Finally, I take my first steps into the world of the Elder Scrolls

Another very famous game here that I have long had, but never got to. Many people claim it to be one of their favourite games ever (or at least until Skyrim came out) so there was quite a lot of hype to live up to. Sadly, I do not think it succeeded here. Not for me anyway.

Being made by Bethesda the same as Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, it once again runs on the long serving Gamebryo engine. Albeit a cruder and earlier version than what was used in Fallout due to this being developed a few years earlier. As a result of this, there was little to no gamepad support for the PC version and few keyboard shortcuts either meaning pretty much everything had to be done with mouse pointer which was quite cumbersome and time consuming. This engine while extremely powerful and flexible is also incredibly buggy and crash-prone. So I did run into a few technical difficulties that forced me to reload earlier saves to redo events and frequent crashes would also cancel out progress at times.


The plot is your fairly standard issue Medievil-timey kind of thing where you are a lowly nobody who is suddenly thrust into a destiny quest and have to save the world from some real bad dudes.

But not these ones

But overall, it had a very Lord-of-the-Rings kind of feel to it. The reasons to this are three-fold:

• The medievil setting
• The gateways to the plane of Oblivion (where the bad dudes live) look just like the eye of Sauron
• You spend an inordinate amount of time walking places

Some of my favourite parts of the game were the featured voices of the likes of Sean Bean, Patrick Stewart and Terence Stamp as main characters and the clearly enormous amount of time sunk into the art design of the world. It really is a stunning place to behold full of beauty and detail. Which is a good thing because of the afore-mentioned large amount of time spent walking so at least you have nice things to gawk at while you're walking. And the dungeon caves that you have to trawl through to find things in are also lavishly detailed and full of fantastic architecture and atmosphere making you feel like you are really treading on ancient ground where no-one has been for centuries.

Some of your travelling buddies

Also, much like Fallout, you pick a class for your character and as you level up you can choose what to pour your experience points into. If you want to wield magic or huge swords for instance. I went for huge swords naturally. But the level progression in this seemed very very slow and I don't think I was even past level 6 or so by the time I had finished the game. And while I am aware there is an enormous amount of things to do outside of the main campaign, not much of it interested me so I opted just to stick to the main quest. However, I may go back at a later date to do some of the extra DLC missions which were later added on.

In summary, I would say this was a decent enough open world adventure where I did have fun cutting shit up in dark caves but after all the hype from numerous sources, I was really expecting more. The hype was so huge and it fell so short of it that I was briefly considering not bothering with the sequel, Skyrim, at all. But I was convinced to change my mind on that one and that review will come soon.