Skyrim

Skyrim is the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, a high-fantasy first-person roleplaying title developed by Bethesda, and one of the most influential video games of all time. Skyrim not only defined the open-world RPG experience for the decade that followed it, but it lingered in the minds of all gamers who, ever since its release, never quite got to experience anything like it. This, in turn, inspired a massive online following that coagulated into the modding community: people who produce free content, patches, and customization options for the base game.

It’s rare to find anyone who, at the very least, didn’t hear of Skyrim, even if the Elder Scrolls lore is a mystery to them. With popularity comes notoriety, and Skyrim is at the epicenter of several, smaller, Elder Scrolls fan bases that produce an astonishing amount of written and video content that discusses its quality.

If you browse through some of this content, you’ll find plenty of dry, repetitive arguments, copied and pasted from one reviewer to another, to monetize anti-Bethesda or pro-Bethesda content, without providing a quality analysis of the game. In this review, I’ll try to step away from the Elder Scrolls community’s infatuation with conflicts, to provide a coherent analysis, and to find a reason why I spent over 2000 hours with a modded copy of Skyrim.

To say this game consumed my life for the better part of 2020 and 2021 would be an understatement. I spent hundreds of hours modding, tweaking modlists, writing character sheets, and roleplaying diverse builds coming from a variety of lore-inspired backgrounds, going so far as to write another series of reviews about this game that was much longer. You could say this is my second attempt at getting closure from the game. Skyrim sparked my interest in game design, which fueled my interest in user experience. It led me to Dark Souls, which gave me the impetus to start a freelance business. And eventually, it helped me realize that I was closer to writing than to the visual arts.

The title is structured around a formulaic narrative about a doomed hero, but it also subverts action-adventure tropes by surrounding them with a world that’s always available for exploration at any moment.

And while there isn’t much else to do but talk, fight, and walk, from a roleplaying perspective you have a treasure trove of prompts that ask you to engage as a person living in the virtual world, not to min-maxing and macro-grinding of poorly balanced stats.

And while I understand the mechanical complexities of previous Elder Scrolls entries have been reduced (according to YouTubers), my take has always been that no “Howard” Elder Scrolls game has ever been mechanically complex to begin with and that the systems implemented in this franchise have always been shallow. No Elder Scrolls game is close to Thief from a stealth perspective, to Deus Ex from a level design perspective, to Dark Souls from an action-combat perspective, or to Planescape Torment from a dialogue tree perspective. Elder Scrolls has always attempted to deliver something for everyone, and Skyrim’s skill tree system is designed to allow for an accessible understanding of what used to be a list of poorly balanced stats.

That’s not to say Skyrim’s skill trees are well balanced. From a character-building perspective, Skyrim is designed to provide the player with the experience of creating a custom class dynamically, by allowing them to focus on a playstyle they enjoy without worrying about class requirements. This can lead to picking up new skills at any level, which is not only impractical due to how leveling progresses, but also not exactly fun. High-level perks unlock game-changing abilities that can make or break a custom build. Even if the leveling slows down exponentially with each passing level, I have a hard time understanding how a player could not “feel” their character has progressed.

No, the problem with Skyrim’s leveling system was that it incentivizes the player to gravitate around the play styles that delivered the most XP because the best perks of the game are gated behind absurd level requirements. This is why a lot of people “end up playing as a stealth archer”; you are leveling two different skills at the same time, and they level up like crazy because NPCs have no protection against it, leading to perk point after perk point that no one forces you to invest.

Grinding is still a thing; the infamous “iron dagger” meme comes from a time when the unpatched version of Skyrim allowed the player to skyrocket from 0 to 100 in Smithing by making iron daggers. It’s still possible to use exploits to level up more tedious skills like Enchanting or Alteration, while useful skills like Block and Speech barely receive enough engagement in moment-to-moment gameplay to be raised effectively in a timely fashion. Destruction’s Impact perk trivializes the game to such an extent that it’s stupid, while Illusion’s novice-level spell Muffle can carry you from Novice to Master in a matter of minutes.

There’s an inconsistency in how these skills and their respective perks are implemented that casts a shadow over the whole game, coloring what playstyles people engage with and what types of characters they roleplay as.

The most memed character build in Skyrim is the stealth archer, which is a custom build that combines the Sneak skill with the Archery skill, occasionally making use of Alchemy and Light Armor. It’s also the playstyle results from finishing the Thieves Guild questline, which rewards you with the most powerful stealth-oriented gear in the game, and the highest base damage bow.

Elder Scrolls factions (or guilds) represent centralized content that encourages the development of certain playstyles. Warriors (melee builds) get the Companions, and to a large extent, the game’s main quest. Magic builds get the College of Winterhold. Sneaks get to play the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood, each pushing towards custom builds, mixing stealth with ranged weapons, or stealth with daggers and magic.

The world design keeps players immersed, looping from quest to quest while trekking a beautifully designed high-fantasy world that’s memorable and still fresh, even so many years later. The game’s art direction is its selling point, and when combined with the iconic soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule, it’s no wonder this is what people play when they just want to walk around and stare at vistas. It’s enchanting, it draws you in because there is always something to discover, something worth exploring even after dozens of playthroughs.

It falls short in the enemy AI design department, which ensures the player will never have an issue with combat encounters. It’s Skyrim’s combat that gets the most pushback from players unaccustomed to RPGs, and for posterity, let me just say I have never played an RPG that had a “good” combat system. Between turn-based combat and real-time-with-pause combat (staples of isometric RPGs), Bethesda RPGs have always attempted to provide a measure of action because it’s more accessible to audiences who do not have the patience to deal with stat optimization. And I’m sorry, but I dislike RtwP, and cannot take turn-based seriously, so modern Fallout and Bethesda RPGs are titles designed for gamers like myself.

Starting from Morrowind, a lot of combat complexities dealing with resistances, damage types, and attributes have been simplified to such an extent that older fans of the series got really mad. Such complexities would add little to Skyrim, in my opinion, because Elder Scrolls combat always boiled down to increase number and decrease number, with few and inconsequential additional effects worth mentioning. If we try to skew Skyrim’s combat more toward traditional RPGs, it’s going to sell fewer copies. If we try to skew it towards action games, RPG fans are going to be even angrier, because what they want is the experience of progress and reward for grinding skills out. Skyrim exists at the center of all these motivations, and while trying to please everyone a little bit, it ends up pleasing almost no one.

Each Skyrim playstyle has its mechanical drawbacks. Melee builds are only concerned with increasing the Health stat and the damage output of a melee weapon; the Block skill is the only mechanical component that adds sophistication to the system. There is no functional difference between Heavy Armor and Light Armor, and almost no difference between One Handed and Two Handed weapons.

Ranged builds are the only ones that have a remote need of the Stamina stat because effective usage of bows consumes all the available Stamina, and then some. I liked making battle archers and utilizing the terrain to my advantage because the enemy AI is incapable of effective tactics. I would say the most fun I’ve ever had with the base system was Archery, Alchemy, and Conjuration, roleplaying as some sort of mystical Legolas who sends spectral wolves to deal with enemies before finding a good sniping position to take pot shots from.

Leveled enemies are a problem, just not in the way you might think. Most enemies will scale with the player up to a point, but where they scale is more important than the fact they scale at all. Dungeons will give you a mix of leveled enemies, depending on the specific “encounter zone” on the map. The most fun I’ve had with the game was after discovering simple patchers that increased the minimum level of all the different factions in the game, making Falmer much stronger than bandits, and Dwarven automatons much stronger than Falmer. It made me appreciate the way dungeons are distributed across the map, where, even if you implement such a modification, you can still “go anywhere on the map” without dying every 2 seconds.

If most enemies scale with the player, it is difficult to appreciate all the different potions, scrolls, novice-level spells, and companions that might come in handy in difficult situations, because, without modifications, the difficult situations are rare.

Stealth trivializes the majority of Skyrim content, needing nothing else than a Muffle enchantment or a spell. Couple this with Skyrim’s lack of guard patrols and linear level design and you get a “broken” playstyle that levels up fast and rewards you with absurd critical damage.

Magic is at the other end of the spectrum, encompassing five schools of magic that differ in their applications, spells, and potential for leveling, but have several design flaws that pile up on one another, leading to the most frustrating playstyle in the whole game: the pure mage. I think the problem is that magic doesn’t jive with the game’s progression system. As a Skyrim mage, you are expected to use as many tools as you can, from potions to regeneration gear, macro grinding, staves, and over-rely on the Atronach Stone just to get by, when most other playstyles can thrive after level 12. And I think the designers were cognizant of this because the DLCs add significant upgrades and spells that benefit mages.

Mages never thrive. The best perks are gated behind high-level requirements, and the Expert and Master-level spells are insanely cost-prohibitive, requiring more reliance on potions and enchanting to earn the privilege to cast them more than once. And then, all schools have their problems that no mod ever came close to “fixing”.

Destruction becomes boring because all potent spells are variations of Firebolt, extrapolated to three elemental schools out of which one (Frost) is ineffective in the land of Frost-resistant Nords and undead. Conjuration lacks so many quality-of-life perks that the experience shackles you into being a slave to your own minions. Illusion is my favorite magic school of all, but it’s flat-out useless without another offensive skill until you get the Master of the Mind perk- which is gated behind level 90.

I never got into vanilla Restoration. While I appreciate the designers used the two free-hands to their fullest potential when designing spells like Ward, base game Restoration doesn’t work without an offensive skill to pair it up with, and, to be frank, what’s the point of maximizing my ability to heal when it’s more cost-effective to invest perks into upgrading my damage potential?

I cannot stand Alteration. The perk investment of making flesh spells matter in terms of armor rating is unheard of, capping to ten total perks to use the Master-level spell Dragonhide, and the school offers nothing else of value. While all other schools of magic offer inferior spells that are useful at all levels, perk investment in Alteration results in redundancy.

Shouts are cooldown-based, Nord-specific spells, and they take up a lot of interesting effects that would have been better utilized in any of the 5 magic schools. But… they are not. I’m not sure if this was by design, or if shouts were added later, but plenty of interesting effects are sorely missed, and the lack of functionality for Skyrim mages pushes people away from engaging with this system, requiring mods to make flaccid Restoration, Alteration, and Conjuration shinier, and funneling more people into dominant playstyles.

The first part of this review established that Skyrim’s leveling system funnels people into dominant playstyles. The second part showed how the inconsistencies of all the different skills limit the roleplaying potential of various builds. This third (and final) part will show how all of this contributes to the larger issue of people being unwilling to suspend their disbelief when engaging with the game’s stories.

The first part of 2024 saw a culmination of a weird online phenomenon. Bethesda lead writer Emille Pagliarulo was lambasted by Elder Scrolls and Fallout fans alike for taking the game’s writing in directions that nobody likes.

Bethesda never employed on-staff writers dealing with in-game stories, and they have a credit policy that makes it difficult to pinpoint who was responsible for what, which contributes to this image of Bethesda being “bad” at writing stories. The reality is that the novel-like quality of a great story cannot be delivered with 30 minutes of voice-acted dialogue when the main product being sold is a game that lives or dies based on the quality of its gameplay and art direction.

I think Skyrim tries to deliver something with the majority of its stories, but it fumbles the ball because it’s difficult to marry the aforementioned leveling and character-building problems with the community’s demand for “good writing”.

But that’s not how you want to think about this issue, because you shouldn’t play the Companions to experience the great Companions storyline, but because you want to roleplay as a Companion. Gameplay and exploration tie into this just as much as the “story”. Nitpicking all the small, insignificant inconsistencies is just content farming an algorithm.

To some extent, all Skyrim stories are about the same thing: a betrayal of either older, traditional values or of some group representing an ideal. The Companions are about the betrayal of the Companions brand, devolving from a"virtuous", Elven-hating, Viking trailblazers to a focus group of furries. The Dark Brotherhood is about the betrayal of the old tenets, leading to the destruction of the last Brotherhood bastion. The Thieves Guild is about the current leader’s betrayal of the previous one, culminating in a botched heist and a mandatory “I will pledge my soul to a goth girl” moment. The College of Winterhold is about the Archmages' betrayal of his friends to contain a dragon priest whose artifact is supposed to stop an impending catastrophe. Finally, the game’s main quest is posed as a question: whose allegiances do you betray to deal with the end of the world, which came as a result of Paarthurnarx’s ancient backstabbing.

The Civil War of Skyrim– a continuous battle between two mechanically identical factions– poses as the game’s greatest narrative achievement due to the incumbents’ philosophical differences towards the concept of betrayal. The Stormcloaks look at the Empire’s unwillingness to deal with the Aldmeri Dominion’s sinister power games as a mockery of the sacrifices made by the warriors of Skyrim. The Civil War is rooted in the so-called Markarth Incident, during which Ulfric Stormcloak was betrayed.

Hell, this bleeds into the DLCs. In the Dragonborn DLC, the antagonist Miraak is betrayed by the Daedric prince he served for centuries, posing the question of whether or not the Last Dragonborn will suffer the same fate. And the Dawnguard DLC has the player fawning over a vampire princess who backstabs her father because he was a negligent asshole, or double-crossing the Dawnguard faction to side with the vampires. The vampire storyline ends with the player betraying the goth princess’ father becuase of his poor long-term business practices.

Alas, some of these stories deliver a quality narrative resolution, and some don’t. Dawnguard is lauded as the best content associated with the base game because it stands in direct opposition to the main quest. While the game’s main campaign is a lonely descent into power-mongering that rewards forming cold alliances with people you hate, Dawnguard has the player character form an actual relationship with an NPC that gets more than 10 minutes’ worth of dialogue lines. The main quest punishes player agency because its purpose is to direct the player all over the map to complete side content that has more immediate roleplaying potential. Here is where I have to criticize Skyrim’s content distribution because some of my favorite holds in the game (Hjaalmarch and the Pale) get so little content when compared to Whiterun or the Rift, that it becomes frustrating long-term.

And the way people engage with content is what matters with these types of games. There was an older YouTube Skyrim review made by a channel titled Private Sessions, in which he spent 3 hours detailing his experience roleplaying as a Khajit thief, but he concludes the reason he managed to roleplay effectively was due to a couple of mods. What I got out of his review was that he changed the way he approached and engaged with the game’s content. He stopped using fast travel, made exploration a more active part of questing, took detours, imagined a background for a non-stealth archer character. He pursued something different than increasing and decreasing stat numbers. He utilized the roleplaying prompts the game offers to his advantage, pursuing a less optimal build. And he chose to engage with the game’s stories on the game’s level; as a video game, and not as a TV show.

And that’s the pitch. You have to be willing to engage with the game’s less-than-stellar mechanics to appreciate the full depth of what it has to offer- which is true for all Elder Scrolls and Fallout titles. Skyrim is closer to an “immersion engine” than to a “traditional” RPG or a sophisticated action-adventure game, and the market for DIY roleplaying experiences was dormant and waiting to burst with creative energy, resulting in one of the largest and most prolific modding communities gaming has ever seen. It’s possible the executives at Bethesda foresaw this and were able to pinpoint what their preferred market was craving. Skyrim was not meant to be “The Elder Scrolls V”, it was meant to be Nexus Mods.