Video Game Review It’s Your (Virtual) World. Feel Free to Roam or Slay.

A Dragonborn hero battles a flying lizard in an image from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a sweeping single-player video game from Bethesda Game Studios.

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: November 25, 2011 

 Want to get lost? Play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

I mean lost in the best possible sense. As in, “Where did those six hours go?” As in, “I don’t really need to go shopping today.” As in, “Hello, Mr. Sunrise.”
When it comes to offline single-player games, no recent title will draw players in for hundreds of hours as readily as Skyrim. Plenty of games promise to let you unleash your inner all-conquering hero (or antihero), endowed with the power to shape both your own epic destiny and the fate of the world. Almost none deliver on that promise as thoroughly as Skyrim.
In Skyrim, developed by Bethesda Game Studios for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, you are set loose on a vast fantasy continent populated by thousands of software-controlled monsters and characters. There are teeming towns filled with merchants, beggars, guards, thieves, craftsmen and kings. There are tundra and forests, plains and swamps. There are steep peaks and river gorges, hidden shrines and bandit keeps. There are assassination plots to uncover (or perpetrate) and deep, dank crypts hiding ancient treasure. There are giants and ogres and goblins and demons and spirits and, not least, plenty of dragons.
Skyrim is modern fantasy role-playing of the highest order. It is akin to the “Game of Thrones” of video games: sweeping, almost daunting in scope, richly realized and fully able to absorb fans for months or even years. Like great fantasy literature, this game has a deep lore and back story (developed over the past 17 years since the series made its debut in 1994 with The Elder Scrolls: Arena) propelling current events. Things happen for a reason. But unlike a novel, a great role-playing game like Skyrim lets you shape those events and become a player on the world stage.
The key to Skyrim, indeed to the entire Elder Scrolls series, is that the game is set up like one huge fantasy playground. You are completely in charge. You can go where you want, when you want, how you want and do what you want once you get there. There is a strong central plotline, but you are free to blow it off completely from the outset. It is possible to spend dozens of hours exploring Skyrim and making your character more powerful before you even touch the main story line. You can join the Mage Guild, infiltrate the Thieves Guild, take sides in a civil war or just roam the wilderness, delving into dungeons and slaying wyrms.
When gamers and game executives talk about “open-world games” they usually are referring to the likes of Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed, Red Dead Redemption and Batman: Arkham City. But none of those set you in a virtual environment as realistically intricate as Skyrim’s. More confining, none of those games even let you decide who you are. Instead you are one particular character, defined by the game’s creators. You can decide how that character progresses through its story, but you don’t control the basic parameters of who that character is and how it makes its way in the world.
Even most fantasy role-playing games lock each character into a defined class, like wizard, warrior or priest. By contrast, a hallmark of the Elder Scrolls series is that you can mix and match various skills and races, like cat people and lizardfolk. Want to play a sneaky scoundrel who also casts huge lightning storms and wields two-handed axes? No problem. Want to summon fire and ice elementals to engage your foes while you snipe away with a longbow? Sounds good. Want to become a master thief with a silver tongue and a vast black-market network of fences? Go right ahead.
Skyrim isn’t perfect. The interface, especially on Windows, is a clunky, frustrating mess, and the game’s subpar technical performance on the PlayStation 3 should be an embarrassment for Bethesda. Yet over Thanksgiving I heard from a family friend who attends college in New Jersey that Skyrim is the absolute rage among gamers on her campus. That doesn’t surprise me because there are very few games that deliver Skyrim’s level of immersion and empowerment. And that may not be something that newer generations of gamers are familiar with.
Here’s what I mean. In a single-player game you don’t have to share the virtual reality with anyone else, so your character can completely shape the game world. You can raze a town or destroy a tower “forever” in a single-player game. In most online games, like World of Warcraft, you can never have that power because there are thousands of other players who need to be able to explore that town or tower as well.
Likewise, in an online game you start off as a relative peon in that fiction’s hierarchy and then spend a long time trying to catch up or keep up with other players who are probably more powerful than you. In a game like World of Warcraft your character is never “the Man.” Rather, you are one of many decorated adventurers.
There is now an entire generation of gamers that has grown up online (World of Warcraft is actually seven years old this week), and it has been fascinating watching those players react to Skyrim with such fascination and glee. A funny, insightful cartoon that compares those two games has been making the rounds online. As it points out, when you are a new Level 4 player in World of Warcraft, “You kill boars and collect apples.” When you are a new Level 4 player in Skyrim, “You beat a dragon to death and rip its soul through its neck.” Certainly, one feels more heroic than the other.
Of course the catch is that in a single-player game like Skyrim, you are, at the end of the day, alone. You are not interacting with other real people in the game. These are the trade-offs: You can play by yourself and be all-powerful in a game world or play with other people and realize you are simply one among many.
I enjoy both. I have online friends (and real friends who play online) and I love playing with them. But sometimes I just want to get lost. When I’ve felt that way lately, I fire up Skyrim.