PREVIEW: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

 

We’re getting very close to the official release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Bethesda is still playing its cards close to its chest. From what we’ve seen of the game, that must be taking a fair amount of willpower – if I had a game that looked like this, I’d be playing it on a huge screen so that everybody could see it.
But, alas. With 11/11/11 looming, much of Skyrim has been kept under wraps. What do we really know about the game so far?

Your character can be completely customised, just the way you like it. Some of the creations we’ve seen walking around have been mindblowing – this goes way beyond gender, hairstyle and skin colour. Choose face paint, scars, body size, muscle mass, and your character’s race – which does play a (small) part in the way other characters react to you.



The game does take a step away from typical Elder Scrolls character creation – the Skyrim developers want you to start playing the game straight away, rather than faffing about with birth signs and other carry-on. If you want to play as a warrior, grab a heavy weapon or two. Mage? Wear a robe. The more you do it, the better you’ll get – and your character will grow and evolve as you play.

I love the way the skill “tree” is presented – rather than anything worldly, with leaves and branches, your skills, progress and perks are all displayed in the heavens, against a backdrop of stars. Your personal journey is immortalised in the skies as you create your own constellations with upgrades and tweaks. (I do wonder though if people might upgrade certain skills just to complete star patterns…)

Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim – review

Xbox 360/PS3/PC; £54.99; cert 15+; Bethesda Game Studios

Every game has a single over-riding requirement for its players. Some demand lightning-fast reflexes and the commitment it takes to master the depth of their controls. Others ask for a willingness to think outside the box or some degree of intelligence for puzzle solving


These are all attributes players will need if they hope to succeed in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. But the one asset players will need above all else is time.


The reason for this is that Skyrim is one of the most gargantuan undertakings gamers will experience all year. The sheer size of the adventure, both in terms of its environment and in the amount of activities available to the player, is mind-blowing.

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. The game's developer, Bethesda, has banked a rather lucrative existence on creating open-world RPGs that are filled to bursting with content. As with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3 before it, Skyrim is a game that's easy to completely lose yourself in.

The reason for this is two-fold. First, the game's production values work hard to immerse the player in Bethesda's sword and sorcery world. For a game of this size the quality of the graphics and the attention to detail is awe-inspiring.

As the player travels through Skyrim, they'll encounter dense woodlands, snow-capped mountains, majestic cities and crystal clear rivers that run throughout the map. They'll run into an assortment of interesting characters and battle myriad monsters.



They'll have to plough through blizzards, find shelter from thunderstorms and, on a clear night, they can gaze up at the sky and see auroras bleeding through the darkened heavens above them. The visual and sonic features of the game completely obliterate any traces of the outside world.

The second part of this enchantment is wrapped up in the number of ways Bethesda allows the players to interact with the world it has created.

Players can while away hours upon hours creating weapons at a forge, mixing potions at an alchemy table, enchanting weapons, chopping wood, practicing archery, investigating subterranean caverns or simply pointing their character at the horizon and heading over the nearest hill.

They can buy a house, join a guild, marry an NPC or read every book contained in the library at a college for mages. Around every corner and at every new town they wander into, there's a monster to fight, a character to talk to and some new discovery to be made.

The amount of things to do in Skyrim makes the player feel like they're a living, breathing part of its world. In short, you need time by the bucketload to get to grips with Skyrim, because once you enter its world, it becomes your world.


There's a story, which guides the player's progress to an extent. It begins with an escape from the headsman's chopping block and then the player is cut loose in the massive world of Skyrim with the barest essentials in information about themselves and the land they now inhabit.

Skyrim is plagued on two fronts – by a bloody civil war and by the return of a race of dragons that, until recently, were extinct. The player is also aware that they are the last of a race called the Dragonborn, and they are also all that stands between Skyrim and its ultimate destruction.

Still, that's enough to be getting on with, eh? The plot then proceeds to reveal its pleasures by inches, one mission and side-quest at a time.

As the player completes one heroic (and not so heroic) deed after another, they get to grips with the game's deep and intuitive control system. The right and left triggers wield whatever weapon, shield or magic spell the player assigns to them. The inventory soon starts filling up with useful items that the player can assign to the D-pad for a quick weapon change act in the middle of combat.

Every time the player uses a weapon or a spell or skill in Skyrim, their profiency with that item or in that talent goes up. Once their overall XP hits the next level, they're able to assign a talent point to the skill of their choosing.


In this way, the game rewards the participant for playing in exactly the way they want to. If you want cut your way through the land using just a sword and shield, the game will ensure you become more proficient in doing so. If magic or sneaking about in the dark are more your things, you'll get better at both the more you do them.

On top of weapons and spells, the player has an edge over most opponents in the form of their Dragonborn "shouts". These are magical powers that are acquired by reading runes carved into the walls of dungeons and caves the player will encounter, and which are unlocked with the souls of the dragons they've killed.

Shouts vary in power and recharge rate; one enables the player to breathe fire on opponents, another provides them with a quick-sprint, and yet another allows them to bring a dragon crashing down from the sky.

There's a price for all this power. Players will have to look past occasional bugs in the gameplay, for one.

These range from characters attaching themselves to pieces of the environment, the odd animation glitch and the rare instance where a previous save needs to be loaded after the game crashes completely.

There are also a couple of niggles that were present in Fallout 3, too, such as the unnerving stare plastered over the faces of NPCs or the way in which accidentally picking up an item that doesn't belong to you can cause a friendly character to turn hostile.

But the largest cost that Skyrim wishes to exact from players is that which is measured in human hours: time. And given the volume of content Bethesda's game holds, preparations ahead of playing may be necessary.

So, with that in mind, may your boss believe you when you phone in claiming you have the plague, may your significant other be tolerant and understanding, and may your friends know you well enough not to make enquiries with the police if they don't hear from you in over a month.

Skyrim awaits, adventurers. All it asks in return is your life …

… well, a large chunk of it anyway.







Video// Youtube
Article,photographs and video taken entirely from the web http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The tantalizingly brief Skyrim teaser trailer debuted by Bethesda Softworks late last year filled my mind with visions of titanic battles between man and beast; of shining steel bathed in ancient flames; of a champion rising from humble origins, prepared to sacrifice everything for the fate of the world. After 60+ hours with the game those visions have been fully realized — and rendered largely inconsequential.


In the frigid northern province of the continent of Tamriel the legendary dragon god Alduin rises, bringing with him a plague of ferocious flying lizards and the promise of the end of the world of Nirn. Only one being stands between this malevolent force and the people of the eponymous continent Skyrim: Dovahkiin, the Dragonborn, a figure blessed with the ability to absorb the very powers these terrible creatures seek to unleash upon the land.

It's the sort of tale that fuels ancient epics and trashy fantasy novel trilogies alike, certainly sufficient enough to serve as the plot for the average role-playing game.

This is not your average role-playing game. In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, this titanic tale is merely a framing device for a much larger story.



My story.

 

 
Battling a dark dragon god is merely an excuse to plunge the player headfirst into this immense Nordic-themed fantasy sandbox, much like the murder of Emperor Uriel Septim VII served as a gateway into Cyrodiil in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. In grand Elder Scrolls tradition the players begins the game as a prisoner, confined to an exciting but linear introduction before being set free from the cages imposed by more structured role-playing experiences.
 
Unhampered by a ticking doomsday clock, the player is free to reconnoiter the beauteous countryside of Skyrim to their heart's content. Far-removed from the alien landscapes of Morrowind, its neighbor to the east, Skyrim's rolling hills, frigid tundra, and towering mountains wouldn't be out of place in a real-world nature documentary. I could easily see myself climbing its peaks, delving its depths, and crossing its streams (sometimes that's okay), and when the dragons make their appearance this realism serves to make those encounters all the more terrifying.


But those dragons, so immense and impressive at first, soon became nothing more than an occasional interruption in my personal tale, dropping out of the sky just as I was about to enter a mysterious dig site at the behest of the Mage College or worse, bringing an early end to high-spirited games of Herd the Moose.
I never said my story made sense.

I'm not sure if it's a testament to Bethesda's open-ended game design or my own frivolity that in a world filled with thousands of built-in activities I spent several hours making up my own. I earned no skill points for relentlessly pursuing elk across the frozen wastes, cliff-diving into shallow pools, or attempting to cross entire towns using only rooftops, but I felt just as fulfilled as I did when I was swiping a valuable trinket for the Thieves Guild, deterring a rambunctious bard from pursuing an unwilling maiden, or battling Dark Elf racism with my bare fists. Skyrim is the ultimate OCD adventurer's playground, packed so full of entertaining new experiences that you can barely complete before the next appears on the horizon.

When all was said and done my 60+ hours of adventure consisted of perhaps seven hours with Alduin and company, ten hours of random exploring, and the rest of my time spent devouring just a small portion of the side quests—the real meat of the game. Ranging from short fetch missions to adventures so lengthy and memorable they rival the core story, it's almost insulting to call them side quests. They are the beating heart of Skyrim.
You can return to the cage at any time, but there's a whole wide world to be explored, and what the hell, it's not like Alduin set a date for the destruction of everything; overwhelming evil's flexible work schedule is one of my favorite aspects of the series
 
 
 
Traditionally a single-player game, Skyrim has spawned its own social multiplayer component. By stocking the game with so much content that only the most dedicated player (or those armed with strategy guides) could hope to see it all, Bethesda has created an ever-growing community of storytellers, each eager to hear the unique tales of others while sharing their own. It's happening on internet message boards. It's happening on Facebook and Twitter. It's even happening in game stores, where the mere mention of the game's name evokes spirited conversation between total strangers. As I write this I'm actively resisting launching into tales of my mage's exploits. He's really rather keen.


Skyrim is not a flawless game by any measure, but where fans of other titles might rise up against rampant glitches and shoddy programming, this impassioned community has embraced it. Thrown into the air by a giant's club? That's hilarious. A horse that mysteriously blinks in and out of existence? He's our legendary steed. An overall lack of proper combat targeting? Damn those stupid non-player characters for jumping in front of my fireball. I've seen accusations since the game's release that reviewers are giving Bethesda a pass because their games are always flawed, but it's not the reviewers. Hell, I'd take ten points off right now if a) we used a point system and b) I wasn't afraid of being trampled by an angry mob.

In the early hours of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim a single word is heard, echoing from the heavens. "Dovahkiin" exclaims a mysterious voice, urging you to embark on a heroic quest to save the world. "Dovahkiin" is also Bethesda's call to arms, beckoning any gamer that's ever dreamt of traversing a magical land armed with spell and steel to an unforgettable role-playing experience. Ignore it at your own peril.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released on Nov. 11 for the PlayStation 3, Xbox, and PC. Bethesda Softworks provided Kotaku with a copy of the game. Played 20 hours of the game on Xbox 360 before switching to PC. Played through full single-player story on PC. Tested both melee and magic-only characters. Chased a hell of a lot of elk, moose, whatever.






 Video// Youtube
Article,photographs and video taken entirely from the web http://kotaku.com/