I'm back.. Oh yeah and I just beat Skyrim

So I've played every PC based Elder Scrolls Game and I have to say this is by far the most immersive RPG's I have ever played.

I sincerely think most commercial game site reviews are tainted by fears of losing advertising revenue. So here's a gamer review from someone who actually finished the game (79 hours of game play first time through so I didn't rush either)!

The first thing worth noting is that you can tell this game was dumbed down for Console Gamers.

I'm an original PC gamer ; and I'm talking from the days when games were TEXT only. I've seen the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to Computer RPG's.

I was very concerned that the class system was dumbed down for console users ; the way you interface with it. The fact that you do not even choose a class any more?  I mean my initial knee-jerk reaction regarding the lack of class system was a wave of betrayal that hit me about chin high.

But once I got past that - honestly for me its an improvement.



The reason it is an improvement is because most of the time I ended up doing the "custom" class anyways and then assigning out the skills I wanted my character to be based upon.


In Skyrim this is not necessary.

You simply play the character you would like to be and the skills in that corresponding area go up; when you level up you may choose to dump points in the skill trees for the area you've been working on - or some other unrelated area as long as you meet a baseline skill requirement.

In other words wear heavy armor and carry around a 2 hander, or light armor and a sword & shield, or robes and 2 hander, or  heavy armor and cast spells and that's what your character will get better at. Oh it reminds me a little of - real life.

Which brings me to my point above that bears more mention here ; Skyrim feels real.

There are ants crawling over things, there are fireflies and butterflies in the flowered meadows.

There are lurking undead deep in the barrows who hunger for your flesh with glowing eyes.
There are rabbits, and deer, and moose running around the foothills and plains of Skyrim. There are salmon climbing the rapids in the river you are running by if you would stop to take a moment and look, many sights in Skyrim will take your breath away for their beauty.

It goes so far beyond that - this entire post could be written to describe the minutae that makes Skyrim feel grounded in a living game world. There are occasional physics glitches that may break the sense of realism but in my play experience there were hundreds of times the physics systems complimented my sense of immersion - so the very infrequent oddities were negligible in my opinion.

Speaking of physics - this dragon threw a soldier in the air as he breathed fire on him!

There are many ways physics are used to enhance the gameplay such as in dungeons you will find oily pools on the ground in certain areas. Careful inspection shows fire pots hang above them. If you run through the dungeon at a breakneck pace you spring the trap and be awash in flames. But if you take your time to enjoy each dungeon as cherished dungeon crawl that an RPG enthusiast should take it as you can easily turn these into traps for your opponents, and I often did.

While I did take the time to enjoy my experience in Skyrim there are many areas that I did not explore either at all or not fully. For example while I did join the thieves guild enough to gain accesss to their fence (the person you sell stolen goods to), I did not complete the chain, nor did I seek out the dark brotherhood. There were also several towns I did not visit, and due to some branches in the main plot lines there is also content I did not experience there as well.

In short what I am saying is that even after 79 hours of game play I feel that there is a wealth of content that I have not touched yet.

I ran Skyrim on a mid-range system at 1280x1024 and it played flawlessly. The game detected my native resolution of 1680x1050 and said I should run this resolution at high quality. While I did do that for Bout an hour there were some visible slow downs. Changing my resolution solved that and I was able to leave it in high quality settings.

Skyrim is a better game than Oblivion for many reasons but the biggest reason is in Oblivion you had the very finite game field that made you like you were playing in a crater that you could not escape.

Whether it is true that is larger or not I do not know; but the design surely is better in that you never get the perception that you are playing in such a constrained play space as Oblivion.

Next mention is the character Art: this is so much better that it is astounding.  I always felt the character art in Oblivion was quite low quality - specifically the faces.  Most of the races looked oddly mishappen, malformed, inbred, and just poorly done. The armor, weapons, and other details were all nicely done, but the faces were quite bad.

Thankfully Skyrim rectifies this for the most part.  It is interesting to note that some variants of elves look a little better or worse. The Dark Elves (dunmer) have such a sculpted facial bone structure they look like Klingons were used as the inspiration for their appearance? While I never pictured Dark Elves in that way myself - it was certainly well done and interesting looking.

Other elven variants do not fare as well as the dunmer, the Altmer (High Elves) receiving in my opinion a treatment reminiscent of Oblivion as noted above.  There are a couple of prominent Altmer characters in the game and each time I looked at them the banjo twangs of the movie Deliverance (featuring several inbred redneck characters) sounded in my head.

This is not a good thing for a Fantasy RPG.  There are literally millions of fantasy artworks in the wild about how high elves might look and inbred/ down syndrome facial features with .50 cent red light district eye makeup rarely makes appearances in those renditions.  But apparently either they re-used the ones from Oblivion with some tweaks or Todd Howard thinks this is how High Elves should look?  Either way this is the biggest visual let down of the game, hands down.

Finally I will speak a bit about quests. For the most part quests are very well done ; dialogue is decent and usually brief enough to be worth listening to but you can click through if you choose not to. Most have nice backgrounds, lore, characters and such in them that they fit into this rich world in a very complimentary way.

A sequence of nordic tombs that can only be unlocked with special dragon claw keys adds an interesting twist on the theme that once I figured it out was enjoyable.  (NOTE: Inspect the dragon claw keys in your inventory -- you can rotate the claw around and on one side is little symbols that will help you out. This might have saved me 20 minutes at one point in the game had I known it earlier)

What most people are probably wondering about though is the primary quest line(s)? And indeed there is some cause for concern here.

In the most general sense I can say it is well done , enjoyable, challenging, and sends you to many interesting places. Definitely worth playing and playing again.

In more specifics though - due to the flexibility and openness of the system the primary plot lines did run into trouble a couple of times.

I don't want this to be a spoiler review so I will attempt to mask these terms to convey an understanding of my concern.

At one point a major character tells you to go kill another major character.  You can do it or not - but either way if you do or not ; one of  two parties from this point on will refuse to work with you.

This event ended up causing me plot problems ; the character who would not talk to me was also needed to form a peace treaty, which was needed to get another character to agree to help me catch a dragon , which was needed to forward the plot.

Unraveling that situation was difficult and took me probably well over an hour of quick traveling back and forth between different NPC's to see if I could figure it out.

Honestly the quest tracking system is pretty awesome in Skyrim - almost all of the time placing a marker on your active objective. In this situation it fell a bit short.   I think it may be something they patch as a bug in the future but for now it is worth mentioning that some buggy quest design can create difficulty in completing the primary plot lines depending on your choices.

Whether you enjoy straight plot driven game play ; or open ended never-ending adventures Skyrim can deliver - in a way that has never been done to this level of immersion and quality to date.

I can only give Skyrim a 10/10 despite the concerns mentioned in my review.  You do not play a game for 79 hours if you don't like it, and I've already started my second character ; that should be testimony enough there!