Looking Back: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

As the name suggests, this is going to be a thing where I look back at a particular game and the influence it had on gaming (for better or for worse). Let's kick this off with a doozy: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Released on November 11th, 2011, Skyrim was met with mostly positive responses. Like many Bethesda games, it did ship with a large number of glitches and errors, some of which have not been patched by the developer (and probably never will, given that we're over four years out). In hindsight, quite a few people (myself included) realized that choosing that release date as a marketing stunt (11/11/11) was a bad idea, and it probably should have been pushed back a few months.

Graphically, many people criticized it for using a dolled-up version of Bethesda's old Gamebryo engine. Frankly, I actually prefer this approach. I hardly find it fair to consumers to force them to upgrade their hardware every couple of years just to buy your latest game, so a game like that which wasn't all that taxing (relatively speaking) was a breath of fresh air in the industry.

In terms of gameplay, the game was mostly an improvement on Oblivion. The melee controls felt a little rougher, but the difficulty curve was nowhere near as insane as its predecessor's level scaling system made it out to be. The magic system was heavily simplified, but was much more viable for leveling than previous games. Granted, it still fell short in terms of balance, mainly due to Destruction being balanced around AOE damage when a lot of major fights like the dragons were about focusing on single targets, and Stealth being very powerful and very useful.

However, the writing didn't really make any advancements, and in some areas took a step back. Like Oblivion before it, the plot of Skyrim is a "save the day" plot; in this case, stopping the return of the dragons who will wreck your stuff faster than you can say "Fus ro dah". At least, that's the theory. With no real time limit or actual in-game threat attached to it, the story has no tension and feels superfluous. The same applied to the civil war questline and the various guilds. Add in the fact that the stories weren't particularly well written either, and the net effect was to incentivize skipping the story and just wander around doing whatever.

One thing that continued and grew was the concept of the game mod community, something that had been present with prior games. However, Valve (the owners of the online gaming service Steam) used the game as a basis for launching a new feature called Steam Workshop. This allowed players to upload their own mods for Skyrim (with limits), as well as quickly find and download other mods through Steam. This service turned out to be very popular, and has shown up on many other games since then, becoming a staple of the Steam platform itself.

Valve later attempted to launch a program where modders could sell their mods for a price, with both Valve and Bethesda taking a cut. Once again, Skyrim was the testing ground for this new initiative. However, due to their planned cut being too unreasonably large, and Valve's lack of curation of the mods that were on Steam, the plan was revealed to be a disaster and quickly scrapped. A pity, really. I wouldn't mind paid mods as long as there were more standards in place to ensure their quality. Sadly, that will likely never happen.

 Skyrim can be credited in part, with its huge success, for influencing the launch a new wave of games incorporating open world mechanics. The downside is that open world style games don't mesh well with strong narratives. (There are several reasons why, one of which I noted above). Yet many of these games at least attempt to have a central key narrative, which means this isn't quite so good. It didn't help that Skyrim's story wasn't good, as I noted above. Many of these games were met with a quite a bit of criticism.

In the end, Skyrim did make Bethesda a major player in the game market, in a way that it hadn't been before. More importantly, it helped paved the way for a more user-friendly modding scene, which is a net plus in my books. The games that tried to imitate it may not be as good, but the legacy is still there; it's a game worth noting and remembering.