The GameFreak Blog

That’s right, i’m one of the only people in the gaming world that’s not playing Skyrim. “Why the fuck not?” I hear you cry. Well, because I just don’t have the time. I’m struggling as it is to get content on here and my Youtube channel. I haven’t got the time to piss about with Skyrim, as good as it sounds. I’ll save it for the long summer gaming drought that always happens.

So that being said, all round good egg Declan, known on twitter by his company name Black suit thinking, has written down his take on the game so far, and because i’m nice like that i’m going to stick it up here. His thoughts follow;

“Skyrim is huge. No surprises there, especially if you’ve played Oblivion or Morrowind before that. But the sheer scale of the game makes a full review a little difficult. If I wrote this review a couple of days ago, it would have been substantially different. In the time it took me to finish Halo 2 AND 3, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this bad boy. Still, let me give you an overview of the game as it currently stands.

If you want to know about the plot and wotnot, there’s been plenty written elsewhere for you to Google. I’m going to concentrate on my personal experiences playing the game I’ve been waiting for the last 2 years to get my hands on.

Firstly, the things I love about this game: In a nutshell, the detail. Smoke from the chimney of the fort tells you there’s bad guys at home. Scenery is atmospheric and beautiful – you almost hesitate to jump into a river because you can almost feel the cold. The vocal performances are leagues ahead of anything found on Oblivion (Except for Patrick Stewart’s turn at the start, obviously), and the scandinavian accents are a nice touch. The bad guys stagger when you hit them, some beg for mercy before you remorselessly slot them like Andy McNabb on a monday morning. The plot is rich without being confusing. It all feels very grown up and immersive, but it hasn’t lost any sense of fun. Truly, it’s the little things…

Speaking of fun, that brings me to the combat. This is, to my mind, one of the biggest improvements to the Elder Scrolls franchise, and Bethesda have done an bang up job of overhauling the mechanics. Fighting is fast and dangerous, much more so than in Oblivion. The addition of dual wielding adds a great dimension to brawling, with 2 weapons, weapon/shield, spell/weapon, or spell/spell having a real impact on the outcome of an engagement. The solid AI of your enemies adds to the challenge, with a good variety of fighting and defensive styles to contend with.

But if there’s a crowning achievement in Skyrim, I would have to say it’s the use of Magic. What could have been a clunky and dull aspect to gameplay (As it was, to a large degree, in Oblivion), has been made very cool. Last night, I watched a fight between my nephew’s character and 2 baddy mages and, I swear, it was one of the coolest game experiences I have seen in a very long time on the 360. Familiars being summoned, jets of flames, lighting bolds, shards of ice… Harry Potter can kiss my arse.

The new lock picking methods, weapons creation/forging give the game a fresh feel and the removal of bartering, weapon and armour degradation, and the persuading wheel have streamlined gameplay nicely.

Now to the doubts and dislikes. The first and most major one is with Bethesda themselves. They’re notorious for turning out half finished games – Oblivion being a case in point. I remember searching forums for answers to questions, only to find many more people with the same problems as me – ie, nothing down to poor gameplay but all about glitches in the game. Inventory items disappearing, characters dropping through a wall and becoming trapped… the list goes on. Many actually went back to playing Morrowind. My experience involved a key item in the main quest becoming stuck inside a staircase. Bethesda advised I should “Save often” and revert to those previous saves (Note to Bethesda: Don’t make it MY fault that you can’t build or play test your games correctly!), but nothing to help salvage my almost 100 hours of gameplay which was now for nothing.

Will Skyrim prove to be another problem child? Well, already I’m getting disappearing water and sky, disappearing NPCs, jerky graphics and lag… So I guess we’ll see how things develop as I progress through the game. Personally, I’d go for a slightly smaller game if it meant less frustration and shouting at the TV in the future.

I’ll say it now, I don’t like the new menu system. It’s like Bethesda took inspiration for this (And other things) from Fable, and while it looks slick I find the lack of bumper button toggling a pain when getting through the menus. Oblivion had it right, on that point. On my TV, it’s also difficult to read the text. Similarly, the maps are confusing and often unclear, and the some of the towns are a nightmare to navigate. The dungeons are HUGE (This is a good thing) but, again thanks to crap maps, difficult to navigate and sometimes under-populated.

There’s also an awful lot of nothing in Skyrim. It looks great, but there’s a couple of towns that offer little to nothing by way of quests. Maybe this will change as I level up, but at least in Oblivion you knew there was something to come later. It would also appear that developers took the most annoying terrain from Oblivion – mountains – and made up about half of the Skyrim map out of them.

I could go on, but to some up in a soundbite I’d call Skyrim a flawed masterpiece. Not heavily flawed, but shy of perfect none-the-less. My gripes are many but minor for the most part, and for a game of this scale that’s an achievement, (The aforementioned Fable gets a lot more wrong in a lot less of a game), and the pleasures far outweigh the pains at time of this writing.

So, like I said. This game is HUGE! Right now, I’d say buy it. I’d shout it in your face, in fact. But perhaps another review in 6 months time is in order…”

Great review there. I’m almost tempted. But i’ll save it for now.

So thanks to declan for that. He’s a motivational trainer, a real life Jedi knight, and he’s a gamer too. You can follow him on twitter by clicking right about here. DO IT NOW!