Provavelmente o maior RPG de todos, Skyrim é a definição de liberdade, a partir do momento que você cria o seu personagem você sai pro mundo fazer o que você quiser, pra mim esse jogo é a experiência em videogames mais próxima possível do D&D e do RPG de mesa. Porque é literalmente isso, você tem a essência dessas mecânicas de criação de raça e de classe, escolher o seu caminho, se você quer ser um guerreiro, um ladino, um híbrido, enfim, tem muito esse intrínseco e essa essência clássica dos RPGs. E você também tem a questão de sair pra escolher várias aventuras que você pode fazer, entrar em várias guildas, guilda dos guerreiros, guilda dos magos, guilda dos ladrões, dos assassinos... As missões principais, as DLCs, missões secundárias, missões de quests Daedricas são sensacionais, é uma infinidade de coisa, uma quantidade de conteúdo tão gigante que quem nunca jogou o jogo certamente vai ficar completamente perdido na quantidade de coisa que tem pra fazer, e isso pra um RPG de mundo aberto como Skyrim é excelente. Não é atoa que ele ficou tão popular, já que ele é um jogo que você pode colocar centenas e centenas de horas nele e ele não vai acabar. Com certeza The Elder Scrolls é uma das franquias mais revolucionárias que já existiram, ela foi responsável por popularizar muito o gênero do RPG, então trouxe muitas pessoas pro RPG, incluindo eu com o Oblivion, e querendo ou não sempre vai ser referência no mundo dos RPGS e dos jogos.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the first M rated game I ever bought. I don’t remember my exact age when I bought it, but I definitely remember it being in between the years of 2012 and 2015. I didn’t really understand how RPGs worked, so I treated the game like it was a fantasy-themed Grand Theft Auto game by just committing crimes and wreaking havoc. Even after all this time, I never actually beat the main story or completed any of the guilds fully until now.

I remember TotalBiscuit (May He Rest In Peace) saying that Skyrim was as wide as an ocean, but as deep as a puddle, and I honestly couldn’t agree more. This game is incredibly shallow and repetitive, as a large amount of it is spent clearing out Nordic ruins that all look and feel exactly the same. This repetitiveness not only plagues the gameplay, but it also plagues the quests and the guilds, as they all involve being granted high-ranking titles in each guild after completing only a few minor quests. Gaining all of these titles also doesn’t feel as important as the one-dimensional characters try to make me think they are, because no matter how many quests I completed and ranks I’ve earned, all of the NPCs treated me as if I was a complete stranger, and the world as a whole wasn’t affected in the slightest.

Despite all of this, I still had my fun with Skyrim, as doing things such as exploring the world and leveling up my character were fun in their own ways, but even these aspects of Skyrim have their flaws. Although the world is technically detailed and especially impressive for the Creation Engine to pull off, the drab, muted color palette and uninspired art direction made me feel like I was visiting a funeral rather than exploring a vast fantasy world. The level up system can’t really go anywhere but up, and some of the skills that are practically essential, such as Smithing and Alchemy, are a chore to level up.

Overall, I don’t think that Skyrim is a very good game, but I still had my fair share of fun with it despite that. I hope that other installments in the Elder Scrolls series, such as Oblivion and Morrowind, will captivate me in ways that Skyrim didn’t.

Hylics like you and I will hang a basket over a shopkeeper’s head, ransack his life’s work from under his nose without consequence, laugh at how ridiculous this is and heap it upon the list of Skyrim’s alleged shortcomings. Game developers will look at the same situation, hang it up on their wall and adhere to it as a design philosophy.

Developers have commented on this sort of contrast between their own perspective and that of players before; most famously, designer of Civilization III and IV Soren Johnson coined the old adage of “given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of a game.” This is no less true of The Elder Scrolls than any other RPG, but in its case, a different sort of contrast also exists in what’re generally considered the best quests. Ask anyone what their favourite part of Skyrim is and you’ll likely hear Ill Met By Moonlight brought up, or often The Mind of Madness, or any number of the ones which incidentally lead them to discover Blackreach for the first time. In a game packed with so many spectacular highlights, who in their right mind would find themselves longing for what most of us would write off as fetch quests, rote tedium amounting to nothing more than having to collect a certain amount of a certain item? The answer’s none other than Todd Howard.

He’s completely right about this. It’s been almost ten years since I’d last played Skyrim, and I still vividly remember the relief I felt in finally coming across a random, unnamed Bosmer bandit whose blood sample was the last one I needed to complete one of the main quests. As Todd describes, I beat the quest in a time, place and manner which were all purely unique to me, which – despite the apparent mundanity of collecting different races’ blood samples – is more than enough to have firmly embedded it in my brain as much as any Daedric artefact hunt or murder mystery or mediation of a truce between two sides of a civil war.

What this speaks to is the greatest strength of Skyrim and Bethesda’s catalogue in general: experiential value. Radiant AI’s long been the butt of jokes, largely thanks to Skyrim’s big brother in particular, but the fact that it enables these games to effectively react to themselves and create genuinely dynamic situations no two people will come across is probably taken for granted. To make an open world feel alive and lived-in’s an elusive undertaking, but even so much as attempting a system like this puts Skyrim several steps ahead of near enough everything else outside of its own series. As invariable as it is that your Dragonborn will eventually become a stealth archer (in part because of how much character building’s been watered down compared to its predecessors), unique, organic experiences and roleplaying opportunities still abound thanks to it.

Both frontrunners for all sorts of industry awards last year were also dark fantasy action-adventure games with RPG elements and emphasis on exploration. There’s absolutely nothing in either of them remotely as cool as being able to ride a dragon and have it fight another dragon in the sky in a battle that can end up seamlessly spanning an entire province, which you can also explore nearly every inch of and interact with nearly any object in on foot (on 7th gen hardware, no less). This is the same game that lets me eke out a quiet life as a married woodcutter with a hoard of cheese wheels of dubious origin in my cellar, or Tamriel’s most indirect serial killer who instigates fights throughout the province by leaving valuables in the street, or an opportunistic necromancer who employs nearby corpses to solve all combat encounters for me, or an Altmeri master thief who stalks and then knicks the belongings of any and all Bosmer I run into because the Thalmor aren’t extreme enough for his taste, or essentially anything else I can imagine. At every turn, on every playthrough, is the stuff you’d see on the cover of a classic fantasy adventure book, something I’d wager only one other game released since Skyrim can lay claim to.

It’s for these reasons that I’ve not given Skyrim a numerical score. Until this revisit I had it logged as a 3/5, which in my view is “just alright,” but there’s two problems with calling Skyrim just alright. For one, games which actually are only just alright don’t have even a fraction of the longevity Skyrim’s demonstrated in so many different metrics, and two, what standard are we comparing it to to arrive at the idea that it isn’t much more than that? There’s no other game that does what Skyrim does, exactly like Skyrim does, but better. You don’t have to love it to recognise that; as of the time of writing, Skyrim isn’t even my second favourite TES, but not even its own predecessors fit the bill since all of them are so starkly different both from it and from each other.

You can easily point to better alternatives for specific, individual aspects of Skyrim. Dragon’s Dogma puts its combat to shame and even features an NPC relationship system more in line with Oblivion’s. Its quests would be more rewarding if it were designed like an immersive sim so that attempted solutions like this would actually work. Its dialogue system’s arguably even more limited than Fallout 4’s, without the excuse of being burdened by a voiced protagonist. The lack of a climbing system like Daggerfall’s or Breath of the Wild’s feels more and more conspicuous every time you bump into invisible walls on slight inclines. The aforementioned simplified character building means that the days of leaping across Vvardenfell or Cyrodiil in a single jump are sadly long past us. It goes on, and on, and on.

Skyrim’s so evergreen despite plenty more issues than just these because there’s no holistic package that compares. There’s being bloated, and then there’s offering such a wealth of varied gameplay opportunities each delivered to a (in the grand scheme of things) relatively high standard that you learn to tolerate its many dozens of cracks. Your favourite game, and mine, probably doesn’t have worldbuilding this well-considered, feature any areas that compare to Sovngarde musically or visually, let you live out the idyllic mammoth farmer lifestyle we all secretly pine for, and/or suplex talking cats. This picture looks like a joke at first glance, but you’ll eventually come to realise how true it is.

~ GetRelationshipRank <ProudLittleSeal> 0 I work for Belethor, at the general goods store.

I feel a bit guilty still giving this game a rating this high. I’ve become really disillusioned to Bethesda in recent years, and this game still has huge, at times game ruining issues that they still just have not bothered to fix across any of its remasters and rereleases. I don’t care how good the water looks, I just want to be able to complete the fucking Bloodline quest damn it. And yet I can’t deny how this game still manages to suck me in. It’s so massive in scope, so dense with things to see and do, so many choices and customization options available to you, and with an atmosphere that just takes me back to a different age. It takes me back not just to that era of gaming, but also to that era of internet culture, all the animations and machinimas from people like Freddiew and Psychicpebbles. The fandom and excitement this game garnered was real and it was hard not to get sucked into.

Skyrim is a game that you cannot avoid. It's available on damn near everything. It's not a matter of if you'll play Skyrim, it's a matter of when. As far as I can tell, this must be some rite of passage, and my time has finally come. Enter H'kage, a female Khajiit who slices and dices, strikes from the shadows, and will rob you blind if given the chance. This game brought out my inner kleptomaniac AND hoarder. Neither of those things are good for the game's save file size, but we'll get to that problem in a while. For now, it's time to embrace Bethesda's masterpiece.

The moment you escape the opening, you can go anywhere you please. See that mountain? There's probably a proper path up it somewhere, but this is Skyrim! Strafe your face up against any incline while mashing the jump button, you'll be surprised at the places you can reach. A new icon pops up on your compass? Time to take a leisurely stroll through the majestic, mountainous region of Tamriel, breathtaking from any angle. But what does one do in Skyrim? Well, it's a lot of fighting. Skyrim's combat feels like the equivalent of smashing action figures against each other, and not in the fun imaginative sense; I mean the combat truly feels like wildly smashing plastic figures against themselves. Granted, melee isn't nearly the only option at your disposal. Magic attacks didn't really do anything for me, but the healing was always nice to have on hand. A good way to tank damage if stabbing unaware bandits in the back with a dagger didn't work out.

Even if the combat is limp, my greatest takeaway from Skyrim is its sidequests. Despite the fact that I don't remember the names or faces of the people who sent me on my various quests, Skyrim did a damn good job at making the journey the memorable part, and not the destination. Almost every single cave and village I came across had something unique to experience. Sometimes I'd stumble into the lair of an alchemist breeding a nuclear spider army, other times I would find a guy pretending to be a ghost in a crypt. These little self-contained stories provide the best kind of tales to share with your friends, especially if it leads to some cool items. Needless to say, this made it all the more jarring that I thought the main quest was nothing special.

There you are, playing your high fantasy open-world game, when all of a sudden, you're the Dragonborn. You didn't ask for this. You didn't choose this, and yet, here we are. I thought the main questline of Skyrim to be boooooriiiiing. I think most of my disinterest stems from a lack of agency. Being the Dragonborn is cool enough, but it doesn't really play into anything. I just am the Dragonborn, whether I like it or not. None of your choices on the main path matter, all these important events kinda just happen around you. Fighting dragons and collecting shouts is cool, but it's not that necessary, and I rarely used them. Also, screw the Blades. I don't know why they're so pissy about the Shoutmasters on the mountain, and I am NOT killing one of the only interesting characters in the whole narrative. When people complain to the point of modding in the option to simply say "no", I think the writers officially lost the plot. I made a point to play through the main story quests before my save file got too big and whoops, I can't hide this problem any longer.

Yeah, I played Skyrim on the PS3, and as it turns out, PS3 Skyrim is arguably the worst version of the game. I got the game for Christmas, so I didn't really have a say in my platform of choice, but I'd probably have ended up getting it on PS3 just to know how people experienced Skyrim back in 2011, in its purest, unmodded form. From my point of view, Skyrim is Skyrim is Skyrim, minus the PC version, because people have modded that game to the moon and back, and I didn't want that clouding my opinion of the game. It's not "literally unplayable" on PS3, but your experience is on a time limit of sorts. Your save file size increases as you discover locations, take on more quests, and hoard more items. As your save grows bigger, load times take longer, and the game becomes buggier. Have you ever been swimming, and suddenly you stop swimming, and then you drop to the bottom and can't reach the surface? That's what actual nightmares are like, and this happened to me late in my playthrough! There were points where I passed up on exploring optional locations because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to fulfill my self-assigned goal of finishing the main quest before the game slapped me with an infamous 10-minute loading screen or some game-breaking bugs. I never reached that point, but 11MB+ is nothing to scoff at.

Frankly, I would love to play Skyrim forever. I played it for a few weeks straight, only to feel a guilty sense of procrastination wash over me. I would play it more if I didn't set myself the "beat the main story quests" goal (and even then I got most of the trophies anyways, whoops), but I have other games I want to play. Todd will take hold of me again some other day...it's only a matter of time.