Over the next few days, while I play through The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, I wanted to keep a journal here on Tumblr about my thoughts on the game. Though mostly because Blistered Thumbs isn’t the place for this sort of thing, I wanted to simply have a catalog of how my thoughts progress through my playthrough of this bad boy. As with any other game, I’m coming in a bit skeptical because of the hype. When it’s being declared a Game of the Year candidate prior to release, I’ve got reason to raise my right eyebrow in confusion.
Anyway, here’s my thoughts on Day 1:
- The introduction to character creation was kind of interesting. Though all of the games start with the player as a prisoner, it’s interesting that you essentially stumble into the big conflict of the game. In most other titles, I’d think it’s idiotic, but a game like Skyrim is a bit different. Due to the open-world nature of it, it gives the chance to build a character in a manner where they get to make their own decisions and come up with their own opinions on the game world and its conundrums.
- Now for a negative point. The motion capture in this game is pretty stiff, even though it’s better than Oblivion and Fallout 3. Seems that whenever I have to follow someone, they stop in their place, slowly rotate around, and then turn to run again. It all looks very robotic.
- Another down note: Though combat is a bit better this time around, it’s still a little herky-jerky. It almost always comes across as “block, attack, rinse, repeat” every time a fight comes along. The voice powers can help mix things up a bit, as can magic, but it still needed work.
-To the game’s credit, the only downside to the default settings is that the game doesn’t really autosave enough. A moot point if you’re playing the PC version (Quicksave keys are truly awesome), on the console it could have used a system that had checkpoints in different dungeon sections. Still, the default difficulty is challenging enough without being overwhelming.
-Though I already mentioned this on Twitter, I love the fact that your initial voice power is just you saying “Boosh.” It’s cool to walk up to someone and saying “Boosh” and they go flying backward. Then again, it has gotten me into trouble.
- The last note for today is that the visuals are really good for an open world game, but by no means the best I’ve seen. Red Dead Redemption looked quite a bit better. At the same time, I’m only five hours in, so I’ll probably have a lot more to say after tomorrow, Wednesday, and Thursday on the visuals.
