Is Skyrim worth your time? - TES V - Skyrim Review

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Hey this is Sven, and today we will try to figure out if Skyrim is (or much rather still is) worth spending your precious lifetime on. Keep in mind that this is just my opinion based on my experiences and the resulting feelings and thoughts about Skyrim, you may have a completely different opinion, which is totally fine.

Skyrim was developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published on November 11th, 2011 by Besthesda Softworks (yes, they are essentially the same company). It is an RPG set in a classic Fantasy world. It is the 5th and currently newest installment of the elder scrolls games if you are willing to ignore Elder Scrolls Online that is. You can play it on nearly every console that's currently sold in stores, the version I played is the PC one.

What is the game about

If, for whatever reason, you never heard about Skyrim, I will quickly summarize what it is that you do in the game.
After a short introduction that shows you some basics, you are thrown in the world of Skyrim. You are basically free to do whatever you feel like doing. You can try to finish all the quests that are thrown in your face or you don't care at all and just wonder through the world. There are insane amounts of areas, caves and buildings to explore and on the way you can pick up whatever gear you like. If thats still not enough the extensive skill system / level system will keep you busy.
But lets go into a little more detail here, shall we?

Quests

As in most RPG games most of your time you will be spending doing tasks for people, that they probably could do themselves, called quests. Let me tell you, there are a lot of them. In my current save file I played about 42 hours and I haven't even completed 10% of the main quests. That should give you a feeling for how many quests there actually are. Exact numbers vary but the internet says Skyrim has between 275 and 500 quests taking endless quests and dlc quests into account.
But it is not only about the sheer amount of quests, it is much more about how interesting most of those quests are. Of course, you have your casual "go there, kill that, get that" quests, but I promise you, most of them won't even bother you, because of all the great quests the game hast to offer. A good example for those good quests, is the quest line about Hermaeus Mora. He is one of the deadrics living in his own twisted realm, where you get sucked into every now in and then by finding and reading the "Black Books". Onces you get familiar with this quest, you start roaming the whole island for more of those books. The great thing is, a lot of quests are like this. They start out as normal every day stuff but end up being ... quests with either great story or fun gameplay or both.
While some people may not be interested in having 30 different quests at once, I really enjoy it, because I can choose to do whatever I want. And you will never run out of things to do.... except when you finished all the quests in which case you earned my respect for your dedication and effort.

Level / Skill System

Most games tend to have a level up system that is based on experience you get from either killing stuff or completing quests. Skyrim however rewards you with experience for nearly everything you do. You sneak pass some enemies? Sneak improved, you smith a new sword? Smithing increased, you kill someone with your new sword? One-Handed improved. You get the point I guess. For whatever stuff you do, the respective skill or proficiency increases determining your overall level. The fun thing is you never need to choose one thing over another. You get bored of being a heavy armor wearing mountain that crushes peoples skull with a hammer? No problem just put on your mages rob, equip a staff if you like and start being a mage. It is actually fun to start the game over choosing a completely new playstyle, because it results in a next to new game experience. Although I, and I guess many others, tend to always end up with the sneaking bow and dagger assassin.
With an update to Skyrim it is possible to reset one of the skill trees once its maxed, which means you can basically level up for all eternity if you feel like thats something you want to spend your life on.

Combat System

As mentioned before, depending on your playstyle you will use different gear. You can use one handed or 2 handed swords, a bow or your bare hands, which I would only recommend if you are a mage. While this doesn't sound like a lot it is more than enough to keep you busy I'll promise.
The combat itself is limit to very basic actions, and in my opinion that is a good thing here. Although Skyrim doesn't try to be realistic, all of the combat seems reasonable and realistic to a certain extend. Even though it is a fantasy world it has its own rules to how things work. Every time you kill an enemy you feel like this would work in real life too. Fighting with all the weapons just feels great and reasonable. Although sometimes an over the top combat system with ridiculous moves can be great, I think in this case they made the right decision with this kind of combat since its adds to the feeling of role playing.
I know this explanation is kind of wacky, but I hope some people will understand what I meant to explain here.

The Story

So, essentially Skyrim is at war. The empire that is ruling Skyrim has to deal with the Stormcloak rebellion. The Stormcloaks leader did even kill the high king of Skyrim, leaving two groups that both think one of them has the right to be the new ruler of Skyrim.

Adding to this dragons which are said to be extinct start showing up, bringing destruction over Skyrim. Luckily you discover that you are the Dragonborn. That means you can kill dragons and use there power for yourself. That makes you either a valuable ally or a powerful enemy for either of the groups taking part in the war. You can decide for yourself who of them you will join and fight for. At the same time you take care of the dragon problem Skyrim currently has.

That sums up the main story of TES V but it is important to mention that the Story of Skyrim consists of much more than only that. All the characters in Skyrim have problems related to the war or the dragons, some even have completely other things that matter to them but in the end every character has their own story and adds to big tale Skyrim wants to tell. As I mentioned before you can get lost in quest lines that have nothing to with dragons or war but completely different topics. You can find people searching for an artifact in one city and 40 hours of gaming later you can listen to another person who just happened to have heard a rumor about the exact same artifact. It just feels great how the world has so many tales to tell even after you finished the main story.

Mods

Probably the best thing that could have happened to Skyrim is the games modding community. The numerous amount of mods for Skyrim range from fixing some of the games flaws, over adding new spells and items, up to the point where a mod lets you play a completely new game based on Skyrim. Not to mention that some of the graphic mods for the game look so gorgeous, that they force modern computer to their limits.
All of them are free to use and they bring even more hours of gameplay to the table. It is just nice to see, that there is a community behind the game that cares so much about it.
So if you ever play Skyrim, be sure to check out the Steam workshop to make sure you don't miss out on great content.

Stuff I like mention as well

There are a couple things more to address that I didn't want to put in their own category, so lets just talk about them right here.

First let me say a little about the looks of the game. While the open world of the game is huge and filled with lots of stuff to discover, its appearance is really monotone and boring. Everywhere you go, you will find ice and mountains and caves and more ice, and thats it. I can't really see this as a pure negative point since it makes sense when you want to build a authentic world. Skyrim is the most northern part of Tamriel (which is the world the game is set in) and with prior installments they showed that they are able to design a beautiful world, but Skyrim is set up to be the rough icy land populated by strong nords. So the lack of beauty is reasonable but still noticeable able playing for hundreds of hours.

I also want to address the dlcs. There are exactly 3 of them: Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn. The first two are really good dlcs that add features like housing or playing as a vampire or werewolf, together with a bunch of new quests of course. These things add to the role play aspect and fit really well into the game. The third one is flat out great. The first time I played the content of this dlc I was just amazed. It adds a whole new Island with its on story. Since I don't want to spoiler you I will just say that the quest line is amazing and the new gear and especially the new skills than can be acquired are extremely fun to use, its a really good example of what I expect I am talking about a great dlc.
If you ask me which dlc to get, just get all of them. By now you should only buy the game with all dlcs included since it became insanely cheap and is worth way more than what you will be asked to pay.

Lastly I would like to talk about
The so called Special Edition is the same game just with improved graphics released in 2016. I like the idea of not only releasing the game on the newer console generation but also improving it, so the power of the better hardware could be used. The sad thing for me is that the graphical improvements weren't as big as I expected. The big problem is that the modding community had improved the graphics of the game way before the launch of the Special Edition and even today the results of modding are way better than the Special Edition. They made a really good choice here though, because every player who already owned the game and all dlcs on Steam got the new version for free, which shows for me that this wasn't a mere cash grab but more of a try to get new players.
In addition to that a remake of the game for 2018 was announced that supports the HTC Vive and the Playstation VR. Honestly I am really hyped up for that.

But for all those years I asked myself why the time wasn't used to develop the next Elder Scrolls game. I am sure fans would have preferred a new installment instead of dedicating resources to remakes. As much fun as you can have with the game, at some point you feel the like you want something new, and in my opinion the Vive version that comes out 2018 could have been a whole new Elder Scrolls if they decided to. But we get the same game again, after about 8 years. Although I am not happy with that, I am sure there will still be fun to have, shooting arrows with the HTC Vive, and maybe they even bring some new stuff who knows.

Just to mention, I will talk about The Elder Scrolls Online in my next article, I didn't forget about that one.

Pros and cons

Pros

Huge open world filled with Stuff that waits to be discovered
Emmersive Story that is much greater than only the main Story line
Easily hundreds of hours of gameplay
Mods for nearly everything, even a whole new Story and world if you want
You can buy it for less than 10 bucks

Cons

The snowy white mountain landscape gets repetitive
The physics do not like more than 60 fps
I dont know please add something

So, is Skyrim worth your time?

The answer is a big Yes.
Skyrim does a lot of things right and nearly none wrong. You can easily spend hundreds of hours with this game and still have fun. The modding community keeps this game alive and adds great content to the game or polishes flaws the game has. The combat and leveling system is fun, and the immersive world never dissapoints you. The best thing is how cheap it is by now. Just skip 2 Starbucks coffes and you have enough money to buy this great game with all the dlcs.
In my opinion this is one of the best singleplayer games that are currently out there and I can only recommend to play it.

Outro

If you do not own Skyrim but feel the urge to play it, just buy the game its insanely cheap and worth every penny.
What is your opinion about Skyrim, what do you like, what do you dislike? Leave your thoughts in the comments.