Since I first heard it was happening, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has been my most anticipated game of the year, promising a return to the vast world that ate up my life in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. When I first bought my Xbox360, Oblivion was among the first round of games I bought, taking it on faith that I’d enjoy it, since I hadn’t played any of the previous Elder Scrolls games. I ended up spending over 120 hours on the initial playthrough, and being completely unready for it to end when I finished. I’ve even restarted it a few times just to spend more time in the world of Tamriel. Of course, I’m cheap, so I didn’t get the expansion packs right away – in fact, I didn’t get them until a few weeks ago, when Xbox Live had an amazing sale on them, and I didn’t get to finish them before Skyrim came out. I’ll get back to them, but for now, my life belongs to Skyrim.
So far, I’ve only scratched the surface of Skyrim‘s world, so this is not a review, but just a catalog of the some first impressions of the game so far. I’ve put in roughly ten hours, and have completed only a very little bit of the main quest line. I tend to like doing the other things first, so I’ve done a lot of little tasks like clearing out a cave of bandits, sorting out an unhappy love triangle, recovering a family sword, those kind of things. You get those just by wandering around and talking to people – it’s amazing how many people need stuff done for them! There are also larger, multi-part side quests, and I’ve done a few of those as well. Then there are guilds and factions you can join, each of which starts its own questline. I’ve joined two of those so far. If you’ve played Oblivion and all this sounds familiar, you’re right. This game is essentially exactly like Oblivion from the general design to the branching questlines and random tasks to the hack-and-slash combat. If you’ve played Oblivion, you already know whether you’re going to like Skyrim or not. I haven’t been disappointed one bit – it’s like being back in the world I love with updated graphics, slightly better combat, a face-lifted menu system (which I quite like, actually, compared with Oblivion‘s), and what promises to be an even bigger world.
