TL;DR – The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (henceforth referred to as Skyrim) is probably the most popular RPG that has ever existed, for better or worse. As such I’d be extremely surprised if anyone reading this hasn’t played the game and much like my F:NV review I’m not sure if anyone will care enough to read it. With that out of the way, I do think that Skyrim is actually a pretty good game even if it’s a poor RPG and I can safely say that my opinion on it has softened after I took the time to actually sit down and play it on it’s own terms. Instead of viewing it as a continuation of Morrowind and Oblivion, it’s a game to be seen on it’s own terms and if you do this it has staggering amounts of content and does plenty of things well.
Quick Note: Skyrim has had not one, but two significant re-releases on PC alone. As a consequence it can be a little tricky to review, but anyone playing it these days will be playing the Anniversary Edition (AE) which was a slight tweaking of the Special Edition (SE). The main difference between AE and the SE is the inclusion of some “creation club” content, while the differences between the SE and the base game were the inclusion of the DLC content and some visual upgrades. For console gamers, the PS3 and 360 are vanilla, PS4 and Xbone will be SE and Switch/PS5/SeX (or SeS) will be AE.
Despite buying Skyrim near it’s release date (in all honesty I pirated it initially as I was a fat kid who’d rather spend his money on chocolate at the time) I never had the best initial impressions of the game. Maybe I was blinded by nostalgia goggles for Oblivion, which after years of playing games on the N64 and Gamecube felt like a vast leap forward from anything that I’d ever played before. Or maybe it was the fact that I never really cared much for the setting, as I’ve never understood why Vikings are so popular with game developers due to them feeling fairly one note (it’s snowy and you have an axe and uhhhh dude look how JACKED i am). Regardless of my own dumb biases, I went into Skyrim with modest expectations and walked away fairly disappointed as it felt like a really dumb RPG game which while possessing some nice touches such as NPCs asking if they could keep the items you dropped, was ultimately as wide as an ocean as deep as a puddle. I can’t remember how many hours I put into it around the launch period, but I do know that within a couple of days the opinions in my friend group had gone from “GAME OF THE YEAR” to “It’s pretty good” to “It’s OK”. Now don’t get me wrong, I had the exact same trajectory for the next big Bethesda game in the form of Fallout 4 as I thought it RULED for the first 30 hours and then realised it was kind of a hot mess, which is both an accurate term and one I use with endearment. Only Bethesda (and maybe Lionshead) seems to have the power to make it’s sloppy RPG worlds so engrossing, in spite of or perhaps because of their lack of depth. Yet even if I was kinda disappointed with my initial Skyrim playthrough, I did eventually buy the game and then buy it again for the SE edition so I won’t pretend there was nothing there. It’s just not a game that ever succeeded in really keeping me within it’s world for more than 15ish hours per install.
But after around a dozen years of not finishing the game, I figured I would use the terrible lovely weather of the Scottish Summer(TM) to finally play through the entire main quest without getting distracted. In most games this wouldn’t be an issue, but Skyrim is even worse than Oblivion with regards to encouraging you to get distracted as it has both a main questline and then an almost main questline in the form of the civil war between the Stormcloaks (Braveheart x Vikings – the collab we didn’t know we needed) and the Empire. Then there’s the fact that the main questline actively requires you to interact with both the mages guild College of Winterhold and the Thieves Guild to proceed through it. Those of you who can put aside these niggling distractions however will be rewarded with an admittedly hit-or-miss series of quests that were blatantly not designed with Survival mode in mind. But before diving into the main quest and at the risk of getting distracted (as is par for the course for this game) I’ll quickly go over what survival mode is and why it sounded kewl.
Survival mode is an optional added in the Special Edition of the game which forces you to eat, sleep and stay warm within the snowy wasteland that is Skyrim. If you fail to maintain any of these responsibilities, you’ll gradually suffer a penalty to the maximum amount of Stamina, Magicka or Health that you have as parts of the applicable bars will turn black and be considered as empty – even if you heal or use a potion. Alongside this, you’ve also got a penalty to the amount you can carry which is halved to 150lb and arrows are now given a weight so you can’t just carry thousands of them around without any thought. Last but not least, you can only level up by sleeping in a bed like in Oblivion and fast travel is disabled almost everywhere with one or two exceptions. Now considering that in the normal version of Skyrim, you never sleep, never eat, never care about swimming in frozen fjords and generally don’t interact with the cooking, carriage or inn systems as a result, this seemed like an interesting little bit of extra challenge that would add some zest to the game. Unfortunately if in F:NV the survival mode was barely a factor, in Skyrim it’s frankly too much of a factor and it breaks a couple of quests to the point of them being almost impossible unless you have been frantically stocking up on Fire Salts (so you can craft the hot soups that no one else sells because apparently not a single soul in Skyrim wants their soup hot) like a maniac for the whole game. The issue is simple, you get cold really fast and this can not only kill you but also reduces your maximum health pool fairly quickly. In addition you need to have a little sleepy weepy, but unfortunately you can only sleep at inns (or your house) which means that extended quests or ill-advised trips through the world can make it so that you have basically no magic at your disposal. Of course there are ways around this, but generally after every lengthy mission you need to return to an inn, without being able to fast travel. Otherwise you will not have any health/stamina/magicka, because most of the tougher missions in this game involve being somewhere really cold and fighting tougher enemies. There was one segment where I had to keep running outside, summoning a flame atronach, then running back inside so I would warm up, but if I left it too long the enemy dragon would regenerate health so I was in-and-out and in-and-out like an absolute psycho. Then again picking an Argonian Mage is just asking for trouble as you get cold quicker and need to worry about magicka. My advice would be to not bother with this mode, or at the very least play as a Nord or Khajit with light armour for the maximum resistances to cold. Otherwise there will be some quests where you just straight up die trying to get to the objective unless you stocked up on those specific types of soup that require Fire Salts (a rare alchemical ingredient).
Anyway my own self-inflicted suffering aside the Skyrim main quest is perfectly fine if a little monotonous, which I imagine is a big part of why less than 20% of Steam players actually finished it. It starts with you almost getting executed, then almost getting executed by a dragon, before you scurry away and soon end up in the town of Windhelm. Here you get roped into helping fight against those rascally dragons, which involves doing some dungoneering and fighting one of them before absorbing it’s soul. Then you walk up a mountain so you can freeze to death repeatedly for not having the specific kind of soup talk to some old guys who tell you that you are the protagonist and then make you faff around for a little bit. Then you find the McGuffin, but not really, so you can go to a lame party with 4 guests total and then kill around 20 guards with no consequence. After doing your part to liven things up you go rescue a different type of old guy, before doing a bit more dungoneering and then fight the antagonist dragon. Once you’re done not killing the main antagonist you faff around some more, which includes a diplomatic conference in which the main parties of the civil war whine at you about things no one cares about, before you finish honing your ability to yell in an ancient language. Then you’re able to go to Valhalla Solsteim and kill the antagonist dragon for real this time. Now it would be really easy to criticism my whistle-stop tour of Skyrim’s main questline which is spread into 17 missions, but basically they’re all listening to NPCs you can’t kill blabber on about stuff and then going to an area and killing a bunch of dudes (and maybe a dragon if you’ve been an especially good Dovahkiin this quest). You don’t get to make any choices that matter and there are almost no opportunities for roleplaying, and outside of a few specific instances it plays exactly the same as the rest of the game. Sure the party at the embassy and the peace conference are a bit different, but they involve walking around for a bit then responding to the only dialogue choices that advance the quest before falling into the same old routine. There really isn’t much to captivate the player outside of the prospect of saving the world but even after you’ve saved the world the game does a little bit of hand-waving and says “yeah, well, there are still gonna be dragons attacking you because uh…… some dragons don’t accept your hegemony videogames”.
With all that being said no one really plays Skyrim for the main questline and I’m fairly confident Bethesda assumed that from the get-go as it has a ton of content outside of the main quest. Even excluding the other quasi-main quest in the form of the civil war, you’ve got multiple faction related quests including the Thieves Guild, College of Winterhold, Dark Brotherhood and the Companions alongside myriad side quests and then mini-quests which aren’t counted as side quests but instead as miscellaneous objectives. Some of these are very straight forward, such as talking to NPC A, then talking to NPC B, then going back to talk to NPC A but others have a bit more depth to them. One smart trick the game does to keep you interested in what are ostensibly tiny little non-quests is that some of these miscellaneous objectives are the stepping stone into larger side quests, and as they’re generally pretty easy I did find myself doing them as a way of taking a break from the meatier quest chains. They also tend to give some sort of reward, whether it be a couple of hundred gold or just assistance/discounts from vendors. Plus the game also has radiant quests, which went on to cause Fallout 4 no end of trouble but which are essentially bounties that various NPCs place on bandit camps / dungeons / dragons (or actual named NPCs if you’re taking one from the Dark Brotherhood). You then go there and kill the dudes for your mediocre cash reward and the satisfaction of a job done (until you get the next one a handful of in-game days later). With that being said, I don’t think people really play Skyrim for these quests either even if all of the factions combine for a total of around 40ish additional quests which have had about as much time and effort put into them as the main quests. Instead I think people mainly play Skyrim for the feeling of their character getting ever more powerful, which I suppose is the only way that Skyrim can really be considered as an RPG.
I suppose in this regard Skyrim does a decent job, as it retains the classic TES system wherein you gain levels in a skill by using it with your total level increasing as you gain levels in those skills. The main difference here is that not only are there no penalties to using skills at a novice level, but you also gain a perk point each time you level up. These can then be used to unlock perks in the associated skill-tree, which are generally fairly minor but are still useful. Some examples include making novice destruction spells cost half of the magicka to cast, gaining a boost to pickpocketing when the target is asleep and being able to craft higher level items out of certain ores and materials. The caveat to this levelling system is that while you also gain a little bit of health or magicka or stamina (your choice), the enemies in the world are scaled to your level meaning that you end up at around the same level. Now to prevent you from totally abusing this system by staying at level 1 forever and grinding through the various skills, many spells need more than 100 magicka, while 100 stamina won’t get you particularly far without any perks. But I still can’t help but feel that this system leads to the game having a treadmill feeling, much like Oblivion albeit with an ever bigger issue as spells don’t scale. They have a flat amount of damage and while you can learn new spells, there is a point at which you’ve reached the maximum potential. But you can still level up via increasing your other skills, so no matter what build you play you’re basically going to end up as a hybrid class anyway. If you go melee only flying enemies (by which I mean dragons) are going to be a pain, and if you go magic only you’ll bottleneck yourself once you’ve maxed out the destruction skill. Fortunately as you level up you do also get access to better equipment in the form of weapons, armour and potions as vendors update their offerings, randomly generated chests upgrade their contents and enemies carry newer and better gear. Yet even if this does create a sense of your character being unable to totally eclipse most enemies, there are still occasions where the world spawns lower level foes and which prevents the world from suffering the aggressive level scaling problem that Oblivion ended up dealing with.
Overall then Skyrim has learned a few tricks from Oblivion and has avoided the worst excesses of it’s level-scaling system while still managing to retain the variation in cities and quests that made it so popular. Yet even with the new dragon enemies and radiant quest system, I’d be lying if I said it was as enjoyable as an experience especially as the RPG elements feel even more basic. There really doesn’t feel like there is much to distinguish various character builds and the lack of roleplaying opportunities within the majority of quests is a sticking point for me personally. Even if the world has so much to do, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this is a game that has spread itself a little bit too thin as the majority of the content basically plays the same. In large part due to the fact that every character you create essentially plays the same across all playthroughs. Regardless I do still think Skyrim has it’s charms and is worth a playthrough, if only for the way in which the game has a large amount of scripted but amusing interactions and mini-quests which appear as if by random while you play. Yet it’s this same reliance on scripted encounters that makes everything feel a bit artificial and almost like a theme-park. Every time you enter a city for the first time a sequence of events plays out, and it will never change no matter how many characters you create or how you choose to level them. Skyrim is therefore a game which has plenty to see and do, but offers no real reason to stay especially if you don’t much care about the feeling of your character gradually progressing in power and ability. As a consequence I would give Skyrim a modest recommendation (excluding those who are RPG novices and will find it a great starting point) and I would honestly skip Survival mode if I were you.
