The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim is a single player role playing game (RPG), the newest part of The Elder Scrolls series.
(For the details on the HD content update, take a look here)
Intro
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has won ‘the game of the year’ award and over 10 million copies of the game have been shipped (dec 15).
The previous part, The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion, was the first TES series game I’ve played. Oblivion was also an open sandbox game with an epic campaign storyline, plenty of side-quests to do, dungeons and places to explore, a life-like virtual world with (at least somewhat) functional NPCs and wildlife. Of course, expectations towards this newest member of the TES family were very high. Some people did criticize Oblivion for bugs when it came to slow turning horses, heavily and clumsy grass detailing, non-realistic water surface… Still, one major issue was in the game itself, the code, and the engine. No matter what hardware you had, the game just didn’t seem to work 100% smooth. With good details and lots of action going on, in instances, and inside towns with lot of NPCs around frame rates would drop massively. This review is based on (currently) 75 hours of game play (according to Steam).
Compared to Oblivion
I have played TES IV – Oblivion before TES V – Skyrim came out. This puts me in the position to compare the new version with the previous one. When you play games from same series, you tend to notice things in the game that they didn’t have in the previous version. At the same time you will notice things they don’t have in the current version (or changed) that worked better in the previous. There are a couple of new things in Skyrim compared to Oblivion. You can now fish while you’re swimming. Or rather its more like you’re swimming peacefully in the sea, then you go like: “Oooh, a salmon!”. During a walk you can capture bees, flies and bugs. They can then be used as ingredients in alchemy. Of course you can also harvest mushrooms, plants, and vegetables for alchemy purposes, but also, for the new feature: cooking. That’s right, you can make foods in the new TES. In Oblivion with alchemy you could only make potions. In Skyrim you have the new crafts: cooking, armor smithing and weapon smithing.
It is now possible to grab and drag bodies. I thought that feature was rather handy and actually used it a couple of times. Once I used a body weight to keep a pressure plate active. And once there was a situation that bandit what I killed did die/fly over the switch I needed to pull to open a door. Now, if I tried that, it did offer as action only to loot the body. That wont help much. Luckily, now I could grab body from it`s leg and pull it aside from the switch and continue my dungeon exploration.
Lets return to the discussion about water. The new water graphic looks better than in Oblivion. There were many water mods for Oblivion, I’m quite sure there will be some for Skyrim too. But for now, the water looks good. Of course, so does the general graphics which are simply stunning. Water has an another realistic effect in Skyrim. Water currents in the streams actually effects your swimming and might push the careless adventurer down the waterfall.
The trap system in dungeons and in caves is slightly updated and some of the old traps are a lot more complicated and deadlier now. There are trapdoors in the ground, pressure plates that will trigger spikes being shot at your head, or drop stones on you. When you open a treasure chest, there’s a cord attached to the box that will trigger a dart trap. Or when you try to solve a puzzle to open a door into a dungeon, the wrong guess might get you barbecued in a flame trap. So you gotta keep your eyes open while exploring.
Now there be Dragons
There’s different types of mobs and dungeons now. One of the biggest new things about the mobs is: now there be dragons. The dragons are causing problems all over the Skyrim province. The player’s character whom you control, is known as the Dragonborn and you find out you are the one who must end the dragon invasion. And that is the key element of the main plot.
When it comes to Character building and customizing, in Oblivion you first selected your race, then you customized your character to make it to your liking. You picked up your three main skills that would level faster then your other skills. In Skyrim, you go straight into a sort of cutscene. In the middle of that cutscene you will customize your character, then the cutscene will continue and the game begins.
While in game, you can find and pick up buffs and blessings by touching the guardian stones. There are thief, warrior and mage stones. Only one buff can be on at a time and it would be useful to pick right one to fit your character and playstyle. While one might help your sneak-skills, another might effect your magic.
When you level up you go into the menu and you put 10 points per level into ether mana, stamina or health. At the same time you will get 1 perk point per level to spend. Those perks can be used to build your own skill trees and to actually customize your toon. In Oblivion you leveled your skills by reading books and by using items or the skills in battle, it’s been modified slightly now. The same system is in Skyrim, but when you reach certain levels, perk points allow you to unlock skills. This type of perk system was introduced in Skyrim. For example, if you like light armor more than heavy armor, you would want to place points into the skill trees that benefit you the most. There really is a wide range of skills, skill trees and perks. There are ones for archery, lock picking, pickpocketing, blocking, sneaking and so on. You can read more about this from http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Perks
So, in short, skills level by using them or by buying lessons from NPCs or by reading skill books you found on your way into what ever adventure it might be. And when you level your skills enough, you will level your character and get those 10 points into health for instance and 1 perk point to raise and build your skills.
Sound
First I have to give a big plus to main title and ~menu theme of Skyrim. It was the something in the trailer that made me really want to get the game. And sometimes I just keep menu open to listen the track. Also, when the main track epically jumps to background instead of the normal ambient sound (which is also nice) in dragon fights, it really prepares you for battle… if your ready for it or not.
Other musics in the game are nice and serve their purpose. They change according your place, be it a town, the woods or if you enter battle. Sounds are nicely done too. You would for example hear a click next to you and then you realize it was an arrow that went just past your head, so you might want to take cover. Or when a giant is heading towards you, you can hear his footsteps near you and it will make the earth tremble. Or when your climbing a mountain, and suddenly you hear a dragon scream. You look up and think: “Mommey!”, or if you are a real Dragonborn you will say “Fus ro dah! You lil’ lizard”…
Other than that, wind howls in the icy caverns, water falling down from the ceiling as drops, or giant spiders lurking in the ceiling above you and making nasty sounds… Oops… sorry for little eight legged spoiler there. :P They all make you hear the world around you, to make you feel like you are there.
Graphics
Simply put: awesome. I had to buy a new graphic card and a new monitor to see more of the awesomeness. The object draw distance is nice and decent. The game can easily make older computers cough and puke out there bits and bytes. Still, one thing I like is that you can run the game at a decent frame rate even with a bit older rig. Just a matter of balancing with levels of details and draw distances. Required specs are at the end of this review if you wonder is your gaming rig is good enough.
One little nice new detail is moving clouds. Of course time of the day changes like before, the two moons move at the night sky, the sun raises and sets, there are lots of stars and you can see northern lights in the sky. Around the mountains you often have fog hanging around them. There are a lot of everyday real life events, this is what makes game feel more realistic and more interesting and just plain: more alive.
Gameplay
Quests
There are a lot of quests in this game. Some are main quests that lead the campaign forward, some are side quests. While main quest moves story forward, side quests can still be very rewarding. You can make friends from NPCs like that, get money, items, skills and so as a reward of well done job.
The method to gain quests varies from getting them from NPCs, reading a book you found from bookshelf, finding note from fallen enemy´s pocket, reading a letter you found from a table while trespassing… You just need to keep your eyes and ears open.
When it comes to the part with the Dark brotherhood (Assassin guild) storyline and quests, I think it was way too short compared to Oblivion. Maybe just a feeling, but it felt like it.
Other than that, I have been just enjoying of side quests and normal fooling around and cave/dungeon raids with my sneaky wood elf archer. I haven’t much played campaign so cannot say too much of it yet. So far, I have played 75 hours of Skyrim according the Steam.
Handling
Movement, attacking, interacting and those in this game are fast and easy to learn, even if you haven’t played previous parts or even haven’t played much of first person RPGs. You can change your point of view from your toons eyes to third person view, behind your back. I, myself, prefer first person for the feeling of being there… but also because I feel it’s much easier to shoot arrows and aim shouts and spells from.
Layout of the land
This might be the ultimate sandbox game, if you see a valley, you walk to it. If you see a mountain, go climb it. There are some caves that are a bit disappointingly small aka just one main room/cavern. But at the same, there are multiple level structures, like hidden temples that have 3 sub areas in one. That might take easily one hour just to look around and loot chests and kill mobs here and there.
Pros
The world is lifelike, NPCs don`t stand in one spot the whole day. They have actual rhythms with work, sleep, go buy stuff, eat etc. Guards walk their patrol route, salespersons open their markets at morning, hunters go to hunt outside village. Just to name a few. Of course, it`s same as it was in Oblivion. Some parts in this routine are random though. They will run into each other and have a funny conversation. Again, same as in Oblivion you might say.
In short: you can do what ever you want, follow main quest, side quests or go around and explore.
Other things you might find: two factions randomly crossing each other’s path, attacking, taking heavy losses and then other party continues their way. If you want, you can intervene… or do sneaky choice and let them fight each other and afterwards go loot what you can find from the ground. It really is your own choice. Just follow the world around you, that alone can be entertaining and I do like that.
Another choice, what you could do, is if you run into too strong opponent, by luck you might lure it near friendly forces or neutral forces and they might come for your aid. Or, if not literally as your aid, at least to kill common enemy. And still you feel they came for your aid.
Cons
*Sigh* Menus and user interface are by first made for consoles. That means a lots of scrolling and moving around with mouse and/or keys. It’s just that same settings and interfaces don’t work fluently on both consoles and on PC. When you press tab, a 4-way menu opens. At first it took a lot of time to learn to navigate through this system. Mainly because ‘Esc’ doesn’t take you out of this menu, but you have to hit tab again to close it.
Other slightly annoying thing is the inventory shortening system. When it’s sorted and made into categories like weapons, apparel etc, I just don’t find it to my liking. If you try to find one special item and use the option “all items”, it gives a huge alphabetically ordered list of all your inventory. That just takes way too much of time to go through sometimes.
And from huge inventory we come to other issue. NPC gold issue. When you sell your junk to NPCs they can run out of money. They only carry 500-700, maybe 1000+ gold if you are lucky. Every type of NPC will only buy its own stuff (i.e. a blacksmith only weapons, tavern keeper only food and potions). There are exceptions, the used wares salesperson, for example, who can buy anything. But still, you would have to run between towns and villages, from one NPC to another to sell everything you have in your inventory if, like me, you prefer long wildlife walks and cave explorations before you return to civilization.
Then there is the navigation system. I do like the system that you see in your compass, on your mini-map, and also in your HUD. There is a quest activated marker indicating where to go or what door to open, for example. The old map system looked better in my opinion. It was a hand drawn map that really felt period accurate. Now you have an almost satellite perfect 3D map, it is great looking and all, don’t get me wrong, but it just feels off.
Map in Skyrim
Map in Oblivian
Steam (only) feature
In this version of the elder scrolls you have achievements through steam. This, in itself, is nothing more than bragging rights, but still fun to top your (steam) friends. Because it uses Steam you also have the Steam friends and IM system where people can see when you’re playing Skyrim. In a couple of cases people PMed me to ask if the game would run on their PC or if it was worth it to buy. It’s up to you if you want to be PMed while in game. Steam Friends option can be turned off of course. Steam keeps Skyrim updated automatically, but on the other hand, so does almost any other game launcher when you hit play game, so nothing so special in it.
Bugs
In a couple of cases an enemy that I had killed fell through the cavern floor – once so I couldn’t loot it, it simply vanished. Couple of times the corpse “flew” through the wall behind it… but bounced back to in front of me so looting was possible. Sometimes funny, sometimes annoying little things. Graphical glitches, like the picture above, tend to be in every game and normally they don’t bother me too much, unless it’s really bad, often and everywhere. I have found few of them so far like that one group of trees floating in the air. Another example, there are a few areas you can see through – under the rocks and stones where textures are missing. Or stones sorta tend to levitate in the air. Anyways, game just looks great and few bugs here and there don’t matter.
At least once or twice I’ve managed to get stuck in the game and I don’t mean because of a too hard puzzle, but physically stuck. It was in little gap between stairway and wall, but after a while with jumping and squirming managed to get unstuck. So was no need to go find previous save. So far haven’t found as bad bug as there was in Oblivion. I got stuck in a basement on one quest and game didn’t allow me to interact with hatch to get out. I was literally stuck in there. Because of what the quest needed, I couldn’t use previous save to load it. Luckily, a console command tip from a friend to finish active quest at that time saved me from great trouble. Thank you Sire, very much appreciated.
Tips
You can buy the game in the store, or through Steam. Keep in mind: you need to activate it through Steam regardless.
One bug that happened to some people is that Steam, instead of installing the game from DVD, it went ahead and downloaded the game from the Internet.
Also because of Steam it installs Skyrim to your default Steam folder. If you would like to install it to different location you could try (at your own risk!) a program called Steammover. With it you can move one or more games to other location from your Steam folder. Handy tool, I used it to move Skyrim from HDD to SSD.
Conclusion
In conclusion the game is better then the previous part on almost all fronts. The graphics, sounds and skill systems are better. The only 2 things that are worse are the map system and the menus. Some of the quests are a bit short, however there are more than enough side quests to keep you busy for at least 75 hours (and counting).
Game information
Minimum Specs
- Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
- Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
- 2GB System RAM
- 6GB free HDD Space
- Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
- DirectX compatible sound card
- Internet access for Steam activation
Recommended Specs
- Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
- Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
- 4GB System RAM
- 6GB free HDD space
- DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with 1GB of RAM (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or higher (i.e GTX550Ti); ATI Radeon 4890 or higher).
- DirectX compatible sound card
- Internet access for Steam activation
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Publisher Bethesda Softworks
Distributors Bethesda Softworks (retail) / Steam (online)
Engine Creation Engine
Platforms PC (reviewed) / PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360
Release date: November 11, 2011
Genres: Action role-playing Open world
Modes: Single-player (first-person and third-person view)
Ratings: ACB: MA15+/ BBFC: 15 / ESRB: M / OFLC: R13 / PEGI: 18 / USK: 16