I'm going to try and write this entire post without making an "arrow in the knee" jokes.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is not a perfect game, but it's a game that has positioned itself out in front of most anything else in terms of its scope, its detail, and how much it feels like a living, breathing world. It's an improvement in just about every way over its predecessor, Oblivion, building on the core idea of a seemingly-infinitely explorable open world, while taking advantage of every bit of improvement in computing power over the last five years to improve how its look, and at the same time making some better decisions with respect to gameplay mechanics. I believe I'm about 35 hours in, and yet I'm not sure if I've played enough of the game to the point where this could be considered a "full" review of it. I think I've been to six or seven of the nine major cities and there are large swaths of land even around the cities I've been too that I've not yet traversed. I haven't put much of a dent into the main story (at least that's my assumption), instead feeling content to focus on side-quests and just simply exploring. The best endorsement you can give the game is that you'd be hard pressed to find another with more stuff to do that doesn't delve into mind-numbing repetition.
Skyrim begins in much the way Oblivion did, in that you begin as a prisoner of no particular note, when circumstances beyond your control launch you into the story. In Skyrim, you're actually about to be executed, the hangman's axe literally about to come down on your head, when a giant dragon shows up and starts wrecking stuff. With the help of another escapee you manage to find some equipment and get out of dodge, and then you're basically launched into the world to do what you will. If you choose continue the main story, you head to the nearby Whiterun, one of the nine major cities in the game (I believe Oblivion had five or six). There, you talk to the Jarl (the local ruler) there, who wants you to use your first-hand knowledge seeing a dragon, which were thought to be extinct, to aid a contingent of troops who are out investigating the sighting of another dragon near the city. Given that this guy just met you, and the only skill you've really demonstrated is "ability to run the fuck away really fast" I'm not sure this is in any way logical, but it advances the story in that you and your cohorts end up slaying the dragon and the rest of the troops look on in awe as you absorb its soul into your body. Whaaaa? To find out more, you visit the Greybeards, a group of old bearded dudes akin to monks who live in isolation at the top of Skyrim's tallest mountain (the trek up provides some of the coolest visuals in the game). They tell you that you're one of a rare breed, the "Dragonborn", who can absorb the power of dragons and unleash it via Shouting: literally, shouting words in the ancient language of dragons that hold special power. I wouldn't spoil the rest of the story even if I knew it, which I don't because, as I said, it's really, really easy to get distracted doing other quests.
The Shouts are the biggest new addition to Skryim's gameplay from what existed in Oblivion. If you dabble in any sort of meme-laden online community, you're probably aware of "fus-roh-dah," which you can use to knock back enemies, or pretty much anything else. There's also Shouts to disarm enemies, turn into a spectral form, detect nearby living things, and a bunch more where that came from. The gist of the system is that you find dragon words inscribed in stone throughout the game word, usually where dragon's are roosting or in the depths of some of the larger dungeons. The word either grants you a new power or is used to strengthen an existing power. To unlock use of the power, you have to spend a dragon soul which you get from straight-up slaying the hell out of some dragons. It's not uncommon to just lay eyes on a dragon flying off in the distance as you're off traveling in the game world, but you can also find them by world of mouth in towns (overhear someone saying "Hey, I hear there's a dragon atop the mountain to the northwest" and that point will be automatically marked on your map). The battles with dragons are the closest thing the game has to boss battles, although there's pretty good variance in the relative strength between certain types of dragon, and like other enemies, they progress in power as you level up.
Speaking of leveling, Skyrim's system for progressing your character is not totally dissimilar to Oblivion's, although it has a little more depth and it's a lot more fun. In Oblivion, instead of just accruing experience points the way you do in the bulk of both Western and Japanese RPGs, you leveled up after you improved any of your skills a certain number of times. Amongst these skills were some pretty bizarre inclusions, like "Athletics," which seems like a reasonable metric for an RPG character, until you realize that it can be leveled up simply by arbitrarily running around and jumping. Once you gained a level, you got a certain number of points to distribute amongst your base attributes, with the game cap on how much you can raise each attribute in a single level based on how much you used each associated skill. For example, if you shot a lot of people with bows last level and upped your Marksmanship skill, you could then increase your Agility score. The rationale behind the system had a certain logic to it, but there wasn't much fun in it. After grinding your way to whatever level you'd just hit, adding 3 ticks to your willpower score didn't necessarily do much more you as far as instant gratitude goes. And what if it so happened to you weren't playing your character precisely the way the class--chosen at the start of the game--was meant to work? Imagine that your character was a heavy-armored bruiser that wasn't at all based around magic, but you spent last level using the giant pile of ingredients you had taking up space in your backpack to brew some potions, and then you decided to do some sneaking around in a city for one clandestine purpose or another. Bettering these skills wouldn't lead to being able to put in the maximum points into the abilities that would help your character most.
Skyrim doesn't completely uproot this. You still level up your character by leveling up their individual skills, but the wacky inclusions of Athletics and Acrobatics have been removed, and the game doesn't include the weird persuasion mini-game that Oblivion had that let you mindlessly grind away at your Speech skill. However, you're no longer locked into a class from the start of the game. When you create a character at the start, you still customize your appearance and your race--which gives you race-specific characteristics, like cold resistance for Nords and a berserk mode for Orcs--but you're no longer locked into a specific class. Your character develops entirely by how you play the game. Want to be a swift-footed ranged attacker? Get some light armor, get a bow, and start shootin' people in the face. Want to be magic based? Find some spellbooks and start casting away.
Once you level, instead of just upping your ability scores, you can actually pick and choose new talents for your character. The leveling up screen shows each of your main abilities along with an associated constellation of stars, that basically acts like a skill tree. At each level, if you meet a certain minimum threshold for the level in the associated skill, you can light up a new star, and then open up the connecting pathway, or pathways, to more. For example, the first star in the Constellation for the Archery skill simply ups your bow damage by 20%. You can choose to put up to 5 levels in this to stack more damage, but once you have at least one point in the first star, you open up paths to other abilities, like your arrows being able knocking back enemies, being able to move faster with a bow drawn, being able to recover more of your used arrows, and a few others. At each new level, you can keep working your way through one of the trees you've already started, or you can begin a new one. Compared to Oblivion, Skyrim allows for much more control over how your character develops, and the new abilities you gain give you much more instant gratification than just perpetual slight increases your stats.
The battle system has remained pretty constant. It's still entirely in first person, and the basics of it are essentially that you left-click (I'm playing on PC) to hit with your primary weapon and right-click to block if you have a shield, or perry if you have a two-handed weapon. A difference is that you now "equip" your spells, as you would a weapon, and so you can end up with combinations of a one-handed weapon and a spell, a spell and a shield, etc. The game's offering of spells is fairly similar to Oblivion's: various elemental based attacks, healing spells of varying effectiveness, temporary buffs to your health or attack power, turning yourself spectral or invisible, reanimating a dead body as an undead meat shield, etc. If you make a conscious effort to level up the various schools it's possible that these more indirect spells might be quite useful, I can't really say, but insofar as I've used magic, I've found that just sticking to trying to burn, freeze, or electrocute whatever is in your path is usually all you need. Really, combat as a whole is still pretty simple. It's still all in the first-person perspective and all using FPS-style conventions (WASD to dodge around and click to attack). There's a certain finesse to blocking a melee attack at the right time, or sidestepping a fireball, but there isn't really a lot of depth to it. Frankly, if the game didn't put so much care into drawing you into the experience in otherwise, things would get quite boring because of how ho-hum the combat is.
The main appeal of the game, then, is that there's just so damn much to do. Talking to passers-by upon entering any of the major cities will net you at least half a dozen new quests to do in a matter of minutes. Most of these quests have their own storylines with multiple steps, but even if you manage to exhaust these, asking innkeepers and the Jarls of various towns if there's any work will produce an infinite number of randomly generated one-off quests where you're sent to a random location to collect a bounty on some sort of ne'er-do-well. You can also join any number of guilds with their own independent quests. If you join the Thief's Guild, there is a main line of quests that allow you to work your way up in the ranks of the guild, but there are also randomly generated quests asking you to pickpocket a certain person, or steal an item from a certain house, or forge a certain business ledger. If you run out of things to do, you're doing something very, very wrong. All of this questing ends up requiring a good deal of travel, but at no point does this lead to tedium. You can instantly jump to any place you've already been to at any point in which you're not in combat, although really, even if you just decide to hoof it you'll find yourself admiring the landscape along the way and you might stumble on some good loot in one of the various caves, ruins, or fortresses along the way.
Skyrim does away with the ponderous weapon repair system, that required you to constantly carry around a giant bag of blacksmith's hammers and constantly repair your equipment or have to deal with penalties in their effectiveness. Your weapons never dulling sacrifices a certain degree of realism, but this is certainly one case where its welcome. Replacing the simple repair system is a robust weapon and armor creation system, wherein you can use the various metal ores and animal hides you collect along your way at blacksmith's forges to create equipment and add bonuses to the equipment you already have. There's also an alchemy system that's very similar to the last game, and a new enchantment system in which you first disenchant already magical items which then allows you how to apply that enchantment to other equipment. So there's a lot do to besides just running into new areas, bashing stuff, and getting out.
The game does have flaws. The fact that the world levels up with you and that is what facilitates the open-ended gameplay, but it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword. There are times when you'll slay a dragon on a mountaintop in a iconic clash, epic choir music blaring all the while, only to be murdered by a random bear during the descent back down. Some dungeons seem to be populated with grunts providing no challenge whatsoever, but with a boss enemy at the end who can fell you with a single critical hit. For all the realism but into the finely detailed and ever shifting landscapes, less care seems to have been put into the people of Skyrim. They don't have the creepy, uncanny valley look of Oblivion, but some of the animations still seem somewhat off and they behave oddly at times. NPCs will stand around and stare at you blankly at times when you're talking to them to turn in a task that they gave you that should provoke an instant reaction. People seem to clip through objects a lot. Most quests are pretty straight-forward, and the game always provides you with map markers showing where to do, but a few don't give you enough direction as to what you're supposed to do once you get there. Overall, there doesn't seem to be as much polish put into the actual mechanics of the game as there clearly was put into creating the game world.
These are minor quibbles, and are quibbles that barely touch my overall experience with the game. Even on the pretty modest settings which I'm running Skyrim on my not-quite-high-end PC, the game world leaves me consistently awe-struck, and I've yet to find myself tiring of uncovering more of it. If Bethesda works under the same time frame as with Skyrim, it'll be another five years before we see another Elder Scrolls game. In five years time I doubt I'll have actually exhausted everything there is to do in Skyrim. This is before the modding development tools have even been released. There simply isn't another game working quote on this scope, and it's a must-play for anyone with even a passing interest in any form of RPG.
