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Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
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PCGamer review is now live lads.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/10/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-review/Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil anything here – I’ll steer clear of anything story-related beyond the premise. With another game, that would be tricky. With Skyrim, the stories that come from how the game works are often the best ones.
It’s a frozen nation, just to the north of where the previous game, Oblivion, took place. A pleasantly brief introduction sets up the plot: Skyrim is in the middle of a revolt, you’ve been sentenced to death, and dragons have just shown up. Good luck!
At that point, you emerge from a cave into 40 square kilometres of cold and mountainous country, and that’s it. Everything else is up to you.
Even after spending hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, the sense of freedom in Skyrim is dizzying. The vast mountains in every direction make the landscape seem limitless, and even after exploring it for 55 hours, this world feels huge and unknown on a scale neither of the previous two games did.
Not all of the landscape is subzero, and even among the frosty climes there’s an exciting variety: ice caverns that tinkle with dripping frost crystals, hulking mountains with curls of snow whipped up by the howling wind, coniferous forests in rocky river valleys.
The mountains change everything. Wherever you decide to head, your journey is split between scrambling up treacherous rocks and skidding down heart-stopping slopes. The landscape is a challenge, and travel becomes a game.
It’s hard to walk for a minute in any direction without encountering an intriguing cave, a lonely shack, some strange stones, a wandering traveller, a haunted fort. These were sparse and quickly repetitive in Oblivion, but they’re neither in Skyrim: it’s teeming with fascinating places, all distinct. It was 40 hours before I blundered into a dungeon that looked like one I’d seen before, and even then what I was doing there was drastically different.
These places are the meat of Skyrim, and they’re what makes it feel exciting to explore. You creep through them with your heart in your mouth, your only soundtrack the dull groan of the wind outside, to discover old legends, dead heroes, weird artefacts, dark gods, forgotten depths, underground waterfalls, lost ships, hideous insects and vicious traps. It’s the best Indiana Jones game ever made.
The dragons don’t show up until you do the first few steps of the game’s main quest, so it’s up to you whether you want them terrorising the world as you wander around. A world where you can crest a mountain to find a 40-foot flying lizard spitting jets of ice at the village below is a much more interesting one to be in. But fighting them never changes much: you can just ignore them until they land, then shoot them from a distance when they do.
Your first dragon kill is a profound, weird moment. I rushed to the crashed carcass to loot it, then looked up. The whole town had come out to stand around and stare at the body, a thing as vast and alien to them as a T-rex in a museum.
I tried shooting an ice bolt at it, just to demonstrate it was dead, and the force unexpectedly catapulted the whole thing violently into the distance. A beggar looked at me and said, “Oh sure, just throw your trash around.”
Your character gets better at whatever you do: firing a bow, sneaking up on people, casting healing spells, mixing potions, swinging an axe. There’s always been an element of this practice-based system in Elder Scrolls games, but in Skyrim it’s unrestricted – you don’t have to decide what you’re going to focus on when you create your character, you can just let it develop organically.
That alone would feel a little too hands-off, but you also level up. When that happens, you get a perk point: something you can spend on a powerful improvement to a skill you particularly like. Every hour, you’re making a major decision about your character’s abilities.
They’re dramatic. The first point you put into Destruction magic lets you stream jets of flame from your hands for twice as long as before. As you continue to invest in one skill, you can get more interesting tweaks: I now have an Archery perk that slows down time when I aim my bow, and one for the Sneak skill that lets me do a stealthy forward roll.
Again, the freedom is dizzying: every one of 18 skills has a tree of around 15 perks, and the range of heroes you could build is vast. I focused on Sneak to the point of absurdity – now I’m almost invisible, and I get a 3,000% damage bonus for backstabs with daggers. It’s the play style I’ve always wanted in an RPG, but I’ve never been able to achieve it before.
The enemies you encounter are, in some cases, generated by the game to match the level of your character. In Oblivion that sometimes felt like treading water: progress was just a stat increase, and your enemies kept pace. That doesn’t apply now that your character is defined more by his or her perks, because the way you play is always changing.
Levelled content is also just used less: at level 30, my most common enemies are still bandits with low-level weapons. And I still run into things too dangerous for me to tackle.
Taking a narrow mountain path to a quest, something stops me in my tracks: a dragon roar. I check the skies – nothing, but I hear it again three more times before the peak.
At the top I find a camp full of bodies, with a large black bear roaring over them. Hah. He’s still more than I can handle in straight combat, but as he reaches me I use a Dragon Shout. It befriends any animal instantly, and he saunters casually away. Feeling slightly guilty, I stab him in the back before it wears off.
Which is when the dragon lands, with an almighty crash, six feet from my face.
I run.0 -
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kearneybobs wrote: »Some gamestops are doing a midnight launch. Feasible for you?
nah, carlow gamestop isn't
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With the activating aspect, the only differences between regions is so they can set the price to match the RRP for that region, which will differ due to taxes etc. Once you've bought the game in your own region, Steam and Bethesda really aren't going to care if you get to play it a few hours earlier.
Even better if you had read the book it was based off.Sasquatch76 wrote: »Yeah, thedinner party where you had to bump off all the other guestswas a personal favourite
Also, RPS's review. tldr version, some small flaws, a ridiculous amount of stuff to do and overall a return to Morrowind level of quality rather than the not quite so good Oblivion and Fallout.0 -
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to me
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