Skyrim is one of the huge blockbuster games to come out this year alongside Batman Arkham City, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3, Assassin's Creed Revelations, etc. Many people are already quite familiar with the Elder Scrolls series and of course will dutifully pick this game up like the sheep they are. But to start, this game is a massive open world action-RPG. You can go anywhere and do anything you want. The graphics are stunning and there are so many playstyles and options available to you from the start. It's truly a breathtaking game that will leave you in awe.
At least, thats what the developers wanted everyone to believe.
This game is developed by Bethesda games, which is known for other superb games such as Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You might see a trend there. They are all massively open world action-RPG games that let you do whatever you want. But thats probably one of the biggest flaws of these games. Doing whatever you want on paper sounds like a fantastic idea but it ends up falling short. Which would you rather do in an action game: be able to do a triple front flip over an enemy to strike at their back or steal a bunch of wooden plates that are worth 1 gold? Probably the triple front flip. Skyrim is huge, no doubts about that, but just because it is huge doesn't make it better. If you only had one town in a game that you could mess around in, you'd probably get tired of it quickly. Bethesda's answer to that is well, lets make a hundred towns and scatter them all over the map, and we'll make them very far from everything else. Now you are still doing the same monotonous and meaningless stuff you were doing initially in the game, but now just in a larger area. That doesn't really increase fun factor. My biggest complaint with this game (and with all the bethesda games really) is that there is TOO MUCH of nothing to do. From an observer's standpoint, in one town you could very easily find a hundred wooden plates. You can take all of them and sell them for a sheer profit. But they are worth 1 gold. Thats not much profit when everything you slay in the world drops 10-60 gold at a time. Why bother stealing those plates? And I know no one out there is actually taking those. So why are they there? Do they server a purpose? Is there a quest later on that I haven't gotten to yet that asks you to retrieve some number of plates for a quest giver? I highly doubt that. Most of the game world is taken up by useless junk to give the impression of freedom and that the game world is large. I'd rather you conserved that space and added some more core game mechanics.
And that is something that this game does do correctly. The leveling up and skill system is perfect in its execution. You get experience for the skills you actually utilize (if you use destruction magic all the time, that skill will level up more and in turn, grant you more exp to your character level.) When you level up you get to choose whether you would like to increase Health, Stamina, or Magic. From there you also get to choose a perk in any of the skill trees such as making pickpocketing people 20% more likely to succeed. However every perk has a skill level requirement. An example is sneaking. At Sneaking lvl 20 you can choose the perk to make you 20% less likely to be seen when sneaking. Now that perk can be upgraded 5 times all the way to 100%, but if you haven't reached skill lvl 40 you can not get the next level of that perk. The system works really well and is very interesting. The only problem with that is that the system can be taken advantage of to a DRASTIC degree. I'm lvl 37 in the game, almost lvl 38. I have done almost no quests. I just stored up about 2000 gold and went to a particular skill trainer in the town of Whiterun. He trained me in one-handed weapons til I had no money left. I then let him turn around (or in most cases go back to sleep) and then pickpocketed my money back. If the chance of success was low I saved my game and would constantly quit and reload until he didn't notice me stealing from him. One successful steal from him raise my pickpocketing by 2 lvls. It wasn't long into the game before my pickpocketing skill was maxed out. Nifty trick, and it leveled up my character fast (I must've been at least 30 by the time I finished doing that.) The thing about a huge game like this is that there needs to an incentive to explore every facet of the game and to engage in the world around you and I strongly feel like the game fails to do that.
Before you cry fowl, I love RPGs. My favorite game of all time is Chrono Trigger, a classic SNES RPG. I'm no stranger to long games and/or extensive quests and sidequests. But Skyrim takes it to another level to where it just gets repetitive. After you fight your first dragon in the game, which is one of the "great" mechanics, it's no longer an enthralling experience. You see another one, you kill it for its power and loot, and you continue on your way. No big deal. No big deal?! In every other game I've ever played that has included dragons, they are not easy to kill at all. They are usually the toughest opponents in video games and this game kind of bastardizes them. They are no more difficult then a pathetic wolf in the wild. That truly saddens me. Giants in this game have proved to be harder to kill the dragons. When did that happen?
And the biggest gripe of all, is that this game is made by Bethesda, a company more famous for its countless bugs in all their games then for anything else. This game is no exception. There are bugs that make the environment look awful with textures not loading or coming out blurry, bugs that allow you to steal EVERYTHING in a building if you just put a basket or pot on everyone's head (apparently AI can't see through baskets and pots), bugs that can utterly break the game for you. If this was Bethesda's first console game then fine, I understand that you are new to this designing a game for consoles thing. But this is not the case. After 3 games, that are literally the exact same game in terms of game engine and gameplay, you'd think that they'd have figured some of these glitches out and known how to look for them. Nope, not only do they still have glitches, they still have the same damn glitches. Do you understand how ridiculous that is? That is a game designer telling you they don't give a damn if the game is broken. That is sloppy game design and that is something I cannot abide by.
Even though I've bashed this game quite a bit, all in all it is fairly good. But thats only if you can see your way past all the flaws. Me? At this point, with all the games that have been released, I don't have the time to drop 100+ hours in a game with so much random crap in it. I'll finish the game, in terms of completing the main quest, but that is pretty much it. And who knows when that'll be. It took me a couple years to finish Oblivion and Fallout 3 (even though I loved Fallout 3, i waited for all of the dlc to release before I finished it) and I imagine the same will be said for Skyrim. There are too many better offerings out there that aren't glitchy and that have a more focused goal. Skyrim is the ADD child's RPG.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim gets a 70 out of 100
