RPG’s have always been the crème de la crème of the gaming world (that’s Role Playing Games to you laymen out there). Dragons, undead horrors, eleves, magic and a multitude of assorted bladed weapons – to your average RPG connoisseur, these are the everyday building blocks of life. And for the past year or so, only word has been on the lips of these gamers: Skyrim.
The follow up to the staggering landmark release that was Oblivion, Skyrim is the fifth instalment of the iconic Elder Scrolls series. When it comes to RPGs, the Elder Scrolls series is the equivalent of a royal warrant, it is a seal of assured quality – not only do you know your hard earned forty quid is going to a game of massively superior standards to its competitors, but you can count on it giving you unparalleled amounts of playing time. While your average shoot-em-up or action bonanza will at best last a good ten hours or so, Skyrim offers a much-touted ‘infinite’ experience – basically, months down the line you’ll still be playing it, still finding new things to immerse yourself in, still hacking away at all manner of slimy monsters.
Like any RPG worth its weight in gold, Skyrim’s foundations are its intuitive levelling-system. It is this experience-points based system that fuels the drive to continue playing as you plough hours and hours into improving your blacksmithing skills or concocting a new, vibrantly coloured potion. While many elements of the game system remain essentially the same as that which powered Oblivion, there are a few new tweaks; chiefly, the perk system. This will prove familiar to players of Fallout 3/New Vegas (both Skyrim and Fallout share the same developer: Bethesda Studios) – with the new perk system you are given a choice of bonuses with every level-up ranging from being able to spout fire from both hands to bashing your enemies in the face with your shield.
With Oblivion, there was a sense that no matter what path you chose to pursue in the in-game world, your character would ultimately end up the same: an all-powerful clone skilled in everything. With Skyrim, the sense of specialisation is far more balanced – while all paths are still open to you at any stage, you feel far more inclined to stick to just one. Other new features include powerful ‘shout’ moves gained from killing dragons and harvesting their souls: these shouts address one of the key issues Oblivion had, being able to deal with multi-enemy combat. Previously, it was nigh on impossible to battle more than one enemy at once, now it represents an exciting, far more manageable prospect.
Without a doubt though, the most appealing aspect of Skyrim is its sheer scale. You can interact with pretty much everything: travelling through the opening areas of the game you will be attacked by wolves; kill these and you can take their skins to craft into leather armour which can then be worn. Stop off at an inn and the bartender will be happy to offer you a bed for the night (ten gold coins please...), giving you a chance to chat to the locals for work and cook up a stew on the fire. Or, if you’re feeling particularly malevolently inclined, you can kill the town shopkeeper and rob everything from his store – though this will most likely end in you getting carted off for a long spell behind bars. Yes, that’s right, Skyrim even has its own justice system and politics – in short, it’s just like our own world, but full of big scary dragons and raging Norse-inspired barbarians.
Which neatly brings us on to the look and feel of the world, surely a key part of any fantasy RPG. The truth is, Skyrim is gorgeous, completely and utterly beautiful – there are times when you’ll forget all about your quests or the goblin whose brains you’re presently battering in, because, quite simply, the visuals are so jaw-droppingly amazing. Bleak, windblasted tundra stetches away into the distance on all sides, towering mountains peeking up from the mists on the horizon. Glistening rivers blast through craggy ravines, catching the first rays of morning sunlight. Skyrim’s visuals are the kind that you want to dive head-first into, never to emerge – in comparison, Oblivion looks blunt, profoundly second-rate; plagued by its population of rubber-faced individuals.
This was another chief fault of Skyrim’s predecessor – the characters you met on your travels didn’t just look goofy, they acted goofy too – often running headfirst into boulders and getting stuck behind them. With Skyrim, the AI is given a first-class fine tuning, resulting in people that look and feel like actual human beings – as such, the overall experience is again made just that little bit more immersive. Skyrim is a thing of immense scope, of incalculable scale, and when I say the game world is huge, I mean absolutely fucking massive. An average journey between quest locations will often take twenty minutes or so, and this represents a mere twentieth of the entire game world – and that’s before we even consider the multitude of creepy, monster-filled dungeons and caves of Skyrim’s underworld.
Funnily enough, some of the best new innovations in the game come from other genres – the influence of Call of Duty on the brilliant opening sequence is clear as you are carted along in chains to an execution before the timely intervention of a dragon allows you escape. As with COD, you feel like you’re being given the chance to play the lead role in a Hollywood action movie, leaping from one high-octane sequence to another. With every hour of gaming, you find yourself writing your own script as new possibilities, new eventualities, occur.
In one particularly shocking instance I was riding my trusty horse at top-speed towards the next quest when I unwittingly galloped over a ridge of sharp black stone. The horse trips, breaking its front legs, and I am catapulted off its back and over the edge of a cliff to my instant death. My body smashes like a rag doll against the snow-covered slopes and I am forced to re-load an earlier saved game (loading times are thankfully now much improved from the agonisingly slow process they were in Oblivion). It’s little stories like these that become a daily occurrence in Skyrim, drawing you back again and again – you find yourself leaving behind the monotony of essay deadlines and pot noodles to once again explore this beautiful, fantastical realm; to seek your fame and fortune in a land of dragons and magic.
Oh, and if you haven’t gathered already, Skyrim has absolutely nothing to do with ‘rimming’ whatsoever.
