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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
PC (Steam)
Circling the Rim
3.5/5 stars
“Skyrim” is the much-anticipated follow-up in ‘The Elder Scrolls’ franchise to 2006’s “Oblivion,” a game that redefined freedom in Sandbox gameplay (despite constantly being misidentified as an RPG due to the presence of swords). Never having gotten sucked into the Sandboxing due to ‘Grand Theft Auto’s’ monopoly on the genre and its focus on present-day criminal behavior, I was floored by my exposure to “Oblivion.” Years later, I still haven’t experienced a game that allowed so much freedom and so lovingly re-created the experience of running around a county-sized Renaissance faire, despite a few dodgy mechanical choices and a whoooole lot of bugs. With “Skyrim” being ‘complete’ with its ‘Legendary Edition’ being fully patched and available with all DLC included, I figured it was time to dive back into the world of Tamriel and check out the improvements.
Presentation
Despite all the hype about the improvements Bethesda has made to their proprietary game/graphics engine, “Skyrim” doesn’t look or sound particularly impressive. Indeed, there is actually very little to differentiate “Skyrim” from its immediate predecessor, “Oblivion.” Yes, the character models have been slightly revamped to make the game’s inhabitants look a bit less hideous, but the changes aren’t drastic enough to make the Altmer (High Elves) and Dunmer (Dark Elves) look appealing. The non-human ‘furry’ races (Argonians and Khajiits) look a bit better, with more ‘hair’ options for Argonians (including horns and feathers) and amazing tufty cheek-beards on the Khajiits that make them look extra adorable and non-threatening (they remind me of my cat). Character animation isn’t particularly impressive either, with stiff, canned animations for pretty much everything. The addition of dragons to the game world has added even more opportunities for awkward animations, as the dragon’s don’t appear to actually ‘fly’ so much as they appear to levitate unnaturally through the air (and sometimes the ground!).
Environments look pretty similar to “Oblivion,” right down to the somewhat low-resolution and blurry textures applied to every surface. While the PC version of the game does include a free high-resolution texture pack as DLC, I didn’t feel that the extra 4.4GB of texture data made the game look all that much better. The change was noticeable, yes, but the ‘improved’ graphics with the HD texture pack is what I would have expected by default, considering the amount of time that has passed since “Oblivion” was released. My biggest gripe about the environmental design, however, is the fact that “Skyrim” seems to be 90% mountains. Without a climbing mechanic built into the system, navigating the game world is incredibly tedious due to the fact that there WILL be near-impassable mountains between the player and ANY given objective. While it’s possible to sort of glitchily ‘climb’ mountains by running into them and constantly mashing the jump button, this feels more like an exploit than a feature.
The audio in “Skyrim” is as unimpressive as ever for ‘The Elder Scrolls,’ with many of the same voice actors from the previous game returning to reprise their roles as generic townsfolk and bandits. Every member of each race sounds like every other member of their race, with several races sharing voices with other races. About the only ‘new and improved’ bit of voicework I noticed is that the Nord race (which is the dominant race in the titular nation of Skyrim) now has a goofy, overdone, fake Scandinavian accent, which is simultaneously awesome and facepalm-worthy. There are a few unique characters with stand-alone voicework by unique actors, which are actually well-done. However the quality of these few unique characters only serves to highlight the uniformity of the rest of the game’s inhabitants.
I’ve seen some people online praising the “Skyrim” soundtrack, but I can’t comprehend why. The music is usually a background afterthought outside of a handful of specific situations. I can’t say that any single musical track stood out as memorable, with the sole exception of the chanting sound made by Word Walls to let the player know there is an undiscovered one in the immediate vicinity.
With five years of development between the release of “Oblivion” and the release of “Skyrim” one might expect that Bethesda (a.k.a., Bug-thesda) might get it together and iron out some of the glitchiness in their production process. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all, and “Skyrim” is just as glitchy and bug-prone as its predecessor. These technical problems range from system freezes, crash-to-desktop instances (which would be more freezes on any other platform than PC), characters randomly duplicating themselves, characters randomly disappearing, items getting stuck in the player’s inventory, quests refusing to advance properly, non-hostile quest-related characters attacking the player, and a host of others. Most of these glitches are merely comical, but some of them can be game breaking. Fortunately, the PC version of the game provides easy access to the game’s Command Console, which – with a bit of Wiki research – allows a technically savvy player the ability to fix most bugs with some command-line work. But the fact that I needed to use the Command Console at all just illustrates the shoddy quality of the game. “Skyrim” is one of the biggest releases of the 7th Generation, and here we are three years after release with the ‘Legendary Edition,’ and it’s still a technical disaster. Bethesda either needs to perform more Beta testing on their software or reduce the scope of their ambition, as the fact that “Skyrim” is NOT noticeably less glitchy than “Oblivion” – even with all patches applied – only makes me want to avoid their products in the future.
Story
I was extremely critical of “Oblivion’s” main story quest, as it was extremely short, linear, and devoid of any unpredictable or interesting plot twists. “Skyrim,” thankfully doesn’t fall into this same trap.
Instead, the main story in “Skyrim” actually encompasses TWO different threads, both of which have a couple of different decision points along the way. One of the main threads revolves entirely around our player created character (PCC), who begins the game riding in a prisoner convoy on the way to an execution. It turns out that one of the prisoners in the PCC’s wagon is the infamous Ulfric Stormcloak, leader of the insurrection against Imperial control of the province of Skyrim. While the PCC’s name isn’t on any of the execution lists, the incompetent Imperial officers decide to execute the character anyway, but are interrupted by a dragon attack on their base. According to ‘Elder Scrolls’ mythology, dragons haven’t been sighted in the world of Tamriel for millennia, so both the Stormcloak prisoners and Imperial guards set aside their differences to save themselves from the fire-shouting monstrosity.
Once free in the world, the PCC is encouraged to report the dragon activity to some of the local governors – called Jarls – to see if anything can be done about it. The PCC is ALSO encouraged to pick a side in the civil war between the Stormcloaks and Imperials.
Before long, our PCC discovers that he/she has the ability to absorb the souls of slain dragons and use them to master Words of Power – called the Thu’um. This revelation sets the PCC onto a fairly generic ‘chosen one’ story path as they learn about their powers and what it means to be the person called ‘Dragonborn.’
Where “Skyrim” actually does a worse job in storytelling than “Oblivion” is in the sidequests. While the sidequests are still numerous, their quality has taken a dive. The reason behind this backslide is, naturally, the use of procedural generation. “Skyrim” includes a new procedural generation system for sidequests called ‘Radiant.’ Radiant quests are infinite in number, and mostly consist of ‘perform action A and location B, then return to the questgiver.’ The worst part of Radiant quests is that some of the meatier sidequest chains include a lot of Radiant nonsense within them, such as the requirement to complete approximately 16 Radiant quests for the Thieves’ Guild in order to return it to its former glory.
Of course, there are still a variety of more interesting sidequest chains, but most of them feel a bit rut-worn for anyone who has played an ‘Elder Scrolls’ game before. There’s a Thieves’ Guild chain, a Dark Brotherhood chain, and a Mage’s College chain. The Fighter’s Guild is gone, but has been replaced with a Companion’s chain and a (super short) Bard’s College chain. Yet, while it seems that there are actually more institutions for the PCC to get involved with than in “Oblivion,” the amount of time it takes to complete each institutions quest chain seems shorter.
Fortunately, the DLC add-ons provide more well-written and fleshed-out quest chains… well, at least two of them do. Out of the three DLC packages (all included in the ‘Legendary Edition’) – “Hearthfire,” “Dawnguard,” and “Dragonborn” – only two of them add meaningful content to the game. “Hearthfire” is pretty much a waste of time, as it only adds the ability to purchase plots of land in the few Holds of Skyrim that don’t include a purchasable house. The player can then build a barely-customizable house on each plot. Yay?
“Dawnguard” is probably the first DLC that most players will encounter… and indeed most players will want to finish it before even jumping into the main questlines, as it has two major features – one good, and one bad. The bad feature of “Dawnguard” is that, as a vampire-centric DLC, it adds random vampire attacks to every city in Skyrim. While this might seem cool and immersive at first, it soon becomes obvious that the only thing these random vampire attacks accomplish is the decimation of every city’s population… including important (but apparently not essential) characters like merchants. The good feature of “Dawnguard” is that it includes a unique NPC follower who is both incredibly useful and unkillable. “Dawnguard” also has a couple of major decision points, allowing players to feel like they are actually exerting their will upon the game instead of being railroaded into plot points.
“Dragonborn” is perhaps the most interesting DLC, as it takes place on a volcanic island off the coast of Skyrim that has some truly unique and fantastical ecology and creatures. The main quest in “Dragonborn” is significantly more linear than the other main quests in the game, but is interesting nonetheless, primarily due to the amount of ‘Elder Scrolls’ lore it reveals without resorting to the info-dumps or excessive book-reading typically required to learn about the world of Tamriel.
Unfortunately, despite the improved quality of the main quest chains in the base game and the DLC packs, none of these storylines really resolve themselves, and there is no real ‘ending’ or credit roll in “Skyrim.” Even more unfortunately, the shorter sidequest chains and overreliance on Radiant quests left me with very few interesting “Skyrim Stories” to tell my friends. Whereas I frequently ran into great narrative material that arose spontaneously in “Oblivion,” in “Skyrim” every story I regaled upon my friends involved glitchiness or stupidity (such as the time I won the civil war for the Imperials by confronting Ulfric Stormcloak in this throne room, paralyzed him, and got to listen to his haughty defiance speech while he lay in the fetal position with his face planted on the seat of his throne). In the end, despite “Skyrim” supposedly having much more content than “Oblivion,” I spent 100 hours less experiencing all of it… and I got tired of it 150 earlier than “Oblivion” to boot.
Gameplay
“Oblivion” had its fair share of poorly-designed gameplay mechanics. From universal level scaling to Major/Minor Skills, to item degredation, “Oblivion” had plenty of stuff that I wished would go away. Thankfully, “Skyrim” DOES make all of the terrible things I just named go away… but then replaces them with its own terrible things.
Leveling in “Skyrim” still works more-or-less the way it always has in ‘The Elder Scrolls.’ The character gains experience in a variety of skill areas by performing actions related to those skills, and gaining enough individual skill levels leads to a gain in overall character level, with a small boost to health, magic, or stamina. “Skyrim” simplifies the process, however, by keeping character stats completely invisible (leading the series even further from its RPG roots into the realm of pure Sandbox), and instead boosting these invisible stats based on the character’s levels in related skills. So having a higher One-Handed skill directly adds more damage to attacks with one-handed weapons, and having a higher Light Armor skill directly subtracts more damage from attacks while wearing light armor. Instead of distributable skill points, each level-up now adds a Perk point to the character, which can be spent to unlock a wide variety of bonuses and interesting features in the character’s individual skills. A Perk can be spent on any skill, not just the ones improved over the course of the level, and can even be stockpiled and spent later on. The only real restriction to Perks is that every one of them has a skill level requirement, thus preventing a player from leveling nothing but Stealth, then buying all the Perks in the Alchemy tree, for example.
Furthermore, “Skyrim” assigns level ranges to each of its areas and dungeons, allowing players to actually feel more powerful by re-visiting low-level areas at a higher level. The hard cap on level scaling also prevents medium-to-high-level characters from being destroyed by bears or trolls while simply exploring the wilderness (or trying to find a way around a friggin’ mountain).
Unlike every other Sandbox game I’ve played recently, “Skyrim” still manages to provide the player near-complete freedom in developing their character’s fighting style. Unfortunately, due to the hideously clunky melee combat ‘The Elder Scrolls’ have always been known for and unbalanced damage scaling on Destruction magic, Stealth and Archery are the only non-frustrating means of killing enemies… fortunately, I LOVE Stealth and Archery, so I was okay with the situation, while still recognizing the overwhelming shortcomings. Why can’t Bethesda improve melee combat? Why was magic intentionally nerfed? It’s frustrating that a game that is supposed to be about complete stylistic freedom has one ‘clearly the best’ option, while everything else is a slog.
While “Skyrim’s” simplifications and improvements to many of ‘The Elder Scrolls’’ core systems are a step in the right direction, these positives are completely negated the neutering of the Enchanting system and the extreme grinding added to the Smithing system. While “Oblivion” simply added spell ‘concepts’ to a character’s repertoire and allowed free use of these concepts to craft unique spells for casting and unique enchantments upon gear, “Skyrim” separates the two, requiring the player to learn spells from books and learn enchantments by destroying a magic item that bears a similar enchantment. Magic is locked-down and completely devoid of custom spells, forcing the player to simply buy increasingly-powerful versions of stock spells as the character’s skill in each school of magic increases. The number of spell concepts is drastically reduced in “Skyrim” compared to “Oblivion,” and there are a huge number of really nifty enchantments on unique weapons and armor that CANNOT be added to a character’s repertoire by any means.
The Magic and Enchantment crafting systems ended up being my favorite part of “Oblivion,” but they feel incredibly weak and watered-down in “Skyrim.” The fact that leveling the Enchantment skill allows for slightly more powerful enchantments also leads to the tedium of constantly re-crafting the character’s entire wardrobe to squeeze an extra point or percent out of the enchantments. Of course, these skills level quite slowly, which typically mandates occasional crafting ‘binges’ of using up a bunch of raw materials to craft crappy daggers, Smithing the daggers to their maximum available quality, then enchanting them with a crappy soul gem just for practice… then trying to sell dozens of crappy magical daggers for 1500 gold each to merchants who typically don’t have more than 1100 gold.
Overall
“Skyrim” is a rather unambitious sequel in one of the most ambitious Sandbox franchises in all of gaming. While the main storyline is dramatically improved and many of the franchise’s gameplay annoyances have been removed, these improvements come at the expense of other aspects of the game, resulting not in a net improvement, but in stagnation or even a small loss. Anyone who needs an ‘Elder Scrolls’ fix can easily get one from “Skyrim,” provided the Magic and Enchanting systems weren’t their favorite part of previous games, and provided that procedurally generated fetch-quests don’t bother them too much. It’s just disappointing that 5 years of development and three years of patches couldn’t provide a truly ‘wow’ experience.
Presentation: 3/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
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