There aren’t many games that we can go back to after a long pause and instantly feel comfortable playing them again. Morrowind and Oblivion were like that, and the latest installment in The Elder Scrolls saga is sure to cause the same feeling once we return to it long after we have finished our adventure. Fortunately, this is one hell of a lengthy adventure, so there is too much to do before even thinking of coming back to it!
Taking place 200 years after the events in Oblivion, Skyrim offers us the Northern territories of Tamriel to explore, home of the Nords, where the theme revolves around Viking influences, snowy mountain landscapes and icy caverns.
The story itself begins as you travel in a carriage with other prisoners, who are to be decapitated for being involved in the King’s assassination. A high-pitch scream is heard and a dragon soars above the village, interrupting the execution. Some are turned into living roast, some flee for their lives, you notice what sounds like words coming from the dragon as he breathes fire upon everything that moves. But your adventure only truly begins when you get out of this sticky situation and find yourself out in the open cold.
Your journeys are mostly up and down slopes, which are a challenge on their own. It’s not exactly easy to make your way anywhere because of the landscape, the creatures and the many distractions along the way, such as dungeons, caves, passing villagers, a tiny hamlet, chests and doors to open, books to read, herbs to pick. It’s easy to fill up your quest log, to the point where you don’t even know what to do next, and you can go on for hours without even touching the main quest because there is so much to do. And basically, everything you do is getting you closer to gain a level: making a potion, sneaking, opening a locked chest (lockpicking now works like in Fallout), disarming a trap, casting a spell, blocking an incoming blow, shooting an arrow, pickpocketing. The more you use a particular skill, the better you are at it. And no, this time there is no Acrobatics to make you jump around the world like an idiot in order to level it up (hooray!).
Every time you level you can improve either Magicka, Stamina or Health. Your skill tree is represented by 18 constellations in the sky, one per skill, composed of several stars, each representing a perk. This allows you to customize your character to the way you want to play the game, and maxing out a particular skill means you get some really interesting and useful attributes.
For example, with Stealth at its highest level, you are basically invisible even in plain sight, you can improve Lockpicking to the point where the lockpicks will never break, while maxing out Enchanting lets you add an extra enchantment to an item. To top it off, there is no level cap, which means you can go on improving your character past level 50. Basically, leveling up is a fairly fast process until level 50, getting increasingly more difficult up until the level cap (81), and mastering all the skills is definitely time-consuming yet extremely gratifying.
All the freedom of exploration and character development make the experience what you want it to be. You can choose to fight that dragon that keeps stalking you from above, or run and let it attack something else. Better yet, you can wait for it to be busy attacking something else, and start shooting at it from a distance! Killing a dragon is always a satisfying feat, and the reward is a soul which you then use to activate shouts. Finding dragon words and combining these words will allow you to use more powerful shouts, which aren’t connected with the usual Magicka and have their own recovery time instead.
The only “buts” in this wonderfully detailed free-roaming world are the bugs and glitches. You will find yourself stuck in invisible world geometry. Your horse will roam off to never appear again (not to mention attack whatever it feels like on occasion, the idiot…). People will randomly talk all at once, preventing you for hearing the important parts of the story (subtitles are useful here). Worst of all, the game will freeze on occasion and you will have to power off your console and resume playing wherever you saved last.
Bugs and glitches aside (and with such a vast, open world, you know you’re bound to find them), Skyrim is a fantastic epic fantasy RPG that draws you in more and more each time you play, and that can steal a hundred hours of your life without you even noticing. And I wonder… would that fall under Stealth, Pickpocketing or Enchanting?
