I hope you’re ready to waste literally days of your lives because Bethesda has released “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” and the amount of content it boasts is obscenely absurd.
In my first playthrough since its release, I clocked 105 hours; that’s more than four full days, and there was a substantial amount of content I didn’t explore. The game also seems to generate randomized content like bounties and events in the wilderness, which leaves it with a crazy amount of replay-ability. During my first playthrough, I kept to being a champion of good and justice, not helping evil figures and abstaining from the war that takes place throughout the game. I felt satisfied with how the game played out. I then started playing an evil character and started doing horrible things to people for power or amusement, and that was just as satisfying. Bethesda has hit the nail on the head here and released an instant hit. What I absolutely love is that while there’s a main storyline, you can skip it completely if you so desire, and the game seems to take that into account and doesn’t just make the game easy on you.
Monsters relevant to the main storyline guard many areas, but if you just ignore the main storyline completely the guards will be replaced by logical replacements. While skipping the main story after my first playthrough, instead of finding a horrifying dragon guarding one point, I found a group of bandits with a nasty master. That same point had been home to a bunch of burned corpses from dead bandits, so it was as if the dragon had never come. In Skyrim you have a lot of flexibility to play how you want to play, but life will be hard if you use obscure specifications.
For example, I wanted to see if I could play as a guy who fights solely with his fists; it was extremely difficult, but once I found some equipment that helped that play style and some skills to go with it, I was set.The game has a lot of interesting features, such as the ability to shout in the language of dragons, which can have horrifying effects such as pulling dragons from the sky, freezing an enemy in ice, slowing down time itself, causing you to let out a burst of flame breath or creating an immense shockwave. The developers also took a lot of strange things into consideration; case in point, if you put a bucket or pot over someone’s head, you’re blocking their eyes, so they can’t see you. While they can’t see you can commit a lot of crimes, and they won’t see or care.”Skyrim” also features a much more robust crafting system than its predecessor, “Oblivion.” You can create your very own weapons and armor and in some cases make them ridiculously strong. By the end of the game I killed the final boss with three swings of my sword, which was kind of a let-down, but given how much time I spent building up to make that sword, I guess it makes sense.
The game also features an unbelievable score, some of it seemingly played by an orchestra of some sort with what sounds like a hundred voices singing. It may sound sad, but the game literally gave me shivers when the main theme started playing while fighting a dragon on the snowy peaks of a mountain. The first time I killed a dragon was a tremendous occasion as well, and the effects that are displayed when a dragon dies are amazing. Overall, the game is incredibly entertaining and has enough content to keep even the most hardcore of gamers entertained for quite a long while. I would suggest getting it for the PC because the modding community for Bethesda games always does some incredible stuff, and you don’t want to miss out! If you haven’t gotten it already, you’re missing out, and it might make a good Christmas present!