This is Skeezix’s Brain on Gaming
Is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Still Worth Playing?
My rule for reviewing games is usually that I have to complete all of the main content and a good number of sidequests before forming an opinion. Since I’m not covering them as they come out, I’m not under time pressure, so I owe it to my readers to put out a complete, thorough review.
Obviously, there’s no way I could have followed that rule for Skyrim.
I did my best. I finished the main quest and a few of the bigger side questlines. I explored a number of dungeons that weren’t required for anything else, and I generally tried to cast a wide net, sampling different kinds of content from all over the map. I even got a couple of skills to level 100. But it was an exercise in futility; I could have spent a hundred more hours with the game and still not done everything there is to do.
I came late to Skyrim, the same way I came late to Grand Theft Auto V, getting it for Switch just a couple of years ago. Since then, I’ve been playing it on and off before I finally sunk my teeth in fully around a month ago. In light of that, I felt it was time to write a review. As I mentioned in my review of Rockstar’s golden boy, I believe that the four essential elements of a successful video game (in reverse order of how interesting they are to discuss in a review) are presentation, mechanics, structure, and story. There won’t be any spoilers in the coverage of the first three sections. Without any further ado, let’s get into it, starting with the game’s presentation.
I wasn’t playing big-budget video games in 2011. At the time, my idea of good graphics was Wii Sports Resort. This is another way of saying that I have no idea whether Skyrim’s graphics would have been impressive when it came out, but, hoo boy, they sure aren’t now. Textures are muddy and gross, characters look like they’ve been doing Nord meth, and the lighting is all over the place. The game is pretty enough when you find a nice vantage point and get a good view, but not at night (and it always seems to be night); then, everything turns into an undefined gray-blue-black mess. Even the food is unappealing, and it’s really hard for a video game to get food wrong.
I’d like to say more about the characters than just that one snippy off-color jibe. It’s kind of ridiculous just how ugly they are. The designers seemed to believe that they could simply paste realistic textures onto a cartoony model and get results, but in fact they couldn’t. For some reason, the various varieties of elves, who are supposed to be the most beautiful inhabitants of Skyrim, got the worst of it; I think it’s the eyes.
Still, it’s not all bad. Even if the textures aren’t all there, they are at least fairly brightly colored, which keeps Skyrim out of the ugly-brown-game trap that a lot of “serious” games of that era fell into. The artstyle is also highly consistent, and because nothing looks out of place, your immersion is rarely broken by a strangely high-definition sweetroll or something. Lastly, the enemy designs are pretty good; even if the game isn’t good at representing, say, Jarl Elisif “the fair,” it does a serviceable job of knocking together a hideous troll or dessicated draugr.
If the graphics aren’t quite up to scratch, the sound design certainly is. Dungeons are moody and atmospheric, leaving players with a genuine feeling of apprehension. It’s far from a horror game, but I was definitely relieved to finally escape the game’s darkest caverns and return to the world above. This also sounds great; the wind and weather is highly immersive, and the music is good as well. I personally liked the lighter touch of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild more as far as the soundtrack goes — it’s hard to feel particularly heroic when you’re just slogging through a swamp looking for nirnroot — but you certainly can’t fault its quality, and it gives you a great sense of adventure. Modern video games need to be made with an artistic eye, and, overall, I would say that Skyrim meets that bar.
As I’ve explained before, “mechanics” is a broad category. Essentially, it reflects the moment-to-moment gameplay experience, things like movement, combat, and the game’s UI, but not larger gameplay elements like quests, which fall under “structure.” When it comes to its mechanics, Skyrim can be a mixed bag; while I could go long periods of time without encountering any issues, they all tended to strike at once, breaking my immersion and leaving me figuring out how to play the game in a way it was clearly not intended to be played just so I could get past whatever the roadblock was that I faced.
One of the major problem areas was movement. On flat ground, things work as intended, but it’s easy to get stuck on roots and rocks. The fact that you can’t jump while sprinting exacerbates this issue, since you’re sprinting almost all of the time, at least when your stamina isn’t recharging. Once you start getting into slopes, things get worse and worse. Most games stop the player from climbing even a moderate incline, forcing them to keep to roads and paths; this is inelegant, but effective. Breath of the Wild allows players to climb vertical surfaces, which is fun and removes a lot of hitches that could otherwise result from wonky geometry. But Skyrim seems to want to strike an unhappy medium between the two. The player can climb steep slopes, but it really doesn’t seem like they’re supposed to be able to. That’s because the “climbing” mechanic consists of glitchily jumping up nearly 90-degree surfaces, and then, when the slope gets too steep, magically gliding horizontally along its surface until you can find a place where you are again allowed to ascend. Almost any incline in the game is eventually conquerable in this way, and it can lead to unintended results, like the ability to skip straight to High Hrothgar — which doesn’t really give you anything, but it clearly unintended.
Horses, the game’s only other mode of transport, feel completely backwards, resolving none of the issues around horizontal movement (they can’t jump while sprinting either), but somehow able to climb slopes even steeper than what the player is able to conquer. They’re also slow as molasses, which means that I only ever considered using one when I had to head up an extremely steep slope for whatever reason, a decision that would no doubt puzzle any real-world equestrian. Fighting from horseback is also completely awful, which brings us to the next area of examination: the combat.
Skyrim, as an action RPG, really needed to get the combat system right. The addictive feeling of leveling up and grabbing new perks would all be for naught if it didn’t feel like what you had unlocked transferred well into the gameplay. Luckily, with a few exceptions, that’s not the case.
Hand-to-hand combat of any description is extremely satisfying. Blows are weighty, and I really felt like I was doing damage, especially when I pulled out a greatsword or a warhammer. The downside is that, particularly in first person, things can feel very chaotic. Unlike in most games, enemies don’t “take turns” attacking you in melee, which amps up the difficulty but also makes it extremely hard to keep track of who has how much health left. Ideally, you’d want to kill the lowest-health enemies first, but that’s just not possible when you can barely even figure out who you’re hitting.
Backing up helps a bit. Bow attacks and archery are a great way to slow the pace of the game down in the player’s favor, and it’s much easier to see who you’re fighting, but if the enemy AI decides to be particularly aggressive, you can easily end up in a moshpit once again, only now without nearly the melee damage output you had before. Ranged attackers are meant to be weaker up close, though, so I suppose that feels fair enough; it’s just that it’s more difficult for the wrong reasons.
The game’s UI is all right, but nothing special. You can find everything reasonably quickly, but sometimes I ran into small issues. For example, I really think the armor and weapons you have equipped should be at the top of the list; once you’re carrying around a lot, it’s a pain to have to scroll up and down looking for anything you want to swap out. Also, spells can be a bit of a hassle to find, since it’s not always immediately clear which of the four schools of magic they fall into. Magelight, for example, is “Alteration,” but it really seems like it could be “Illusion” as well. Lastly, the map is a bit lackluster; it looks amazing, even now, but between the clouds, the shadows, and the muddy textures, you can’t really tell what the terrain around you looks like from it. The fact that you can’t see the roads, which are the main way you get around, feels like a head-scratching oversight.
At the end of the day, Skyrim’s mechanics are serviceable. Combat can feel very satisfying in the right conditions, and movement works correctly even if it can sometimes be a bit janky. Triple-A game mechanics have to meet a high bar to be received warmly by players, and Skyrim’s mechanics do — if sometimes only barely.
Next, I’d like to examine the game’s structure. Essentially, “structure” refers to how a game keeps a player busy. In Skyrim terms, that’s mostly quests. Obviously, not having played through every last one, I can’t speak to the quality of all of them, but I think I experienced a representative cross-section of what the game had to offer. I would divide them into categories, which we’ll discuss individually: “Dark hole” quests, where you go down into a dark hole, like a cave or a mine, to fetch something, “hunt” quests, where you kill something in the overworld, and “murder and mayhem” quests, where you go to a town and do something illegal.
The “dark hole” quests are by far the most numerous; after all, what would an RPG be without dungeons? They are clearly what Skyrim was built around, and it shows; the cycle of kill-enemies-loot-room never really stops being satisfying. You’re always on the lookout for better gear than what you have equipped, and since the game’s loot levels with you, there’s always a chance you’ll find something good, even in the smallest, most unassuming bandit lair.
There are sometimes some issues that do crop up, though. Some enemy factions (particularly Forsworn and Falmer) have gear that’s just plain awful, no matter what fancy enchantments it has, and many caves are inhabited by trolls or giant bugs that drop no usable loot at all, unless you really like alchemy ingredients. When this happens, the dungeon quickly loses its luster, since the promise of something shiny at the end of the tunnel is obviously a hollow one.
Also, it seemed to me that many of the dark holes looked very similar. If I headed into a Draugr barrow, I knew that I could expect cramped tunnels overgrown by mysterious roots (odd, considering that many of them were not covered in forest), corpses that would get out of their nooks on the walls to attack me, “traps” with poisonous darts that never seemed to do any damage, even at the beginning of the game, and approximately ten thousand iterations of that same stupid puzzle with the spinning blocks. In a Dwemer fortress, on the other hand, I could count on a difficult first section, navigating twisting, indistinct stone passageways and fighting incredibly tanky automata, and an easier but frustrating second section once I reached the Falmer area further on. Some dungeons did depart from these predictable formulae, but the bulk of them felt a little bit less than innovative. Still, they were mostly a good time.
“Hunt” quests are a very broad category, but generally involve either a mini-dungeon (i.e. a bandit or giant camp), a battle (like the Civil War quests), or a literal hunt for something out in the woods or mountains. Often, they were over more quickly than “dark hole”-type quests, which was refreshing, but that also meant they felt a bit less meaningful. And there’s no prospect for good loot in the snowy, pathless wastes of Skyrim. Usually, these felt like filler, but it was nice to see the sun and feel the wind on my virtual face. They could be shallow — the Civil War battles were usually over as soon as they’d begun, and finding objects was as easy as following the quest arrow — but they weren’t trying to be revolutionary, just to provide a change in pace, and they did this admirably.
I have mixed feelings about the “murder and mayhem” quests. The average player may not do very many of these over the course of a playthrough, since they were tied to the Dark Brotherhood, Thieves’ Guild, and Daedric questlines and really found nowhere else. But since I played a chaotic-neutral thief character, I ended up doing quite a few of them. On the one hand, it’s thrilling to break the rules the game sets for you, to break into buildings, pickpocket, and murder. That feeling of exhilaration alone carried me through most of the Thieves’ Guild questline. But, after a while, the missions started to feel a little bit samey. Killing NPCs is really easy compared to killing actual enemies, and robbing someone is as simple as sneaking into their house at around noon (when they’ll likely be gone), taking what you want, and getting out. Honestly, I felt like I was spending as much time going in and out of the Thieves’ Guild (four long loading screens) as I was committing actual crimes. Doing both the Thieves’ Guild and the Dark Brotherhood was, I think, too much of a good thing; they really aren’t that distinct from one another. Still, I appreciate that they made an appearance in the game, because it gave me a chance to try out a new playstyle that I really ended up enjoying.
If you twisted my arm and made me choose, I’d say that the game’s RPG systems also fell under “structure” rather than “mechanics.” So…how are they? In a word, nice! The fact that you gain “experience” by actually doing things, rather than just investing points into an abstract system that doesn’t make very much sense, is very satisfying, and the points that you do invest create interesting new possibilities. While some of the perks feel a little on the weak side (for example Light Foot in Sneak; not activating pressure plates isn’t much of a benefit if the traps they trigger don’t do any damage), most of them are strong without being broken. The fact that you can level up everything just by practicing does create an issue for some players: Since enemies scale to your level, if you level up skills you don’t need, like, say, Block as a stealth archer character, then your foes will get tougher even though you’ll be no better equipped to face them. This creates a perverse incentive for players to avoid activities they might otherwise do because they’ll level up unwanted skills. Overall, though, the system is liberating, and it was a relief to rid myself of one of the worn-out hallmarks of traditional RPGs.
So much for the game’s quests. What about its story? If you know me, you know this is where I really dig in in my reviews — and also start spoiling plot points, so if you haven’t played the game yet, read no further. But for Skyrim…well, it’s harder. The thing is, the main story questline may be the game’s longest, but not by much. You’ll spend far more time doing other questlines, and no one would consider a playthrough complete after just the main story. So, while I’ll by all means review the main storyline, I’ll also discuss the Civil War (which feels sort of “main”-ish). Beyond that, most of the sidequests honestly felt a little light on “story” content, but I’ll mention a few of them.
Still, I think we should start with the main quest, which is, after all, the game’s centerpiece. The thing is, I don’t think that this is the best questline by any means. Fighting dragons, which you have to do a lot of, isn’t really a lot of fun; it’s more spamming Dragonrend (if you have it) or running around waiting for the thing to land (if you don’t), then wailing away with your strongest attack. They’re big and almost stationary, and it’s really just a contest to see which will happen first, the dragon running out of health or you running out of health potions (hint: it’s always the former). You’re also sent down into a large number of absolutely huge dungeons. I think that two hours is the longest a dungeon should really take to complete in a game like Skyrim, and some, especially Blackreach, which is obscenely massive and impossible to get your head around, go way past that limit. Others, like Bleak Falls Barrow right at the beginning of the game, don’t really do anything new; Bleak Falls is just another draugr tomb that happens to take a little longer to clear out. And there are, of course, the obligatory quests that involve simply going to a location and talking to someone, like the one where you capture a dragon in Whiterun.
The story was kind of fun, though. I particularly enjoyed the Thalmor embassy infiltration mission — it felt like medieval James Bond, which I was not at all expecting. The characters are all right, though it’s hard to feel that they’re lively and interesting when mostly they just talk to you woodenly in a standing position. The Blades feel oddly demanding, especially when they tell you to kill Paarthurnax, who is probably my favorite character of the lot (kind, thoughtful, and voiced by Charles Martinet). Mostly, the main quest pushes you to explore Skyrim and find other side activities to do, which is a purpose it serves admirably, so it doesn’t really need to be anything special on its own. The grand finale, the battle against Alduin, is incredibly anticlimactic; while Sovngarde is cool on its own, the fact that you have three meatshields to help you meant that I never even took any damage during the fight. Anticlimactic fights are…something of a theme with Skyrim, actually. The game just doesn’t really do a good job of setting up the encounters as something important; instead, the intense music starts, a health bar appears, and you start wailing away, just as if you were fighting bandits. This is universal, across all questlines.
The main quest certainly doesn’t disappoint like the Civil War questline, which seems like it should serve as an extension to the story; after all, you’re introduced to it first, before you ever learn a Shout. Instead, though, it’s a boring, repetitive slog. I chose the Empire (since “Skyrim belongs to the nords” has aged poorly as a battlecry), but my impression is that it wouldn’t have been any better as a Stormcloak. All you have to do is go to far-flung forts and have incredibly awkward, anticlimactic battles with enemies who are inevitably far weaker than you are by the point you reach them. And it’s all pointless; characters continue to refer to “the war” long after its ostensible end, and the rewards are just not worth the effort.
As far as side quests go, I really liked the Dark Brotherhood storyline. It felt deliciously evil, and Cicero was a fairly interesting character, who I chose to kill off because his voice was annoying. While the betrayal “twist” was pretty predictable, it was still fun to go up against the Penitus Occultatus, although it was a little jarring considering that I was aligned with the Empire for the rest of the game. The whole experience certainly had a bit more story meat on its bones than the Thieves Guild, which I was into more for the robbery than for the ho-hum plot.
This is a weird little tangent, but I loved finding the archaeological notes in the Dwemer ruins (I think it was the Tower of Mzark?). Even though I knew the team had met a grisly end, I was thinking, as I descended, about what could have killed them, and what secrets the ruin hid that they might have found. Since the story beat was tied to a risk (whatever got them could have gotten me), and a reward (treasure was constantly mentioned), it was really engaging and kept me moving forward, even as the quest dragged on and on.
I wouldn’t say Skyrim’s story was anything special, but it was good enough to keep me engaged in the rich, fascinating world the game provides, which is an achievement in and of itself. The voice acting (which I suppose really falls under presentation) is good enough to bring some otherwise fairly standard dialogue to life, especially that for Paarthurnax, who I mentioned, and Arngeir, who’s voiced by Christopher Plummer. Overall, I enjoyed the time I spent with Skyrim’s story, and I would have liked if it had had some more meat on its bones.
So…it seems like we’ve covered everything. That could only mean it’s time for the answer to the question: Is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim still worth playing?
Honestly, how could I say no? The game is a ton of fun. It has its issues, with Bethesda bugs and other weirdness, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s an experience you can sink thousands of hours into. Even better, most of the problems I did mention are all fixable with mods, a whole other rabbit hole you can go down that has the potential to turn Skyrim into a completely different game. It can be anything you want — a harsh survival experience, a business-management game, even a dating sim. Some people say that Bethesda stopped being a good developer after Skyrim. Very well, but you have to admit that they used to be very good.
I give The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim four illegally punched chickens out of five.
Originally published at http://skeezixblogs.wordpress.com on October 9, 2020.
