Game Review: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

For my first game review on my blog, I want to review a game that's positively amazing. So amazing that it would be impossible for someone not to want to play it if they considered themselves gamers at all. I would like this to be the first in a long line of video game walkthrough/advice/discussion articles. Not just for this game, but for any that I or any subsequent writers would be willing to play. I decided that the first game should be my favorite game of 2011, one the I have sunk about 16 hours into, and then another 38 after my character was accidentally deleted, as of the beginning of my winter break, December 16. Yes, you read that right. Thirty. Eight. Hours. Over a period of a month and a half, playing every other day or so. The sales clerk at GameStop told me this game has over 500 hours of content, so that means that after spending over 2½ days in this game, I am just under (or over if you add both periods of time together) one tenth done with the game, and I don't think the INFINITE QUEST GENERATOR that is in Skyrim has even kicked in yet. My character's name is S'rPuphi, read Sir Poofy. My family has a tradition of weird sounding, abstract character names in video games. For instance, my dad's character name in Skyrim is N'hara, my name in Skyrim on my computer (I can't get enough of it on PS3, so I have to have it on the go!) is Azciikha. I have to restate that this game is simply astounding. It may need the Guiness World Record for Largest Frikkin' Game Ever Made, and when I am in a state of political power that is honored enough, I shall make this a record, and then make Skyrim, or whatever Elder Scrolls game is out a that time, the winner. The Elder Scrolls games have had a history of being gigantic. Because I can't explain how massive this game is other than what I've said before, I'll give you this comparison: The hard drive space on my PS3 that Skyrim needs is 5.5 GB. A racing game that I have in the Burnout series that I haven't played in a while is a couple hundred MB. Skyrim is over 25 times larger than that game. But I digress from the review. I should be talking about what in this game is great, not how this game is great. There are also setbacks that Skyrim has, but I'l talk about those in a little while. So what makes this game my favorite game of 2011, a very prestigious honor in this blog, but for some odd reason nowhere else? Let's begin with the novella. If Skyrim doesn't break any records, this post will by winning Longest Blog Post of the Year. OK. No more sidetracks. But sidetracks are actually the first thing I'm going to write about. In some games, even thought they do not have a quality that Skyrim has (coming up next), have side quests that are maybe a fifth or sixth as big as the main quest, and are usually pointless, as the rewards that you get won't help you, matter, or provide more than an hour of extra content. This is, of course, more opinion and generalization than fact (for this sentence only). Side quests in Skyrim are large. I played one branch of side quests a few days ago that took 5 hours. I later found out that I was only through with a third of these quests. On the start menu, in the General Tab, there is a Quest category. In this category, there are maybe 10-12 rows of stats, Quests Completed, Side Quests Completed, but then, there's Storylines Completed. There are 14 Questlines in Skyrim. There is the Main, College of Winterhold, Companions, Greybeards, Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Civl War, Blades, Bards College, Imperial Legion, Stormcloak Rebellion, Daedric, Dungeon, and Miscellaneous. The Miscellaneous Quests are any and all quests that don't fit these first 13 categories because they don't feed into larger quests. The main quest took me maybe 40-45 hours or more to complete. Remember what I said earlier about 38 hours as of the 16th? Yeah…too much free time over the first half of winter break led to what I call the Days of Loneliness. My dad had not yet been let off his self-employed job for his winter break, so I had our theater room to myself. I would wake up at about 5 or 5:30 (thanks to school, I automatically wake up around that hour every weekday), complete my morning routine, and zoom downstairs, have breakfast (a Pop-Tart, meal bar, or bowl of Cheerios and milk), and then shut the doors to our sound-proof room, load up the PS3, theater screen and turn off the remote-control lights, and play. I would emerge hours later and have dinner, talk with my family, and then go to bed. This is all a slight exaggeration. My play time has risen to over 55 hours over winter break. That's 20-ish hours over 2 weeks of being alone at home. That's not as much as you would think per day. But I finished the Main Quest about 10 hours into playing this break. 48 hours was the main quest of Skyrim. If the sales clerk at GameStop was accurate in the 500 hours of pre-loaded content in Skyrim before the Quest Generator, the side quests in Skyrim are 450 hours, and counting. The side quests, as I said before, are maybe a fifth or sixth of the size of the main quest in other games. In Skyrim, the included side quests are nine (or is it ten?) times as large as the main quest. If that doesn't sell you with this game, nothing will. Or actually, this might. Skyrim follows the Grand Theft Auto and previous Elder Scrolls customs and ways and has a free roam, completely open environment. The only places you can't go are blocked by mountains too steep for the characters to cross. 99.999 percent of the world of Skyrim is reachable with your avatar, and that's expanded by the multiple areas with enormous underground levels, such as an area called Blackreach that in an underground city spanning a ninth of the map, which is absolutely massive. A foldout poster of the map that came with the 656 page strategy guide had over 250 locations, and is about 2½ or 3 feet tall. There is, however, one area with an invisible wall. There is a gate in the lower right of the world that is only passable through hacking the game with the developer console. If you pass through the gate in no-clip mode, you can travel through scaled down versions of the areas from the other Elder Scrolls games. These games were almost as massive as Skyrim. There is a looming rumor that these areas will be added in the DLC for the game. The game is also very random. The Creation Engine in the game allows for dragons to randomly appear. You may never know when they appear, but it add an element of surprise to the game. If you are someone that likes to explore, and wants to see the vastness of Skyrim, but you have a quest going (which will be almost always), then you can venture out, and disregard the quests you have active until you return to this area. To simplify what I just said, you could say that a player could postpone any quest forever, if they wanted to, and it won't affect the game. There are many other things I could say to praise Skyrim, but, as promised, I must say some negative things about the game. The AI of many characters feels clunky. Many characters act like robots, just programmed to do what they should. For instance, I asked one character, who was following me, to take an item to a certain person. They walked about halfway, but then appeared right back next to me when I entered a different area, doing what its programming told it to do by default, and I had to deliver the item. Another thing that annoys me in Skyrim is the abundance of loading screens. Yes, you may be in a large area for many hours, but if you are out in the open world, looking for a quest, or delivering  something to someone when you don't know where they are, then you may encounter a loading screen every few minutes. Loading screens take maybe 15 seconds to a minute to load, and become an annoyance after a while. Sure, the developers included snippets of tips or fun facts about Skyrim in the corner, and movable 3D models of many characters, weapons, items, and enemies, but it's still annoying to wait a minute every time you enter or leave a location. If you mistakenly entered a location, it might be another 2 minutes before you are back on track.  Still, Skyrim is a great game, and I hope anyone who hasn't played it already to check it out. Skyrim is (retail) $60.00 for Windows (Disc and Steam), PS3, and XBOX 360, and there are probably some unofficial ports out there too. Happy Gaming!