The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Preview

Another hands-on preview of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is in, courtesy of BeefJack, that talks about “some potential issues with the Xbox 360 version” of the open-world title among other things. Here’s a sampling:

The dual wielding of weapons naturally fits the 360 controller (and presumably the PS3 Dualshock as well) like a glove, with alternating and combining the left and right triggers quickly becoming second nature. Assigning a different weapon or spell to each hand involved no more a quick trip to the menu screen, and even within the confines of that short dungeon it was clear that the two-handed system enables a tactical approach to combining weaponry and magic in Skyrim that is far superior to Oblivion’s inevitable (run backwards rapidly) combat scenarios.

What also came across was how much more of an option the third-person camera has become in Skyrim indeed, I rapidly found myself preferring it during melee combat to give me a sense of the environment as well as enjoy the wide range of well-animated attack and finishing moves.

Eventually, having wiped out the brigands and looted their meagre belongings, I exited the dungeon, finding myself back in the bright sunshine right outside Riverwood’s gates. In the remaining time I had with the game, I tried out some smithing creating a rather fine iron dagger for myself as well as attempting to parse who exactly was saying what from the torrent of voices in my earphones. Bethesda clearly still need to work on the placing and volume of voices within the environment, because in this version it was almost impossible to follow all the overlapping dialogue coming at me from all directions.

And, for the Xbox 360 version specifically, it’s not all they need to work on. Although Bethesda have claimed that the previous footage shown of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was from across all three platforms, it was clear within the first few minutes that the vast majority of what has been shown is from the PC. The usual caveat applies that this was pre-release code we were playing, and the game is still the best part of two months out, but the Xbox 360 version was a noticeable step down in graphical quality.