I have bought a lot of video games; what I haven’t done is beat a lot of video games. For whatever reason, I’ve decided to go back and give some of these games another shot: this is the Backlog.
This Week’s Game: The Elder Scolls V: Skyrim
You don’t know how close I came to tossing the Backlog to one side so I could talk about Dragon Age: Inquisition instead, because that game does some shit and I got super excited by it. Instead of talking about it, though, I recorded a podcast instead, so if you’re curious, give that a listen. This week, though, I am going to talk about Skyrim, a game that shares some DNA with Inquisition but is entirely its own beast, and what a marvelously strange and wonderful beast it is.
I have been playing Skyrim on and off for roughly 2 years now, and every time I fire it back up I am immediately enamored of its presentation. The landscapes, the music, and the weird characters that inhabit the mountainous Nordic world of Skyrim are designed in a manner that takes my breath away. There was a month where I listened to nothing but the soundtrack at work. In fact, it was largely the soundtrack (and the Randy Savage mod) that led me to finally buy the game.
Macho Man's a-comin'. You were warned.
There is a sense of scale in Skyrim that I have found is unmatched by other open-world games that I’ve played, even those created by Bethesda. I’m sure that the mountainous terrain has something to do with this perception, as does the incredibly detailed night sky. There is an entire world in Skyrim that is going on while you’re not around, which gets incredibly silly once dragons start showing up randomly around the game world. It is entirely possible to come across, say, the house of a necromancer, only the necromancer is dead on account of having picked a fight with a dragon who is flying around the area.
Then the dragon kills you. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Loading into my save, I discovered that I had apparently been following a dog around, so that’s what I kept on doing, and man, let me tell you, I discovered that the dog does some SERIOUS DIRT if you get into a fight. This shaggy dude tore through an entire cave full of Draculas, leaving destruction and free loot in his wake. Turns out I was apparently going to run some errands for a god of chaos or something like that, so the dog was leading me to a shrine to said god so I could have a chat with him, and when I write that out I kinda realize how totally fucking insane that sounds.
I also found a gem that wanted to talk to me, and that’s how I ended up hundreds of feet in the air having a chat with another god, only this one was a goddess and she was more or less just a ball of light. I had to take out another necromancer, and unfortunately he was in a temple so I couldn’t just wait for a dragon to show up and take him out. I did, however, have a psychotic dog. Turns out he is pretty good at killing wraiths and ghosts as well.
At this point, I had to stop playing. This all happened in one game session, mind you. I didn’t end up going back to the game this week – too much Destiny and Dragon Age to play. I think that one of Skyrim’s greatest strengths is the fact that you can play the game for a couple hours and have a totally unique experience that sounds like utter craziness when you look back on it. While I was charging around, I was having a blast not only because the gameplay is solid and engaging, but also because everything I was doing was so outlandish. Yet to the denizens of Skyrim, this is just sort of a normal day.
I will go back and play more Skyrim. I always go back and play more Skyrim. The game is too much fun to leave for any real length of time. And, if you’re the father of a young child (I am), it helps to have a game that you can both save and put down at any moment, and a game that you can go for hours without having to kill anything.
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