Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Amazing"

With so many gamers complaining about a lack of ideas and the subsequent overkill of too-samey titles this generation, it is easy to forget just how much game design has progressed over the past 6-7 years. The claim that modern gaming is all about graphics and presentation is especially difficult to uphold when you take a look at how sandbox/open world games have evolved over the past decade. While GTA III (2001) definitely wasn't the first sandbox game, it contributed hugely to its popularisation and paved the way for developers that were ready to abandon the safe confines of linear game design. Although many early sandbox/open world games were labelled as "GTA clones" due to their very similar game design and setting, developers eventually started beating Rockstar at their own game. By offering a more intuitive mission/quest structure and improving the connection between the open-ended overworld and the main storyline, titles such as STALKER: Call of Pripyat, Fallout 3 and Oblivion took open world design into exciting new directions. As such, it is no surprise that Skyrim, the sequel to Oblivion and the fifth instalment in the Elder Scrolls series, sets yet a new standard in open world game design.

It is noticeable that developer Bethesda has put considerable amounts of effort in impressing the player with its new game world from the start. Skyrim takes place some 200 years after the events of Oblivion, during which the Empire crumbled as a result of in-fighting and a costly war with the Elven Aldmeri Dominion. This lack of stability facilitated the eruption of a civil war in the northern province of Skyrim between the separatist Stormcloaks and the Imperial Legion. To make it worse, ancient dragons roam the land once again, ready to enslave the people of the land of Tamriel. It is this premise that leaves the biggest initial mark on the introduction of the world of Skyrim to the player. In good Elder Scrolls tradition, the player character starts out as a prisoner. On the way to your execution, you are already presented with fragments of information regarding the overarching story: you are accompanied by Ulfric Stormcloak, leader of the rebellion, and you catch a glimpse of representatives of the Thalmor, a shady organisation of Elven supremacists that bears a scary resemblance to the Spanish Inquisition. The build-up to your execution and the subsequent hectic escape from captivity after a dragon attacks the village present Skyrim's setting in such a way that it leaves a lasting impression very early on in the game. You're even presented with a choice between the Imperials and the Stormcloaks during the escape, ensuring immediate personal involvement in the civil war.

The Elder Scrolls series has always been about offering the player an open-ended and personal experience. As such, Skyrim is a logical but therefore no less impressive evolution of Oblivion, taking the latter's base structure and developing it into something more intricate than ever before. The radiant AI system, which dictates that every NPC in the game lead a complete daily or even weekly cycle, is back, as is the real-time mission structure (as opposed to the one in GTA, where starting a mission places you in a more confined version of the open world). In Skyrim, however, this design is taken to the next level. Many of the quests also have radiant characteristics, as the quest-giver or location may vary. It is this addition of more or less randomised content that defines the main distinction between Skyrim and previous entries in the ES series. During your travels across the province's inhospitable tundras, you will often be confronted with random events, such as an Imperial patrol escorting a captured Stormcloak, a band of Daedra hunters going up against a monster, or a mighty dragon attacking a village. What makes these encounters particularly interesting is that they are not uncommonly influenced by the player's actions. For instance, stealing from a shopkeeper may cause them to send an assassin after you, and having a high price on your head will make you an attractive target for Skyrim's bounty hunters. Events like these, in combination with the radiant AI system from Oblivion, make for an incredibly vivid game world, and contribute to each playthrough feeling truly authentic.

The improvements to the radiant AI and quest systems typify this game in the sense that, all across the board, the developers have primarily occupied themselves with taking concepts from Oblivion, improving them, and combining them with just the right amount of fresh ideas. The dungeon-delving, too, underwent such a process, with the basic concept of a large offering of linear dungeons having been left intact, but with considerable improvements having been made in terms of size, puzzles and variation in the art direction. A lot of the dungeons have their own characteristics, often providing them with their own little backstory. This backstory can manifest itself in numerous different ways: the presence of a dogfighting ring may hint towards an illegal gambling circuit, or a bandit's journal might explain how and why the group of marauders you just sneaked by got to that particular hideout in the first place. These additions may essentially be but small details, but they are remarkably effective in providing the game with a lot more colour and personality; entering a dungeon now actually makes you wonder what you'll find in there, which is a considerable improvement over Oblivion's drab, brown dungeons that more often than not contained no particular points of interest other than the chest of loot you'd find at the end of them. As a result, the game retains a strong sense of familiarity without feeling worn-down or formulaic. In a way, it's the perfect sequel.

But there is more to Skyrim than just the refining of familiar game mechanics. While Oblivion's art style was by no means bad, its sequel offers considerably more mature artistic direction that stands out in both detail and versatility. It is encouraging to see a fantasy game moving away from the generic Lord of the Rings-inspired aesthetic and take more direct inspiration from history proper. This does not mean that they suddenly got rid of all the Elves and Orcs, but, for example, the references to the Roman Empire are much more clear and abundant in the Imperial Legion, and the game draws extensively from Nordic and Germanic mythology in its construction of lore surrounding Skyrim's native Nord people. The success of the influence of these real-world historical elements lies in the fact that Skyrim's art direction retains a certain amount of originality, while the connotations of said elements are thankfully employed to present a more fleshed-out cultural and political setting. The vociferous nationalism of the Nords adds a layer of political tension to the game world, while the majestic, steampunk-like design of the ancient Dwarven dungeons establishes the presence of this long-lost, technologically advanced civilisation in the history of the continent. In respect to the latter, it is already impressive in itself that, in a video game that draws its main inspiration from the middle ages, the artistic directors managed to insert full-blown sci-fi environments without any aspect of them seeming unnatural or otherwise out of place.

Regrettably, Skyrim is not an improvement over its predecessors in every way. One of the main issues that more seasoned fans of the series may experience with this instalment, is that it is not very successful as a role-playing game. The main reason for this is that, while you often get to make choices in how you approach and/or complete certain missions and questlines, you are not encouraged to walk down a certain path with the development of your character. In other words, you can be good at everything with a single character, allowing you to experience all of the game's content in a single playthrough. While this may seem like an advantage at first, you will often notice that most of the game's quests were designed with this idea in mind. The College of Winterhold questline (comparable with Oblivion's Mages Guild) can easily be completed using a minimal amount of magic. The Thieves Guild questline was even more disappointing, seeing as stealth wasn't required to finish any of the quests. In Oblivion, the Thieves Guild sort of forced players to employ a decent amount of stealth by bestowing upon them various rules, like not being allowed to kill anyone during a quest. This motivated players to be creative in exploring areas without being spotted, an incentive that simply isn't there anymore in Skyrim, as you can just take the biggest axe you can find and bash the skull of anyone that is foolish enough to stand in your way. Some might say that it is a good thing that the developer is not trying to force a specific playstyle down the player's throat, but this type of design does, ultimately, make the player's choices less relevant, and it doesn't reward those who may not like the warrior's way of handling things. Add to this the fact that bugs and glitches are still every bit as prevalent as they always were in this series, and simplistic, button-mashing combat that requires but a minimal amount of tactical insight, and you cannot help but conclude that Skyrim could have been an even better game than it already is.

Because make no mistake, the phenomenal game design makes Skyrim a true joy to play through, despite some less-than-charming issues. Many of the quests themselves are creative and surprising, and draw obvious inspiration from prevalent themes in modern entertainment. You may find yourself ending up in a Prison Break-like situation, where you need to hook up with the right inmates to obtain a shiv. In an even more bizarre turn of events, you will wake up after a heavy night's drinking and gradually find out that, the night before, you desecrated a temple, stole someone's goat and flogged it off to a giant, and proposed to a witch. It's this type of quests that ultimately shape the experience and turn it into this huge, unpredictable adventure with tons and tons of memorable moments that you'll be eager to share with fellow gamers. This was already the case with Oblivion and other instalments, but Skyrim has several advantages, such as the far superior dungeon design that makes the missions themselves much more enjoyable (as most missions involve a certain amount of dungeon-crawling), as well as the more randomised content that makes for a more genuine and individual experience. But what makes Skyrim truly stand out is the sheer vastness of content offered. There are always new things to do, new places to discover, new characters to meet, and it is nothing short of mind-boggling to try and imagine how Bethesda managed to cram so much worthwhile content into a single game.

When you look at Skyrim's place in video game history, you can't help but conclude that open world/sandbox game design has come a long way over the years. Bethesda succeeded in offering perhaps the most genuinely vivid video game world to date; I can think of no other game world that interacts with the player so actively and convincingly. Choices you make will affect the world around you, and a large chunk of the quests can be completed in several different ways, ensuring that, ultimately, everyone will be able to enjoy this game in their own way, even though you'd sometimes wish that the game would reward creative players a bit more. One could already come up with numerous ideas to make the Elder Scrolls series even better, but for now, we need to stop, acknowledge and appreciate just how much game design is being pushed forward by titles such as Skyrim. Game development stagnating? Hardly.