10 years after the release of Skyrim i finally play an elder scrolls game for the first time, in my life, EVER!
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Before i go to the review-ish part of this article i wanted to pre-ramble it with this:
Okay, this article, for me, is really all over the place in the emotions-spectrum. Part of me is “A hell yeah!! Still da same as evah!! Never change M.F.!!!!” and genuinely positively surprised about the subject of this article. This automatically ignites another emotion in me which is offended thaT what I do is considered surprising, and is like “What? What now surprised?! As if it’s something that’s rare in my life to do this?! Ah hell no, we’z always like this, we’z just not showing it because we’d be incriminating ourselves maybe.”
Those are two voice in my own head,
voices which usually remain completely unknown, their very existence denied by any and all.
The voices that usually do the talking in my articles are also showing different and somewhat conflicting emotions. One is like “Why the frack am I only now finding out how fracking awesome the lore and narrative is in this game?? Dayum! I could’ve had this much fun for the past 10 years!” after which my other voice immediately comments “Yeah, and when did you think to have that 10 years of fun numbnutz?” adding “As it is you wouldn’t have had enough hours in a day if they’d doubled them, so where did you imagine that time slot for this game?”
One voice shuts up, pissed off!
The first voice doesn’t really reply anything intellegable. “mhhrrr.. mothef.. Always.. hmmmumummum”. I have no idea what an average reader gains from my adding this piece of pre…..ramble…. But somehow I felt compelled to preramble this article. There is always a lot of which I think later “Next time try and figure that shit out before you write the article numbnuts! That’s way more convenient.!”
But... we don't do convenient. Never have!
I justy wanted to preramble this before moving on to the task at hand, which turned out to be this very lengthy and very time consuming (not just time tbh) bigass article that is going to be followed up with a Youtube video later on:
“The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” 10 year anniversary edition. My first time playing an Elder Scrolls game EVER!”
You see I’ve known about the elder scrolls games when they came out, but somehow the first three didn’t make the cut at that time because they were released in a very release rich environment so to speak. So they didn’t get any time because other games did. And then when the 4th came out there was another reason I didn’t pick it up at release but I can’t remember what it was. So when 5 came out, Skyrim, I was kind of thinking that to get into a game series in episode 5, not having played the previous 4 is going to going to be irritating as f**** because you’ll hear and see things you know are references and pull backs from previous editions, but you’re clueless about what you’re missing. I hate that with a passion. Knowing you’re missing something but you don’t know what.
So I left Skyrim pass me by.
Friends kept me somewhat up to date (up to last year)
I have some friends though who didn’t and so throughout the decade of Skyrim’s life I got snapshots and updates on what going on with it, and I basically got that MODS MODS MODS MODS MODS!!!! Especially when my friend once told me (proudly) that his game began to drop in framerate and finally crashed at about 150 modules installed.
How many mods? Like what the actual f........... lierefluiter......
I was flabbergasted. I had played modded games before sure! And I’ve had more than one in a game as well. But I had never done anything like that! At most 10 mods installed for one game, and even that might be an overestimation!!
Uhuh, rule 34 strikes again!!!
When I came over to see those 100+ mods running, I kind of grinned and nodded knowingly before swiftly loosing interest. For him more than 50% of the mods were……. Rule 34 related, we’ll just say. So throughout I never gave it much more attention than that.
Or maybe not so much after all!
With this 10th anniversary and the “Special Edition, Anniversary Edition” relase, hearing the game has been re-released at least 8 times already and is running on more platforms than you can throw a stick at, I began thinking “Well, there’s gotta be something good about it, for it to last this long, with such an active (modding) community, and selling enough for the publisher to be worth it to make a anni-edition. Soooo, why don’t I try it, and see what’s what, and then write the story and edit a video for it? That’s going to take what? 8-10 hours? Why not…….
Personally, i have no rule 34-ish mod installed at this time
Only realy good story, gameplay, or graphics related mods get installed!
Right now I am dealing with anxiety and considerable force needed to keep me from switching back to the game because I can’t stand not knowing how the current story (main quest and shitload of side quests) is going to finish!!! And at the time I quit the game to finally make this article and edit the video I have spent no less than 70 hours playing the game in the last 5 days!!!
YES, ITS SICK AND IT'S FUCKED UP! But i had fun, i was happy and that's why it's also ok.
I’m not gonna lie. It’s not a record. It’s not even top 3. But it is the first game that’s 10 years old that has ever managed to kidnap my brain and hold it hostage like that EVER!!!!! I mean, I am someone who had the achievement “from single cell to space civilization in one session” in Spore and was beginning my second playthrough of cyberpunk 2077 by the time most channels came with their first review videos. But what’s worrying to me is that if there ever was a time in which I really shouldn’t or even couldn’t afford to spend so much time completely sucked into a game then it probably would be this week. And still, I did it, or to say it as it feels to me: And still, they managed to do this to me….
The part that's f-ed up when you're honest and realistic. (I avoid being at all times)
And no matter how you twist this, shuffle it around and try to wriggle out of it in a positive way, it’s not going to work out. This is bad, no matter what you focus on, which point you emphasize…. When I am honest to myself I can only say: “You fucked up numbnuts! Now go fix the up you fucked before you’re not the only victim anymore!” And despite the front that is always going to be there when there’s a chance other peoples going to read it, or hear it, you can take it from me when I say that this is going to be a tough one for me as soon as the lights are out and the eyes are closed. (that’s when my brain gets the option of thinking about… myself, my life, my shits and my hits, and where my mental state for the next day is basically organically formed)
But enough about that! Let’s give the people who came here for a review-ish kind of thing what they deserve:
My review.
I had been given a warning that the intro throughout which you can’t skip or exist or whatever could be considered long by some. Well, they weren’t wrong! Or at least it feels like it’s long until the opening sequence ends with the character creator. But In reality, it is around one minute. One minute and then the character creator pops up. Which is in the scale of things really not that long. It’s not really a spectacular opening, it’s not tutorial or helpful in explaining the way the game’s played in any way. It’s purely setting up the story, and nothing else. And it does it well I have to admit. By the time I was done creating my character I knew I got mixed up in a rebellion and, wrongly or justly, arrested along with a couple of rebels by the ruling authorities and sentenced to death by decapitation.
Before the axe could be swung as it had for the prisoner before me, a dragon decided to basically appear out of nowhere and fuck shit up good! It starts to completely trash the village and everyone in it, regardless of whether they’re rebels or rulers. That’s when you gain control over yourself so to speak and basically, the goal is to “RUN MOTHf*ER RUN!!!!” to save yourself and get away as far and as quickly as you can. You get the option to run with an officer (the one that was gonna chop your head off) or with one of your fellow convicted prisoners, and I chose the latter after first having run after the officer for a while.
Not a bad "Tutorial, opening sequence, initial game experience" overall!
All things considered, I enjoyed that beginning part of the game. I did notice though that graphically speaking I was going to need some extras to really get into the game because even though the official release is a 4k high res texture remaster or whatever, I felt that the graphics lacked “the right stuff” for me to really get immersed. I know I am being a spoiled little bitch right now, where not more than 2 months ago I wouldn’t even be able to play the base game on high settings and love the heck out of it, let alone Ultra and bitching about it. But since I’ve upgraded to 6700xt and 5700x on 32Gb of ram running 3200 I’m a spoiled kid and have higher demands.
Might even tick some Witcher 3 boxes in the final analysis! Not on vanilla graphics though!
Well, there isn’t really a mod out there like they’ve got for the Witcher 3 for example which overhauls almost all of the graphics significantly in one mod.
It looks like for every little thing there’s a separate mod. For lighting, for effect post processing, for npc characters, for buildings of a type, for a material type, or even for a single npc characer’s eye color. (yes, one mod changes nothing but the eye color of ONE NPC)
Nevertheless, it was less than two hours later when I could fire up the game with significantly better graphics than the one in the video that I linked to. (which is the raw footage for the review video that I am editing later). The fishing video gives a little bit more representative representation of the game play in which I experienced most of the time I’ve played it.
Unfortunately, my tv’s/monitors are stuck in the same decade the vanilla game was released in and don’t go over 1080p, so the glorious 4k experience is gonna have to stay future dreams for now.
Dreams are in 4k, reality is 1080p!
Things I absolutely love about the game.
There is one “keep in mind” that I’d like to give before I get into it though: I’ve never played without the DLC, and I have no idea which storyline quest or side quest is vanilla and which is a later addition through DLC or mods. So the diversity and quantity of missions/side-missions that I experience and absolutely love in this game might not have been the same as when the game was first released 10 years ago.
Top-quality of this Skyrim experience!
Because NUMBER 1 top thing I love about the game is the almost Witcher 3 like amount of quests there and the very little “grinding repetitive Meh” sense the side missions have given me to shit point. Sure, when you go look at it while you’re not playing and analyze what you’re actually doing all the time, you see there is a SHITLOAD of grindy repetitive things you’re doing. But while you’re playing, with the intention of following the storyline without taking detours to pick up every side quest you can, you hardly notice any of that.
Remember, this is MY experience and MY opinion. Your experience and opinion may be different.
(It's okay to disagree, you have the right to be wrong)
At least I felt more than once, after a couple of hours going from side quest to side quest without doing a single main story quest, like “Hey, wasn’t supposed to do this after that for the main story?”. I’ve had only a few times that I thought “yeah the same thing as the first three times I got one of these quests”.
Most of the side quests are either part of a side quest chain which links together 3 or more side quests to one arcing story and almost all side quests are so strong in their story, differing from the rest and gripping in their own right, enough to keep me from feeling deja vu or worse.
Traveling in Skyrim
Another point that I think is awesomely executed is the traveling in the 2 different maps that I’ve been on so far. And I initially wanted to put this system on the burn side of the scale, to be honest. Because if you’ve not been to some place yet, you’re not gonna fast travel to it. Certainly in the beginning you’re also not going to have a horse to hippaty hoppaty over to the other side of the map for something.
That meant that at times, when I saw where some of the next mission was going to start (where the story said the next thing was going to happen, you heard me “WHAT? That’s a fracking long fracking walk! Are you insane?!”
But I came to realize that those tedious long walks never materialized because on the way there you run into so many “world incidents” like crossing paths with a pack of wolves, or straying too close to some bandit stronghold or something or stumbling on so many side quests along the way that yeah, it does sometimes take long before the story line gets advanced but that’s got nothing to do with the travel time. You just keep getting side lined by compelling stories in side quests or pulled into mobfights and often forget you were on the way to somewhere for a long time, without that being annoying or even disruptive.
It all meshes together so well that it's rare to even notice it. There was once or twice that I did notice that the main story mission was…. Off, not nessecarily bugged or broken, but off because I had already been to a place or cleared a fortress already because I wandered into it by accident when I “Went full tourist”
Skyrim... the final frontier... these are the voyages....
That’s another thing I like very much: The exploration ability of the game. You really can just forget about any storyline and go exploring, for hours and hours and hours on end. There are still parts of the main map I’ve never set foot on, and I know there is stuff to discover, find and stumble upon for many many hours to come. I think that as far as completion goes, a percentage of below 40% is not exaggerating. So with an odd 60 hours in the game and not an end game in sight or even a halfway point, I think that the number of hours of gameplay that’s in there is closer to 250 than to 200 or fewer hours.
And this is where there was a big old scissor and it cut the article in half!!!
Check out part II real soon at an anonsunamun near you('re readcash)
Check out part II for the things I didn’t like, the nitpicking whiney part, and the final conclusion. Because, just like the game, this article turned out to be way more than I initially thought it was gonna be.
Thanks for reading this!
Stay safe and stay happy!
