Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The World of Skyrim!

After a trip back to my parents house, wherein my gaming was more or less replaced by some light hacking (with dramatically varied levels of success) for the span of my Thanksgiving break, I realized I had to write a Super Nerd Sunday. And while there are a lot of things I’d like to write about right now I don’t really feel comfortable doing so for a number of reasons. But since NDAs are legally binding and not having finished Skyrim isn’t I think I’m going to talk about the latter.

I still don’t want to assess Skyrim as a finished product – I’d feel uncomfortable doing that. Despite putting in almost seventy hours I still don’t think I’m anywhere clear the end game, and there are still corners of the world map I’ve barely touched. But the sections I’ve visited and the quests I’ve navigated have been incredible experiences for me. Every creature I fight, from wolf to giant, has been a joy. So I’d like to list off, just randomly, a few of my choicest Skyrim experiences.

- Robbing a museum filled with deadly traps
- Fleeing said museum by tricking some guards with an arrow and jumping into a waterfall to land safely at its base
- Becoming a werewolf (Of course)
- Helping someone else stop being a werewolf
- Going on a bender with the god of liquor and merriment
- Getting my own woman in exchange for slaying a dragon, who I leave in my house for her own safety
- Buying a house, then renovating it with absolutely no help from my house-lady
- Making armor from the skin and bones of my enemies
- Meeting the stripper god of stealing shit and making a good first impression
- Fencing a gemstone the size of a statue’s eye
- Jumping on a dragon’s head and driving a sword into its skull repeatedly
- Cinematically stabbing a guard through the chest after bungling the job on the first try, then letting her body slide off my blade into the still waters of a smuggler’s cove
- Piecing together my bender with the aforementioned god of merriment
- Getting locked in a cage
- Getting a pet robot spider
- Killing a pet robot spider
- Killing a ghost
- Taking back a marriage proposal
- Breaking into dozens of safes
- Downed a dragon with the sound of my voice
- Broke a Viking out of Elf Gitmo
- Made some stew

That is, at Skyrim’s heart, the sort of game it aspires to be. It’s a game rife with cool shit in a world where you can really appreciate the scope of your shit and how cool it really is. It’s one thing to provide players with a sandbox, as so many do, but Skyrim takes it one step farther: it makes the world more than just a sandbox. It makes it a place where you can have an impact.

It’s nothing new, really, for this team or their allies: Bethesda and Obsidian have been doing this for decades. But the way they’ve done it in Skyrim, along with the changes to the interface and the underlying systems of the game, really makes the whole thing feel tighter than it ever has before. It’s one thing to populate a world with interesting people, it’s another altogether to write stories tying them together and parcel them out as perfect as Skyrim has.

And the stripped down character development system forwards this end: instead of letting characters micromanage each of the ten stats you make very skill-specific bonus choices and add to one of your three previously derived stats in other Elder Scrolls games (health, magicka and stamina). There are certainly ways that the whole system could’ve worked better, for example the addition of racially specific trees with character bonuses that consumed skill points could’ve added personality to the races that the alteration of the skill system sort of removed. But as it stands it’s a nice, tight little system that seems to give characters an excellent sense of customization without distracting them from the real star here: the world of Skyrim itself.

I’ll write more about that soon, more about how new systems like dual wielding and a revamped spellcasting system have changed the way this plays as an Elder Scrolls game. But for now I’d like to just leave it at the wonderful world of Skyrim itself and the crazy shit that happens there. Because I’ve never enjoyed crazy shit quite so much or in such wonderful variety as I have in Skyrim.