I was slightly hyped for the release of Skyrim. Not as much as many others who were drooling with anticipation, but I was looking forward to playing it. Which is exactly what I did on 11/11/11. This review will be based off of the PC version of the game.
I'm somewhat familiar with the Elder Scrolls series. I've played through Daggerfall, I started Morrowind(never finished) and I played a little Oblivion. I enjoyed all of them to an extent and Daggerfall still is my favorite of the bunch (yes even over Skyrim). I did enjoy Skyrim though. I do however think it is very overrated. Here are my thoughts.
Playing this on the PC I had some trouble from the very start. First off the menus were clearly designed with consoles purely in mind. I was forced to downloads mods to fix them. They were poorly designed for PC. They were hard to use, disorganized and pretty useless. Mods fixed all that thankfully.
Right from the start you can tell the world of Skyrim is fairly massive. Not the biggest I've seen, not even for an RPG, but still a very reasonable size. So it's big, so what? It's whether or not the things in the world are actually interesting or not that's important. Well, it's alright. You got your mountains, your lightly treed forests, your snowy areas and....dungeons? I got bored with the world after about 40 hours. There was nothing that really surprised me (and trust me I looked EVERYWHERE). And although the graphics aren't really anything special, especially the ugly textures, horrid character models and horrendous animations. But the world somehow looks pretty nice, especially while looking over it from atop a mountain.
Now onto the story. Let me start by saying that the Elder Scrolls lore is actually pretty decent if you take the time to get into it. There are a lot of things that paint the picture of the setting. That being said, the general plot for Skyrim is meh. It's a story that could have been found in a 1980s D&D children's cartoon. I mean if you say the words 'Dragon Slayer' to someone who never heard of Skyrim, they can know the general plot of Skyrim from those two words. Even worse than the plot is the story delivery. For example: Within the first hour of the game, when you go to fight the first dragon (right outside of Whiterun), this is the first dragon anyone has every saw. Many people didn't even believe they ever existed, and people thought they were impossible to kill! So of course who do they send to kill a dragon? You and a few random city guards of course. Doesn't that sound like a suicide mission? Shouldn't they have assembled an epic team of the greatest heroes in Skyrim? Now that would have been cool. Another example is the Stormcloak war with Whiterun. Now the way they talk about this 'war' makes it sound huge. But when you actually go participate in the final battle, the taking of Whiterun, guess what? It's you and a few Stormcloak soldiers. Wow, what a war. Basically the delivery sucks.
Another thing that ruins the delivery and immersion is the dialogue. I could complain about the dialogue for hours. Show any decent author the dialogue and they will laugh at it. It's pathetic, it does things that amateur writers are taught not to. Not only is the dialogue writing bad, but the dialogue option are a step backwards from the Fallout dialogue options, providing much less choices. I can go on, but there are a few article you can find that go into finer detail. EDIT: Another thing I forgot to mention, the characters are boring, uninteresting and totally forgettable. Oh and boring quests.
On to the gameplay. The most important thing a game has to offer. In summary: it's bad. The melee combat was so bad I started a new character and became a mage. The magic system isn't very good either but it's less annoying than the melee. Both are boring though and have pretty much been the same since Morrowind. There are tons of bugs, some of them game-breaking. I once had a bugged main quest that i could not get around and I had to reload a 2 hour save. Very annoying to say the least. (SAVE OFTEN!)
One of the worst things about the game for me is the lack of enemy variety. Let's see there's Draugrs, Skeletons, Wraiths, Spriggan, Falmer, Wolves, Spiders, Giants, Dragons, Crabs, the Dwarven machines and a few others I'm forgetting. Overall there are less than 25 different enemies! That is terrible for such a big world and gets boring very quick. Not to mention non of them are particularly interesting to begin with. The dragons are fun the first few times but after that they just get boring and tedious.
Of course there are a few other things I didn't like that I didn't feel was worth mentioning. The game is good for awhile. It will suck you in for a decent amount of time and then you'll just stop playing. It was pretty fun while it lasted.
I'd give it a solid
7/10 based on my experience with it but I feel it more deserves a
6.5/10.
