Skyrim Review: Dragonborn or Dragonyawn?
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What is there left to say when every bandit, troll and dragon has felt the power of FUS RO DAH!?
It probably won’t have escaped you that it’s now early January, almost a good 2 months since the release of Bethesda’s 5th title in the Elder Scrolls series: Skyrim. While this means that the game has probably faded from the minds of many readers, it has allowed me to take a detailed look at Skyrim after no less than 127 hours of play.
While this is nowhere near enough time to explore every nook and cranny of this mindblowingly beautiful open world, it’s been enough for a decent delve. I’ve finished the main questline, become master of every guild, amassed gold beyond counting and slain almost every type of foe with sword, arrow and spell.
… and there’s still a shitload of quests left in my journal.
So let’s dive in and drink deep of the title that has graced the “Game of the Year” lists of many a publication.
FUS RO DAH! (The Good Stuff)
Unshackled Adventuring: First and foremost, Skyrim’s strength is its ability to deliver an adventure on a genuinely epic scale.
As mentioned, you can happily plough tens, if not hundreds of hours into this game and still not think twice about doing it all again from scratch. Why? Because Skyrim truly does let you play the game your way, not just in terms of how you butcher beasts of legend, but also in your moral choices, allegiances and a whole host of other personality traits that bring your character to life.
With an open world of such magnitude, exploring is a joy all of its own, a rare boast in a games industry that too often handcuffs players and boots them inexorably down a series of corridors until the final boss looms large. In Skyrim, the final boss is only the beginning of the tale, if you choose it to be.
A packed yet relatively well paced main questline will satisfy many RPGers who want to battle the scourge of Skyrim’s returning dragons, but it is simply dwarfed by the vast amount of side quests, discoverable locations and other activates that make up the rest of the game’s content.
The grand scale is helped immeasurably by the fact that the player is left completely unshackled and is left to simply enjoy it to the fullest. No time limits, no nagging from NPCs (“Hey, when are you going to get round to killing that world-eating dragon? – “When I goddamn feel like it!”) just you and a vast landscape to carve your name into.
Lands of Breathtaking Beauty: Perhaps Skyrim wouldn’t by such an unrestrained joy to wander around if it wasn’t the most stunning open world environment I’ve ever seen in gaming. Not only is there great variety in the various types of adventuring areas but each one is lovingly and spectacularly brought to life.
Weather effects are immaculately pulled off, from drizzle in damp forests to howling gales on shattered mountaintops. Equally impressive is the shadowing which actually corresponds to whatever the time is in the game’s daily cycle.
Indoor environments are no slouch either, with dingy dungeons putting the shadow effects to excellent use to create real tension as you cautiously creep through the gloom.
In short, Skyrim is stunning to look at, a vast improvement on the previous Elder Scrolls game: Oblivion and even on the much more recent Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas.
Even looking up at the night sky is enough to make your jaw drop, especially if the “Northern Lights” Aurora effect can be seen. This makes the untold hours of open world exploring not just a journey to be endured but something to actively be enjoyed.
Non-limiting Levelling System: Fans of Oblivion will be used to the levelling system of Skyrim that incrementally boasts a range of skills as you actively practice them. If you want to be skilled at wielding axes, then simply equip a pair and start swinging them around, then watch your “One –Handed” skill rise accordingly. Similarly, if you throw fireballs as your weapon of choice, then your “Destruction” spells skill will steadily improve.
The difference in Skyrim is that as you level up, you gain access to a glittering array of perks that complement each skill. In effect, this means that you can still become extremely competent in every available skill, but you can only truly master a handful of them.
This also means that it’s extremely easy to blend your skills and perks to create exactly the kind of character you want to play as. From straightforward fighters to stealthy mage-assassins who indulge in a spot of alchemy, it’s all possible! The levelling system is as open and unrestrained as the gaming environment itself, letting you experiment with exciting new skills without worrying that you’ve made a terribly ineffective character.
FUS RO BLAH! (The Bad Stuff)
Lifeless Characters: Although the main questline is exciting and does a good job of drawing you ever deeper into a series of climactic events, Skyrim is actually very short on memorable characters. I genuinely struggle to remember the names of even the big players as their lines of delivered dialogue don’t do much to make a lasting impression.
Nobody seems all that interested in convincing you of their motivation for acting as they do. Skyrim’s characters tend to be there simply to drive the events of the plot, without embedding themselves into the fabric of the story.
Ultimately, people in the story are simply there to let you exhaust a few lines of stilted dialogue before they tell you where you’re about to ship out to next. Towards the end, I couldn’t finish these awkward little scenes quickly enough, as I was keen to be back out on the open trail, exterminating dragons with extreme prejudice.
This goes doubly so for the mostly charmless companions that you can acquire. They add almost nothing to the story and I took to calling Lydia “Saddlebags” as she was purely there to carry my dragon bones and other heavy shit. Chivalry is dead in Skyrim, it seems!
Copy Paste, Copy Paste: For such a huge and diverse world, there are a lot of recycled ideas in Skyrim. If you adventure long enough, you’ll notice an unsettling sense of déjà vu settling in.
It seems that almost every puzzle revolves around spinning stones with animal depictions so that they line up correctly. I must have accumulated every color of dragon claw under the sun to be used in opening the same kind of circular door all over Skyrim.
As well as the puzzles, there’s very little diversity in the traps. Pressure plates and tripwires are the order of the day and they’re highly unlikely to give you any trouble. Either they’re placed where it’s laughably easy to see them, or they do so little damage that you may as well run straight through them.
Even the NPC dialogue isn’t free of the copy-paste phenomenon, giving rise to perhaps Skyrim’s most famous internet meme yet: “Then I took an arrow to the knee.”
While Skyrim’s copy-pasting is far less severe than its predecessor, Oblivion, it’s still noticeable and it takes just a little of the gloss off a superbly well-crafted game.
User Interface Nightmares: This is a small gripe, but an important one. You accumulate stuff in Skyrim with the speed and rapacity of a kleptomaniac left to their own devices in giant yard sale. Before you know it, you’ll be carrying several hundred pounds of swords, tomes, potions, gems, jewels, soulstones and an assload of other assorted adventuring gear.
Gods only know why Bethesda thought an inventory that is ordered alphabetically would be the best way for the player to quickly scan their little hoard of gear. Newsflash, Bethesda: it isn’t.
Fortunately, the modding community is at hand, equipping players with better, less infuriating ways to display your inventory and the rest of your UI. However, this is small comfort for console players who have to mostly have to suffer as they scan long lists without the ease of access to mods open to PC players.
Dragonborn or Dragonyawn? (The Verdict)
Skyrim is a beautiful, engrossing and thoroughly absorbing RPG worthy of the title of “Game of the Year”. Its open-world environments are a joy to look at and even better to traverse. In a time when so many games developers are focusing in on carefully scripting every element of their story, Skyrim gives you the means to forge your own.
I would go so far as to say that almost every single element of the game is an improvement on Oblivion (except the lack of Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean!). It looks, feels and plays so much better with a much improved combat system and the same sense of unbridled adventure.
However, Skyrim is not without its faults. There’s so much packed into the game, it does take you a while to see the repeated elements, the puzzles, traps, dialogue, etc but when you do, it’s jarring and breaks you out of the immersive adventure with an audible crack.
It’s also a good thing that players can feel like they’re crafting their own story, because nobody else is doing much to make things happen! Most of time, central characters look intensely bored with the situation and give off the impression that they’d rather the whole bothersome business of the civil war/guild strife/ draconic devastation just went away.
But if you look past these failings and embrace the core strength of Skyrim, you’ll see that this game is worthy of any RPG fan’s attention. In this world, you are the ultimate authority. You can create, destroy, befriend and betray as you see fit.
You are the Dragonborn. Skyrim is your story to be told however you wish it to be.
This is a good review. Well done.
This is a great review, I think you gave an excellent and impartial view of the game. At first I thought it would be another article complaining about faults in this game, but you really do a good job weighing out the pros and cons.
On a side note, I’d like to see how mods coming to xbox through add-ons turns out. As a PC gamer, modding definitely does increase the lifespan of Bethesda games. Hell I even find myself playing Fallout 3 to this day.
Great game, great review, great everything.
Thanks Ryan, glad you enjoyed it. Absolutely, modding has opened up a whole new level of enjoyment for a variety of Bethesda games and Skyrim is no exception.
While I do think that the modding community is fantastic for helping to elevate games past their original design, I can’t help but think that some issues should have been fixed by the developer before release. In Skyrim’s case, it’s that truly awful inventory, I think they should have realized early on that there were better alternatives.
Still, it just spurs on the modders to get modding, so it’s not all bad!
Yer man good review except I think that the nord puzzle doors are meant to be all over the place as this is how the ancient nords kept ppl out . and the province off skyrim was home to mainly nords with a few exceptions
:P all in all though a good read thanks.
Cant wait for the next one there still more areas to publish.
Thanks Benjamin, yep you’re absolutely right the game does provide an explanation on why there are many dragon claw doors dotted all over Skyrim to keep tomb robbers etc out.
They look quite cool and I’m not begrudging Bethesda for using them multiple times, it’s just that most of the other puzzles seem to revolve around spinning animal carving stones too to unlock a door.
Granted, I haven’t seen everything in Skyrim, not by a long shot, but I just wish that there was a little more variety in these minor aspects of the game.
I got to 205 hours almost playing and sleeping then stopped. Just like Gump’s trek I didn’t want to do it any more and have not looked at it for weeks. That never happened playing Oblivion. Helped by mod’s I still play and prefer it. Skyrim, the game, is beautifully made but Skyrim the land is a scrapyard of a place. I just wish Skyrim had came before Oblivion to see Cyrodiil made by Bethesda using Creation Engine.
Haha great analogy, I know just what you mean! Hope that you enjoyed the trek while it was happening, like Forest did.
That’s really interesting that you still prefer Oblivion thanks to the use of mods. Do you think that maybe with the right mods you would grow to like Skyrim more? If so, what would you like to see changed in the game?
Sorry for late response. I did so but your site thought it was spam (maybe it is! joking), then I had an internet problem. I was really hooked on skyrim for a while and had only a few nuisance bugs until Beth started patching it. The last (1.31) helped to ruin it for me when dragons seemed too scared to fight or would give not up souls when defeated. I found that frustrating. Some bugs seemed to be caused by cell buffers becoming full like I’ve seen working on large Oblivion mod. I could live with them.
I think I probably will visit Skyrim again but only because I enjoy modding (still modding Oblivion) and want to enjoy the creation kit.
Yes it seems that we’ll never be free of the buggy business of Bethesda games during their early stages of release. Still, at least in Skyrim the majority of bugs seem to be of a weird/amusing visual variety (floating mammoths, etc) and the game-breaking bugs were – in my experience at least – few and far between.
Hope you enjoy modding Skyrim, as a non-modder I’m always in awe of what you guys come up with.