Bethesda has been showing off The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in the form of a behind-closed-doors press demo, and several sites are reporting back with their impressions.
GameSpot.
The revamped game engine powering Skyrim is an impressive bit of technology. Whether it’s a massive view of a distant mountaintop that you can actually go off and climb–one such mountaintop houses a race of men called Greybeards, who have become masters of communicating with dragons–or the ability to wander through the woods and simply pick berries, Skyrim is a game that concerns itself with the big picture as well as the little one. “We’re trying to build this complete virtual fantasy world,” said Howard. “And we’re all about the little details that make it a believable place.”
The demo moved from the wooded pathway running along the river into a waterfront lumber town called Riverwood. Howard says that each town or city you encounter in the game has its own economy and job system, which you can see in regular non-player characters going about their day-to-day lives chopping wood, sharpening axes, or what have you. In fact, Howard even pointed out that there are now children in the game to add more believability to the gameworld. But it’s believability with one minor compromise. “You can’t kill them,” joked Howard. “Someone already asked in the last demo.”
GameSpy.
Eric Neigher: Yeah, I wasn’t a big fan of the combat system in the original Oblivion, either. But, to be fair, Fallout 3 had guns — it’s easier to do V.A.T.S. with guns. That said, did they overhaul anything else in Skyrim? The quest system, the skill trees, character development? Not that those things were bad in Oblivion… but they could always be improved upon.
Gus Mastrapa: According to Bethesda’s Todd Howard, Skyrim is a ground-up reworking of the Oblivion engine. Everything from the graphics engine to the way that quests are generated has been rewritten. That said, the game still feels like Elder Scrolls — just greatly improved. When you walk into a town, people do more than stand around and talk. They have jobs; they work. And if you walk up to their anvil or workbench while they’re away, you can attempt to do the same stuff. Skills are streamlined, but not dumbed down. And remember the clutter of menus you had to sift through in Oblivion? Those have been totally reimagined, making managing your characters and items way more intuitive and fun. My favorite new embellishment was the way you take perks on your skill trees. When you enter the menu, your character looks up to the heavens where you see constellations representing the different skills in the game. Each star in the constellation is a perk or bit of growth you can take as you gain strength. It’s a nice touch.
IGN.
This attention to the finer points of presentation extends to the interface, reworked in Skyrim to be less cluttered. Your character’s skills are displayed as star constellations, and as you dive into each to see the individual perks contained within they’re displayed as stars within each celestial pattern. The text that pops up while in conversation and while quick-swapping weapons and armor is designed to be unobtrusive, so it that it doesn’t feel like it’s calling any more attention to itself than it has to. Models of all the items, from the more impressive pieces of armor and weapons down to individual herbs, can be inspected, rotated and zoomed in on however you see fit.
IGN, again.
You absorb the soul of every dragon you slay. One soul is strong enough to empower one word from any shout you’ve uncovered. Will you increase the potency of Fire Breath? Or Slow Time? Maybe you prefer the tornado style of Whirlwind Spirit. Just remember that this is the language of dragons, meaning that whatever you can shout, a dragon in Skyrim can shout right back at you. Good thing dragons can’t hold battle axes or you might be in trouble.
Though certain dragons may patrol a certain area, all are unscripted. The dragons’ artificial intelligence is designed to utilize their strengths both in the air and on the ground, and battles can play out differently depending on how they’re approached. And some dragons are bigger, fiercer, and tougher than others. So kill the weaker ones first before tackling something as strong as a Frost Dragon.
BeefJack.
Bethesda say that Skyrim will offer several different environment types split across seven broad regions, but what we’ve seen so far seems to stick fairly rigidly to fantasy stereotype. There’s the lush green forests, the snowy mountainous regions, the dark, flame-lit dungeons. They’re the environments we’ve seen in every fantasy RPG, in other words, and while the variety might be strong, whether Skyrim’s locations have any real character of their own remains to be seen.
The game will also succeed or fail on the strength of its quests and storytelling and, again, it’s too early to pass judgement on that. However, with a new quest and storytelling system created especially for Skyrim, I’d say it’s worth being cautiously optimistic. And since it’s looking to be such a spectacle, and Bethesda have shown such a keen understanding not just of what Oblivion did right, but what it did wrong. well, put together, it all gets me quite excited about November 11th, when we’ll finally get our hands on The Elder Scrolls’ fifth outing.
G4TV.
The woolly mammoth was at least five times taller than I was. It had a mythological quality to it, like a mix between what an actual prehistoric mammoth may have looked like and a Mûmakil from Lord of the Rings. I could see the detail of every coarse hair covering its body. The mammal was so peaceful, so majestic, so at one with nature that I was this close to actually feeling bad when Dovahkiin shot a fire ball in his furry face. So close.
A few overpowered spells and slashes later both of my new friends were near death. Apparently, we had disturbed the peace; a huge fire breathing dragon flew overhead, spewing his flames as it passed. Suddenly my new friends didn’t matter as we began running away from the dragon. We came across a lone, run-down tower. Dovahkiin summoned a storm using one of his dragon calls. Dark clouds filled the sky as lightning began shooting down onto the dragon. Dovahkiin ran down as the dragon lay dying. Since he is dragon born, he can absorb the souls of dragons. As he began absorbing the soul, the dragon burst into what looked like flames. He burned until there was nothing left but bones. With a newly acquired soul, Dovahkiin could learn a new word to complete another dragon yell.
The Escapist.
It wasn’t the shouts themselves that I found so interesting – they’re functionally not all that different from your other spells, though obviously far more powerful – but rather the way they made your character feel distinct. The main character of the Elder Scrolls games is always some special something or other, but that’s reflected in the story, as opposed to your character. There is the hero of the story – the one who’s foretold by prophecy, for exmple – and there’s the hero that you create by putting in the time to earn the experience and adjust your skills exactly the right way. Though they’re the same individual, they don’t really feel all that connected. The shouts of Skyrim form a bridge between the customization of your character and the hero that the designers envisioned when they crafted the game. You can mix and match skills and weapons and spells and equipment all day long to get the kind of character that best suits your play style, but the shouts make sure that no matter what, your character still has that connection to the story’s hero.
The one aspect of the demo that left me somewhat unsettled was the user interface. It’s far less fussy than that of Oblivion, is much cleaner and easier to navigate, but it looks like it was ripped right out of Fallout: New Vegas. It’s a little absurd to be bothered by a choice of typeface, but every time an alert popped up to let us know that a stat had improved or that we’d discovered some new location, I was forcibly reminded of Fallout. The lettering looked modern and out of place to me in Skyrim’s setting, perhaps because Fallout has such a focus on mechanical and technological things. It seems reasonable to assume that it’s the type of thing you’d get used to, though.
Just Push Start doesn’t have a full preview yet, but has already concluded based on a hands-off demo that Skyrim “plays better than Oblivion”.
When Oblivion was released on the Xbox 360 and PC five years ago, it was one of the best games ever released. However it fell short in the presentation department due to its poor loading times and frame rate. Today, Bethesda showed Skyrim to us behind close doors and, let me tell you, it plays a lot better than Oblivion in many ways.
As Bethesda demoed Skyrim, one of the first things I noticed was how the game streamed smoothly without any hiccups. Aware of its early build, we are very impressed with how the game streams the vast world. Texture pop ups are close to non-existent and not a single loading time was seen.
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