The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim arrived on November 11, 2011, for Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, and it did not sneak up on anyone. Bethesda Game Studios built the fifth main entry in The Elder Scrolls series on its new Creation Engine, five years after The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What the studio turned in is a cold, mountainous province you can ignore for a hundred hours and still finish the story. That freedom is the whole point, and it is also where the game’s worst habits live.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
A Province Built on Forts and Old Ruins
Skyrim is set 201 years after Oblivion, in the northernmost province of Tamriel, on the continent of Nirn. It is not a direct sequel. The land is divided into nine holds, each run by a jarl from a larger town, and five of those settlements carry the weight: Solitude, Windhelm, Markarth, Riften, and Whiterun. Between them sit wilderness expanses, dungeons, caves, towns, fortresses, and villages, plus forts, camps, and ruins left by the extinct Dwemer.
The Nords call this place home. Dark Elf refugees from Morrowind, devastated by a volcanic eruption, are everywhere. The Reachmen hold a large western stretch called the Reach, and Orc strongholds sit across the map because the Nords let them settle.
Todd Howard, the game director and executive producer, wanted a rugged, largely sub-arctic world after Oblivion’s Imperial Province of Cyrodiil. He considered the new setting more unique by comparison. He was right about the choice. Cyrodiil was a postcard of rolling green; Skyrim is a place that feels like it wants you gone.
The Dragonborn and the World-Eater
The main story follows the player character, the Last Dragonborn, on a quest to defeat Alduin the World-Eater, a dragon prophesied to destroy the world. The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge. The High King of Skyrim has been murdered, alliances form as claims to the throne are made, and in the middle of that squabble a far more dangerous, ancient evil wakes up. Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned.
The future of Skyrim, even the Empire itself, hangs in the balance as they wait for the prophesized Dragonborn to come; a hero born with the power of The Voice, and the only one who can stand amongst the dragons.
That is a lot of capital letters, and the game knows it. The civil war between Empire and Stormcloaks is the more interesting thread precisely because it is smaller and pettier than the dragon apocalypse layered on top of it.
Ten Races, Eighteen Skills, No Straight Line
You pick a sex and one of ten races: Nords, Imperials, Orcs, Bretons, Redguards, Altmer, Dunmer, Bosmer, Khajiit, and Argonians. Each race carries a skill bonus and a unique power. Nords, for example, start with bonuses to several martial skills and can intimidate enemies for a short period. Appearance is chosen at the start but is not permanent; an in-game mechanic lets you change it later.
Three attributes govern everything. Health is how much damage you take before dying, magicka drains when you cast spells, and stamina fuels heavy power attacks and sprinting. Each attribute shows a status bar when it falls below its maximum, regenerates over time, and refills faster through potions, regenerative spells, or enchantments.
Experience is indirect. You level skills, not a character sheet. The 18 skills split evenly across combat, magic, and stealth, and each has its own bar that fills when you do the related thing. Craft a dagger and Smithing goes up. Land damage with a bow and Archery goes up. This is the best idea in the game and the reason a hundred hours can pass without a single main quest marker.
Horses, Fast Travel, and the Cost of Scale
The open world tradition holds. You can travel to discovered locations at any time and ignore or postpone the main storyline indefinitely. Movement is handled by riding horses, paying for a ride from a city’s stable, or fast-traveling to a previously discovered location.
Playable from first or third person, it is a fantasy action role-playing game first and a simulation second. You can recruit one NPC at a time as a follower to travel and fight beside you. There are forty-five available followers in the base game, with thirteen more added in the downloadable expansions.
The scale is the achievement. It is also the problem. At launch, technical issues were numerous enough to draw criticism, and they were not cosmetic. A province this size, running on hardware from 2006, was always going to strain.
Where the Fighting Falls Short
Combat is the weakest pillar. Dual-wielding drew praise, and it deserves it: pairing a spell with a blade or two blades at once gives the system a flexibility the earlier games lacked. The melee itself is another matter. Swings lack weight, and the feedback loop that should make a hit feel like a hit never quite lands.
Dragon battles take the most criticism, and the criticism is fair. The dragons are the marketing image of this game, and the fights built around them are the least satisfying encounters in it. A dragon should be the reason you look up. Too often it is the reason you wait for it to land.
Character advancement, world design, and visuals earned the acclaim. Those three carry the game. The leveling system rewards whatever you actually do, the world is dense with places worth walking to, and the northern light does a lot of work on a landscape of rock and snow.
The game shipped over seven million units, and it received critical acclaim on release. That figure is a shipment number, not a sales count, and the distinction matters when a publisher talks about a franchise’s reach.
What Skyrim Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
Skyrim’s real invention is the permission it gives you. The main story can wait forever. The civil war can wait forever. You can spend a session crafting daggers to push Smithing, or clearing a Dwemer ruin for no reason except that it was there. Very few games of this size trust the player that much, and the trust is why the world sticks.
The cost of that trust is a main quest that competes with its own distractions and loses. Alduin is a prophecy, not a character. The High King’s murder sets up a political argument the game never resolves with the force it deserves. The dragons are loud, and the war is quiet, and the quiet one is better written.
The technical state at launch is the part that has aged worst. Praise for the world design sits awkwardly beside a launch that drew criticism for numerous technical issues. A game this ambitious should not have shipped in that condition, and the fact that it became a fixture of the decade anyway says something about how much players will forgive for a world worth living in.
Eighteen skills, ten races, nine holds, forty-five followers, and one province that has been re-released more times than this review needs to count. The math of Skyrim is generous. The math of its combat is not.
This is a game that earns its reputation on exploration and character building, not on its set pieces. The dual-wield system is a genuine step forward. The melee and the dragon fights are a genuine step back. Both things are true, and the score has to hold both.
Bethesda built a world worth the walk and filled the walk with fights that do not deserve it. That trade is the whole game in one sentence.
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