Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Still Not Done With Skyrim!

I still don’t know how close I am to finishing Skyrim, and I’m now 80 hours into it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the central quest line at this point, and I’ve really only tackled a handful of major quest lines. I’ve purchased houses in two cities and finished two sets of guild quests. I’ve uncovered a conspiracy at the heart of a city and liberated a war criminal. I’ve been trying to cure my lycanthropy, but it doesn’t seem to be going too well for me right now. And I’ve been looking for a Necklace of Mara to give to a Aela so that she’ll settle down with me and we can start making some half-scaly, half-regular babies, but to no avail.

This is kind of the heart of Skyrim, of Elder Scrolls games in general: distraction, rather than guidance, is the order of the day. And that’s actually kind of great. Since Daggerfall the games have been less about what you’re supposed to do and more about the staggering array of options available to you in the world on offer. For the most part the series has just improved the fidelity and accessibility of the material as time has gone on, rather than really expanding it overmuch. There aren’t a lot of options that haven’t been around for many, many games at this point: the ability to acquire property, the ability to improve your own equipment, being able to marry characters, become a member of a guild and so on, you’ve been able to do most of these things since Daggerfall, at least. In fact, sometimes features are lost in a new Elder Scrolls offering and the world of possibilities shrinks a little. Oblivion and Morrowwind, for example, didn’t let you form relationships with NPCs. In fact, I’m confident that Oblivion got rid of your ability to become a werewolf altogether, a crucial part of many storylines in previous iterations.

The skill based leveling, the way that magic functions and the way that you chose stat bonuses, these were qualities that Elder Scrolls titles before Skyrim had kept consistent but they weren’t the core of the game itself. They were its delivery system. The experiences themselves formed that core, the wealth of cool shit you could do in Tamriel was the real driving force behind each of the games. And while fidelity has always increased from game to game, the degree of cool shit has remained inelastic at best, at times shrinking as the game progresses. That is, until Skyrim.

Skyrim has some problems, to be sure. It features a simplified system of character development and combat, wherein difficult decisions really don’t have to be made: you really can be a jack of all trades, there’s no sort of upkeep or grind for your equipment and the major and minor skill system which previously controlled leveling and the speed at which skills increased is gone, lost in favor of a set of stones that allow you to pick and choose which skill set you want to raise faster at any given time. In doing so, Skyrim has abandoned a number of things that would’ve been considered key Elder Scrolls features in the past, but it has also accomplished something wonderful. It cut through a lot of the bullshit of playing the game and made experiencing the world that much more approachable. And this more approachable corner of Tamriel is jam packed with cool shit that you couldn’t do in previous Elder Scrolls adventures. If you want to dual wield, you can. For the first time ever you can have companions at your side. You can make your hand into a fucking flamethrower, for fuck’s sake. And you can fight dragons, use your voice as a weapon and fight in a revolution that reshapes the entire game world.

I understand why die-hard fans might not like the mechanical changes: they’re a big step away from what was a previously consistent element of a venerable series. They dumb down a system which people would ply painstaking mathematic formulas to in order to develop the best character, a system people really loved. But much as I loved it, I have to admit I sometimes found that system of character progression to be kind of oppressive. In order to make the character I wanted to play I had to invest a lot of time and effort in gaming that progression system, effort that I’ve put into exporing the world in Skyrim.

Which brings me back to the scale of the game, the scope of its distraction. Skyrim is full of details, so full of them that I’m not sure I’ll be able to actually ever experience everything the game has on offer. And many of its details are things I don’t want to engage on my first playthrough, like picking a side between Imperials and Stormcloaks. Skyrim is full of places, more so than anywhere else I’ve been in a video game, ever, spare possibly Morrowwind. I don’t just mean that it’s big, though the world is quite large. I mean that the world has a lot going on in it, that it is densely populated and interesting in a way that other places normally aren’t. Each tiny hamlet, each ramshackle camp, is possessed of a story all its own, not just a single quest line but a history, a branch of quests that twine into the surrounding world and sometimes make their way back to distant places, places you’ve already been with histories you’ve already been a part of.

The end result is a flowing, shifting world where your actions, which are as robust as they’ve ever been in any Elder Scroll’s game, more than most of the recent releases, have meaningful impact, where you can make a name for yourself and change the world around you. Sure, there are technical problems (the giant-death bug where you’re launched into the skybox remains one of my personal favorites) but in any game with the sheer scope that Skyrim has, you have to accept a modicum of bugginess. When physics act a bit odd, there’s nothing wrong with it. However, when the scripting language bugs out the immersion breaks a bit. I’ve had to use console commands to complete a major quest which has a history of breaking early on (the Thieves Guild quest line, specifically) and a character who dramatically sacrifices himself in battle is now sitting in the Companion Hall again, ready to give me quests as often as he feels like it. The fact that things like this happen is a problem, bigger than a handful of bugs that make the game a little wackier than intended.

But with all that said, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a wonderful place to take a very, very lazy vacation, and I still think that, for allowing you to become a part of a world, to relax there and build it up or break it down as you wish to, there’s no better game at present. I can’t wait to finish enough of it that I’m comfortable writing a fuller and more formal review of it.