Final review of Skyrim
Yuan Xu
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Ratings and Interest
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the fifth game of the Elder Scrolls series, gained much popularity upon its release on November 11th, 2011 across multiple platforms. Skyrim is acclaimed for its excellent quality for its time and is praised in several ratings; it received a 9.5/10 from ign.com and a 94/100 from metacritic.com, just to name a few. Skyrim’s graphics were modern for its time. Combined with an interesting story and excellent mods, the game has attracted many players with varying interests. There are several points to review in this game, such as its reflection on The Middle Ages in Europe in a Fantasy setting, the cultural aspect of this country, and its influence on the game industry.
Skyrim’s genre: Both a RPG and an Adventure game
Skyrim is an action-adventure Role Playing Game (RPG) that allows you to choose your own play style. Skyrim has a very typical class system, the user can choose from several classes such as a magician, archer or warrior. These classes are often found in other typical RPG games, such as Final Fantasy series, Dragon Quests series and Dark Soul series. Skyrim however, has a flexible class system in which the user can easily switch their classes by learning skills from different classes , an option unique to Skyrim. Skyrim also has a classic story in which a warrior fights an evil dragon, this is also a common setting of many fantasy RPGs. Skyrim also fits in the category of an open-world adventure game, which is a type of game that allow the users to freely explore the world of the game as they choose with no forced path. Aside from the main quests, the player can choose to explore optional caves and mazes to get rare items and abilities, just like in all other adventure games. The more the player explores in adventure games, the easier the game is for them, as the items and abilities they get from their explorations can greatly strengthen their characters. Nevertheless, what make Skyrim unique is that there are so many things to be explored in Skyrim. Subquests and side quests are spread everywhere in this world, and the user can easily spend a great amount of time to fully explore the world after finishing the main quests.
History of Skyrim
Bethesda Game Studio, the developer of the The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is a development team of its parent company, Bethesda Software. Bethesda Software is an American game developer, famous for producing the Elder Scrolls series and the Fallout series. Bethesda Software kept updating Skyrim within the next few years after its release in 2011, including the release of three chapters of Downloadable Content (DLC) and different versions of Skyrim. Lets compare Skyrim with another big title in 2011 -- Dark Souls. Both games have a lot of RPG factors, like level upgrades and classes, while Dark Souls is a significantly harder action game compared to Skyrim. For example, it has much higher requirements for working through the levels and beating bosses. Another famous RPG around 2010 is Final Fantasy XIII. Both games are fantasy RPGs; in both game worlds there are fictional creatures including dragons, dwarves, and demons. The appearance of the characters, however, is slightly different. Many Characters in Final Fantasy XIII have been idolized; one of the main female characters was later used as a model for Louis Vuitton. As for the game history, I would say that Skyrim also tries to evolve to adjust the trend of more and more AR and VR games in recent years. Bethesda tries to keep the popularity of Skyrim by adopting the popular VR technology in its newest version--Skyrim VR(released in 2017). Bethesda's decision of making Skyrim VR indicates that VR and AR game shall become more and more popular and will become the main trend in the future video game history.
Aesthetic perspective of Skyrim
The official trailer of my game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim presents the game in its classic RPG setting. The trailer presents the strength and evilness of the dragon that the player must fight. The powerful and mysterious black dragon is depicted with sharp claws and very powerful wings evoking a sense of awe and fear of this incredible beast. On the other hand, the scene showing the warrior’s fearless eye when he faces the dragon proves his courage and presents him as an equal match for the creature. These scenes together perfectly help audience to visualize the epicness of the fight that will eventually take place. The intense music also signifies this theme, beginning with a quiet intro underneath the narration of the legend. The music gradually raises in volume and complexity until it reaches the climax as the “dragonborn” slices the dragon with his blade. The background music uses its rhythm and tone to evoke in the player a sense that Skyrim is a game to accomplish something great--to defeat the evil dragon for the sake of the world. Appropriate usage of film angles and music together with other fantasy elements exemplify that Skyrim tells the story of a legend of great heroism, the story of the almighty dragon king Alduin. Rules are quite important in this game, as the player’s decisions in their gameplay will determine the outcome of the story. The players valor is taken into account and is critical to the experience, as pointed out that “These rules define which outcomes are considered positive and which consequences are negative” (Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction). The player will want to follow the rule of valor well so that they won’t underestimate the consequence for violating these laws, such as being sent to jail when being caught murdering someone. In general, “valorization rules” can greatly influence the player’s gaming decisions, so that he/she can do better in the game. Balance is important for games, as there should not be only one gaming skyle that is superior than all other styles. Skyrim has various of classes and different sets of skills, and it manages to keep a good balance between different classes within the game by making skills that player can learn , in a way that not a class can be all-rounder and superior than other classes, like mage is good at magic but bad at melee combats. As for skill and chance, I believe that Skyrim is designed in the way that most of time, the outcome of battles are determined by skills, but chances can also occasionally affect the result. For example , for most cases an excellent assassin can murder all targets in a mission without getting hurt, as these enemies are usually spread out enough to allow this if they player is ski. Skyrim definitely have the emergent play. There are many results that the designer may not have predicted in Skyrim, like a mix usage of smithing, alchemy and enchanting can create a weapon with 10000 on attacks, which is 50 times a normal weapon’s stats. In general, emergent play exists in Skyrim, as there can be quite surprising gameplays in Skyrim, if the player has a good amount of familiarity to this game.
` Culture of Skyrim
Skyrim is generally played by those who enjoy single player games rather than multiplayer games. Skyrim has none of the online gameplay elements, like team battles or trades between players. Bethesda Softworks understand the needs of these types of users, and thus designed a game with only single player mode, and made sure that the player can enjoy the feeling of acting as a unique and great hero. As a popular video game, Skyrim has adapted its own culture -- making the game community even greater. The main character is the last dragonborn of Skyrim, creating a sense of an epic story, much like the story of Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. One critical culture influence that is oriented from Skyrim is its fabulous open world. According to inverse.com, “Before Skyrim was released, Bethesda enticed people with promises of an endless landscape to explore, pointing out mountains looming in the distance that you could actually walk to and climb. And they made good on that promise.” Skyrim fulfilled Bethesda’s promise, and made Skyrim a masterpiece of open world RPGs. According to hardcoregamer.com “Many famous game studios are willing to follow the example of Skyrim to develop excellent open world games.” It means more and more games begin to adapt the open world setting after the release of Skyrim, which altogether show the powerful influence of Skyrim in video game culture.
Narrative Aspect of Skyrim
Skyrim is a typical task-oriented game, which means all game narration is centered from tasks. Characters and contexts are tools for the player to accept and complete these tasks or missions, and stories are the result of completion of new tasks. To illustrate my point, I will use the main mission of Skyrim “the way of voice” as an example. In this mission, after beating a dragon (a context or the precondition), the player gets the chance to talk with the important character--the Lord of Whiterun. The player needs to find a way to see the Greybeards (important characters) to make further progress in the game.This is how Skyrim organizes its narration. Skyrim has a narrative structure of the vector with side branches. Skyrim completely fits in this structure, as it has a main quest and a main plot--to defeat Alduin and save the world. At the same time, Skyrim allows user to do countless side missions, such as joining dark brotherhood and defeating dragon priests to get their powerful masks. So, it can be logically inferred that Skyrim has a narrative structure of the vector with side branches. Skyrim is designed in the way that the player can feel and enjoy the epicness of the game by a good amount effort to defeat certain powerful boss and narration of stories. In general, after knowing some background stories(story level) and trying hard for the boss fights, the player can feel how epic it is the world that Skyrim tries to present.
Possible impact/risks of Skyrim
Skyrim can be used for educational purpose for either history class, as it was built based in the Middle Ages in European history. If a history professor wants to help the students to visualize the history, they can simply takes a screenshot from gameview in Skyrim, to help their students visualize what the country may have looked like in this time period, or what characters (or clothing) could have looked like. Skyrim can be a great resource for providing visual cues in a European history class. By no means is this game considered something “educational,” however it is something that students may still be able to learn from, due to the style of the art in the game. According to the eighth chapter of the textbook, “From a socio-cultural perspective, video games are tools for constructing viable learning experiences.” Skyrim can be a good method students to learn socio-cultural thing, such as how to interact with people with strong biases and how to resolve conflicts with different people. Thus, it is again proved that Skyrim can be used for educational purpose, even though it was designed mainly for entertainment. Playing Skyrim can bring some risks to the player in terms of both active media and active user perspective. From a active media point of view, Skyrim can make the player more aggressive. There are many CGs (something that the user has to watch to continue the game) in Skyrim involve violence, like the brutal fight of Alduin and the Nord heroes. According to Cognitive neoassociation model of aggression theory, gamers’ brain receive such violent messages in their brain and create/strength nodes to make the player behave more aggressively. As for the active user perspective, the risks can be that the user practice too much of the violent acts that affect his or her aggressiveness level. There are many missions with great rewards require the user to resolve problems with violence. A good example can be mudreing the high king of Skyrim. If I were to design a study about video games, I would focus on active user perspective, as I believe that it is more effective than media perspective theory. Since most players are older than 15 years, they are intelligent enough to make their own judgements in the game, and therefore,it makes more sense that the changes they have after playing video games are more dependent on their choices of actions rather than receiving messages from games. If I were to do a research. I would recruit a team of testers to play Skyrim for a month, and use observation data I gathered to do further analysis on active user perspective risks.
Final assessments
In general, Skyrim is an unique open-world RPG and adventure game. It is the fifth game of The Elder Scrolls Series produced by Bethesda Studio, and more versions and updates were released after Skyrim’s initial release in 2011. It is one of the most AAA games around that time, as it has excellent graphics, outstanding bgm and epic stories. It adepts many elements from traditional RPG games, yet its class system and open world setting makes it unique. What Skyrim did well were that it targeted a certain group of players and designed the game accordingly (to be a single player game and a typical warrior versus dragon game). Then, with well implementations of task-oriented system, balanced classes and coordinations of actor perspective and media perspective of gameplay, Skyrim successfully narrate the epic story of the fictional state Skyrim to its players. Finally, although Skyrim is a game designed for commercial reasons, it can be used as an edutainment if the player play in with certain methods. Certainly, players need to be aware that it is after all a video game, so that they will be avoid risks like addictions and more aggressive behaviors in life. To sum up, Skyrim is a great game to enjoy with if the player can control himself/herself and not go too far in this game!
Reference:
Nielsen, S. E., & Smith, J. H. (2016). Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction.
Macgregor, J. (2016, November 3). The evolution of The Elder Scrolls. Retrieved April 29, 2018, from https://www.pcgamer.com/the-evolution-of-the-elder-scrolls/4/
A. (2015, December 25). Lightning stars in new Louis Vuitton advertisement campaign. Retrieved April 29, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agLN33rs7zg
James, B. (2011, November 20). Sinisterdesign.net
Famularo, J. (2016, October 18). 'Skyrim' Is the Blueprint for Modern RPGs. Retrieved May 14, 2018.
Beaudette. M. (2014, March 29). An examination of Skyrim’s massive success May 14, 2018.
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