The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Let's have a brief look at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, although at this point in time Skyrim has so completely overshadowed the rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise it might as well just be called Skyrim. Not Something Something Skyrim or Skyrim Something, just Skyrim.

The ironic thing is that Skyrim is one of the few Elder Scrolls games with an actual Elder Scroll in it. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Are you sick of reading Skyrim yet?

The huge success of Skyrim raises the question of what Bethesda will call the sequel. The Elder Scrolls VI: Whatever will just confuse people. People want Skyrim! They want more Skyrim! They don't want The Elder Scrolls: Whatever. It's just confusing. The Elder Scrolls VI: Skyrim 2 sounds like a football score. Will it be called The Skyrim Chronicles: Skyrim? Skyrim: Ages of Skyrim? Skyrim and Knuckles and Knuckles and Skyrim Featuring Knuckles and Knuckles and Skyrim?

Seriously, I have the impression that most fans of Skyrim aren't even aware there are other games in the series. The lamers! The fourth episode, Oblivion, was a big hit on the PS3 and Xbox 360 way back in 2006, but that was a long time ago. The earlier games were pretty obscure. Morrowind sold well back in 2002, but Daggerfall and Arena were PC-only role-playing games of no great distinction. Skyrim on the other hand is one of the best-selling games of all time, with sales of over sixty million copies, more than the entire rest of the Elder Scrolls franchise put together.

What is Skyrim? It's a first-person open-world role-playing game by Bethesda Software. It takes place in a generic fantasy world based heavily on Norse mythology. It has dragons, magic, swords, simple technology etc. Bethesda's games have the same basic template. There's a relatively dull main quest accompanied by masses of short side-quests - players often ignore the main quest entirely, in favour of the side-quests - plus a bunch of busywork. In the case of Skyrim the busywork includes cooking, making potions, mining for ore, building houses, none of which are essential, but they pass the time. The cooking minigame is particularly pointless, and yet I found myself compulsively hoarding piles of salt (an essential ingredient), because the food looks so attractive, and it made me feel hungry. If nothing else Skyrim captures the feel of chopping wood on a cold winter's day before going indoors for a hot bowl of soup.

Bethesda's role-playing games tend to have a "never mind the quality, feel the width" element. Skyrim itself doesn't have a particularly lengthy main quest, but it has dozens of hours worth of dungeons to explore and mysteries to solve. On top of which it's fun to just explore the map. It takes place in a large open world that has a day-night cycle, weather patterns, plus several hundred independent non-player characters who live their own lives.

I'm old enough to remember the likes of The Hobbit on the ZX Spectrum and Midwinter on the Atari ST, and in theory Skyrim should blow my mind, but it's easy to take it for granted. One of the most popular sports on the internet is Bethesda-bashing, whereby fans who have played Bethesda's games for thousands of hours compete with each other to insult Bethesda as harshly as possible. In their minds Bethesda sucks, Starfield is the worst game of all time, and Todd Howard - the public face of Bethesda's games - is a moron, a liar, a lying little speck of a man. And yet they can't walk away, because they're addicted. Todd Howard has the last laugh.

Skyrim was originally released in 2011 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, and then again in 2016 as Skyrim: Special Edition for the PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and then again in 2017 for the Nintendo Switch, and again a year later as Skyrim VR for virtual reality headsets, and again in 2021 as Skyrim: Anniversary Edition for the PC, Xbox Series X, and PlayStation 5. Did you get all that?

As of 2024 Skyrim is still available at full price. In theory £40 or so, although it frequently goes on sale. Along with Grand Theft Auto V and Minecraft it's one of a handful of games that has been on sale continuously at full-price for over a decade, which is an impressive feat given that it has spanned three whole console generations.

Incidentally I played it on the PlayStation 4, because it was on offer for the PlayStation. The screenshots in this article are taken from the unmodified PlayStation 4 version of the game. I found the fixed field of view frustrating when indoors, and aiming arrows is awkward with a controller, but otherwise the experience of playing the game on a console felt painless. The game did make my PS4 chug air, though, so be sure to leave a lot of space around your console for ventilation.

This character is voiced by Lynda Carter - the actual Lynda Carter, of Wonder Woman fame. There's something immensely gratifying about being praised by Lynda Carter.

Why is Skyrim so popular? The obvious answer is that it's a good-looking, good-sounding game that builds on Oblivion without doing anything particularly wrong. I'm not a fan of role-playing games, but I quickly picked up the gameplay mechanics. Combat consists of stepping forward, swiping, then stepping back again, and you can go a long way just with those moves, but there's enough depth to allow for flexibility.

Unlike Dark Souls the gameplay is mostly mellow, and one upside of Skyrim's pervasive narrative blandness is that it never becomes emotionally overwhelming. As pictured throughout this article the graphics are still attractive today - everything is blocky, but the colours and lighting are lovely - and during the COVID years Skyrim even had a second wind as ambient entertainment for people who couldn't leave the house. At a time when people were flocking to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for their travel fix, they also binge-watched 84-year-old Shirley Curry as she gleefully power-smashed raiders and giant spiders in, yes, Skyrim.

It has aged well. Oblivion was in theory an A-list title, but it felt janky. It had roughly a dozen voice actors for a cast of over eight hundred non-player characters, so the characters ended up sounding the same. The AI mostly worked, but the results were often bizarre. The combat became tiresome at higher levels, and on a visual level it was all over the place, as if the monsters had been sourced from a bunch of different public domain libraries.

Furthermore the pervasive use of bloom locked the game visually into the mid-2000s. Skyrim has a side-mission that sends the player back into the past, at which point the graphics, amusingly, turn into Oblivion:

In contrast Skyrim is visually, tonally, literarily-ly, writer-il-lilly restrained. It has none of its predecessor's camp excesses. The writing and voice acting are low-key, almost dour, as if the developers made a conscious decision that Skyrim should be less camp and more grown-up than its predecessor. The landscape is rendered in autumnal tones. The character models have a deliberately stylised look that resembles wood carvings.

The supernatural elements are also toned down. Skyrim still has mysterious underground cities, and the player can major in magic, but it has none of the deep lore of Oblivion, with its multiple planes of reality and occasionally baffling excursions into the minutiae of the Elder Scrolls franchise. Did you know that the moons in the sky are actually the decaying corpses of dead Gods? And the sun is actually a hole through which magic enters the mortal plane? None of this troubles Skyrim.

The player can role-play as a cat person, or a lizard, but those races appear only fleetingly in the game itself. For the most part the baddies are generic barbarians or more-or-less realistic wild animals, with the occasional zombie. There's a stereotype that fantasy games are full of Playboy models wearing chainmail bikinis, but Skyrim has none of that beyond the occasional bare arm.

Now, I'm 100% heterosexual, but if Tsun here ever needed someone to plait his chest hair I would happily volunteer.

Chest hair. Even the main plot feels more grown-up. The Empire of Cyrodil is being pressured by its more powerful neighbour to give up its old superstitions. The Emperor agrees, but this causes the most traditionally-minded part of the Empire to break away. A civil war seems inevitable - a war that the Empire can ill afford - but just as Skyrim gets going a more pressing issue arises. Dragons! They were killed off long ago, but now they are returning, led by a particularly bad dragon who wants to use the people of Skyrim as food.

The player is an amnesiac drifter who begins the game under arrest, on pain of imminent execution. I decided to role-play as Robert Plant, lead singer of Led Zeppelin, because the game is full of Vikings, and the main character has a special power whereby their voice can knock dragons out of the sky, which is true of Robert Plant as well.

Skyrim is full of books. They're mostly just flavour, although some of them can boost the player's skills. I was amused by the presence of a fighting fantasy / choose your own adventure book:

Is that postmodern? I think it is. The developers intended for the civil war to be a dynamic wargame along the lines of STALKER: Clear Sky, but for whatever reason most of it was cut during development, with the result that the war only amounts to a pair of mission chains. I have to admit that I wasn't even aware Skyrim had a civil war until I started playing the game. I thought it was all about dragons. Dragons in Norway, because the map, the accents, the buildings are all based on Old Norse mythology.

Skyrim suffers from erratic writing. Sometimes it's good. The rebel leader, Ulfric Stormcloak, is a particularly interesting figure. He has some dubious followers who believe that the province of Skyrim should be Vikings-only, but the Empire itself is no better, forcing the aforementioned cat-people to conduct their business outside city walls and only grudgingly allowing the lizard-people to enter cities. But on the other hand Ulfric's actions weaken the Empire at a crucial time, and yet if the Empire continues to give concessions to the baddies, why does it exist?

None of this is highbrow, but it's surprisingly nuanced. In the hands of lesser writers Ulfric could have been a cartoon villain. Instead he comes across as a tragic figure, doomed to long-term failure no matter how the war goes. In a nice touch his home city is, as he points out, run-down and neglected, because the Empire doesn't care about its distant provinces, insert political shoehorn here.

In contrast the main plot, with the dragons, is much simpler. Which leads to the game's biggest problem. For all its size, for all the things that exist to divert the player's attention, none of it feels meaningful. It doesn't have an emotional payload. I didn't care much about the civil war, and the dragons don't come across as a particularly dangerous threat - after the player has levelled up a few times the periodic dragon attacks lose their shock value and become slightly irritating interruptions. The chief evil dragon, Alduin the World-Eater, has an awesome name, but I never had a handle on his character. He's just a big mean dragon. For gameplay reasons the side characters tend to be interchangeable, so despite the mass of NPCs Skyrim often feels empty.

Fleetingly, intermittently, I felt things. One side-quest in which I helped a ghost find justice stood out because the voice actor - Babylon 5's Claudia Christian, no less - really sold the role:

And another sequence, in which I infiltrated a cult that had committed ritual suicide, stood out for the following terse note:

Followed by the horrible realisation that the small steps I had just trodden on were not steps:

But for the most part the quests blend into each other. Each one involves clearing out a dungeon, or the lair of an undead dragon priest, and although the environmental storytelling is much more elaborate than it was in Oblivion, it's not on the same high level as the Fallout games. After a while it felt as if the game was washing over me.

Now, Skyrim is still great fun, and as mentioned earlier the lack of emotional grip means that it's easy to dive into the game periodically, but even the Fallout games had an underlying story, an underlying theme. Skyrim doesn't have that. It's not about anything. There are no twists, just mission after mission.

Skyrim also continues the Elder Scrolls tradition of having some high-profile voice actors who are barely featured in the publicity materials, which raises the question of why the developers bothered. Oblivion had Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean, who admittedly was very good in his role. Skyrim has Christopher Plummer as an old man, and Max Von Sydow as another old man. They both have one big speech apiece. Great actors in real life, but they don't stand out in Skyrim.

The game also features Joan Allen, who gives a good performance in a difficult role. She plays Delphine, leader of an outlawed sect who quickly realises that the player character has hidden potential. She illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of the game's writing. Most of the decisions she makes are wrong, and as with Ulfric Stormcloak she comes across as a doomed figure, fated to spend the rest of her days trapped in an isolated monastery with a bunch of followers who no longer have a raison d'etre.

Which could have been the basis of an interesting storyline - everything seems to be leading to the conclusion that Delphine's dogmatism has no place in the modern world - but it never resolves, presumably because the developers wanted her to remain in the background as a source of radiant quests. The overall lack of character growth or change is disappointing, but again the developers had to build a world that worked equally well for a low-lever player powering through the main quest, and a high-level juggernaut just chilling, so the opportunity for character change is very limited. The civil war ends with one set of local functionaries being replaced with another set, but the new bosses are more or less the same as the old bosses.

The game also has Lynda Carter, as mentioned above. In the 1980s Carter married the co-owner of the company that now owns Bethesda, and she appears in several Bethesda games, presumably as a favour, dating back to Morrowind in 2002. One mission in Skyrim involves accompanying her character into battle against a particularly tricky foe, after which she praises the player to the skies. It struck me that this is one of the things that makes video games so appealing. They're a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which the universe revolves around the player, and Lynda Carter thinks you're terrific. Is that so bad?

Do I have anything else to say about Skyrim? The music is lovely. There's masses of it. I was particularly struck by a simple piano piece, which I learn from the internet is widely beloved. It's called "Secunda" and it has a clever bit where the piano goes down. That's right. Instead of staying the same, the piano goes down.

At times the combination of lovely music, butterflies, the wind in the trees etc made me wish there was a mod that could turn off the monsters, turning Skyrim into an ambient wandering experience. And perhaps there is, because on the PC at least there's a popular modding scene. This mostly seems to involve turning the characters into anime dolls, but that's because most people are manko, a word that I just invented.

Anything else? Ice-T once said "don't hate the player, hate the game". Every baller on the street is searching for fame. Skyrim has been indirectly responsible for some of the least entertaining internet content ever. A handful of NPC stock phrases have been turned into unfunny internet pseudo-jokes. "I took an arrow to the knee", "something something cloud district", "never should have come here". None of those lines are funny in the game, and they aren't funny otherwise. So much internet humour is based on the simple repetition of stock phrases. It's just no good. Youtube is also full of multi-part Skyrim "let's play" videos that usually begin with the narrator saying "hi youtube be sure to like and subscribe what's up".

"But at least some of this content must be good" - if there's one thing I've learned from being on the internet for thirty years, it's that you can comb through the creative efforts of millions upon millions of people, and still find nothing of value. You know what's the worst? Blog posts. They are horrible.

There are also entire websites dedicated to scraping content about Skyrim, notably GameRant, which regularly reposts messages from Reddit's Skyrim subreddit as news stories. "This Player Found a Crazy Detail in Skyrim", "These Players Miss This Thing That Skyrim Doesn't Have", "Here are Ten Insane Things You Might Have Missed in Skyrim", that kind of thing. Skyrim has been responsible for some of the most worthless content on the internet, but that's not the fault of Skyrim. Who is to blame? People. It's our fault. You and me.

Still, in summary Skyrim has a mass of content, and as per Bethesda's other games it works as role-playing junk food. But it doesn't mean anything, and I didn't feel anything, so after finishing the main quest and a scattering of side-quests it has started to drift from my mind. Nonetheless as a form of ambient entertainment it is tops, and it looks and particularly sounds wonderful.