2 years later, I finally tackle "the best game ever"

After being severely under-whelmed by Oblivion, I was giving serious consideration to skipping this sequel to it. Fortunately, I was convinced otherwise by a friend because this one was a very very large step up in every way from it's predecessor.

To start with, I played it with the very nice PC exclusive HD texture pack which made it look a lot prettier than it's console counterparts. The PC version also allowed the use of the console which was necessary to get around a few game breaking bugs. This is quite a buggy game....and as I read more of the Skyrim Wiki through my progression, I became more and more aware of how many holes there are in the engine and quest scripting and just how many ways the game can be broken and how much harder it is to fix on console versions.

Asides from the obvious graphical upgrades (both stock and HD addition) which provide both much nicer looking locations as well as a great deal more variety and detail in said locations. This makes all the walking that you do (of which there is again, a lot) at least interesting to take in all the scenery around you. The voice acting is also greatly improved, although does not have quite the star-studded cast of Oblivion. The keyboard short-cuts and interface are enormously improved allowing for much speedier navigation of everything taking full advantage of the keyboard and mouse which is greatly appreciated.

I also enjoyed the story much more in this game over Oblivion. Instead of just being some dude who just stumbled into a quest, this time you are a "Dragonborn". A descendant of a member of the Royal family from Oblivion who have the ability to use their voice as a weapon by learning magic words or "Thums". You come into this knowledge at quite an opportune time in that Dragons are just starting to return to the world and the Dragonborn is the only one who can truly kill a dragon by absorbing their soul and their "Thum" along with it. This gives the story a much greater sense of an epic and a great sense of accomplishment when you complete your mission and even the smaller goals along the way.

The game-play itself remains mostly unchanged from before in that it has action RPG level progression and you pick the kind of traits you want to develop. Again, I went with a skull-cracking bruiser who cuts dragons into very small pieces.

The only drawbacks that come to mind are the aforementioned enormous amount of walking. And while the nice scenery does help to alleviate the boredom of walking, even this wears off eventually. And some of the areas that you have to get to are in very inaccessible places either around or on the other side of or on top of enormous mountains that you have to find a way around or up and this can also wear a bit thin over time and starts to feel just like padding the way with pointless obstacles.

I only did the main quest in this run but will definitely return to it to do all the DLC at a later date. With many more mods attached to it to make it look even prettier. The screenshots here will be something to aim for. And while I did thoroughly enjoy it and would easily recommend it to anyone I still don't think it lived up to the enormous amount of hype surrounding it or all the "best game ever" claims. It's good, but not that good. Looking forward to going back to it though and pushing it and my PC hardware to the limit.

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.