And so, Skyrim has come out and I've spent the last 6-7 or so hours playing.
A fairly quick rundown.
Skyrim is a console port. So, all of the things you typically associate with console ports, including ridiculously bad menu controls, intense LOD, and graphical quality that doesn't quite compare to modern PC games, you can associate with Skyrim.
Skyrim's download is fairly small compared to most modern games - this is because most of its textures are very low resolution; consoles don't have much memory, after all. The 360, as usual, got shafted the most. Us real platform players got shafted extra by a console port. Of course, Bethesda games don't really shine until modders fix them. More on that later.
Character customization has been dumbed down quite a bit, relying mostly on presets with a little hint of manual operatives. Nothing like SR3 or Oblivion, though. Something that stuck out to me was that hair looks distinctly bad in Skyrim. If there was one graphic thing that bugged me the most, it's how bad hair looks.
Because Skyrim's textures tend to be low-res, inspection of most surfaces yields that ugly Starcraft 2/doom 3 glossiness going on when the normals get pixelated all to hell.
On the flip side, the game performs admirably well, although there's no small-scale skirmishes or anything going on. Sound work is decent, voice acting ranges from decent to clearly intern-level, but passable at least. Soundtrack is probably Soule's best work in many years.
It's 2011, and you still don't see your own bloody legs or body for some reason. I remember back in the n64 when there was this mysticism about one day being able to see your own body in FPS games more often but it just never happens for some reason. This immediately struck me in the game - you don't see your own body. Which is probably a good thing, because while the animation quality has improved a little bit since oblivion, oblivion's animations were so bad that the only way you can go
is up. Thankfully, the crazy bugs in the engine make up for this. Not 2 minutes out of the starting area and I witnessed a moose skating around in the air like a missile, to land a distant in front of me and then die. Unfortunately, I had
just turned off fraps, and it happened too fast to get any more than his landing death.
Wait, is this really Skyrim?
First-person weapons have the texture quality of Morrowind. It's a stark difference from the characters, especially your FPS hands, which much higher detail.
What's with that weird outline, anyways? Was this game actually tested?
Looking past the incredibly unreliable UI, which seems to play a game of hide-the-interactive-element with your mouse cursor, the porty texturing and bland-as-every-other melee combat, and Skyrim really isn't too terrible. I guess because it's a Bethesda game, who have relied very heavily on modders to fix and sell their games, Skyrim will potentially have the same life that Oblivion did. This is in part because there is simply no competition for this kind of title. From what I understand, Fallout 3 had very little in the way of modding and didn't have nearly as much longetivity to it as a result. Nowadays, people often state they can't play vanilla Oblivion without their mods.
So, the question now is, what potential is there in Skyrim for mods? That answer will have to remain unanswered, as AFAIK there's no SDK available yet. Oblivion's SDK was buggy as hell and a trial by fire; again, because these are alone in the pit, modders had to make due. This is probably why they have so few actual conversions and mostly just aesthetic material. With such a texture mod, Skyrim could potentially start challenging Unreal 3 games in graphics. Who knows where it could go.
Investing in Skyrim now is a long-term investment. As a short-term game, don't expect anything fantastic, especially for the esteemed price of 59.99 USD when almost all other non-activision publishers have gone down to 49.99. If you loved Oblivion (I didn't), Skyrim will be your kind of game. If you didn't, maybe it won't be for you. I went in with skepticism, but wasn't as disappointed as I expected to be. Yeah, it's a bloody console port, but I kind of like it.
extras -
WHY IS MOUSE ACCELERATION ON BY DEFAULT ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME
There's supposedly some ini changes to make the game prettier. I'll report back after I've fooled with them a bit.
/cont
The first Dragon you fight in the game is very underwhelming. Dragons are extremely rigid in their animations and how they move, performing extremely unrealistic turns and landings. While they kill generic NPC's easily enough, they don't do that much damage to you in comparison. I fear for when I start getting some actual magic and such and actually start doing damage - then they'll be really screwed. I kind of pitied the poor bastard, so I let him eat my indestructible ally for a while and kill the faceless dolts following her around, then sat behind him and hit him a few times.
On the other hand, as I was running around 1-2 shotting generic Undead in some tomb, I quickly met my match by ten fold in the form of some crazy fucking mini-boss. He and a Wight (separate fights, different rooms) both handed my ass to me several times before I dispatched them in abusive ways over the course of a half-hour. They were so ridiculously beyond my level and the level of the Undead around them that I have to wonder if the autolevel engine broke. Following this I ran into a dual-wielding boss that 2-shotted me and has thousands of hp, along with summoning wight allies. I 1shotted his normal undead. My power attack didn't even move his health bar. Yeah, fuck that. I ran through his room, collecting boxes and the dragon shrine, then ran away.
/e
Do you own Skyrim? Okay, seriously, stop whatever you're doing. Go find a Giant, one of the friendly ones. Find a Wolf and aggro it, and drag it towards the giant so the giant aggros onto it. Sit back and enjoy.