Review: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Like this? (7 votes)The first time it really hit me, I was walking up the path to Whiterun’s main gate. Whiterun is the first city you will come across when you play Skyrim, Bethesda’s expansive new open-world RPG. Or at least, it is the first city you come across if you follow the game’s story for the first fifteen minutes or so. But maybe you don’t. Maybe the moment you exit the obligatory, linear, slightly too long tutorial introduction you turn left instead of right and just walk off into the wilderness, story be damned; that’s totally okay.
But anyway, I went straight to Whiterun. That’s beside the point as it was probably the twentieth or so time that I had walked up the path to the main gate before it hit me. See, Whiterun is a walled city on something of a mound. To get inside, you have to walk up this winding, gradual path that follows an entire side of the city before u-turning and eventually coming back to the gate. There’s no other way into Whiterun. I was walking this path for the umpteenth time and thinking about how it would have been far easier and user-friendly if the level designers had just put the gate down the front with some stairs.
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But the moment I thought it, I realised why it was like this: the titular world of Skyrim isn’t a level. It’s a place. The path to the gate is like this not to be friendly or unfriendly to the player, but because that is how it would be in a world where a walled city’s ultimate priority is defence, not convenience. Skyrim cares about the consistency of its fictional world first and your playing of it second. Conversely, this is what makes playing Skyrim so enjoyable.
That Bethesda build worlds will be of no surprise if you have played any of the studios previous games, be it the earlier Elder Scrolls games such as Morrowind and Oblivion or the more recent Fallout 3. Bethesda author vast and dense worlds lavished with mythologies, histories, personalities, and intrigues; then they place you in it. There is a ‘central’ quest, of course, and finishing that (I suspect) will cause some kind of credits to roll over the screen. But more important than this is the story of your character that you weave through the landscape: an individual story consisting of moments from the game’s main plot, moments from myriad other quests, and moments from just wandering around. All of these come together in your own personal character’s existence and growth, and that is what Skyrim is about.
It’s something that Morrowind did perfectly but Oblivion stumbled with, that perfect assimilation of the ‘central’ quest and everything else possible within the game’s world. Oblivion’s issue was that the central quest was central. It was time sensitive. It was urgent. The Empire was being invaded immediately and you had to stop it or else. If you went off and spent a year in, say, the Thieves Guild, that city you must save now would still be burning down a year later. It created a schism in the time line. Kind of like Grand Theft Auto; you have the emergent play and the story play, and they went together like water and oil.
So the biggest compliment I can give Skyrim, and my biggest relief with the game, is that it more-or-less resolves this schism. It’s not perfect, but Bethesda seem to have learned (or perhaps remembered) that the kind of stories their worlds are made for are not urgent but prolonged. Less about an imminent tsunami and more about the long-term effects of global warming. Sure, there are dragons that are terrorising the nation and they must be dealt with. But you rarely get the sense they must be dealt with now. Dealing with them just becomes a part of your life, along with walking through the countryside, joining Bard College, and fighting in/against a rebellion.
Speaking of rebellion, Skyrim’s political landscape is as dense, thick, and multi-layered as its natural landscape. The dragon crisis is just one highlighted thread amongst many others weaved together to form the tapestry that is this game’s world. The rebellion-cum-war between the colonising Imperials and the Nordic Stormcloaks avoids classification as a simplistic invaders-vs-indigenous conflict, with many Nords falling on both sides of the conflict and many others on neither side. Regardless of which side you personally choose to join (assuming you pick either side) you quickly find out that neither is particularly good or evil—just different. Elsewhere, the Thieves Guild is able to operate more publicly than in previous games thanks solely to the needs of a powerful, corrupt, and monopolising businesswoman. Simultaneously, the Thieves Guild must do anything that businesswoman demands if they don’t want the full power of the law coming down on them. One of the true pleasures of Skyrim is tracing the flows of power between factions and cities and people. Instead of simplifying its politics for the ease of the player, Skyrim lavishes in its complexity.
But what of the player in all this? A detailed world is all good and fine, but a good game hinges on how you are able to interact with that world.
Most importantly, Oblivion’s horrendous level-scaling has been more-or-less fixed. In Oblivion, where once there were rats and stray wolves, ten hours later there would be trolls and thieves decked out in expensive glass armour demanding 50 gold. It completely negated any progress you made with your character and ultimately removed one of the main pleasures of playing a role-playing game: getting stronger. In Skyrim, enemies still scale, but far more subtly and far more proportionately with your own character’s growth. While my stealthy thief struggled with the lowliest of bandits at the game’s start, now she is taking out trolls and giants with a poisoned dagger before they even know she is there. So the enemies are getting stronger, but I am getting stronger still. I feel more powerful now than when I started playing. As it should be.
However, it is far from perfect, and many players are still being held back by the increasingly powerful enemies. Though, I suspect this problem lies not in the level-scaling so much as in Skyrim’s streamlined character development system.
Did I say you could take my picture?
While previous Elder Scrolls had you choose a job class and assigned you major and minor skill accordingly, Skyrim does away with the jobs completely and gives you complete access to all the available skills (light armour, lockpicking, destruction magic, sneaking, smithing, one-handed weapons, etc.). Every skill has its own perk-tree, and every time your character levels up, you can unlock or upgrade another perk. It is a very open and customisable system that allows for a vast array of characters. However, the downside of its openness is its lack of guidance. Without the direction of any kind of job classification, it is far too easy for a player to spread their skills and perks too thinly across too many skills, becoming a jack of all trades and a master of none. While one player’s level 10 character could be an absolute master of one-handed weapons, another player’s character could be moderately good with one-handed weapons, destruction magic, and bows, but great at none of them. Yet, the enemies will simply scale to “Level 10”.
If you haven’t played an Elders Scrolls game before and don’t have a memory of the previous job classes to guide you, this can be disastrous. I’ve heard of many a frustrated player giving up after about ten or twenty hours with the game as their dabbling in a variety of skills have led them into a world their character is too weak to deal with. The system allows flexibility and diversity, yet the nature of the game demands specialisation. This isn’t a failure of the game’s character development system per se, but a failure of the game to communicate what is required of you.
In fact, it is communication failures that are my major criticisms of Skyrim. Most notoriously, the user-interface.
Oblivion’s menu system was clumsy, annoying, and ugly. Skyrim’s is clumsy, annoying, and pretty. It looks good, don’t get me wrong. The modern serif font and slender black columns look great. But my god who decided lists were a good idea for an RPG inventory system? The items menu may be separated into a few arbitrary submenus (weapons, apparel, books, potions, etc) but once you have been playing for a few hours and are carrying a small caravan’s worth of potions in your magical pockets, this hardly helps. The lists are made worse still by being sorted alphabetically—which is great in theory but just a pain when you have “Health Potions”, “Minor Healing Potions”, “Strong Health Potions”, and “Lesser Healing Potions”. Why aren’t all my health potions in the same place? Meanwhile, under weapons, instead of having all your arrows together and all your swords together, all your Ss are together and all your Is are together.
Worse is the lack of any kind of decent hot-key system. Instead of being able to assign a different combination of left-hand/right-hand equipment/spells to each of the eight directions on the d-pad, you are stuck with a “favourites” list (also alphabetically sorted) that is no less annoying than the full inventory menu, just slightly quicker to open. Perhaps it will be less troublesome for a brutish, straightforward character who just needs a great sword and room to swing it. But for my stealthy character, swapping between dual daggers, bow, magic, and poisons, combat becomes so jarringly stop-start between my visits to the favourites menu that I might as well be playing Pokémon. I imagine a magic-focused character would have similar trouble.
The communication failures of the user-interface go beyond the inventory menus, too. The map is fancy and detailed, but completely lacking in any of the information one normally requires of a map, such as paths. Meanwhile, half of it is blotted in cloud cover. Never mind the fact that the button to place a compass marker is the same button used to quick-travel to locations—ultimately making it impossible to place a compass marker on actual locations. Then there is the equally pretty skill/perk trees that are equally impossible to ween any kind of over-arching information out of. It is all quite minimalistic, to be sure, but it has achieved its minimalism by removing the wheat, not the chaff.
This is what happens when you're not Team Jacob
Being on console is hardly an excuse, either. Morrowind’s grid-based inventory worked perfectly nearly a decade ago on the original Xbox. There is no justifiable reason why we are stuck with such clumsy (albeit pretty) lists in 2011. Of course, after about fifty hours of playing, I have gotten used to the inventory. But that doesn’t make them acceptable.
Phew. That was a lot of words of grievance about a menu system. The thing is, they are really annoying and jar horrifically in a game that is otherwise utterly beautiful and compelling. I have lost myself in Skyrim for weeks, and I plan to remain lost for several more weeks to come. The game is a staggering achievement marred only by the amount of time you will spend scrolling through lists, wondering if your health potions are under H, G, L, or S. There is so much here, so much I could spend several more thousand words talking about. In fifty hours there is still so much I haven’t seen. Not just caves and dungeons, mind you; entire cities and territories I am yet to explore.
Skyrim presents you with one of the most detailed, dense, consistent worlds in the history of gaming and gives you more than enough to do while you are there. Entering Skyrim is easy. The difficulty is getting back out.
I have found it odd that reactions have been so strong in both directions for the UI. I have found that it works perfectly for my own needs, but I imagine that it might be different depending on the demands of your playstyle
I found the favourite system to work fine, and the pace of the game when favourites are need, which is combat is slow enough (at least for my stealthy character) that the brief time I spend swapping things out in the menu is never a problem. Most item management is during my downtime at my house so I never feel like it is keeping me from doing all I need to do.
I generally have no problems with the menus. I generally like to use it when selecting weapons or magic. But when I move to the list of potions and poisons, I get really annoyed.
It doesn’t help that some similarly named potions are grouped together. Not just the differences between a Potion of Plentiful Healing and Minor Healing. But I’ve had two separate entries for Minor Healing potions before, though I can’t see any discernible differences. Perhaps I’m just encountering a bug here, but it’s still annoying.
Still, it’s a minor annoyance, and given the grand scale of the game, I’m willing to overlook it.
My initial reaction to the menus/interface was that I really liked it. It felt natural to me, and for the following 20 hours. I’ve had a break from the game, so perhaps when I dive back in I’ll start to feel some of your frustrations – although I think as you say that it depends on your character.