Succeeds despite the shortcomings because its a rare gaming experience that provides thrill of exploring its rich world
But that is fine.Because like I said role-playing never was Elder Scrolls' forte or their main selling point.
What the series did really well and better than its influences was evoke the immense thrill of exploration and the overwhelming sense of scale of its massive world.
Elder Scrolls isn't at its best when you're talking to a NPC, or leveling up or other little role-playing forms like that. It is at its glorious best when you're out exploring the large open-world and its secrets –be it a cave infested with bandits, or a tomb hiding some Daedric secrets. This is where the Elder Scrolls games have always shined for me and what has ultimately been the series' biggest singular triumph over the years.
Which is why 2006's Oblivion was a disappointment for me purely because it took place in a setting-Cyrodiil that was so bland and uninteresting that the primary reason why Elder Scrolls appealed to me was lost. With the loss of that, its role-playing shallowness underneath became all the more apparent. Oblivion had some interesting ideas but they were lost in absence of what made the series fun in the first place-exploring a detailed fantasy world that was rich in lore and historical background.
That is why Skyrim, the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls saga is in more ways than one-a familiar but thrilling comeback for the series. It brings back the glorious and often-overwhelming feeling of exploring a massively rich world that seems to be hiding some secret around its every corner. Bethesda for all the flack they've gotten from me have realized their series' biggest strength and have done a commendable job of creating a rich setting in Skyrim.
Filled with waterfalls, lush green plains, towering snow mountains and dark swamp forests, Skyrim is a beautiful place in every sense I could describe. It is also a very dangerous place because it is inhabited by creatures of all kind – be it mammoths, giants and of course, the dragons. It is another confirmation that how essential the richness of a world is for enjoyment of games like Elder Scrolls. Skyrim has everything that Oblivion's Cyrodiil didn't. Skyrim's towns and cities have much more life about them-each having a little in-built conflict of their own which fits into the central conflict of the game. Each inhabited place feeling like its inhabited by people who continue with their own lives yet are inadvertently torn apart by the problems plaguing Skyrim.
Skyrim is a land torn apart by civil unrest. Taking place 200 years after Oblivion's events, it sees the once proud Imperial Empire now nothing more than a glorified puppet in the hands of Thalmor who wish to assert their superiority over Skyrim's traditional customs. The local Nords of Skyrim are obviously not happy and their anger is fronted by a powerful rebellion led by Stormcloak. Amidst this civic unrest, dragons are mysteriously returning from dead and terrorizing every living soul in Skyrim. As one of the last of the Dragonborn, only you have the prophesied ability to stop the Dragons and to unite Skyrim under a single banner.
The premise falls into the all-too familiar area of every Elder Scrolls' plot. Prophesied hero saving the world. Nothing more beyond that. What Skyrim does have this time is a central conflict – one that gives the entire world a lot more charm and character to go about than Oblivion's "stop the Daedra and close the Gates of Oblivion" ever did. In Skyrim, every town has a stand on the issue of the civil war. Some support Imperials, some support the Stormcloaks. Some try their best to remain neutral even though they find it increasingly hard to do so. Families within the same town stand divided on the issue of the war. People wonder aloud if the dragons are supposed to put an end to the war or end them before the war does. The hopes and fears of the people of Skyrim feel very natural and real and it doesn't take long before you start associating with people.
At the risk of sounding clichéd, Skyrim feels more alive than any Elder Scrolls game ever has. Sure Morrowind still is by far the richer game in terms of setting, but Skyrim is filled from top to bottom with so many unique events that occur with and without player intrusion that it easily elevates the game above your vast crowd of RPGs. On Skyrim's streets, people talk to you about recent events in this world – which you may or may not have been a part of. They carry on with their lives while occasionally taking time to discuss, comment or berate someone or something. With a sizeable conflict and unique events –scripted or evoked by player action springing across the world, it doesn't take a long time before Skyrim becomes a very believable place.
This isn't an easy thing to do. Creating a believable world is one of the toughest things to do in game development. Bethesda try their best – they stumble plenty of times-NPCs comment on entirely irrelevant things or treat you like a nobody when you might be the savior of the world or the Thane of the town. These little things do break your immersion every now and then, but by and large Skyrim creates a chilly and beautiful atmosphere whenever you play it. Bethesda's sincere effort of creating a rich world does show in the end and make a considerably powerful impact on how Skyrim fares as a game.
Skyrim is subjected to plenty of improvements and refinements of various degrees. None bigger than the leveling system. Instead of restricting and binding a player to "Major" and "Minor" skills like Oblivion did, Skyrim instead gives players a free rein over how and what abilities they choose to develop in. To facilitate that, they've introduced perks from the Fallout franchise. These perks form a skill tree of sorts for every skill-set giving you a wider choice when it comes to deciding how you develop your character. If you choose to develop One-Handed, you will be given a choice to better your skills in a specific one-handed weapon –be it Sword,Axe or Mace.
The skill set is still unbalanced. Skills like Speech are grossly under-used and serve little to no importance. Process of gaining experience remains the same as in the previous games and it still is one of the most organic forms of gaining experience I've seen in any role-playing game yet. With the leveling system improved, leveling up in Skyrim feels a whole lot more satisfying and fun than it ever was in Oblivion.
Combat is still for better or worse the same awkward hack-n-slash affair. Sure there have been minor refinements by means of which you can now dual-wield spells and combine their different effects, perform powerful Shouts in the ancient dragon language or the Fallout-esque finisher animations displayed in stylish slow-motion. But other than that, Skyrim's combat will be familiar to anyone who played Oblivion. It is focused on action, fast-paced, more immediate and also more clunky. Hit detection is still off by a fair margin and even though Skyrim has fully left behind its dice-roll roots, combat is still imprecise. Ranged combat like Archery introduces auto-aim so now you no longer need to worry about the trajectory of the arrow. It's been streamlined although frankly it didn't bother me too much. The clunky and imprecise nature however and doesn't take away the fact that combat is still fun occasionally but clearly it isn't the best what Skyrim could manage.
Amongst the surprising improvements, I'd give a special mention to Alchemy. While Skyrim does follow the general trend of removing complex activities from its past installments for the sake of simplicity and accessibility , Alchemy is a rare occasion where Skyrim doesn't shy away from its old CRPG roots. Rather than giving you a set of ingredients required to make a particular item like it does in the case of Smithing or Enchanting, Alchemy rather invites you to experiment with your ingredients and find out its effects. This mix-and-match technique leading to a mysterious output is very reminiscent to what actual Chemistry feels like and kudos to Bethesda for actually making it a small but nonetheless enjoyable component of the game.
It wouldn't be an Elder Scrolls game without its quests and Skyrim has plenty of them. That is an understatement actually because Skyrim has infinite quests. That's right one of the ever-polarizing "innovations" of Bethesda this time around is Radiant Questing. This makes certain friendly NPCs give you an infinite number of looping quests that automatically point to a random location on the map. This location may or may not be discovered yet. What Radiant Quests succeeds at is encouraging exploration of the world through these quests. Another example that Bethesda have understood the main strength of their games. Sadly these infinite quests are cookie-cutter quests of the lowest denomination and do not really serve any special purpose. It's a good thing for those who want to keep playing Skyrim for long after it is finished, for the rest of us however, such Radiant Quests serve little purpose.
There are some excellent quests in Skyrim however. Some. Quests involving Daedric princes are generally the high-point of the game because they evoke the exact kind of feeling Daedric quests should – dark, twisted and highly atmospheric with mad twists of all kinds thrown in. Questing in Skyrim is a sheer joy when you encounter these rarities where quests actually have some substance and show some semblance of having good writing.
Unfortunately for Skyrim, such quests are few and far between. Most of the quests in Skyrim are sadly bland and lacking any kind of substance. This is once again where Bethesda falls flat. Clearly not having learnt a single thing from their peers at Obsidian after their stunning effort with New Vegas, Bethesda provide a wide array of interesting premises for every quest in Skyrim but almost all of them entirely boil down to the same repetitive routine of dungeon crawling. Quests in Skyrim start on a promising note but almost always end up with you retrieving some lost item from a cave, killing some evil person in a cave or having a rendezvous with someone in a…you guessed it…a cave.
For ordinary sidequests, I am ready to forgive Bethesda for such painfully generic quests but when entire questlines of certain factions are nothing but one excuse after another to explore some dungeon, you cannot help but wish for better. Writing is mostly unimpressive.
For AAA-RPG like Skyrim, such writing isn't easily excusable especially when quests with tremendous potential boil down into the same routine of dungeon-crawling. Not that I have a problem with dungeon crawling but surely it isn't the ONLY way to role-play in quests. Not to mention, Bethesda have still not grasped the notion of role-playing through dialogue.
Quests are still a largely linear affair and on the rare occasion where you're given a decision to make it makes little to no impact. For someone born to change the world of Skyrim, quests are poor indicators of your destiny. To add to that, voice-acting is mostly average.It isn't helped by the fact that a lot of NPCs voices are just recycled between a number of voice actors.
This is 2011 and not 1998 anymore when developers could get away with that. Unfortunately, Bethesda does seem to get away with such mistakes game after game. To Skyrim's credit however, the dungeon design is mostly great, easily the best thus far in the series. It remains fresh throughout and is filled with enough variety in traps, puzzles to keep you invested. The notorious Dwemer ruins are the high-point of dungeon design in Skyrim.
Then there are the dragons. The mighty flying creatures that have been the core of the hype machine Skyrim had before its release. Fighting with dragons is mostly a random encounter and thus the thrill of fighting a dragon that has caught you unawares is an immense feeling. Despite the fact that dragons respawn infinitely in Skyrim, their rate of respawn is pretty slow enough so they never become a hindrance in your exploration. That said however the intensity of dragon fights is slowly lost the more of them you fight. Skyrim treats battles with dragons as more of a menial, methodical task of killing creatures which can fly rather than treat them as intense battles that require you to combine your wit and best skills to succeed.
Result is Skyrim's dragons never evoke the kind of fear which dragons in many other RPGs over the years have managed to. It's certainly not a disappointing aspect of Skyrim, not when fighting two dragons at the same time in an Aurora-lit sky counts high amongst my most memorable moment in Skyrim. Yet it's hard to shake the feeling that the fights with dragons could've been far more intense and epic had they been used with more thought and restrain in the frequency.
Skyrim is supposedly built on a new engine that is not GameBryo but that doesn't stop the familiar problems plaguing Bethesda's previous games from plaguing Skyrim-- namely glitches of all kinds. Mammoths disappear through the terrain and then reappear two minutes later by falling from the sky. Broken quests, disappearing NPCs, terrain failing to load and you being stuck in a white space of nothingness aren't rare occurrences in Skyrim. While I do admit that a game as massive as Skyrim is bound to have such glitches but Skyrim has a bit too many of them to avoid such criticism and often comes across as an over-modded Oblivion.
Special mention needs to be given to Jeremy Soule's excellent score which remains quiet in the background but reinforces the chilly beauty of Skyrim time and again.
The UI of the game is a neater and cleaner version of Oblivion. It still isn't the best UI around but it doesn't pose as much of an issue managing inventory and spells like Oblivion's did. I need to mention the PC version I played suffers from its own separate set of issues.In addition to the controls being awkwardly mapped and mouse sensitivity needing to be tweaked initially to be anywhere near playable, I had various instances where I was greeted by a black screen for no reason.
Possibly the biggest glitch I faced was when the voice files of an important character in the main quest failed to load. The result was he remained mute and trying to initiate conversation with him was impossible. Something which nearly broke my main quest until I had to follow the advice of a FAQ online and fixed the glitch. These are massively basic-level mistakes that shouldn't be there in a AAA-game like Skyrim. Yet they still are and they contribute collectively to break immersion every now and then the game's world so magically creates around the player.
Ultimately, Skyrim succeeds because of its setting. That was the one and the only thing any Elder Scrolls game needed to be good. Fortunately a lot of other things work in favour of Skyrim. A central conflict that gives peoples' problems more weight, events that acknowledge players' actions spring up now and then, making you feel that you are actually making some difference in the world. These are very small things many other RPGs forget but they add up to make a very big difference here. They make Skyrim one of the most immersive games this year.
It still has plenty of short-comings, some familiar, some bred by Skyrim's own half-baked innovations. It doesn't make any major changes you'd expect to happen in the 5 years since Oblivion and right now familiarity and low-risk nature of Bethesda poses the biggest danger to the series'. The role-playing genre has improved in a lot of aspects over the years and Skyrim often finds itself too slow to adapt to them. Its quests and role-playing still appears too linear for a game that provides immense freedom otherwise. It still needs to realize that smart writing can make the world's difference in a RPG.
The fact that Skyrim succeeds despite these numerous shortcomings should tell you exactly how good it is as a game. It brings back the thrill and excitement you feel while exploring a world as massive and richly detailed in history and lore as Skyrim. It overwhelms you not by its size but by its attention to detail. Skyrim chooses quality over quantity where Oblivion had chosen the latter.
This is where Skyrim triumphs and it is this which keeps you coming back for more. It isn't the story, towns or any characters, but it is the world of Skyrim itself which keeps pulling you back for one more exploration through its vast lands.One more run through an unexplored dungeon before you call it a night. That never turns out to be the case of course, but there lies the biggest justification if we needed one about Skyrim's true success. Its ability to immerse its players in a richly detailed universe that always keep them coming back for more.