The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Everything We Know and Retrospective

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on November 9th, 2011

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A good deal of your time playing Skyrim will likely be spent wandering around getting into trouble. Travel can be accomplished on foot, by horse, or by using fast travel. Similar to Fallout 3, you can only fast travel to a location you've already discovered.

Finding your away around this gigantic world will be a cinch thanks to Skyrim's beautiful map, which deploys as a seamless zoom into a bird's-eye view of wherever your character happens to be standing. Additionally, in contrast to Fallout 3'²s canonically accurate but often awkward system, Skyrim's menus have been praised for their design and ease of use.

When you're out in the wild, expect to contend with mammoths, giants, vampires, wolves, draugr (creepy, undead, formerly cannibalistic Norseman) and all sorts of other adversaries. Most importantly, however you'll have to contend with dragons. Dragons follow no preset pattern. Instead, thanks to Radiant AI, they wander the skies, burninating anything unlucky enough to get caught in their path. To take down a dragon, you'll first have to bring it out of the sky, then win the battle on the land and help yourself to its fiery soul.

Skyrim's not all danger and massive, fire-breathing beasts, however. The game is a truly living world, with animals hunting other animals and NPC's in every nook and cranny, going about their business. Some are friendly enough to do favors for you; others, friendlier still, are willing to become (Followers) comrades-in-arms who will assist you on your quest. The game even has a fully-functional economy destroy a local industry like a lumber mill, and expect to pay more for wooden items like arrows in the local area.

Daggerfall gave us more of the same, but with greater refinement, more complexity and, most importantly, more detail. The world gained more colour, more flavour, with characters possessing aspects that made them more than just pixels. The Dark Brotherhood agent who draws inspiration from his work to write poetry. The ability to not just be a werewolf or a vampire, but a goddamn wereboar.

Surreal? Absolutely. Fun? Obviously. Still: move on, make it bigger, make it better. That's been the mantra of The Elder Scrolls. Next stop: Morrowind.

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