TES V: Skyrim - A Dragonbore?

No. This is not a review of the 2016 Special Edition. I didn’t even play the add-ons. It is just a cute, harmless review of Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as it was released in 2011 for PC. Skyrim was then a great and acclaimed game, and it still is. 

Skyrim provides some great improvements compared to its predecessor, Oblivion. Most notably of them being that you can now level almost infinitely, something that the predecessor didn’t allow because you had to pick a very limited number of major skills. If those skills had reached level 100, you were unable to level your character as a whole, meaning no more increasing for the size of your inventory, magical power, or hit points. The reason why this was such a major issue is that The Elder Scrolls games, being role-playing games, heavily rely on leveling.

 

Game Mechanics

 

Skyrim expands on this core mechanic by allowing the player to unlock new abilities as they increase their skills, be it lockpicking (don’t; it’s easy enough already!), axe-wielding, stealing and sneaking, and all kinds of sorcery from belching flames and turning invisible to enchanting armor. The latter adds some crafting mechanics, which again is very fun and very rewarding.

 

A Centurion - finest Dwemer craftsmanship.

During my best moments of playing I found myself eagerly planning to get the perfect armor, and just a random aspect as this can be made as complex as you wish: First, become a perfect blacksmith. Second, perfect your skills of enchanting the armor: You can implement permanent spells to protect yourself from destructive magic, increase your health and/or skills in ridiculous amounts. But that's not all: Third, you can use these skills to create a set of armor that enhances your ability to mix potions. Consume these potions to become an even more efficient blacksmith or enchanter. Rinse and repeat, but be careful not to create a friction in the space-time continuum while you’re at it.

If you haven’t noticed yet, the game mechanics are Skyrim’s absolute forte. You can turn almost any idea on top of your mind into a strategy to win the many, many battles you will have to fight. Sneak upon them? Shoot them in the head? Poison them and crush them with a telekinetically moved crate? – It’s possible. After all, Skyrim is a game about fighting, and it excels at this aspect.

More precisely, it is a game about fighting some sick bastards in abandoned ruins. It doesn’t matter much if those bastards call themselves Bandits or Trolls or Necromancers or Vampires. If you join the Dark Brotherhood, you can be a sick bastard yourself. The same goes for the Daedric princes, whose shrines can be found all over Skyrim and offer great rewards for scaring people, betraying your friends, and creating chaos in general. 

Casting lightning bolts at your enemies is fun.

Speaking of sick bastards: Yes, there are lots of moral choices to be made. You can freely choose whether you want to side with the racist northerners around Ulfric Stormcloak or whether you want to join the oppressive imperial forces, although the racist Northerners seem to be the obvious choice as at least they were not planning to execute you at the beginning of the game. While the outcome of this conflict doesn’t affect the game a lot, there are many quests that have at least some influence on the game. Some of them require you to be evil, mostly to acquire special loot. Other quests are fairly innocent: You can buy a house so that you will have a place to store your many, many treasures or you can help the locals and become a thane; you can even marry. There is a lot to do. 

First, the game will ask you to choose a race (another choice that does not matter all too much): 3 kinds of human, 3 or 4 kinds of elves (depending whether you regard orks as a kind of elf) or one of the weird options, being the cat guy or the lizard guy (or girl, respectively). I chose the high elf, because I wanted to be an excellent mage, but I did use heavy armor (it doesn’t really slow you down) and a mace from time to time, proving once again that you can be anything you want in the wonderful land of Skyrim. 

Talking to gods is daily business for the Dragonborn, but rarely do they appear physically.

Tall tales, small tales

 

And you should put that to good use and goof around a bit. Because being just the Dragonborn is a bit redundant sometimes, meaning that the story is not particularly interesting. I would even call it boring. It could really have been a great epic inspired by the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, the oldest remaining heroes’ tale in English language with a brave hero fighting monsters, claiming a throne and dying heroically. But it isn’t. 

 

After one less exciting quest or two you will soon pick up the habit of skipping dialogues, because sometimes it is just more interesting to try out new skills than listening to some grumpy guard who got an arrow to the knee. In fact, if you listened to every dialogue and read every book that crosses your way, the game would lose a lot of momentum. 

You can marry at the temple of Mara.

In some instances, the game will force you to sit and wait and listen to dialogue sequences while the voice actors are taking their sweet time (this goes especially for Daedric Princes). For my taste, the writing simply lacks something. I couldn't care less about the Blades, and neither are the Greybeards on top of the mountains particularly secretive, stylish, threatening or interesting. And dragons. I’ve never been a fan of dragons, and they can become annoying once they start attacking you in random locations. 

 

Also, there is not really any way to tell the epic artifacts of the story apart from those that you may find during the quests for, say, the College of Winterhold (equivalent to the mage guild of Oblivion). If everything is super precious, nothing actually is. Skyrim aptly shows that this economic rule applies to storytelling as well, as I find myself enjoying the Dwemer the most - an ancient civilization whose people completely vanished from the face of the earth and who therefore can and will not pester me with drawn-out dialogues. Their mastery of magic and technology turned out to be their undoing. What is left from them are ruins of their civilization inhabited by their tireless steampunk robots which are among the most impressive monsters in the whole game. 

The Greybeards are not very talkative, but that alone does not make them particularly interesting.

Skyrim is addictive enough to have kept me playing for a total of roughly 240 hours. It offers a lot of freedom, many skills to master and places to discover. I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys exploring the vast worlds of Action-RPGs and can forgive a game for having a bit of a "meh" plot. I certainly can.