Spartan Daily

Skyrim sets the bar high with an immersive fantasy world

Bethesda Softworks LLC

Skyrim features epic battles with dragons. 

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is a game that begs to be played.

If you’ve ever been on a road trip and wanted to get out of the car and explore the countryside, this game is for you.

If you’ve ever watched an educational program about the castles of Europe and wanted to go poking around them (and keep what you find), this game is for you.

What about caves? Check.

Treasure hoards? Indeed.

Skyrim has them in all spades.

Oh, and it has dragons. We’ll get to that in a bit.

An epic fantasy adventure, this role-playing game features a massive world populated by a variety of races, cultures and factions, with wild animals, mythical monsters, flitting insects and more to interact with.

The artificial intelligence works so well that it’s mostly invisible, with anything alive or moving keeping a natural rhythm and schedule of activities.

The places all these people and critters inhabit have a nice amount of variety as well.

There are different topographical features with microclimates — you’ll find snow-capped peaks, steaming hot springs, tundra regions, forests, plains and more, all with their own varieties of life.

You can chop wood, mine ore to smelt for weapons, hunt for hides and meat and collect bugs.

It’s a wonder to behold and it all together adds up to a great “suspension of disbelief.”

An open world

For the uninitiated, Skyrim is the fifth entry in the long-running Elder Scrolls series of RPGs by Bethesda Game Studios.

Initially PC-exclusives, the series expanded to the original Xbox in 2002 with Morrowind, then made the jump to current-generation consoles with Oblivion in 2006 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

These titles helped craft the open-world “American RPG” genre, distinct from the more linear Japanese RPG style which is notable for games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

These are large, complex worlds with robust, nonlinear “sandbox” gameplay, a hallmark of the series. Imagine the Grand Theft Auto series in the world of Beowulf.

This game oozes ancient Scandinavian goodness. Bring on the mead-halls!

As expected, players can choose to either focus on the main quest storyline or go their merry way to meet people and find their own adventures. The numerous people milling about the world all have their own stories and will often give you side quests to go on, while the large number of places to discover will keep you busy for weeks on end.

You can kiss daylight and real-world social activities goodbye altogether. That’s okay — the game features realistic weather and you can get married if you want.

Just about anything rational that you can think of can be done in the game.

The main story features a multi-faction civil war between the Imperials (reminiscent of the old British Empire) and one faction of Nords (essentially Viking-types), even as a new threat emerges in the form of dragons.

Surprise, you’re a central figure in all of it — if you want to be, that is. You can do your own thing if it suits you.

You begin by creating your own character from a number races, tailored to your playing style.

You can choose to beef up your character for combat with skull-splitting weapons, learn the arcane ways of sky-rending magic, or be a sneaky little thief.

It’s up to you, and you aren’t limited by those archetypes, though there are benefits to focusing on one style of gameplay or another.

There are countless items you can interact with and store or lug around with you, from multiple varieties of wearable clothes and armor to knickknacks, common household items and even that luscious pile of loot you’ll stumble into (good luck carrying it all at once).

For some, that level of choice is intimidating, while others revel in the sheer freedom of it all.

What makes this open-world approach work is the number of clues in the narrative for people to pick up on.

Talk to people and they’ll give you information about the town they are in, who the key people are and the larger gossip of the region, which often features whispers of your own exploits. While you aren’t coddled, there’s enough intel to help you along.

A handy quest log helps with this, which is tied to an impressive world map, loaded with locations and unique icons, such as those denoting towns, mines or dragon lairs.

Here there be dragons

Getting back to the dragons, they’re a fantastic element that keeps you watching the skies.

I’ve never experienced anything like visiting a small village that I enjoyed frequenting for the trading post, only to have a dragon swoop down, land on the top of a house and set the place on fire.

There are no guarantees that a village person you were chatting up won’t end up a scorched corpse in a smoldering alley after a dragon attack.

Dragons will use icy or fiery breaths, snap with their jaws, and snatch up people in their claws, only to hurl them at the ground from the sky.

Villagers run in terror while guards attack with arrows and swords.

Kill that dragon and you will absorb its soul, which you can use to unlock “words of power,” found in various ruins and dungeons through the world. These “dragon shouts” are essentially special abilities you can use in addition to weapons and magic.

What really makes the whole thing work is how natural it all feels.

The dragon attacks seem unscripted and can really get your heart pumping. You actually find yourself hoping people you were talking to a minute ago don’t end up getting killed.

This all adds up to a different element than existed in previous games in the series.

The last two titles, while similar, had some differing mechanics going on in each title.

Your adventure, refined

Morrowind offered a bit more freedom, but was intimidating by virtue of the massive number of customizations possible.

Oblivion (re-released this year as the 5th Anniversary Edition) was much more structured and accessible while still featuring an open world, but sacrificed some of that freedom in its approach.

What’s great about Skyrim is that it sits comfortably in between the two. It’s structured in a way that feels less restrictive than Oblivion, but is more intuitive than Morrowind.

How this plays out is a streamlining of various skills and abilities while adding in a few new mechanics to help keep things fresh. Skills have been broadened so players can grow in general categories instead of having to repeat extremely specific tasks to level up.

For instance, weapons are characterized as one-handed or two-handed, instead of being focused on specific weapon types, i.e. swords, hammers, daggers, etc. It works out so that you don’t have to sacrifice progress in a general category by switching between weapons.

Some of the new things to do include smithing, wherein you can create your own weapons at a forge, and learning the aforementioned dragon shouts which grant you more attacks and abilities.

Another nice change is that Skyrim features a larger voice cast than previous titles, though you will undoubtedly meet several characters with the same voice, though less than in the last two games.

The ability to have another character or dog tag along is a nice touch as well, and helps to keep you from feeling so alone when you are making your way though a desolate mountain pass in a raging blizzard.

The visual appeal of the world can’t be overstated, though there are occasional graphical glitches, which serve to remind you that a team of people slaved on this experience for years.

The sound design is flawless, with a masterpiece of a score by composer Jeremy Soule. The music flows seamlessly from one theme to another, depending on the context of the actions the player takes, as it has in previous entries to the series.

The foley art is also very good — sword strikes, running water and dragon bellows all sound as they should.

As in the last game, which featured the voice talent of Patrick Stewart, Skyrim brings in the considerable talents of Hollywood actors such as Joan Allen and Christopher Plummer, and the much larger voice cast makes a big difference.

The bottom line is that this is a very atmospheric, fun game that will absolutely suck you in and kick you in the pants. All of the little flourishes in the game add up to a huge, deeply immersive experience that will rival any other you’ve had to date.

It feels like the world exists even when the game is turned off, which is just as it should be.

Skyrim is available now for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.