elder Scrolls 2. Knowing almost nothing about games besides whatever my friends were playing (and a couple Star Wars games like Dark Forces that I had), Daggerfall caught my eye from the bargain bin and I decided I was going to try to expand my gaming horizon. And boy did it expand. I mean, by swishing your mouse in a certain direction, your sword swung in that direction. It was the greatest gaming innovation I had ever experienced. Sure the whole fantasy world and hard to decipher story was interesting and all, but come on. It was basically the predecessor to the Wii.

But as with all games Daggerfall eventually fell from the list of games I played and was practically forgotten when I finally got around to playing Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. But Morrowind was not so quick to fade. Oh no. Despite the fact that the entire game was basically swamps and a mountain, I played the crap out of it. I loved every bit. The story, the locations, the immersiveness of it. Especially the Bloodmoon expansion, which provided a nice change of scenery along with a very early glimpse of what Skyrim would be like. Sure it had its issues, but it was still one hell of a game.

So anticipations were high for Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. And don't get me wrong, I still logged countless hours on it, but I enjoyed Morrowind more. To me, Oblivion got rid of a lot of the great things from Morrowind and didn't add enough improvements to make up for it. By all accounts it was a more well designed game, but the main story especially left me wanting as it focused more on helping someone else save the world than it was about you. I will also never really get over the zooming in on those godawful facial textures during dialogue.

Now Skyrim comes along, and starts promising to fix every problem with the past games. Better, more varied combat. Hand-crafted dungeons instead of the repetitive randomly generated caves. A better game engine with prettier graphics and fewer bugs. A new and improved leveling system with perks. And DRAGONS, which have been clamored for from the beginning. It promised us the most immersive RPG to date. Did it deliver?

It's fair to say that you all know by now it lived up to those expectations and more. I easily throw my hat in with the crowd that calls Skyrim one of the, if not the, best games ever made. So why should you keep paying attention? Because I still have some major gripes with this game that don't just boil down to "OMG IT'S SO BUGGY" as everybody else who gives the game a negative review seems to say. First off, maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones, but for me Skyrim plays like a dream. Sure there are some menu issues and the occasional follower glitch, but for the most part I have no issues with bugs. Instead, what I have issues with are what people should be having issues with, and that's the actual gameplay.

For those who are still unfamiliar with what Skyrim is all about, you are placed in the shoes of the last Dragonborn, an individual blessed by the gods that has the power to use the language of dragons (in the form of "shouts") and can absorb the souls of dragons to gain their power and make sure they can't be resurrected. However, you only discover this after waking up riding in the back of a carriage, arrested and on the way to execution after having been found near the border with a group of rebels and their leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, and being saved from execution by the timely intervention of a giant dragon out of legend burning down the town. After hunting down that dragon and getting some vengeance, you absorb its soul and learn that you are the Dovahkin/Dragonborn. From there, you're basically free to roam about the world, or continue to discover where the dragons have come from, and why you've been sent to stop them. You can also take sides in the civil war between the Imperials who are trying to maintain their hold on Skyrim, and the Stormcloaks who are trying to reclaim their homeland.

There are of course many other quests and things to do in Skyrim, like joining any or all of the 4 guilds: The Companions (Fighter's Guild), the College of Winterhold (Mages Guild), the Thieves Guild, or the infamous Dark Brotherhood (assassins). You can also aim to become Thane of the major cities, a mostly honorary title that simply involves helping out the townsfolk and owning a home. And then there are the literally infinite number of miscellaneous and radiant quests you can pick up, which are usually more simple quests (kill a bandit leader, slay a dragon, etc.) that lead you to areas of the map you might not have explored yet. It's a big game, with no shortage of things to find or do, just like its predecessors (though even more so as you can get endless amounts of quests).

There are, however, many things which make Skyrim much different from its predecessors. The first is combat. This time around you can dual-wield weapons, spells, or both for a giant variety in how to approach each encounter. It rewards experimentation, but also allows for you to face any fight in the way that simply feels right to you. Enjoy just rushing in and hitting everything that moves? Two handed weapons. Prefer more strategic fights? Switch up between holding a shield and sword and maybe toss some spells. It's a very fluid system (with fun Fallout 3 style finishing moves thrown in) that provides a great deal of versatility and replayability.

The second, and my vastly favorite improvement, is the leveling system. In the previous titles the idea behind leveling was that you would get better at the skills you used, and those in turn would help you level your basic stats like Strength, Dexterity, etc. However, it really failed in practice simply because the way the math worked you had to be really careful which skills you increased during each level if you wanted to maximize your results. This was especially disastrous in Oblivion as the enemies leveled with you, so if you weren't managing your leveling well, suddenly you were facing normal bandits wearing glass armor and weren't really prepared for that. In Skyrim, however, they simply did away with attributes altogether. And the amazing thing is, by throwing away what has been such a staple of most RPGs for years and years, it actually accomplished what the series has been trying to accomplish all these years. You get better at the skills you use, you can use perks to add bonuses to those skills, and it's all amazingly intuitive and easy to manage. You stop worrying about what you're doing and just play how you want to play, and you're rewarded for playing that way.

However, there are definitely some changes I'm not happy about. Spellcrafting is gone. I understand it broke a good deal of the previous games (especially the well loved levitation spell in Morrowind), but not being able to make my flamethrower hands more powerful except with perks is a little frustrating. Skyrim is a game that begs you to experiment with it, and so to not provide it with the spells makes me sad. Another change seems to be a drastic reduction in enemy types. Going by the wikis, there are about 30 different types in Skyrim while there are 46 in Oblivion and 49 in Morrowind. Most of the time in Skyrim you will either be battling a wolf, a bear, a bandit/vampire, or a draugr (undead). Less often but still frequent are spiders, trolls, and dragons. It just felt really repetitive. In a game where you're expecting people to log hundreds of hours of time in a game world, you'd think you'd want a greater variety of enemies, not drastically fewer. You would also want more region-specific enemies than "snow" and "not snow". There are like 9 different climates in this game. More than the flowers should change.

Another enemy gripe I have is actually one of the selling points of the game: dragons. They were made out to be these epic battles between man and beast where each dragon reacted differently to the location and situation. In reality, each dragon fight plays out exactly the same. It spams you with either fire or ice breath from the sky, then when you hurt it enough with ranged attacks or when it lands you run up and hack away at it until it falls. Sure, the first time you do it it feels pretty epic, having to run around and try to lure the dragon to the ground, escape its breath, and dodge its bites and tail swipes at you. But that's the first time. Second time, still feels pretty epic, but it plays out the same way. By the third time, I was looking for something different to happen. By the fourth, I was a little bored. And from the fifth onward the only reason I would fight a dragon would be if I had to either from a quest or from it randomly attacking. It became a chore instead of an epic experience, and fighting a dragon should never seem like a chore. There are, I think, two reasons it devolved. One, each dragon fights the same. You'll come across several different types and levels of dragons, some more challenging than the others, but each one goes through the same exact pattern. Two, there are simply too many, which ties into the shouting system.

I love the shouts. I think they're a lot of fun. Each one is essentially a power that lets you do things like breathe fire, or slow time, or disarm foes, and each shout has three words of power associated with it which can be discovered through various "word walls" scattered around the map. There are 20 shouts in all, some of which are simply given to you through the main quest, but for all the others once you learn the word from the word wall you need to spend a dragon soul (collected by beating a dragon) to actually use it. So say that you learn 4 shouts from the story that you don't need to spend souls on (I think it's 4...), that leaves you with 48 dragons you need to kill to fully level up your shouts. Even if I'm remembering incorrectly and give some allowance, you have to kill at least 40 dragons. Even if you don't care about leveling up your shouts, the point is they had that in mind when designing how many dragons to put in the game, so you'll be seeing a fair share whether you want to or not. So if you're hopping into Skyrim for the dragons, be forewarned, they're really not as cool as they should be simply because it seems like they're treated as just another type of creature inhabiting these lands and not the epic mini-boss battles they were made out to be. In fact, by treating all dragons the same, even the final boss (a dragon) comes across as just another dragon battle where you just hack away until it dies.

The main stories in general suffered a bit in this game. While the dragon storyline has some interesting history and twists in it, the final battle kind of ruins it all (though the awesome scene after helps). And as for the civil war, forget any interesting politics or policies, you choose a side, capture a couple forts for that side by defeating a certain number of random troops that continually spawn until you win, and then capture the opponent's main city in the same way and force them to surrender. Add to that that both sides are basically assholes with little reason to choose their side but plenty of reason to fight against them and you get a storyline with little to no investment in the outcome, especially because the big determinant of the war (how Skyrim will fare against the elven Aldmeri Dominion) won't be addressed until some future point (one would assume in DLC). It basically boils down to "Hooray we won!" and no answer to the question of "Now what?"

"But Zach," you may be thinking, "if you hated the main storylines and the dragons, which is what the game is essentially sold on, how can you still call it one of the best games ever made?" The answer is simple. In Skyrim, it's all in the details.

The laurels of this game essentially rest on all the extra stuff around. What about all those handcrafted dungeons? Well...most of them unfortunately still look pretty similar to each other. The good news, however, is that the ones they decided would matter to the story or other big quests (read: the ones they paid attention to and didn't just crap out in 5 minutes) are AMAZING and tons of fun to explore. How about radiant questing? Wish there was more variety than "Kill bandit leader/dragon/giant at [insert location here]" but it does its job to facilitate you exploring new regions and finding new and interesting things. And as for all those new and interesting things scattered throughout the world? Main reason for playing this game. They obviously spent the greatest amount of their time simply fleshing out the world environment and adding all sorts of hidden treasures around. I spent probably around 100 hours with my first character and I still didn't discover every location. Mind you I didn't specifically try to, but there was so much else to occupy my time I didn't have to either. Despite the fact that Skyrim is technically smaller in landmass than Oblivion, it feels much much larger because more care went into crafting it.

I know this is a long review, with a lot to take in, and there's still a great deal I didn't cover, so I'll try to sum up here:

The Good:
-The world is very well crafted, as are the dungeons they actually spent time on.
-Tons of new things to discover/explore
-It all just looks so...damn...pretty
-Combat is versatile, with no wrong way to play
-The guild quests (especially the Dark Brotherhood) are tons of fun
-The leveling system is the best and most accessible it has ever been.
-100 hours will fly by and you'll still have more to do
-Despite the fact that there isn't any spellcrafting, spells are still a ton of fun to play with. I literally giggled with delight when I got a spell that summoned an exploding dog made of fire.

The meh:
-Radiant questing is repetitive but serves the goal of getting you to explore
-Fast travel is useful to have, but gets too easy to just skip to your goal and focus on the arrow on your compass instead of the world around you
-Enchanting, smithing and alchemy. Just kind of blah. Wish there were more interesting effects.
-Perks. Sure they make you better, but there's nothing that interesting to them besides one where you can behead people with a power attack. Wish they had included some perks for fun like in Fallout.
-The dragon storyline. There are some fun twists and turns and interesting history behind it, but the final battle being the same as all your other dragon battles kind of ruins it.
-Shouts. There are too many to know what to do with (especially as using one requires a recharge time before you can use another), but most of them are really fun to use.
-The Guardian Stones scattered around the map provide some neat abilities that can vary up how you play, but some are obviously much better than the others and you'll probably find yourself sticking to only one or two.

The bad:
-The civil war storyline. Boring from both sides (haven't finished the Imperial side yet, but for the most part it has been the exact same as the Stormcloaks side), especially because each side only has one good reason to fight for them but plenty of reasons to fight against them.
-Followers. Useful as mules, but their highly repetitive dialogue, tendency to step in front of your sword swing, and inability to follow you over an edge can make them major annoyances.
-Dragons. Epic the first time, boring the rest since they all fight exactly the same way and you will encounter a lot of them. They become annoyances and chores to fight instead of epic enemies.
-Fights in general can get pretty repetitive and boring as there are much fewer enemy types this time around.
-No spellcrafting. Grr.
-Every potion weighs .5, instead of the scaled weights they've had previously where the weight depended on the ingredients used to make it. This makes carrying a wide variety of potions as I like to do much more unfeasible.

Overall this may sound like a fairly negative review, which honestly I kind of wanted to slant it towards as it's all to easy to come from playing this game and simply say "OH MY GOD IT'S JUST SO AWESOME." To me, without a doubt it is the best Elder Scrolls game, and one of the best games ever made. That doesn't mean it doesn't still have its problems, but to be honest, a good deal of the problems I have will probably be adjusted or fixed with mods once the Creation Kit is released. Oh, and this is all not to mention the fact that it appears the entire continent of Tamriel has been built into this game, which means the modders (if not Bethesda themselves) can start incorporating both Oblivion and Morrowind into this game, as well as all the other countries that haven't yet been explored. Which means this game will never end. And frankly, I'm okay with that. If they would've tried the same thing with Oblivion, I don't know if I would've been as happy simply because to me Skyrim fixes the one thing I've always had trouble with, and that is the leveling system. So who knows, maybe we'll finally get what Elder Scrolls fans have always dreamed of...an entire continent to roam.

Until then, I'm more than happy to stay in Skyrim and explore every last nook and cranny.

Skyrim gets a 10/10.